PERSONALITY PROFILE
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This in turn is a strategy that inevitably has financial
requirements to grow the revenue base of the body.
“It is a chicken-and-egg scenario: we were increasing the
costs of the organisation to grow the revenue to do the
projects required to ‘go big’. With hindsight, it has proven
to be the right move, though it wasn’t easy at the time to
persuade the regional structure – for whom it was a step
into the unknown.” It could have easily gone awry if the
wrong ED had been selected. The position requires both the
skills set for plumbing, and a clear understanding of running
a membership-based organisation, which is quite different to
a plumbing business.
The central requirement is having passion and desire.
“We started the process by appointing Gary Macnamara
(a member of the Macnamara family which owns IMD, the
publisher of this magazine). He already had considerable
knowledge of the industry though Plumbing Africa. It proved
to be an inspired choice, and thereafter he and I worked
closely together.”
With IOPSA’s change in strategy has come a challenge of
expectation, says Smith. “Today, members expect ever more
from IOPSA, which in turn needs to expand its revenue and
range of services without losing focus on its membership
– which could occur if ‘other’ sources of revenue were to
exceed membership revenue. There’s a vast array of sources
of revenue available, given sufficient IOPSA resources.
While the bulk of that growth has come in the last 18
months, Smith says the foundation for that exponential
growth was put in place over the past four years, in turn
stemming from that original ‘grow or go’ board decision.
“The board as a collective gave leadership to the industry,
and Gary (Macnamara) laid the foundation for almost
everything that is happening today, such as the DSPP and
Centres of Specialisation projects. He put in place a lot of
the management systems which are not visible to members,
but which enable everything to happen. Today, we are seeing
the rewards of that work coming through. There is still a lot
of work to do – such as the five-year 2025 Training Strategy
we are in the process of finalising (see Plumbing Africa
March issue).
“As a result of these initiatives, IOPSA is, in many respects,
ahead of its time,” says Smith.
“When Gary emigrated from the country, we were fortunate
that another opportunity arose with Brendan Reynolds
looking for a new career direction. He had both an extensive
understanding of the plumbing industry and a membership-
based organisations understanding through fund-raising
experiences he’d had with various charitable activities at that
time,” says Smith.
Lea Smith, outgoing President of IOPSA and continuing Chairman of the PIRB.
“Today, members expect ever more from
IOPSA, which in turn needs to expand its
revenue and range of services without
losing focus on its membership – which
could occur if ‘other’ sources of revenue
were to exceed membership revenue.”
“Blazing our own trail”
IOPSA’s future is in its own hands, says Smith, including
that of training. IOPSA is working towards positioning itself
to cover all aspects of the training environment to assist
the plumbing industry. Like IOPSA did four years ago,
with not only the ‘going big or going home’ approach, but
showing true leadership. IOPSA will be doing the same in
the training space.
“Other professional membership organisations talk about
IOPSA today because we decided not to ‘fit in’, but rather
April 2020 Volume 26 I Number 02
to ‘do things right and do it our way’, fit for purpose for
the industry. We’re blazing our own trail – and similarly
in the training environment, while blazing the trail, we’re
aligning it with the national occupationally directed training,
but doing it in a way that suits our industry. However,
availability – or rather say access to – funding of learners
is challenging and fraught with obstacles and challenges,
because we do not ‘fit in’. Our focus is on training people
who dearly want to be plumbers, whereas the current
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