00:00It's my honor to be one of the recipients of this year's Icons of Change International Awards.
00:07And it's especially meaningful for me this year because the awards are tied into the United Nations Sustainability Goals.
00:17And I want to explain to you what my life has been about and what the company is about, CCA
00:23Global Partners.
00:24My father was a Ukrainian refugee and came over here at the age of 14 years old.
00:31Never had a high school degree.
00:33And it was his dream to open a family business.
00:36And when I was five years old, he opened a small retail floor covering store.
00:42He got cancer and passed away when I had just turned 13.
00:46And it was only a business that was $100,000 a year.
00:49But I saw the pride and the love he had of having a family business.
00:55And I realized what that means in our communities.
00:58And so when I got out of college, I went back into the family business.
01:01It was a two-person business.
01:03And it grew.
01:04But I realized family businesses needed scale.
01:08We were no longer competing against other family businesses.
01:11We were competing against billion-dollar companies.
01:15Lowe's and Walmart and Home Depot.
01:18And couldn't do it alone.
01:20So with a dear friend of mine, over 40 years ago, we started CCA Global Partners, which is a cooperative.
01:29It means it was going to be owned by the members that use it.
01:33And those members are going to be family businesses across North America.
01:39With that one goal over 40 years ago, today we're a multi-billion-dollar company, having thousands of family businesses
01:48in North America, where we do the buying and the marketing and the training and the digital.
01:54And we have made them enormously successful.
01:57Because what we found was, it wasn't they didn't have the talent or the ability.
02:03They didn't have the scale.
02:05We have some individual members that started out doing $700,000 a year.
02:10And we have one member that this year, he went from $700,000 to 30 years later, he's doing $100
02:17million on a family business.
02:19Because family businesses are the core and the heart and the soul of our communities.
02:25It's not Amazons.
02:27It's not Walmarts.
02:29And it's not OpenAI.
02:31It's local family businesses.
02:33But they can't be on their own.
02:35And the concentration of wealth has been happening so much in companies and individuals in our society that we need
02:44to make sure we protect the family businesses that exist.
02:48Over 1,500 go out every single day.
02:541,500 businesses close.
02:56That's 500,000 businesses a year.
02:59And every time a family business closes, there's a local family, their entire structure is in chaos.
03:08And so what we do is provide the scale.
03:11It wasn't that they didn't have the brains or the drive or the talent.
03:14But they couldn't compete on their own.
03:17So by taking the combined leverage and having what a cooperative does, having shared ownership, we could provide that scale
03:25to them and all the resources they need.
03:28And for those that don't understand the word cooperative, and I understand sometimes it's misunderstood, cooperatives have 1 billion members
03:35in the world.
03:36It's 10% of the world economy.
03:40Over 250 million people work in cooperatives.
03:44And the cooperatives are one of the only structures that is aligned with UN sustainability goals.
03:51And that's why I said this year that the Icons of Change Award is aligned with sustainability goals means so
03:58much to me.
03:58I was very honored this year to be invited to speak at the United Nations about the work that cooperatives
04:05are doing about bringing equality and opportunity to people around the world.
04:12Just to give you an idea, in India alone, they have 300 million members of cooperatives.
04:18And they have a ministry of cooperatives.
04:19And now, as part of CCA Global Partners, our company has over 15 different divisions, where we've reached thousands and
04:29thousands of family businesses.
04:31And we have childcare centers, over 35,000 childcare centers, all with bringing opportunity for the local family business and
04:42increasing the value of our communities.
04:45So I want to thank you again so much for this award and being part of the Icon of Change
04:51International.
