Matt Gruhn of MRAA

February 2026 Association CEO Conversation

Matt Gruhn of MRAA | February 2026 Association CEO Conversation

As President of Marine Retailers Association of the Americas (MRAA), Matt Gruhn transformed a struggling, one‑person association into a high‑impact, 25‑member team. Together, they rebuilt the association’s conference, expanded education and certification programs, and grew membership dramatically, revitalizing MRAA’s role in the industry.

Editor’s Note: This conversation was audio recorded using Otter.ai on Zoom. The transcript was edited by Jeff De Cagna and has been reviewed for accuracy by Matt Gruhn.

Jeff De Cagna [JD]: Board performance is an ongoing issue in our community. Why do you think so many associations struggle with board performance challenges?

Matt Gruhn [MG]: There are two aspects to this issue I think. On the one hand, you have volunteer leaders who don’t always understand fully what it means to be a volunteer leader. You have people who have been in your industry for a long time and they are passionate about it. They believe in the value they have received from the association so they make the decision to give back and return that value in some way. They want to give back to the industry and the association, or perhaps they didn’t plan to give back but they were asked to participate. They often come to their board roles not really knowing what they are there to do, what the responsibilities are, and how they deliver in ways that are effective for the association. I think that’s one side of it.

The other side is staff members like me who are running the association. Unlike board members, staff lives and breathes the business of the association every single day. We are passionate about the organization’s brand and deliverables. Staff members can get to the point where we feel strength in our vision but that can be counterproductive to the vision that the Board should be bringing to the association. For example, when membership engagement declines, the staff might think they have a helpful solution. But the board, which operates with both fiduciary and member perspectives, may be able to connect the decline to an engagement obstacle and offer strategic insights to solve the issue.

Human nature is at the heart of the whole thing, and I think alignment and collaboration are critical. With that in mind, board performance comes down to how we help the board understand what good performance looks like and what high-performing boards can achieve by carrying forward the organization’s mission and vision.

JD: I’m intrigued by your analysis and I want to explore it further with the next question. Let me first ask you a version of the question I have been posing to all CEOs for this edition. We have known problems in association board performance, and it does not feel as if we have made a concerted effort as a community to solve them. I’m curious to know your take on why we seem to allow these problems to persist.

MG: I take a different perspective. Every job, every company, and every industry has its own inherent challenges. The association world is no different. We have our own inherent challenges including, for example, board turnover through term limits and new people joining the board without knowing the business of the association. Association CEOs have to understand and be okay with that.

I believe one of the great strengths of association CEOs is their agility and their adaptability. In my role, I get a new boss and at least one new board officer every two years. Every three years, there is the potential for board rotation. We have had board chairs who were extremely involved and engaged, and we’ve had board chairs who have been distant. It requires a different kind of leadership to adjust and adapt to that dynamic. If I were an employee at a more typical company, I cannot imagine that every two years I would have a new boss with a completely different approach and management style. And yet, here we are. It’s what we do in our community.

I don’t think it’s feasible to fix the inherent problems. In our CEO roles, I think we can help our boards get better and help them understand what is required of them. We can also help ourselves get better through learning. Some aspects of our work are not solvable. They are just inherent to what we do.

JD: It’s a very fair point that some board performance problems may not be solvable. Perhaps as a community we need to work toward differentiating between the solvable problems and, as you describe them, the inherent issues that defy easy solution. If we can build awareness around this differentiation among CEOs/CSEs, board directors and officers, and even board advisors so that we are always talking about how we can eliminate as many obstacles as possible to high board performance, that would be beneficial.

MG: It makes total sense. I would suggest we adopt the notion of the growth mindset from Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset. As association executives, we must operate with a growth mindset and prioritize learning. We also must seat board members who bring this same mindset: they want to learn, they want to grow, and they want to improve. If we can continually communicate organizational vision and mission, and keep the board focused on the strategic plan and what we’re trying to achieve for the industry, we can learn and grow together, and deliver real impact.

