Valerie Smith

I would attribute my success to my parents and my family and friend support system. I'm surrounded by really great people, and I've done that intentionally. My dad retired at age 80 from being a university professor, so my entire life is rooted in education. I grew up living in college towns surrounded by academic life (and sports!). My whole world is education, and I've made that a foundation of the company. I provide professional development and education for my team members - it's just who I am. Every situation, every conversation, every person who I'm with, I learn something from that moment. I am a consumer of information and knowledge. It's 100% true that you are a product of your environment. When you surround yourself by good, supportive, positive people, you will have a good, supportive, positive nature and things like that around you.

The best career advice I received was from a former employer, and she told me to make sure that I never made horizontal employment moves. But she told me that it's not just based on one factor. You don't just look at salary - you look at the whole picture of what a position is offering you. She explained that your career needs to look like a ladder in that it is always moving up, thinking of up as forward. Not to just stay flatline. You always want to move forward. I think that's possibly one reason why my career path doesn't look as traditional as other people's. I bought a company and became a CEO when I was in my 50's, and if you had asked me when I was 40 if that's where I would be, I had no intention for that. That was not my goal, and a lot of people in their 50s are ready to relax a little bit, and I chose to do something new and different instead.

I would tell young women to take advantage of every learning opportunity, because best practices in this industry evolve quickly. Number one, stay current with trends and technology. But also invest your time in developing relationships with people, because you never know who in the industry, at some point, you will cross paths again and you will partner with. Everyone, every relationship is a potential partner, so everyone is an asset.

The biggest challenges in my field right now include a massive generational divide in organizations. Technology knowlege and comfortability, along with attention span are a great part of that divide. In an organization there are members who are young 20s up through their 70s and beyond, and organizations have to serve that entire span of demographics. The way a 25-year-old and a 70-year-old consume information, what they value as important, where they want to go, how many steps they're willing to go through to get there are wildly different.

Another major challenge is that post-COVID, people are very protective of their time and their finances. To recruit members to join, to be engaged, to be involved, to lead, to serve - you have to not only make it easy and appealing for them. The value and ROI has to be so clear becuase people are making choices for themselves and their families, not only their careers.

The third issue is that labor trends have changed so much. People used to go to college or training school, enter a profession, and people were in that profession for 25 or 30 years. There was a natural entry point into associations and people stayed for decades, so it was very easy to build organizational loyalty. Now people change not only jobs but careers every 3 to 5 years, so you have a much shorter time to capture and engage and move people forward in an organization.

As for opportunities, there are so many because there is an association for everything. The association and nonprofit world is expansive, not only in the United States but internationally. I truly see association management and nonprofit management just growing and expanding, especially with a company like The Solution. When employees tend to turn over a lot now, an association management company has shifted where we become the keepers of the institutional knowledge versus that institutional knowledge living within an employee. It's a whole paradigm shift. Opportunities in our industry are also varied - we run every aspect of an organization, so if someone is specifically interested in marketing, or finance, or lobbying, even social media, communications, event planning, all of those areas are found within the association world.

The values most important to me in both my work and personal life are honesty first and foremost, hard work, education, commitment, follow through, and communication. For me, there's not a huge divide between personal and professional. I have been very fortunate that my passion and my work have always aligned. That's just the way I'm wired.