Behind the Scenes at WF&FSA  

Santiago Cock-Rada, WF&FSA President

Santiago Cock Rada Headshot

Our 2016 Floral Distribution Conference is behind us and, as many of you might have seen in our e-newsletter, netWORK, both the reviews and the results are very gratifying. We managed to change venue successfully, which leaves us in a promising position to become “the do-not-miss” event for wholesale florists and florist suppliers every year. Our staff, committees and board have compiled a robust list of suggestions and ideas to make our 2017 conference even better.

After the great success of the Floral Distribution Conference and with the backdrop of WF&FSA’s solid financial performance, the leadership is excited to look into the future for new possibilities for expansion of member services.

For this reason we have been working on a holistic approach to the development and growth of our association.  In my speech as incoming President I presented some of the concepts covered by this approach. I would like to describe these concepts again, here, since many of you missed our business meeting at the conference.

First is the planning process framework we are following which is illustrated below:

Planning Process Framework

Our values, which represent our beliefs and convictions, guide the development of our strategy. Our strategy, very simply put, is a carefully chosen list of priorities on which we decide to focus our efforts. The strategy we choose to follow, thus, drives the design of the team we need in place to address our areas of focus. Our team devises the actions we must perform to reach the results we believe represent the perceivable testament of our values. In this way, our planning process helps us figure out where we want to go and how to get there.

To represent our values, we have developed a diagram which we call our Compass:

Compass

At the center of our Compass is our reason for being: our Floral Wholesale Community. The values we wish to foster in our community are Share, Learn, Build and Grow. With these values in mind, our Leadership Team has been discussing the five areas of focus we choose to prioritize. We have called these our Strategic Building Blocks and they are:

Building Blocks

For each of our Strategic Building Blocks we must identify a set of key performance variables and targets. In other words, the measurable results that indicate we are successful. This process will be developed in the coming months.

Our organizational structure, notwithstanding, has readily and steadily been adapting to properly support the developing strategy. Our Education Committee is in charge of leading Building Block #1 and our Marketing Committee is in charge of leading Building Block #2. We have started to work on the rest of the Building Blocks through specific task forces with the approval and participation of our Board of Directors.

From here, we will start to match all ongoing or new initiatives to the corresponding Building Block.  The idea is to have the team that leads each Building Block assess and propose the scope of their work to the Board.

At the end of this process, as each Building Block team carries out their set of action plans, we should be reaching the results we set out to achieve.

I feel it is important to share this “behind the scenes” effort to show all our members that a large group of extremely committed volunteers and staff are diligently working to make our association clearly meaningful to your businesses.

Merry Christmas to all and best wishes for 2017!

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1 Comment

Maria Lourdes Reyes   on Monday 01/09/2017 at 04:39 PM

I am ready to be of assistance in this new year 2017 .

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the comments shown above are those of the individual comment authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of this organization.