The Alliance of Automotive Service Providers of New Jersey (AASP/NJ) joined partner affiliates at AASP National’s bi-annual Board meeting held in Boston on May 5. The four-hour meeting allowed representatives from affiliates in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania an opportunity to detail their individual group’s efforts to improve the industry.
Hosted by AASP/Massachusetts, AASP/NJ President Jeff McDowell and Executive Director Charles Bryant made the trip north to add the New Jersey perspective to the event.
“It was definitely a worthwhile trip,” McDowell says. “It was great to be able to share and listen to perspectives from other affiliates. We came out of the meeting very impressed with AASP National’s plan to aggressively change things up and make the association more valuable to members.” McDowell also thought the process to keep each affiliate on a single subject added to the overall content of the meeting. “At a lot of these types of meetings, sometimes people go off on tangents and we end up going in several different directions that ultimately take away from the initial goal. That didn’t happen here. Each affiliate stuck to the one topic that their association felt was the priority and then we moved on. There was no wasted time. We thoroughly enjoyed it.”
For Bryant, who has been to every type of industry meeting over the last 40 years, the event was a pleasant surprise. “Everyone was extremely eager to participate,” he says. “That was very impressive and encouraging. We covered a lot of good topics and we as affiliates look forward to working on them to help make the industry better for everyone.”
For more information about AASP/NJ, visit aaspnj.org.