A Year in Review: A Look Back at 2023

It’s incredible to look back over the years to see just how far the American Supply Association has grown in our ability to unite the industry and to lead with one voice and purpose.

Seeing hundreds of firms — that compete in their marketplaces day in and day out — join and work together to create a successful future for the industry under the banner of ASA is truly remarkable. Today, our distributor members represent more than 4,000 dots on the map and more than $70 billion in sales, which shows the true strength of our association. Thank you for being a member of ASA and supporting our work to build a strong future for everyone.

2023 was another strong year for ASA. Once again, we achieved net growth both in profit and especially in distributor membership additions, strengthening our foundation and our ability to serve our members. Thanks to an aggressive social media and marketing campaign, our image and brand as the voice of the industry has also grown in 2023 as we see our connection to industry-leading firms deepen. Today, more industry professionals than ever are coming to the new ASA website (www.asa.net) to see what’s happening in the industry and the association. 

Our strategic plan of bringing hundreds of volunteers together with a strong professional staff under a new governance structure has deepened our ability to think big and bold into the future.  

This past year, our four new strategic councils governing our four mega goals (Advocacy, Workforce Development, Operational Excellence and Embracing the Future) have started their work and the work of the task groups under each council to identify the future disruptors to our members and position the association to support our members’ ability to win in the future. 

We can’t thank enough the roughly 200 member volunteers who are currently serving on the 25 committees, councils, and task groups. Few associations invite as many volunteers to create the strategic vision as ASA does annually. It is not easy bringing hundreds of opinionated leaders together to create one voice and plan. We do it annually, and in fact, it’s a big reason for our strong success over the years.

ASA Accomplishments

Project Talent, led by ASA Director of Recruitment Marketing Steve Edwards, expanded our ability to grow our industry brand and attract interested career seekers to jobs in the industry. We continued our aggressive social media campaign that has reached nearly 1 million Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat users, while we launched the effort to drive those interested career seekers directly to our members’ web pages, enhancing their ability to close the deal toward hiring the 100,000 people we will need to replace those transitioning into retirement.  

To support this effort, we started providing education and guidance to our members, transforming their website to be more inviting to those job seekers. We also launched our second labor study to follow up on the results from the first-ever labor study conducted in 2017 to benchmark our progress of building an industry brand to attract the best and brightest to our industry. Results from the study will be presented in 2024.

MDM

The mission of the Workforce Development Strategic Council is to recruit, train and retain our labor force. This past year, under the leadership of ASA Vice President of Education and Training Taylor Albano, we created an addition of our Essentials brand of courses and developed the Masters of Distribution Management course, authored by 13 visionary industry leaders. This new course now forms the core to our revamped MDM program, deepening our ability to retain labor.

ELEVATE, EMERGE & NETWORK: New Heights

Strengthening professional networks has been a value of membership within ASA. This past year, the Women in Industry and Emerging Leaders special interest divisions expanded their value, with both conferences reaching new attendance records and ELEVATE experiencing a 50 percent increase in attendance. Both divisions expanded their programs and offered educational sessions throughout 2023, making engagement in both groups valuable for our members and their key teams.  

NETWORK2023 in Orlando received rave reviews from the roughly 850 attendees and 90 distributor firms, expressing strong interests in the speakers, panel sessions and the highly successful Great Ideas Roundtable best practice sharing program. NETWORK continues to bring together the leading distributor, manufacturer, and rep firms in the industry, representing more than $40 billion in annual industry sales. It has truly become the industry’s largest “all-industry” meeting place for building networks and sharing ideas.

