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February 2014 | Construction Equipment Distribution | www.cedmag.com | 35 2014 AED Chairman lot of them come back," he said. Watters' involvement with AED goes back about 25 years. He joined Hoffman Equipment in 1985 while his dad, Joe Watters, was president, and a few years later, as he took on more responsibility as sales manager, Tim found that AED's annual meeting was a must-attend event – and he hasn't missed one since. He became the association's Northeast regional director in 2007, serving a three- term, and then accepted Kruepke's invitation to "join the chairs" of AED officers, moving through the ranks as vice president, senior vice president, then vice chairman, before assuming his role this year in the top seat. And AED isn't the only recipient of his volunteer leader- ship. Watters is serving a three-year term that began last spring on the board of the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators. He's also the chairman and chief volunteer officer on the board for his own community's YMCA in Red Bank, N.J. Top Jobs Watters spent the second half of 2013 leading another somewhat historic project for AED, chairing a search committee to find and hire the association's new presi- dent and CEO. Together with a team of AED officers, past chairmen, and AED Executive Vice President Bob Hender- son, Watters completed that mission late in the fall, and Brian McGuire officially debuted as the top staff executive last month. So, with that major task checked off, what is Priority No. 1 on Watters' list for 2014? "CEO transitions aren't always easy, they can be disrup- tive – so the most important thing is to do whatever we can to ensure that Brian McGuire is a success as our new CEO," he said. "Maybe I should stay the heck out of his way," he laughed. "Job 2 is we need to re-engage with our members," Watters added. "We have a declining membership, and we can't continue long as a successful association if our membership continues to decline." Acknowledging that the industry is in consolidation mode, he pointed out that although AED member dealerships are becoming larger companies, there are plainly fewer of them. So, in addition to bringing more dealers into the fold, Watters says AED's got to connect at another level. "We have to figure out a way to engage all the distribu- tors that are not currently AED members, and also to engage more deeply with our current members," he said. "If you have a member that used to have one location and used to send the CEO to AED functions, but then through a consolidation they ended up with six locations, we some- how have to engage that distributor at the branch manager level, too; or the marketing manager and service manager levels. We also need to re-engage our manufacturers." AED, known for its strong and effective lobbying pres- ence in Washington, D.C., as well as growing influence in Ottawa, has built a highly respected advocacy team led by Vice President of Government Affairs Christian Klein. And this program, Watters is pleased to note, is a finely tuned machine that will continue working in the capital cities with the relentless goal of reducing members' costs of doing business and general regulatory headaches stem- ming from federal policy. "With regards to advocacy, we've got a good thing going there, and we will continue to support Christian and his group as we have for the last several years," Watters said. "It's good. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We don't want to mess it up!" The same is true with The AED Foundation, the new (continued on next page) Tim and Patty Watters have three daughters: Kelly, 23 (second from left) is a freshman in a landscape architecture masters pro- gram at the University of Minnesota; Grace, 21 (center, pictured a few years ago on high school graduation day) is now a junior at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania studying chemical engineering; and Laura, 19, is a freshman at Loyola College in Baltimore. Last November, Tim Watters and his wife Patty vacationed in Mexico, but not at the beach – they scaled the country's highest mountain, Pico de Orizaba.