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Inside the world of trade associations, the135-year-old American Coatings Association\u2019s has never wavered in its dedication to advancing the needs of professionals inside the paints and coatings industry.

However, ACA members\u2014like those of many associations these days\u2014are becoming increasingly demanding when it comes to the value that they receive in exchange for their dues.

\u201cIn 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,\u201d comments Ilana Esterrich, who was named ACA\u2019s 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\u2019s membership, she needed to clean house\u2014beginning with the accounting department, which seemed to be a province populated by known underperformers.  

\u201cI came in thinking that this was going to be a turnaround situation, and it was\u2014but not in the way that I think management thought that it was going to be,\u201d reports Esterrich, who after assessing the \u201cskills and wills\u201d of her accounting team members rendered a verdict of \u201cnot guilty\u201d on all counts. It turned out that instead of being based on malfeasance, the accounting department\u2019s laggard reputation was rooted in dated systems and processes\u2014a set of circumstances that she and her team have since taken steps to correct.

Meanwhile, Esterrich discovered that a number of the association\u2019s 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.

\u201cHowever, when we took a \u2018fully loaded\u2019 look at the costs of the magazine, we were upside down in the red,\u201d 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: \u201cFinance needed to show where the magazine brought value and where it did not\u2014and at what cost.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney