State of the Co-Op
Day 2 opened with a candid look at where Innovia stands — the Member Portal in development and the 2026 priorities: expanded focus groups, portal build-out, and a national industry perception campaign.
Co-op leadership · plenary
The Innovia Summit is the closed-door annual convening where the cooperative becomes a single body — member-only sessions, candid working groups, and the unhurried hospitality of a yacht-club retreat.
Three days in Newport Beach — the working sessions, the hallway problem-solving, and the camaraderie of the country’s best independent operators in one place. If you weren’t there, this is the next best thing.
Innovia Summit 2026
Watch · 2:30
The 2026 Summit gathered 45 member-company executives and senior operators at the Lido House in Newport Beach for three days of working sessions, member-only conversations, and the kind of unhurried networking that calls and emails can’t reproduce.
The format is deliberately spare. No vendor booths. No sponsor floors. No tracks of fifty parallel sessions. Just one room, the whole co-op, the topics members raised in the months before, and time to actually work through them. The hospitality — the rooftop reception, the firepit dinners, the morning runs along the harbor — is the connective tissue.
“No noise. No vendor floors. No filler. Just focused conversation, meaningful connection, and forward momentum.”
By Tuesday afternoon members were trading new tech tools in the lobby. By Wednesday morning two companies had quietly started a shared talent pipeline. By Thursday night the playbook for next year had already been roughed out at a firepit.
Members travel in from 31 companies across 28 states. The cooperative opens the way it always does — in person, over drinks, before the work begins.
The full program day: the State of the Co-Op, four rotating breakout tracks every attendee moved through, and the member banquet to close.
Facilitators and team captains recap each track, the cooperative introduces Alloy Growth Partners as its new agency, and the Summit closes on the Lido Lawn.
Four professional facilitators guided rotating focus groups on Day 2, and every attendee moved through all four tracks.
Day 2 opened with a candid look at where Innovia stands — the Member Portal in development and the 2026 priorities: expanded focus groups, portal build-out, and a national industry perception campaign.
Members moved past experimentation into measurable wins: company-specific AI trained on governing docs, voice assistants fielding routine calls, and freed capacity redeployed into high-touch “Ambassador” roles.
A three-level profit model: plug scope-creep leaks, layer in Schedule A add-ons, and build new revenue streams. Refreshed contracts, billing-capture logs, and incentives on billed extras led the takeaways.
Hire for attitude over experience. Pre-interview assessments, sourcing from hospitality and retail, and structured check-ins that catch burnout early — built on a Hire, Retention, Culture, Scalability framework.
Set a minimum client margin target, forecast with weighted pipelines, and use business intelligence tools layered over your management and accounting software for profit by client, manager, and service line. The right metrics, acted on.
Facilitators and team captains recapped each track’s takeaways, and the cooperative introduced Alloy Growth Partners as its new agency for national campaigns and shared digital resources.
2027 heads to Florida the first week of February — an expanded program of member focus groups. Attendance is members only, by invitation through a member company.