ABMA Keynote Speaker Donald Cooper: Creating Your High-Performance Culture
The ABMA’s 109th Annual Convention brings together manufacturers and suppliers for three days of education, strategic planning and relationship-building at a pivotal time for the industry. The 2026 keynote speaker, Donald Cooper, a business coach and former manufacturer, brings what he calls a 90-minute “straight talk” session titled Creating Your High-Performance Culture. His thesis is direct: mediocrity is no longer sustainable in manufacturing.
“Sounds boring … trust me, it’s not,” Cooper says of his session. “I don’t do theory. I deliver practical tools leaders can use immediately.”
For brush manufacturers navigating margin pressure, global competition and workforce challenges, the message is designed to be both urgent and actionable.
From Ice Hockey to Global Business Strategy
Before becoming an international business advisor, Cooper led his own family manufacturing company. Cooper Sports Equipment grew to 3,000 employees and achieved 70 percent global market share in ice hockey equipment, becoming what Cooper describes as “an industry brand icon.”
The company’s eventual sale taught him hard lessons about leadership transitions — lessons he now shares with manufacturing clients worldwide.
“Unfortunately, we sold it to the wrong people who destroyed it in just three years,” Cooper reflects. “But that’s a story for another day.”
Since then, he has worked with businesses in more than 40 industries across the globe, including manufacturing sectors facing the same operational complexity as brush production: supply chain volatility, pricing pressure and talent constraints.
His central observation after decades in manufacturing and consulting? Many businesses struggle because they lack clarity — and almost nobody talks about that fundamental gap.
The Clarity Problem
Cooper argues that while operational ideas can originate anywhere in an organization, clarity must originate with leadership.
“As business owners, leaders and managers, our first job is clarity,” he says. “If we, at the top, are not clear about ten specific things, who else in the business can possibly be? The answer is nobody.”
Those ten clarities form the foundation of Cooper’s keynote. Ten days before the convention, registered attendees will receive electronic access to several of Cooper’s proprietary business tools, including his Clarity Score assessment, a culture effectiveness evaluation and a talent pipeline diagnostic. Completing the five-minute Clarity Score in advance will allow participants to calculate a baseline measurement for their own organizations.
“All attendees will also receive free access to my complete set of copyrighted Business Assessment & Management Implementation Tools,” Cooper notes.
The goal is to transform the keynote into a working strategy session rather than a passive lecture. Cooper will walk members through the ten clarities, explain how to measure them and provide frameworks to address gaps.
Culture as a Profit Driver
Cooper’s core message is that high-performance culture is built on five interconnected elements: clarity, commitment, urgency, accountability and profitability.
“We do this by creating a culture of clarity, commitment, urgency, accountability and profitability,” Cooper says. “I’ll be explaining specifically how to do that — and providing a few business tools to make it happen.”
Among the specific topics Cooper will address: what business culture truly is and why it directly affects margins, how leadership style impacts operational performance, the outsized damage caused by even one toxic supervisor and the cultural challenges unique to partnerships and family-owned firms. He will also introduce attendees to his “17 Keys to Creating a Winning Culture” tool, which allows leaders to calculate a culture effectiveness score for their business.
For an industry comprised largely of small to mid-sized and family-owned businesses, these topics have direct operational and financial consequences. Culture in manufacturing is not an abstract HR concern. It shapes production discipline, quality consistency, safety performance, customer responsiveness and the pace at which companies adapt to new technologies or market demands.
The Talent Pipeline Challenge
One of Cooper’s strongest themes — particularly relevant to the brush manufacturing sector — is organizational foresight. Many ABMA member companies are facing generational transitions, making succession planning and talent development critical strategic priorities.
Cooper’s approach is methodical. He will introduce attendees to his Talent Pipeline evaluation tool, which guides leaders through building an organizational chart aligned with where the company needs to be in three to five years. The next step is evaluating current team members across five categories: sustainable, promotable, toxic, in the wrong job or retiring soon.
“From this exercise, it becomes clear what the staff development and recruitment plan needs to be,” Cooper says. “This exercise has been transformational for hundreds of clients.”
The framework allows leaders to move from vague concerns about succession to concrete action plans. It identifies not only who might retire or leave, but who is ready to step up, who needs development and where the organization has structural gaps that require external recruitment.
In an industry where institutional knowledge and technical expertise often reside with long-tenured employees, losing key personnel without a transition plan can disrupt operations for years. Cooper’s model provides a systematic way to prevent that outcome.
Strategic Thinking in a Reactive World
Cooper believes industry conferences offer something most leaders rarely give themselves: structured time for strategic thinking. “We all spend much of our regular workday solving immediate problems, rather than thinking about longer-term strategy, generational sustainability, management and leadership,” he says. “A convention like this, if we seize the opportunity and come with a list of key topics on which we need new insights, provides the best opportunity to move our business forward.”
But he offers a cautionary note: “Almost no one comes to a conference with a list. They walk around in the faint hope that something important will accidentally leap out and stick to them. Don’t do that. Success comes to those who do the homework.”
Cooper will remain onsite for the full convention, participating in Thursday morning Table Talk discussions where attendees can engage with him on any aspect of the insights delivered the previous day. He also makes himself available for quiet, confidential one-on-one conversations throughout the event.
“Some of the most important value is delivered off the platform in the form of quiet, confidential conversations,” Cooper notes.
