The biggest event hosted by the CEP each year is our Annual Luncheon. Each of the last four years, this has been a Sold Out event and the 2017 edition was no different. In fact, this year’s event filled up before Christmas – a full six weeks before the event! For the 600 attendees we are grateful and hope you left excited about our community and the CEP. For the many, many more who were not able to attend, I am excited to share with you a few highlights of this event.

Moving Forward – A Race to the Finish

At the CEP’s inaugural Annual Luncheon in January 2013, we laid out the plan which had just been adopted by the CEP Board of Directors. This plan, called Moving Forward, was to guide the start-up of this newly merged organization and set three major goals all of which were to be accomplished over the next five years. The plan detailed how the entity was to be structured with our emphasis on our five key program areas: Business Advocacy, Business Attraction, Business Creation, Business Retention and Business Services, as well as a Business Support area which would provide administrative help to the efforts. The plan outlined how each area would be staffed, what would be the focus of their efforts, initial plans for implementing those efforts, and how each area would interact with the others. [Read more…]