An Important Message from the Editor

*T*he What Board Members Think Association Community Survey is open through Wednesday 3/18 at 11:59 pm PDT. You can read my recent public update* on the project and ask your board to complete the survey. I ask you to join this effort to enrich our community’s understanding of association board service. Thank you!***

JD: In your CEO role, what is the bedrock principle you follow to build and sustain high board performance?

MG: For me, it is transparency and collaboration, along with the growth mindset I just mentioned. From my perspective, the board and staff co-own our association’s future. My team and I are paid to champion MRAA, further its interests, and deliver impact for our industry. Our board members are accountable for making sure things happen within the framework of fiduciary responsibility.

To ensure transparency, I report on everything that we are doing so the board is aware and clear and able to make the best possible judgments. We are always talking about how we’re learning and growing together as a fundamental part of our work, which brings me to collaboration. We collaborate to achieve the association’s goals, move our industry forward, and operate as the leaders that we’re supposed to be. I cannot do what I do on my own, and I can’t do it with just my team. The board can’t do it on its own either. It must be a collaborative effort.

JD: As a follow up, one of the reasons I wanted to include you in this edition is MRAA’s excellent board handbook. It is one of the most comprehensive resources of its kind that I have seen and I am wondering if you can talk about the impact you think it has had on board performance.

MG: Happy to talk about it and give credit where credit’s due. We got the idea from the ASAE Exceptional Boards course during which a sample handbook was shared. We modified it for our board and integrated concepts from The Practitioner’s Guide to Governance as Leadership by Cathy Trower. While I cannot know for sure that my board has read it cover to cover, we have discussed many of its elements.

What I really love about the handbook is how helpful it is for volunteer leaders who come to the association without understanding Robert’s Rules of Order and how to work with them, what board leadership is really means, the full scope of their fiduciary responsibility. As part of our commitment to learning, we want to help them understand what the board role really involves and be the best they can be within it.

As you mentioned, the handbook is comprehensive. It includes information on the core characteristics of a strong board, our board expectations, legal responsibilities, what the board is responsible for, what am I responsible for, and where we each have input. It also includes board meeting time allocations since it is important that we are always using our time well.

To complement the handbook, we recently created a strategy placemat. One side of the placemat is a quick reference guide for the handbook and the other side is the mission, vision, values, and our three-year plan to have in front of them when making decisions during meetings. We created these tools to help them focus on being their best as board members in all situations.

JD: How has your experience as a board director informed/influenced the approach you take with your board as CEO?

MG: It has actually been very important for me. As association executives, there is gap between what we believe our board knows, and what they actually know, or at least to what they are (or we think they are) paying attention. It’s a big gap that we do not necessarily see. We expect that board members hear everything we’re saying and are in tune with our strategies and tactics.

As a board member, I have come to recognize that I need refreshers on that organization’s work since I am very busy day-to-day running MRAA. When I step out of that role and into my board role, I need to redirect my thinking toward what that organization is working on and how can I best contribute. My own board service has helped me do a better job of communicating, even something as simple as addressing them as “MRAA Board members” in email communications since some of my board directors/officers serve on other boards, and that small reminder allows them to reorient themselves to that role.

Similarly, I was an association board chair and now I know what it is like to be an immediate past chair. You go from a high level of day-to-day involvement to almost none. The transition can be very jarring. I felt that gap with my previous MRAA chairs, and now I have felt it myself. It has given me a better understanding of what my board members experience.

Board performance comes down to how we help the board understand what good performance looks like and what high-performing boards can achieve by carrying forward the organization’s mission and vision.

JD: The March edition of Association CEO Conversations will focus on artificial intelligence. What is your most significant concern about AI use in our community’s organizations? What do you see as the most significant opportunity?

MG: I think the biggest challenge is that by the time I finish this answer, AI will have changed again! I’m kidding, of course, but, honestly, AI is changing basically every day and keeping up with the changes may be the biggest challenge right now.