Data Standardization Under Construction

During the second half of 2023, an ASA Product Data Standards Task Group comprised of leading manufacturer firms and wholesale distributors started work to develop a product data template that includes recommendations such as: included columns, column sequence, column names as well as product attributes such as color, weight, size and UPC. This significant investment of time and subject matter expertise will, once established, create a product data foundation for the PHCP-PVF industry. Then, ASA will take the next step of approving and adopting the recommendation of the task group as well as begin efforts to foster awareness, education, consensus and ultimately, adoption by industry members. Led by ASA Vice President of Innovation Beth Ladd, this task group will deliver in 2024 a predictable product data standard that will offer the following benefits:

• Manage and potentially reduce resource hours necessary to create product data sets
• Decrease miscommunication and manufacturer support for provided data sets
• Minimize human error by reducing the need for manual manipulation of product data
• Reduce confusion and misunderstanding when interpreting product data sets for use by distributors
• Increase usability of digital data in distributor ERPs and PIMs, etc
• Support data quality and increase data integrity

Voice of the Contractor

The American Supply Association’s new Voice of the Contractor Survey, shepherded by ASA Vice President of Sales and Operations Mike Miazga, is a new addition to our suite of business intelligence reports. We asked nearly 30,000 plumbing, mechanical, and mechanical/industrial PVF contractors a variety of questions, including ones about their product purchasing habits, relationships with wholesalers, as well as training/education preferences for employees and inventory strategies.

5 Key Findings from the Report:

• On average, 38% of a contractor’s total purchases with wholesalers are made through call-in phone ordering, while 29% are made through walk-ins at the counter — or 67% of respondents rely on long-established phone/counter ordering methods.
• Younger-aged contractors (less than 45 years old) rank inside sales service and support as the most important factor when selecting a distributor to purchase from. 
• Almost two-thirds of contractors do not have a formal succession plan for their business. 
• Only 6 % of contractors that took the survey fall into the 20-34 age-range category.
• The average contractor is holding 30% more inventory now than they were prior to 2020.

Quarterly Market Survey
 

This past year, again under the leadership of Mike Miazga, we launched the ASA Quarterly Market Survey for ASA-member distributor companies. Once a quarter, ASA poses questions on hot-button topics of great interest to our members. These questions have been generated by ASA distributor members — their peers, colleagues, and competitors. We publish the results in our weekly ASA Insights e-newsletter, in our quarterly ASA Review publication and through Supply House Times, ASA’s official media partner. 

Some of the questions have been kept open-ended to allow for distributor elaboration, which will enhance the value of the report when published. This has become another popular addition to our suite of business intelligence reports.

135 Distributor Members Participated in the Annual Operating Performance Report

This year, we saw a huge jump in participation in our annual Operating Performance Report (OPR) of the PHCP-PVF distribution industry, which represents the most complete, accurate and up-to-date database of full-service plumbing, heating, cooling and piping, and industrial/mechanical wholesaler financial and operating data published anywhere. 

The information contained in this report is designed to provide easy-to-understand guidelines for identifying business performance improvement opportunities. For the fortieth consecutive year, the ASA OPR was prepared by Columbus, Ohio-based Industry Insights, which works closely with ASA staff. 

Confidential survey forms were sent to ASA members in early March and the final sample of responses was compiled and included in this industry-wide aggregation. The information in this report represents one of the largest databases of respondents among any wholesale/distribution industry. As in the past, the report includes comparative financial ratios and statistics by type of firm, sales volume size and high profit firms. 

In addition, building upon the historical information that has resulted from past ASA OPR surveys, the study contains various 10-year industry trends data, along with appropriate analysis. Such information is important for identifying shifts occurring within the industry that may be representative of future conditions.

Data collection for the 2024 OPR will begin in February.

New Office, New Website, New Association Management Service

Building a stronger infrastructure and upgrading our systems (giving ASA a stronger capability to serve our members) was competed in early 2023 thanks to the strong efforts of ASA CFO Aaron Scheiwe and ASA Chief Administrative Officer Caitlin Beeter.

After 10 years, we took advantage of the lower commercial rates and elevated our national headquarters to a more state-of-the-art setting, saving the association nearly $40,000 per year. In addition to a more professional office, we launched one of the finest association websites, as well as transitioned our data to a new association management system, enabling the association to better target our services. All of these upgrades were launched early in 2023.

2023 has been another strong year for our association thanks in no small part to our members and the continued support you have given us. It has been a pleasure serving and supporting all of you. We look forward to 2024 and another year of successes for ASA and you, our members.
 

Mike Adelizzi
CEO