Networking with Other Shops is the Best Tool We Have

The Cabinet Makers Association is inviting all woodshop owners and managers to its 2020 national conference, which will take place from March 4 through the 6 at the Q Center in St. Charles, Illinois. The venue is situated on 95 acres along the Fox River, just over an hour west of downtown Chicago.

Dominic Rubino

Back in 1998, a group of shop owners decided to create a mechanism whereby small to medium-size shops might network together, and help each other grow profitably. The result of their efforts, the Cabinet Makers’ Association (CMA), is made up primarily of businesses with twenty or fewer employees, and in fact the majority are 1-5 person shops.

The CMA’s first national conference was held in March 2018 and drew almost two hundred attendees – one of whom summed it up thus: “It was nice to meet so many others with the same challenges, and to hear their ideas to overcome those challenges. And it was also great to walk away more motivated than when I arrived.”

Guy Bucey

The theme of the Association’s second conference will be “2020 Vision: A Clear View of the Woodworking Industry”. Guy Bucey, the director of operations for Albany, NY based Inova, will kick off the conference. Bucey, who served two deployments in Iraq, was the keynote speaker at the Under 40 Leadership Conference at AWFS in Las Vegas. The closing address will be delivered by Dominic Rubino, who has spent much of the past two decades teaching shop owners how to work less and earn more.

In addition to local plant tours, educational sessions will focus on creating a business roadmap that includes Hindsight (looking in the rearview mirror to see where we have been); Peripheral Vision (checking the blind spot to see what’s happening around us); and Looking Ahead (shifting gears to accelerate forward). Woodworkers don’t need to be CMA members to sign up, as they will receive a one-year membership when they register for the conference.