Associations have to think deeply about how AI becomes part of our operating structures, i.e., how does it get fully embedded into the organization? To my previous point, however, the rapid evolution of AI services increases the risk exposure related to AI infrastructure decisions.

I believe the AI opportunities are endless. Three years ago, we understood AI as just ChatGPT. That is now old news and today is all about agentic AI. By the end of this year, everyone will have their own agents and the opportunities will be amazing. We just created our first internal agent to help press releases. It has greatly reduced the time and effort we put into that work, but we’re just scratching the surface of its potential at the moment.

Our next big step is about getting our data right. The data shows us the path, but we have been slow in addressing this issue with respect to AI. Once we are up to speed, the more effective and efficient our operations will be. Getting all of our information, including customer and member information, into our systems will enable us to do so much more with AI.

JD: As a follow up related to the board performance theme, how have you involved your board in the AI conversation? What role are you having them play?

MG: In 2023, we trained a closed AI bot from a third-party provider with our content. It serves our membership very well, but it is not our AI strategy. It was a first step into the strategy conversation through learning what works. We went to the board with the idea and they thought it made sense to make our content more accessible to our members.

So we started the board conversation early. More recently, we have launched “the dealership of the future” task force. Our members are boat dealers and what we’re seeing is changing consumers, changing technologies, and changing needs around retail business and experiential business models, including the adoption of AI. We’re working to get our board and our members up to speed on it.

What we need to do is determine how to meet the customer where they are as an industry and as a retail body. The task force is focused on helping our members and our industry better understand how they can use AI in their businesses beyond asking questions of a chatbot. The conversations with both the board and the task force have been strong.

JD: If you were granted the power to change one thing about how association boards function today, what would it be and why?

MG: I think operating with an ownership mindset is the change I would like to make. I live and breathe MRAA’s work, but there are days when I feel as though I’m on an island by myself. It would be great if we had consistent board ownership and engagement to facilitate the understanding, for example, that MRAA’s certification program is not my program, it’s their program. If they could challenge my thinking about how to best allocate our resources to advance the strategic plan, we would have much greater strength and impact. It would be a game changer.

There are board members who contribute in this way consistently and all of my board members will engage at this level on occasion. When a board member calls me with a very specific question about our P&L, it gets me thinking about how we can do things differently or better and it creates an opportunity for a real conversation about how we can deliver a bigger impact.

JD: As a CEO, what guidance would you offer to board directors/officers about your role, their roles, and what it takes for an association board and CEO to build a more interdependent relationship?

MG: CEO Excellence is a great book, published by McKinsey, in which the authors discuss the CEO role and what great CEOs do. One point they make is the importance of CEOs talking regularly with the board, and that is an area in which I have not done a good job. We can talk about board performance, but it also starts with me. I have to do a better job of making sure that I’m in contact with them. As association executives, we have to care about our customers and employees, and we have to care about how our board members show up and engage, and how they are feeling about what we’re doing.

My board members bring something unique to my work. I have never worked in a boat dealership, and yet I’m passionate about boat dealers and what they do, what they deliver for our industry, our economy, for the boating public. While I have been boat owner, my board brings a deep understanding and expertise that I can only get from them. We need them to come to their board service with a strong sense of fiduciary responsibility to make the right decisions and recommendations for the health of the industry rather than their specific business interests.

My staff and I know how to run the association and how to deliver for our members, but we can’t do any of that without the board’s guidance. We have big aspirations at MRAA. We want to change the trajectory of our industry in a way that will redefine our members’ business model. We believe that we have arrived at an inflection point at which this business model shift needs to happen. It’s not an MRAA conversation, it is an industry conversation. The magnitude of what we’re working toward means we must be able to work well together.

Matt’s Powerful Quote

“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

— Jim Barksdale, former President and CEO of Netscape

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