For outgoing Diving Equipment and Marketing Association President and CEO Tom Ingram, the biggest piece of advice for his successor would be: “Keep an open mind.”
In his final conversation as the organization’s head with DeeperBlue at the annual DEMA Show in Orlando, the 71-year-old added:
“You’re a servant here. That’s your job. You need to listen to your members. You need to make sure that you’re staying within the letter of the law, which, frankly, is tough in this position. Every day, there’s 10 different opinions about something, or more, about how something could be done. And you need to just be very cautious about it.”
Of course, diving will be “foundational” for the next DEMA head, according to Ingram, for whom this year’s show was his 24th convention at the helm:
“You have to understand the diving industry [and] you also have a show that you must take care of. You’re a steward for that, and it’s the driver of everything that we do, pretty much, with memberships and sponsorships. And you have a duty to the association in a way that’s both lawful and helpful. And I think those are tough nuts to crack.”
Ingram also credited the whole DEMA administrative team, all of whom aren’t going anywhere:
“We have a new general counsel that’s been really helpful for us, even up to this point, she’s here at the show, helping us to make sure that we’re staying on the straight and narrow.”
The DEMA board of directors was also a subject of Ingram’s praise:
“We have a fantastic board, and we have some great board candidates that are coming in next year, since folks have to rotate off, because they’re term-limited out, but we have some great folks that are out there that I think will drive the industry and drive the association in the right direction, and keep things moving as they should. And hopefully advance more. I think we got a great foundation.”
Overcoming Challenges
The biggest challenge Ingram encountered over his two-plus decades at the helm of DEMA was turning the organization into a true trade association:
“My opinion was that it was not a good trade association in 2002. We ran a show and we had the portable pool. Remember the pool? And really, that’s what we did. We had some research — most of it was not real good. And so I felt like having been affiliated with the [Small Business Administration] for a while [before starting with DEMA], having worked with other trade associations as part of that deal, I felt this is the path that DEMA really needs to take. We really need to have solid research. We need to have good marketing information to provide to people. We need to be able to actively be involved in doing marketing ourselves, if we can — it’s expensive, really hard to do. And we need to participate in advocacy along the way here.”
For Ingram, all the above should be expected by members of a trade association.
One thing the board of directors did in the past decade was to “bring in an outside facilitator to help us from a strategic standpoint,” he said.
“We did that in 2013, and actually implemented a new mission, new objectives, strategic goals, those types of things in 2014.”
A major aspect of that new mission was to engage with the membership, he said. That engagement “saved us, especially when COVID came along, because people were looking for that engagement“:
“They wanted to have the interaction with each other, and they wanted to have the interaction with us. If we had not been able to provide that, we’d have sunk with a whole bunch of other businesses that went [under]. People stuck with us and we started coming back really close to it, pre-COVID [participation] levels now.”
Involving Volunteers
Part of that engagement over the past 20-plus years has come in the form of involving volunteers participating on various association committees, according to Ingram, who said in the early 2000s, he was told not to involve volunteers.
“And I’m like, why would you not want to have other people involved? Don’t you want to facilitate having knowledgeable people on the board, and et cetera, et cetera? I questioned that, and when I questioned that, the board said, ‘Hey, you know, you’re probably right.’
“So we went from almost zero volunteers other than the members of the board to — I don’t know how many we had at the meeting this morning, but it was probably 80 or 100 different volunteers that are participating in different things, like the DEMA show committee, and the research committee, and all of those things.”
Ingram readily admits that he doesn’t “know everything.”
“There’s an awful lot of people that know a lot more than I do. So that was really became our role: We began to facilitate that engagement through those committees, and we also did it through the board.
“We have people that are more active now than we ever did before. And again, I think that saved us, that type of thing where people, they wanted to reach out, and they wanted to know more about how to do things. And they could help each other.”
Consequently, that involvement led Ingram to consider DEMA “to be a real trade association now”:
“I think if I look from Day One and 2002 to now, I think people rely on the data that we have. I think people look to us to understand more about what’s going on in the industry. And I think they look to us for help or advocacy on a statewide level, on a federal level and even internationally.”
Ingram said he’s looking forward to spending more time with his kids “who are kind of spread far and wide.”
“There’s something to be said for going out when things are working right. I think that’s where I am.”
