Each year, Promo Marketing provides the definitive ranking of the Top 50 Distributors in the promotional products industry. For the next two weeks, we will be counting down the top 10 distributors of 2016 with exclusive interviews featuring the CEOs, presidents and owners of each company. Check back each day for more updates on the biggest companies in the industry. The full Promo Marketing 2016 Top 50 Distributors list will be published on Tuesday, May 30 and in our May issue.
No. 8: AIA Corporation
Answers provided by David Woods, President/CEO of AIA Corporation.
Promo Marketing: What led to your company’s success in 2015?
David Woods: We believe our success is created by our employees and the distributors we serve. We have a great culture, and have won “Best Places to Work” honors many times. We try to create a great place to work, and to offer employees many educational, growth and fun opportunities. Although we are growing and getting larger, we try to maintain that “small company” feeling, which our employees seem to love. We’ve worked on culture for a number of years, and it all seems to be coming together in a very positive way.
PM: What goals do you have for your business for 2016 and beyond?
DW: We will continue to be one of the industry’s leading distributors! We are launching a wide platform of new initiatives in sales, marketing, technology and operations to keep us and our distributors in the forefront with end-buyer clients. Naturally, we have sales goals and a list of [key performance indicators] we monitor. For the foreseeable future, we will be focused on growth—the organic growth of our existing distributors, as well as recruiting new distributors to our unique AIA system.
PM: How did you grow your company into what it is today?
DW: AIA has grown and prospered by being flexible and offering what the marketplace wants. Starting in the early ’90s as a company selling turnkey franchises in promotional products (Adventures in Advertising), AIA has grown into a large company primarily by attracting experienced promotional products professionals to be sales affiliates of AIA. We have added a significant number of sales and marketing tools, and our current focus is heavily on technology. We are particularly interested in developing e-commerce and website technologies, as this is one of the major areas of growth available to us today.
Here are the other distributors we’ve featured so far:
