Kansas City Annual Meeting Provides a Great Experience at a Great Price

The FY2002 annual meeting held at the Crown Center Hyatt in Kansas City, Missouri, October 13-15 was a great success. There were 407 members in attendance, in addition to our business partners, and 74 exhibitors in the Information Exchange area. Besides a brilliant program, there was an abundance of great food and valuable time for meaningful interaction with colleagues and business partners.

The annual meeting began on Sunday with caucus sessions that were designed with the two key objectives; 1) to provide attendees with the opportunity to meet and interact with peers from similar institutions and 2) to provide an opportunity to raise issues and engage in discussions with colleagues on real life challenges that we encounter on our campuses today. Based upon the feedback of attendees, these sessions were an outstanding success.

Time in the exhibit hall, eating ice cream and interacting with our business partners, and a general session with Mark Victor Hansen, author of the ‘Chicken Soup’ books, rounded out Sunday’s programming. Sunday evening, the meeting attendees enjoyed a wonderful time of great food, jazz music, and socializing with professional colleagues at the opening reception, which was held in the beautifully restored Union Station.

Barbie Tootle brought laughter to the group as she introduced the general session speakers in her own unique, powerful, and energetic way.

Monday morning Martha Gilliland, Chancellor of the University of Missouri Kansas City, shared her views on the importance of a strong connection and partnership between higher educational institutions, the local community, and business leaders. Concurrent sessions were presented on endowment management strategies, small institutions pooling their resources to procure information technology more cost effectively, tax issues impacting higher education institutions, and ways to turn obstacles into opportunities. Todd Sweeney, presented a session highly rated by Julee Sherman. “It provided great information about the planning process for construction projects. His checklist of what items must be considered, and who should be involved in the planning process from the campus, prior to the beginning of actual construction, was very valuable.”

Monday afternoon, Joe Calloway talked to the group about the need to exceed our customer’s expectations to become the ‘Brand of Choice’ and thereby elevate ourselves into a new category where we are the only choice in the minds of our customers. He explained that you must start with a quality product, but that we must ultimately win with our customers because of our distinctive presentation. Because this is difficult to do, he reminded us that it is very important to make sure you have the ‘right people on the bus’ and that sometimes circumstances require us to ‘invite people to get off the bus’ in order for the organization to meet its goals. He also reminded us that our customers compare our service alongside everyone they do business with, so we had better be as customer friendly as ‘Land’s End’.

Monday also brought an opportunity to visit with our business partners, get lots of great information on areas of interest, make new contacts, and renew old acquaintances. The exhibit hall was a busy place.

Concurrent sessions on team building, building strong relationships between chief financial officers and chief advancement officers, hot legal issues in higher education, 529 college savings plans, current insurance issues, and records management issues in the electronic environment rounded out Monday’s programming.

An early bird caucus session at 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning on ‘Issues in College and University Budgeting’ was so popular that is was repeated as a concurrent later Tuesday morning. Attendees broke into groups to discuss different budget issues and to learn from each other. Other concurrent sessions covered topics such as strategies for leveraging financial aid, managing our human resources when financial resources are tight, what Presidents really need from the CFO, and NACUBO’s methodology for costing undergraduate education.

In our general session, James Glassman talked about what is ahead for the economy and the markets and left us with a somewhat optimistic view.

Roy Williams, University of Kansas men’s basketball coach, and one of the most highly respected and active leaders in college basketball today, was our luncheon speaker on Tuesday. He shared his personal philosophy of how to build a winning team, basketball or otherwise, and how each person’s personal development and achievements are crucial to the success of the team. He also shared his personal beliefs about being a college basketball coach and what drives him and his players to continually strive for improvement. His remarks were well received by the membership.

Tuesday afternoon concurrent sessions focused on managing health insurance costs, a GASB/FASB update, strategies to deal with the demand for increased Internet bandwidth, and career planning tips for the those aspiring to be a CFO/CBO. Duane Nelson found the session “How Do Your Resources Ever Find Your Strategic Priorities in Higher Education?” particularly interesting. In the session, Harlan Patterson discussed how the University of Washington reallocated financial resources to fund strategic priorities during tough financial times. “This was useful”, Duane says, “because it described how to encourage and fund new projects during times of limited resources, how to find funds to reallocate, and how to get cooperation from our campus departments.”

Barbie Tootle presented our closing general session and did a marvelous job of recapping the lessons of the conference. Her list of 10 items to remember to help us ‘Take the Message Home’ and be successful in the coming year contained something powerful for everyone. Morris Beverage introduced Barbie and proved that some of Barbie’s techniques can be used by others. You truly missed something, if you missed this session.

Overall, the annual meeting was very well received, with 86 percent of the responding attendees ranking it 4 or 5 on a 1 to 5 point scale. There was truly something for everyone, and many great professional development opportunities, as well as opportunities for personal growth, networking, renewing professional acquaintances and making new ones. All of this for a registration fee of only $375 thanks to the generous support of our business partners. For those of you who came, you got a great bargain. For those of you who missed it, we are sorry. Hope to see you in Columbus in 2003.

Acknowledgments

CACUBO wishes to thank TIAA-CREF for their continuous and generous support to the CACUBO Annual Meeting, and for their sponsorship of the President’s Dinner.
	For more than 80 years TIAA-CREF (Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund) has provided financial investment and insurance services to the faculty and staff of the education and research community.

CACUBO expresses their thanks to Sodexho for their sponsorship of the annual banquet and their generous support to the CACUBO Annual Meeting.
	Sodexho provides services in the food and facilities management services market throughout the United States and Canada. Their outsource services provide solutions to the educational, business, and healthcare arena.

CACUBO wishes to thank Aramark for its generous sponsorship of the program at our recent Annual Meeting in Kansas City. We appreciate your support.
	Aramark, a growing service industry, started with one man putting vending machines in businesses and factories. From that idea 66 years ago has grown a “service industry” that has been able to incorporate environmental, healthcare, childcare, and uniform services in the business, educational, entertainment, sports, recreational, and government market.

CACBUO thanks Follett, Inc. for its generous support and sponsorship of our opening reception at the FY2003 Annual Meeting in Kansas City.
	Follett, Inc. an international educational market provider specializes exclusively in the educational arena. Follett works with large universities to small private colleges in the textbook, bookstore, efollett, and computerized programs area.