Podcast: Carla Balakgie has elevated NAMA and the industry’s image in her 14 years of leadership

Carla Balakgie hit the ground running when she was named president and CEO of NAMA 14 years ago. With Carla moving on to her next chapter after this year, the convenience services organization has big shoes to fill. 

In this episode of Automatic Merchandiser’s Vending & OCS Nation, the podcast for the convenience services industry, host Bob Tullio sat down with Carla to talk about her journey and her perspective from the industry’s top spot.

Much of the conversation centers on advocacy, dodging legislative landmines and the industry’s proactive approach to improve their image and increase revenue opportunities for operators and suppliers.

Tullio also interviewed key industry leaders who shared their perspectives on the impact of Carla Balakgie, including Craig Hesch of AH Management, Pete Tullio of Gourmet Coffee Service and Tom Steuber of Associated Services. 

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No time to listen? Prefer to read? Here is an edited podcast transcript:

Bob Tullio: For today’s episode, I sat down with Carla Balakgie, President and CEO of NAMA, the convenience services industry organization. We talk about her journey, and her perspective, from the industry’s top spot. This is Carla’s last year at NAMA. She has decided that she is ready for a new chapter. I thought I would get her thoughts before everyone else interviewed her, and I must say, her comments were genuine, candid and thought-provoking. I also interviewed a number of people in the industry who had the pleasure of working with Carla over the years.

The one common theme I heard from so many industry leaders: Carla took NAMA and the convenience services industry to a higher level. Here’s Craig Hesch, a NAMA chairperson who spent 42 years in the industry at AH Management Group, now retired. Hesch was involved in the hiring of Carla Balakgie.

Craig Hesch: I was the chairperson for Carla’s selection, and the difference between her and other candidates was by far and large — huge. So, Carla came with a very good resume. Also, she had the ability to focus objectives into strategy and implementation. We had the ability, through her, to put things together that would actually focus strategically on what we needed to do, and then implement them. And finally, the ability to communicate with all different types of people in our spectrum.

Bob Tullio: My brother and former business partner at Gourmet Coffee Service, Pete Tullio, also a former NAMA chairperson, said he was impressed at how quickly Carla began to make good things happen at NAMA.

Pete Tullio: When we hired Carla as the new CEO of NAMA, we knew that we had found someone with extensive association experience and strong leadership qualities. Both of these attributes became immediately apparent from day one as she hit the ground running. At that time, NAMA was at an important crossroads. Health and wellness issues were at the forefront. A capital campaign was in the early planning stages, and there was a strong need for increased advocacy at the state and federal levels. She addressed these issues immediately, put together a strong staff to implement a new strategic plan, and moved forward with fresh new ideas to strengthen NAMA and the entire industry.

During her tenure, she gained the respect and admiration of all stakeholders.

Bob Tullio: Here’s what Tom Steuber has to say about the impact of Carla Balakgie.

Tom Steuber: Now that I’m the NAMA chair, I realize she’s been able to adapt her working style to work with me and all of the other operators and suppliers who have filled that role. Her impact on NAMA has been profound. Under her leadership, she’s developed NAMA into a very professional and responsive organization.

Bob Tullio: Clearly, Carla Balakgie has had a significant impact on the convenience services industry. But how did she ever arrive at the top spot at NAMA? Here is her story, and it’s a good one.

Bob Tullio: So, Carla, you’ve been in the association business for a long time, since the early nineties. Take us through your journey. How did you end up in that industry, and how did you ultimately end up at NAMA as president and CEO?

Carla Balakgie: Thank you for being so kind to say that I was starting in the early ’90s. It might have been a little bit before that, but not too much before that.

I grew up in western Pennsylvania — in Punxsutawney, Pa., the famous groundhog town. I’ll probably be the only person you’ve ever met from there, as we’re 5,000 people and dwindling. In the mid-’80s, when I left Pennsylvania, economically things were pretty hard. You know, it was the decline of the steel industry and the coal industry. I had a college roommate who lived in Washington, D.C., and so, I made my way south to make my way into a career. My first job was for a magazine called Association Management, and that magazine was published by the association — the professional society — of the Association for People Who Work for Associations. It’s called ASAE. So over four years of working in the publishing department of ASAE, every week, I was reading and internalizing about a profession I knew nothing about. And I realized that this was a whole career track.

So, I spent four years in that publishing division, got hired away to another association, and decided that this was going to be my profession. It’s not widely and well known — nonprofit management isn’t something you necessarily get a degree in — but it’s been a fantastic career for me. So, I spent 15 years working for a higher ed association, accumulating skills, and my first CEO job was with the Electronic Transactions Association, which is the industry that enables merchants to accept payments.

When NAMA was looking for a new CEO, one of the growth areas — I think at that time, there was only 11% penetration of electronic payments in vending, and micro markets were just a thought in someone’s mind at that point — they were looking for someone who understood retailing and electronic payments. And the rest is kind of history.

Bob Tullio: That’s great. What is it about the whole industry, though, that flipped on a bulb for you, and you said, “God, I’m really attracted to this”?

Carla Balakgie: So, you don’t work for nonprofits unless you have an orientation toward wanting to make a difference — a mission. And so, in looking at the NAMA opportunity, I saw great opportunity for the industry itself because it was at a, I’ll say, an inflection point. I understood how electronic payments could drive growth. And I saw an industry that was...had the potential to be technology driven — or technology enabled and consumer driven. From my time in the retailing and payments space, I saw the potential for unattended retail. And I thought, here’s an organization and an industry that has great bones. It’s well established, it has endured — it’s been there everywhere all the time for a really long time. It’s primed for a breakthrough. And so, that’s what attracted me to this industry and to its potential.

Bob Tullio: It sounds like you had a vision: You could see what was coming, that technology was around the corner, and that things were going to get a lot better for this industry, or at least it was going to move forward in good ways. And has your vision changed over the last 14 years?

Carla Balakgie: That was my vision originally, and my vision hasn’t changed. How the industry is going about it has changed. My understanding of the potential — my understanding of the opportunities, and my understanding of how to help operators capitalize on that potential — has gotten much deeper and much broader.

But, the idea that the industry is consumer-driven and technology-enabled has not changed. When I first came, I was looking at: What can vending do, and how can we increase acceptance of electronic payments? How can we help operators understand that if they make it easier for people to give them their money, their sales are going to go up?

Bob Tullio: Right.

Carla Balakgie: You know, I’ll start with the tangible. Calorie disclosure in vending: That was a fairly early-on issue in my tenure.

Imagine this: Somebody in Washington attached it to a bill because they hated vending. And we were swept in with calorie disclosure with restaurants, and nobody had been advocating. And NAMA was the tail wagging the dog on that, where we led a coalition of product manufacturers. And we were the ones on point on the FDA. And that was how I ended up on Fox News very early in my tenure talking about the burden of what it would take to disclose calories on a vending machine. And, we successfully redirected that to front-of-pack labeling.

Now, you may not love front-of-pack labeling, it may be a curse, but it was a heck of a sight better than requiring every vending operator to figure out how to disclose calories on every product in every spiral.

Bob Tullio: Nightmare.

Carla Balakgie: Nightmare! And for little guys who don’t… I remember having conversations with the FDA and they’re like, “Well, can’t you just press a button? Isn’t that all electronic?” I’m like, Oh, yeah. We have a lot of education to do here…. “No, it is not electronic, and we can stick up a sign, but … no.”

So anyhow, that’s one of those things where you go, “Wow, that was a big train wreck that we managed to redirect and keep a collision from happening.”

We were really active on things like R290 and refrigerants in vending machines. And interestingly, that affected operators and other parts of the supply chain — machine manufacturers.

I could go on on those types of things, but the thing that is both a win and not a win, and yet I’m really proud of it, is that when I came to NAMA, we had something called FitPick, which was a very ahead-of-its-time program for identifying healthy products and vending. And the tools that we had were, they were sort of very mechanical, right?

A lot of operators used that for a long time, but when we would go into legislative office, they would ask us for measurements and say, “Well, okay, so you have this program. What kind of outcomes do you have?” And we’d be like, “Well, we couldn’t measure it because we didn’t have a mechanism to get reporting and data.”

So, in around 2019, we partnered — this is the first step toward a more proactive policy agenda  — with Partnership for Healthy America and Alliance for Healthier Generation. And we committed. We worked with the NAMA leadership in the industry for at least 18 months — it felt like 18 years. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, but to get an industry to agree — to make a commitment to selling a certain percentage of healthier products in vending — was a big lift.

But, we went public, and we made this announcement that we were going to measure. We were going to commit to selling healthier products in vending — because it was the stepchild that got all the abuse — and we were going to measure our results.

Then the pandemic hit, and everything kind of went sideways. But, we continue to this day to participate. And how that has helped us is first, when the CDC mandated 100% healthy in government buildings post-pandemic, we were able to point to the public health commitment that said, we have a better design for you. Because that design was intended to help operators be profitable while they also met with this healthy mandate from the powers that be.

It opened the door to the White House Conference on Hunger, which opened the door to relationships to have conversations about the acceptance of SNAP. And suddenly, we were propelled into an opportunity where we could both do well by doing good, and help operators meet people’s nourishment needs at work and in food deserts by working to get acceptance into the SNAP program.

So, this is one of those things that seems lofty — some, like why are we doing this? And it’s a long play, but in the end, it changes the image of the industry.

Bob Tullio: And that’s important.

Carla Balakgie: It’s hugely important. What goes around comes around. It might not be important for the next four years, but trust me, it’s going to be important that we not be considered an industry that sells cigarettes, jujubes and junk food.

And that if we proactively point to things that show how we’re doing well by doing good. Like I said, it’s a long play, but it’s got long returns.

Bob Tullio: Do you have a sense or maybe some really conclusive thoughts about how this administration is going to play out for our industry?

Carla Balakgie: Gosh, if anybody has any idea about how this administration is going to play out with anything, I want to know them because we’re all just kind of going, “Oh.”

Bob Tullio: I thought you might have some inside information.

Carla Balakgie: And being in Washington D.C., you have to keep your wits about you. You have to play both sides of the fence. You can’t really declare whether you’re an R or D, because you have to work with everybody, right?

And so sometimes that can make you numb — or sort of immune to what’s going on. I also think that the current administration enjoys keeping everybody off balance because that — like in business — that’s a negotiation tactic: Throw out the most outlandish ideas, propose the craziest things, keep people off balance, because that gives you the whip hand.

But I will say this, it is a Republican administration through and through — both houses and the executive branch. They tend to be more business-friendly. And the amount of regulation that had been promulgated and hadn’t even been written in — might have been written into law but hadn’t gone through the rulemaking process — they’re still figuring out stuff from the Obama administration, not to mention the Biden administration.

If I were going to prognosticate, like my groundhog, I would say there’s probably going to be a lot of focus on rolling back regulation and unnecessary tax and complicated things. How far it’ll get and how well it’ll be done is to be seen, but Republican administrations tend to be more business-friendly.

Bob Tullio: Mr. Kennedy could be the wild card in that.

Carla Balakgie: Yeah, that’s going to be interesting. I don’t know what he is, whether he’s an R or a D or an I.

Bob Tullio: There’s a lot of people, I think, that aren’t sure what he is.

There’s a new normal — a lot of people say — in the office environment, in the workplace. It’s somewhere around 70 percent at best. What operators need to do to adjust, especially on the OCS side, to be successful?

Carla Balakgie: Hmm. Yeah. So, you know, we dedicated the reimagined CTW Show to thinking about this. I think the OCS and pantry channels have had a slower recovery post-pandemic because assuming that that tends to be more, let’s say, of an office or white-collar environment, though it depends on who you are and what you’re doing. But, it’s just been a slower trail back. Certainly, our census bears that out.

Operators had to get more creative about what they’re doing. And that is, to own as much of the person that’s on site — to own as much of their head, heart and stomach throughout the day as possible. Not that what operators do is transactional, but really thinking more about bespoke solutions, talking to every client and understanding what is unique about their environment. And then the new world order and figuring out solutions — whether you’ve got them in your warehouse or not — figuring out the solutions that are going to help you own head, heart, and stomach throughout the course of the day.

And again, I’ll bring in SNAP as an idea there. That’s also take-home for people. If you’re in a warehouse, you need to have breakfast, lunch and dinner, and you can take it home, and you don’t have to divert and make an additional stop. That’s owning a whole day. So, it’s becoming a solution provider for the people who are there, adjusting your product mix and portfolio to be more varied and responsive to individual client sites — and easy for me to say, right? But being more consultative — being a solution provider rather than just a service provider.

Look for part two of Bob’s conversation with Carla Balakgie on April 22.