On February 9th, CU*Answers, the cooperative CUSO headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will launch an annual Business Development Series for participating staff members. This year’s series marks the fifth year of offering a course that emphasizes business and brand development exercises designed to foster both personal and professional growth. The course is a series of ‘lunch and learn’ sessions over the course of a seven-week period, followed by a video shoot where each participant applies what they have learned.
This year’s series will be co-facilitated by Scott Collins, Executive Vice President of National Sales and Marketplace Development for the CUSO, and Julie Gessner, Vice President of Sales for the CUSO’s Management Services team. Collins notes, “Since we had to take a year off for COVID, we designed this year’s series with a ‘back to the future’ theme we called Future Forward. We believe the future is indeed bright for both CU*Answers and for the cooperatives we serve, so Future Forward seemed like an appropriate theme. We are a fifty-two-year-old company that is excited about our next half century and investing in business leaders that will be the future of our cooperative will help ensure our success for those many decades to come. I am pleased to be co-hosting this year’s series with Julie, as she has been an integral part of our business development initiatives for several years.”
Collins noted that this year’s series will include eighteen participants from various business units at CU*Answers. “We also added a new twist this year: each participant will be working with a mentor that has participated in a previous Business Development Series course,” said Collins.