The Sweeney Agency

About Donald Cooper - Expert in Leadership, Management and Customer Service:

Donald Cooper has helped thousands of companies throughout the world add more value to their customers’ lives and more dollars to their bottom line. Drawing on his real-life experience as a world-class manufacturer, retailer and tireless researcher, Donald devotes his time to helping companies redefine and reinvent their business to thrive in the new millennium. With wisdom, humor and a strong dose of reality, he delivers insight on how to increase profitability through leadership, management and customer service in the face of ever-stronger competition!

After earning his MBA from the University of Western Ontario, Donald spent 18 years at Cooper Canada, the family business. Cooper Canada became the world's leading manufacturer of hockey equipment and Canada's largest sporting goods supplier.

In 1981, Donald made a strategic decision to do something less corporate and purchased a chain of four small exercise and casual wear stores, expanding to 13 stores just as the market was declining. The mall locations were sold off leaving a small warehouse in which a bold new retail vision was born. In just 3 years, Donald won 7 Awards of Excellence for marketing and service innovation, including the Retail Council's Innovative Retailer of the Year.

His insights of Human Marketing will inform you, challenge you, inspire you, and leave you with a new and powerful understanding of your business, your customers and your life!

What Donald Cooper Talks About:

From Great to Gone: Important business lessons from Cooper Canada
From humble beginnings in 1905, Cooper Canada became a world-leading maker of sports equipment and fine leather goods...and a Canadian Brand icon. In the process partners were bought out, the company went global, then went public, was unionized and un-unionized, opened an offshore factory, bought competitors and, finally, sold to the wrong people.

Today, Donald Cooper devotes his life to helping businesses around the world create compelling customer value, clarity of purpose and long-term profitability.

Managing any business is tough…and getting tougher. We’re all faced with more demanding customers, more and stronger competition, increased complexity and shrinking margins. On top of that, great staff are hard to find and keep…and that problem won’t go away any time soon.

Add to all of that the unique challenges of running a family business, and life gets interesting, indeed. Donald has worked with 100s of family businesses and entrepreneurs to deal with both business and family challenges.

In this candid, ‘no-holds-barred’ presentation, Donald shares what made Cooper Canada great, where it fell short and how lack of communication resulted in its sale and subsequent demise.

Donald’s internationally acclaimed work on business Vision, clarity, commitment and accountability will inform you, challenge you, disturb you and inspire you.

Human Marketing: Four Powerful Steps to Creating a Customer-Focused Organization.
Donald’s powerful insights of Human Marketing bring much needed clarity to the critical issues of loyalty, value and customer ownership. Drawing from his unique experience as a world-class manufacturer, award-winning retailer, and international business speaker, Donald delivers his own insight into three of your most pressing marketing challenges:
1. How to create and deliver compelling customer value that will increase market share and profitability in the face of ever-stronger competition.
2. How to communicate that value in a way that clearly differentiates you and creates powerful connections with your target customers.
3. How to create an internal business environment that generates clarity of purpose, commitment, creativity and operational effectiveness.

The 8 Essential Steps to Finding, Leading & Keeping the Best Staff.
One of the biggest challenges facing every business in the world today is how to attract, lead and keep outstanding people at every level of their organization. Not having the right people in your organization carries a huge cost in lost business, inefficiency, frustration and missed opportunity. And the cost of hiring, then terminating, the wrong people is huge. In this powerful presentation, The 8 Essential Steps To Finding, Leading & Keeping the Best Staff,,Donald defines, explores and simplifies this critical challenge. He delivers dozens of valuable insights and a step-by-step process that works.

Many business owners and managers complain that they just can’t get good people any more while good people say that it’s tough to find good businesses to work for. Rather than complaining about how difficult it is to find great people it will be far more useful to ask and answer these two simple questions:
1. What kind of company do the best people want to work for?
2. What must we do to be that kind of company?

Although this subject is a bottom-line serious issue in every business, Donald’s presentation is delivered with large doses of humor and humanity that touch people’s hearts while feeding their minds.

How to Sell More, Manage Smarter, Make More Money and Have a Life!
Every industry today is in a crisis of overcapacity. There simply isn't room in the market for everyone to make a decent profit. Drawing from his unique experience Donald Cooper challenges old assumptions and shares new ideas on how to make more money and still have a life.