Concurrent Sessions for Thursday, February 18
Thursday, February 1811:00 AM - 12:00 PM Our panel of AMC colleagues will be sharing short, relatable, and inspiring AI stories. Think of it as AI “Show and Tell” for adults. These stories will be quick, real, and relatable. Authentic stories about how the panelists used AI to make something better, faster, or easier for their AMC or client. Even cases of things they tried that didn’t quite work out. These sessions will highlight real stories from panelists who’ve used AI in creative or practical ways. Running the Business Within the Business: Flat-Fee Pricing That Builds Partnership, Not Line Items For small and mid-sized AMCs, how you price your services shapes how your clients experience the relationship. This session breaks down an all-inclusive, flat-fee pricing model with built-in annual review escalators — a structure that lets AMCs hold a true partnership position with clients instead of a transactional one, where every additional ask starts to feel like nickel-and-diming. Attendees will learn how to build escalators into contracts so pricing keeps pace with cost and scope creep without annual renegotiation, and how this approach changes the tone of client conversations from “what's this going to cost extra” to “how do we grow this together.” This model is best suited to small and mid-sized AMCs; larger (L–XL) firms typically need more granular, service-based pricing structures, and the session will address that distinction directly. Scope Creep Survival Guide: Spot It, Stop It, Prevent It "Just one more report." "This will only take a minute." "You make it look so easy!" Sound familiar? Scope creep doesn't announce itself. It accumulates through small requests that compound over time, straining your team and eroding profitability. In this interactive session, you'll learn to identify the early warning signs of scope creep, develop practical strategies to address it, and build prevention systems into your contracts and client relationships. Through real-world scenarios and actionable frameworks, you'll gain the confidence to say "yes, and..." instead of just "yes," protect your team's capacity, and demonstrate value without giving it away. Whether you're managing volunteers, boards, or client expectations, you'll leave with tools to maintain healthy boundaries while strengthening partnerships. Creating Career Paths in a Multi-Client AMC Environment Career development in an association management company rarely follows a straight line. This interactive session will explore how AMC leaders can create meaningful, flexible career pathways that leverage cross-client experience, stretch assignments, mentoring, and internal mobility while continuing to meet changing client demands and organizational capacity needs. Panelists will provide practical strategies for balancing employee aspirations with business realities, identifying transferable skills, and building a culture that strengthens both retention and client service. 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Who feels like their client boards have less time, less confidence, and higher expectations than ever? This session outlines strategies for how AMCs can set (and reset) appropriate expectations with board leaders in both the business development phase and in ongoing service relationships, how to coach and guide junior staff members to manage outsized expectations, and how to keep your association client relationships happy, profitable, and peaceful. The Client Team Is a Business: Building an Operating Model That Can Scale In an AMC, growth rarely arrives in a neat, predictable package. A new client is added. An existing client launches another program. A once-manageable event expands. Board expectations increase. Staff members quietly absorb the additional work—until missed handoffs, competing priorities, role confusion, declining margins, or burnout reveal that the client’s operating model has not kept pace. Sustainable growth requires more than adding people. It requires treating each client account as a business within the business, with clearly defined client leadership, appropriate functional expertise, visible capacity indicators, and a consistent process for addressing scope and staffing changes. In this interactive session, members of AMPED Association Management’s leadership team will share a practical framework for evaluating and strengthening client-team operations from multiple perspectives: AMC ownership, operations, client success, and functional department leadership. Participants will explore how to distinguish client-account accountability from functional leadership, clarify decision rights between executive directors and department leaders, identify early signs that an account or function is exceeding its capacity, and create an accountability rhythm that brings scope, staffing, service expectations, professional standards, and financial stewardship into the same conversation. The presenters will also examine the dual-accountability challenge common in AMCs: employees must successfully serve the priorities of their assigned clients while remaining connected to the standards, systems, development, and capacity needs of their functional departments. Drawing on the marketing function as a practical example, the session will demonstrate how functional leaders can create consistency and depth across client teams without undermining the authority of the executive director or creating unnecessary layers of management. Using a composite AMC case study, participants will work together to diagnose where the operating model is breaking down and determine whether the solution is clearer accountability, workflow redesign, functional-leader involvement, additional capacity, a revised service model, or a client-level scope conversation. Attendees will leave with adaptable questions and tools they can apply within AMCs of different sizes and structures. Who's Running This Firm in 10 Years? Every AMC owner has a growth plan for their clients. Fewer have one for their own bench. This session brings together emerging leaders from across the AMC industry, the account managers, program directors, and rising operators who are quietly running the day-to-day of your firms, to talk candidly about what it actually takes to build a leadership pipeline that outlasts you. We'll define what "emerging leader" really means in an AMC context, hear directly from emerging leaders on what's changing about their jobs right now (AI, tightening entry-level pipelines, a workforce that expects a real growth track), and close with a concrete, practical list of what owners and CEOs can do — starting Monday — to make sure the answer to "who's running this firm in 10 years" isn't a shrug. Letting Go of Your Client: Successfully Transitioning from My Client to Our Client Owner transitions are different. When an owner has personally managed a client for years, the client may believe it is buying the owner, rather than the capabilities of the AMC. The owner often holds several kinds of capital simultaneously: institutional knowledge, personal relationships with board leaders, credibility, political awareness, and the authority to solve problems quickly. This is really another form of succession planning. Hear firsthand from speakers through real case studies. Learn the good, the bad, and the ugly. This interactive session will discuss risks and opportunities and offer recommendations to help you prepare bette
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