841: When Every Member Counts | Ilana Esterrich, CFO, American Coatings Association

Inside the world of trade associations, the135-year-old American Coatings Association’s has never wavered in its dedication to advancing the needs of professionals inside the paints and coatings industry. However, ACA members—like those of many associations these days—are becoming increasingly demanding when it comes to the value that they receive in exchange for their dues. “In the old days, belonging to an industry association was a badge of prestige, and it was something that people felt that they just had to do if they were part of an industry,” comments Ilana Esterrich, who was named ACA’s CFO in 2019 after having served as chief administrative officer for a Washington think tank and spent the previous decade among the financial planning rank-and-file of Thomson Reuters and General Mills Corp. Upon her arrival, Esterrich was told that to better address the escalating demands of ACA’s membership, she needed to clean house—beginning with the accounting department, which seemed to be a province populated by known underperformers. “I came in thinking that this was going to be a turnaround situation, and it was —but not in the way that I think management thought that it was going to be,” reports Esterrich, who after assessing the “skills and wills” of her accounting team members rendered a verdict of “not guilty” on all counts. It turned out that instead of being based on malfeasance, the accounting department’s laggard reputation was rooted in dated systems and processes—a set of circumstances that she and her team have since taken steps to correct. Meanwhile, Esterrich discovered that a number of the association’s traditional sales practices involving media needed to be updated in order to be able to provide the sales team with better guidance when it came to determining if and when a customer could receive a discount. No unlike most associations, ACA has long published a membership magazine, which Esterrich was told operated profitably. “However, when we took a ‘fully loaded’ look at the costs of the magazine, we were upside down in the red,” recalls Esterrich, who sought to distance ACA from associations that choose to view the price tag of their member magazines as a necessary evil. Says Esterrich: “Finance needed to show where the magazine brought value and where it did not—and at what cost.” –Jack Sweeney