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Chuck Violand started the Violand Executive Summit in the early 2000s with about 40 or 50 attendees, a borrowed conference center at Kent State University’s Stark Campus, and a simple conviction: the cleaning and restoration industries needed real leadership and management training, not just technical content.

More than two decades later, the summit has grown into one of the most respected executive development programs in the trades. And this year, it’s moving to Chicago, July 20-.

“There was very little being offered within the cleaning and restoration industries in the realm of small business leadership and management,” Violand said. “Lots in technical, which is very important, but nothing with leading and managing companies.”

That gap is exactly what the summit was designed to close—and according to Violand and Tim Hull, who took over ownership of Violand Management Associates at the end of 2024, it’s more relevant now than ever.

A new city, the same standard

The move to Chicago is a deliberate one. With a large concentration of cleaning and restoration companies in the metro area and a venue capable of supporting the summit’s signature blend of high-level instruction and high-touch experience, Chicago was a natural fit.

But the location change doesn’t alter what the summit has always been about. Violand describes the experience as “Fortune 500-level programming for businesses of any size.” The goal from the beginning was to bring world-class instruction and facilities together with the day-to-day reality of running a small business—and to hold that standard from the moment an attendee arrives at the hotel to the moment they leave.

“We deliberately made it different than other programs,” Violand said.

Education as the whole point

Hull, now the owner of Violand Management Associates, said what sets the summit apart from other industry events comes down to a single word: purpose.

“If you go to industry conferences, you go there primarily for the networking, which we have a lot of,” Hull said. “But coming there solely for the purpose of furthering yourself and leveling your business up is a unique endeavor.”

First-time instructors at the summit consistently remark on how eager the audience is to learn. That’s not an accident. The summit draws a self-selected group of business owners and leaders who show up ready to work—and the instructors are chosen specifically to meet them there.

Past faculty has included nationally and internationally recognized names such as Jim Bagnola, Jim Ryerson, Jack Shanks, Jim Sullivan, and Holly Bogner, among many others. These are professionals trained in adult learning, not classroom lecturers.

Sessions are interactive, built around group exercises and real-world case studies, and structured so that attendees leave with something they can implement immediately.

“The goal on our part is to give the audience something that they can immediately go back to their businesses with at the end of the week and implement,” Hull said. “If we did that, we did our job.”

Who the summit is really for

The word “executive” can give some people pause, but Hull pushes back on the idea that it’s intimidating.

“If you’re intimidated by that word, maybe look at it in a little different context—look at it as something that you aspire to be,” he said. “We try to go to great lengths to bring out the best in people, and the Executive Summit is set at that level to get people thinking and working at a different altitude. That’s why it’s called the Summit.”

Violand puts it plainly: the summit was built for small business owners in the trades. Whether a company is just finding its footing or already running at scale, the content is designed to meet owners and leaders where they are and push them further.

What’s on business owners’ minds right now

Hull said the challenges he hears most from cleaning and restoration business owners today are consistent: unpredictability, economic uncertainty, pressure to do more with less, and a constant shortage of time. The summit, he said, directly addresses all of it.

“In my opinion, the summit really represents an opportunity for business owners to invest in themselves and their staff,” Hull said. “You can’t get a bigger ROI than when you invest in yourself and your team and your business because it all starts there.”

Violand added that one of the most pressing issues for businesses of any size right now is developing the next generation of leaders from within. Today’s workforce is populated with smart, motivated millennials and Gen Z employees who are eager to advance—but who simply haven’t been in the workforce long enough to have built deep management experience.

“The Executive Summit, in our opinion, is a powerful tool in that leadership development toolbox to help bridge that gap by providing that training,” he said.

Results that show up over time

Violand is candid about the nature of leadership development: it rarely produces an overnight transformation. The summit is designed as what he calls a “trickle feed”—the kind of investment that compounds over time as owners and their teams absorb and apply what they’ve learned.

One sign he watches for? LinkedIn profiles. Over the years, Violand began noticing that attendees were listing the Executive Summit under the education section of their profiles—placing it alongside college degrees and professional certifications.

“That told me volumes about the value that they found in the program and the impact that it was having on their businesses,” he said.

Hull’s example is more personal. A longtime client who attended one of his early sessions on organizational design—a course that used NASCAR pit crew strategy and a competitive Lego race car exercise to illustrate business growth concepts—brought it up years later, as the two were preparing to sell the client’s company.

“He said, ‘Looking back on all the things that we’ve done and we’ve talked about, one of the things I remember very fondly was the duct tape,'” Hull recalled. The metaphor—using a temporary fix to get a business from one phase of growth to the next—had stayed with him for years and shaped how he navigated his own transitions.

That kind of staying power, Hull said, is the point.

The details

The Violand Executive Summit takes place in Chicago from July 20-22. For registration information and the full event schedule, visit the registration page .