A new year brings a refreshed view.
Some of us hit the gym, some of us make a bunch of New Year’s resolutions and some of us dive into our strategic plan. No matter how you start your year, CKCA wishes you the very best of success this year!
We’re kicking off the year with a webinar that is a repeat of the presentation we had at our National Forum last September. It was so well received, we asked the presenters, Muskoka Cabinets, Planit Canada, Biesse and AutomaTech Robotik if they’d do it again so more of the industry could benefit from the valuable insights shared in the “Future of the Industry” session.
Then we’re heading west to Richmond, B.C. to deliver another face-to-face event. We’ve got a great program lined up, packed with plant tours and time to network. We’ll be visiting Nickels Cabinets, Sunrise Kitchens, Sofo Kitchens, Lauten Woodworking, Fraserwood Timber and Leone Lebeniste. Plus, we’ll have some time at the Centre for Advanced Wood Processing at UBC so we can meet with some of their graduating students who will be entering our industry. Going west is always a great experience and our members are always keen to see us. In fact, so keen that we squeezed in an extra tour because we had so many companies willing to open their doors! As always we’re grateful to our sponsors and we encourage you all to work with these companies who step up to support the work associations do. Remember it’s purely voluntary on their part. I am always so impressed by the level of participation from our suppliers in this industry.
Because CKCA is a national organization we want everyone to know they are welcome and so next fall we head east to Moncton, N.B. for the National Forum. We’ll be visiting Glenwood Kitchens, Triangle Kitchen and Avondale Kitchens plus a few others. It’s going to be great and who can resist the East Coast hospitality? Watch for more on that as we build up that program. There’s no shortage of industry topics to cover while you’re there, so we’ll be inviting industry experts to come and speak. All of this is geared to help our industry move forward.
In between all of this, we’re working on a number of initiatives including a recruitment program that introduces our industry to newcomers to Canada to help prepare them and incentivize them to enter our sector. We’re also building more profiling tools to shine a light on our industry. We all know most people don’t even realize our industry exists; it’s time we changed that if we’re going to get more people into our industry. We’ll do this in a variety of ways including the launch of Women in Kitchen Manufacturing program to encourage more women into our industry.
One thing we get asked so often is about data and benchmarking. We do collect this intel and we’ll intensify our efforts to get at the numbers you need because we all know that having a perspective on the kitchen cabinet industry is vital in your decision-making process.
We’ll continue to develop programs that can help our members and negotiate more discounts to put money back in your pocket. We’re also building a platform so you can easily access industry help on the hot topics you are asking about. CKCA has built relationships with many experts and getting this information to you and having it available at your fingertips allows for a quick lookup and less time taken searching for help. We’ll continue with our weekly newsclippings and informative newsletters because we get asked all the time “what’s going on out there.”
We’ll also keep running our monthly manufacturer roundtable discussions. Any manufacturer can hop on the call from anywhere in Canada and bring their questions to their peers. There’s never a shortage of things to talk about and why learn the hard way when there’s someone out there who may have an idea or solution that can help you?
This and much more is on our radar because of the feedback we get from you. So keep feedback coming and reach out to us any time at info@ckca.ca or call us at 613-493-5858. Participate in our surveys so we can share that valuable intel with you.
We hope we’ll see you either in person or virtually at a CKCA event, but if an email is all you have time for, we’ll take that too!
We’re excited about 2023 and we know there’s a lot of work ahead. But the underlying goal for CKCA has always been to help our industry succeed. So that’s exactly what we’ll remain focused on in 2023. It’s not a New Year’s resolution; it’s a steadfast commitment to be there for you.
