Dear SIGMA Community,
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the inaugural electronic edition of IGM! We’ve put a lot of thought and spent a considerable amount of time making sure that we get this right. Special thanks to Amy Rider, SIGMA’s Communications Director, for taking the lead and putting this over the finish line.
I’m so excited to make this important publication even more valuable by making it more accessible. Thank you to everyone who was supportive of this initiative – it’s part of our continuing effort to modernize SIGMA, and to provide more value to our members.
By the time you read this, we will have just finished SIGMA’s Annual conference in Nashville. What a meeting! We had record breaking attendance, and an amazing line up of speakers. I have spoken with so many of you – including many members – who are coming to SIGMA either for the very first time, or for the first time in a long while. We are growing fast, and getting very positive responses on all things related to our meetings.
In my prior communications to all of you, I have stressed how important SIGMA is to me, personally. My goal is to take what is already a great association and make it better. Since we last communicated, we’ve made many strides to achieve that goal. Including:
SIGMA University – launched in the summer. We released our first online course entitled “Fuel Buying Best Practices.” The response has been overwhelming – those that have taken it call it the best two-hour explanation of this complicated business that they have ever seen. Looking toward next year, we will be adding two more courses to the library – A Fuel Heding Basics course, and a Basics of Fuel Compliance and RINS. For those of you with new staff members, I would very much suggest that you consider getting them up to speed with this cost effective, and time intensive course.
For more information on the current course, please visit this website:
https://www.sigma.org/sigma-university/
SIGMA Share Groups – many of you have pulled me aside and told me how much you valued the share groups that SIGMA did in the past, but asking multiple staff members to be away for several days is unrealistic and expensive. We recently did our first virtual share group – and before you grimace – it was met with resounding approval. We packed in a full day of information, and the technology was flawless. We’ll be doing more of these next year.
Webinars – we did three webinars last year that were very well attended. We got the leading experts in the industry, and market “pundits” to give attendees clear visions of the state and future of our markets. Stay tuned for more exciting webinars next year.
And, there’s more exciting things for next year – don’t forget our Winter Meeting in February. We have an amazing speaker – Alex Aberle – who is going to talk about “neuroscience” and the way it can be used to recruit and retain key employees. And our Spring, 2026 meeting at the Four Seasons outside of Dallas is going to be huge. In addition to lots of outdoor activities like golf and pickle ball, we are putting together an amazing line up of speakers.
Here's how to get more information on both these meetings:
SIGMA 2026 Winter Conference
SIGMA 2026 Spring Conference
So excited about next year – and I didn’t mention a revamped, and improved SIGMA Weekly Report. More on that next time.
Scott BerhangCEO, SIGMA
