GBA President’s Letter to Membership, May 2024

Guy Marcozzi, P.E., D.GE, LEED AP BD+C (Verdantas)

As a reader of NEWSlog and GBA NEWS, there’s a pretty good chance that you are one of our core members and we appreciate your commitment to GBA. Thank you for all you do for us and for this opportunity to serve as your President this year.

May begins the new business year for GBA. In GBA’s long history we’ve had 54 prior Presidents including some of the iconic figures in our industry, each trying to lead the organization for current and future relevance in delivering for our member firms. Through the years, GBA has been driven and nimble in tackling the big business issues we all faced including finding viable professional liability insurance, risk management best practices, as well as business optimization including leadership and ownership transition, commoditization, and most recently recruiting.

I’ve personally benefited from more than 30 years of meeting attendance, Peer Review, FOPP, and lots of other ways and welcome this opportunity serving on the Board to try to repay the efforts of so many others that made my experience special. I’m humbled to be part of it and promise to do my best to help GBA remain strong and deliver relevant and timing content and services for you.

Under recent former presidents Thomas Blackburn, P.E., G.E., F.ASCE, F.ACEC (Blackburn Consulting) Leo Titus, P.E. (ECS Group of Companies), and Matt Moler, P.E. (S&ME) we largely completed the goals of our prior strategic plan with tangible outcomes, including expanded engagement through our committees and the launch of our “Career Continuum,” which assures that every GBA member will be able to find and engage in activities and materials directly relevant to their career stage.

We have another cyclical opportunity this year to continue repositioning GBA members for current and future success as we are entering a strategic planning year. Our world is changing rapidly, driven by technology and demographics, such that some of the old paradigms may no longer be effective, requiring us also to change. But how? Change is hard for lots of reasons, not the least of which is recognizing that change is here and seeing through our normal environment to view change objectively with its challenges and opportunities. These circumstances are best addressed together in a group, as no one single individual or organization has a broad enough perspective to do so. It’s in these situations that GBA has excelled because of our nimble size, trusting peer to peer relationships for sharing best practices. and a tradition of not hiding from the hard things.

Your Board will dedicate its Summer Board meeting in early June towards the facilitated development of our next strategic plan. We have already started this process by conducting a poll of members in the late fall on what they see as future challenges and opportunities. Additionally, we solicited Big Ideas from our leaders who participated in the Winter Leadership Summit in February 2024, where we engaged a facilitator to challenge our thinking.

We always welcome new ideas and if you have some and would like to share, please  feel free to reach out to me at guy@verdantas.com.

In the meantime, we will keep delivering useful and timely content and opportunities to engage with your fellow geoprofessionals! Thanks for your membership and engagement.