NATM’s Executive Director Search Seen Culminating in September Choice
NATM’s search for a new executive director will cover a broad and long list of candidates with a goal of having a new executive by the group’s annual meeting in September, NATM members familiar with the process told us.
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NATM President and R.C. Willey CEO Scott Hymas is charged with sifting through a list of potential successors to William Trawick, who retires later this year, and presenting them to the group’s board, which will conduct interviews in the next few months, NATM members said. Hymas wasn’t available for comment Friday, but “he has the backing of all the members and we're appreciative of his efforts,” Cowboy Maloney’s Executive Vice President Eddie Maloney said.
The list of candidates will be drawn from a pool that’s overflowing with candidates because CE industry consolidation has put many former executives out of work, NATM members said. Trawick has been weighing retirement for 2-3 years so the group has been preparing for a change, members said. Trawick hinted at retirement in 2011, but said a year later he would remain through 2013 and “beyond that I don’t know” (CED Sept 18/12 p2). The transition to a new executive director will be orderly in contrast to Trawick’s replacing former NATM Executive Director Saul Gold, who left in 1999 after losing the backing of some NATM members. Trawick joined NATM from Conn’s, where he had landed after a 29-year career at P.C. Richard.
"The hardest thing is going to be able to pick a person out of a number of great candidates,” Maloney said. “There are going to be a number of great candidates looking for this position and Bill is going to be involved” in the selection, he said. “We wanted to do this on our terms and I think we are going to be able to make an orderly transition. I think it’s going to be good to have some new blood because our NATM members are mature and we need some new ideas, because who would have thought five years ago all of us would have been selling furniture."
No clear candidates have emerged yet and the group is just starting to collect applications, a process that began with Trawick’s retirement announcement, a NATM member said. Hymas’s effort to compile a list of potential candidates will take “a few weeks” before it’s ready to be presented to the NATM board and interviews begin, several members said.