Ensemble last month marked the one-year anniversary of its acquisition by Navigatr Group, a period spent building out its team at its headquarters and introducing new programs for members.
Now, as the organization turns to its second year under the Navigatr umbrella, it has one clear goal, said president Michael Johnson: growth. And that focus will be split in two directions: helping existing Ensemble agencies grow their businesses and bringing on more members.
To that end, Johnson said, Navigatr will be introducing a group that will focus on "externally talking about the Ensemble value proposition."
Johnson declined to release the number of members Ensemble currently has, instead preferring to offer its total annual sales of around $4 billion. In the past year, he said, the organization has seen "single-digit attrition."
"I want to just call out that while that's an encouraging number, we don't take that for granted," he said. "We wake up every morning, we go to bed every night focused on our member experience and focused on helping them grow their business."
He also said the pipeline of agencies considering Ensemble membership is "very strong," with some "significant groups" interested in joining.
A year of building
Over the past year, Ensemble has doubled the size of its headquarters team to a full-time staff of around 75. The first area of focus was the member experience team, Johnson said, to ensure Ensemble understands member needs and develops appropriate programs.
"As we grew, we made strategic decisions around acquiring the best talent, and I think that is our secret sauce," he said.
As an example, he pointed to Ensemble's hiring of Sydney Loney, the former editor of Air Canada's in-flight magazine, to head its Range magazine, a publication launched earlier this year.
Senior vice president of operations Kristina Boyce said that while Ensemble has focused on building new programs, including fam, marketing, hotel and DMC programs, and the Ensemble Training Academy, the consortium has also focused on maintaining existing programs members were using.
Johnson said that one of the biggest surprises over the past year came with Ensemble's business-model switch.
When Navigatr acquired the member-owned cooperative, it became a private company operating as a consortium, not a co-op. The change has enabled Ensemble to act faster and accomplish more than expected, he said.
Another surprise: The industry's openness to the organization. Johnson said he expected "a fair degree of skepticism and fence-sitting," but the industry has been welcoming. "I think people want to see Ensemble succeed and are willing to partner in win-win-win outcomes to make that happen," he added.
Going forward, Ensemble plans to broaden its support at the advisor level, Johnson said. In the past, the main focus had been on agency owners and managers.
Key at every step will be keeping that focus on growth.
"We've stabilized the foundation," Johnson said. "We've built out the programming, and now we're positioned for growth. I think from an industry perspective, tomorrow's Ensemble, I would say, [will be] larger and certainly more profitable than today's, which is an improvement on Ensemble previous."