Before joining the association community, Jay Younger, an avid chef, once considered culinary school. But his first job, behind the front desk of a hotel, grew into a senior sales position and he stuck with it for five years. He became acquainted with associations as they held meetings at the hotel. 

Then, as one of the two partners running the consulting firm McKinley Advisors, Younger helped switch the firm’s core business from affinity marketing to association consulting. 

While Younger — the CEO Update and Association TRENDS Partner of the Year — runs a for-profit firm, he is drawn to associations’ mission-driven nature. “Getting that has been just a great fit for me professionally,” he told CEO Update in a Zoom interview from his home office. 

As president and CEO of McKinley Advisors, which focuses on strategic and governance consulting and research for the association market, Younger has had a profound impact on the sector. 

“Jay Younger has served the association community with distinction during his 25-year tenure with McKinley,” wrote Mark Dorsey, CEO of the Construction Specifications Institute (and CEO Update Roundtable member) in nominating Younger for the award. Dorsey has sought McKinley’s guidance at both associations he has run. 

“McKinley is well known for delivering exceptional outcomes for over 500 association clients and has been at the forefront of giving back to the association community through unique contributions to our industry’s body of knowledge,” Dorsey wrote. 

“We operate at the intersection of the board and the CEO,” Younger said. “We are enablers of insight. What does the market need, what do our members want? What does our staff think is the right way to go? Strategy is about making choices. It’s about choosing A over B, something associations are often challenged with. With a broad set of stakeholders, it’s difficult for any association to say no.” 

Broad capabilities  

Younger said the depth and breadth of McKinley’s offerings — it even has business in Europe — set it apart from the many other consulting firms serving associations. 

“Most of our success stories are about scaling up with our clients to handle the work that they need done,” Younger said. “One- or two-person shops do great work, but we have capabilities across all kinds of different things that associations need. We work in continued partnership with our clients to take ideas and turn them into reality.” 

But he said the firm’s true “secret sauce” is its culture — including a passion for the work associations do. That’s why clients don’t dread when McKinley’s consultants arrive on site, Younger said. 

Some things don’t change 

Asked what changes he has seen in his two decades consulting for associations, Younger said many things have actually stayed the same. He has seen several technological threats to association business models come along, but associations persist. 

“Some of the best strategic choices that we see as long-term wins that organizations make are based on things that don’t change all that much,” he said. “As an example, people still want to meet, people still want to be together, people want to associate.” 

Having said that, some things have changed, so associations need to keep up. They don’t have the luxury of, as Younger puts it, “infinite noodling.” 

“Speed to market is what is most different now than when I started,” Younger said. 

“It used to be that you had a lot of time, comparatively, to think about things, to discuss and debate ideas. You might send it to a committee, and they might take six months, nine months, a year to study it and the board would say, ‘Nah, that’s not quite it,’” he said. 

“You can’t operate that way anymore, not if you want to have opportunities to create value. You have to be willing to take some risks, and get some actual feedback from the marketplace, about what’s working.”  

Optimizing board performance 

To accomplish that, volunteer leadership needs to function at a high level, he said. 

“The board has to prioritize where it’s spending its time,” Younger said. “You have to be focused on the right conversations and the right decisions. Shedding all the operational minutiae that boards can get into is paramount right now.” 

But Younger takes issue with the conventional wisdom that boards set strategic direction and CEOs just execute, calling it an “oversimplification.” 

“If we look at what happens (at) most successful corporations and other nonprofit organizations, the CEO and the staff team are essential,” he said. “They’re the ones that are living every day. A typical board meets for only a handful of days.  

“The insights about what’s next for the organization, the insights about how to deliver value for the members, those are going to be much more informed if they come from the people who are living it every day. (We have to) reposition the role of the CEO and the senior team as enablers of strategy and value as opposed to order takers,” Younger said. 

UP CLOSE WITH JAY YOUNGER 

First job: After graduating from Duke University with a degree in English, Younger started out behind the reception desk at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington, D.C. “It created a very long-term foundation around service, which, if you’re going to be in a service business, is a really great place to start,” he said.  

Pivotal career moment: Two decades ago, Younger and McKinley Advisors founder Jodie Slaughter made a strategic decision to switch from affinity marketing for for-profit companies to focus on consulting in the association sector. “I don’t think we would have predicted that it would take off the way that it has,” Younger said. “We have 45 employees now and operate globally.” 

Power hours: Younger is the proud owner of a 37-foot Monterey cruiser, a power boat, which he keeps in Annapolis, Md. He, his wife Jennifer, and their three children enjoy the water. “This stems from growing up in Florida: I really love boating,” he said. “Being on the water is a big part of my life. We spend a good deal of time on the boat together as a family.” 

Words of wisdom: Make sure you and your employees get to “unplug” and avoid answering emails when not working. “Our work is very taxing,” Younger said. “To be sustainable, you have to recover. We operate in a series of sprints. If you’ve been going nonstop for six weeks or eight weeks, it’s time to throttle back. That’s been something we’ve tried to do in our culture, to not just give people permission but to set an expectation that that’s what you have to do to take care of yourself.”