At a black-tie ceremony in Chicago last night, Counselor magazine named Chuck Fandos, CEO of Brand Addition U.S., as its Person of the Year for 2016. Honored for his industry vision, Fandos engineered the purchase of his distributor company Gateway CDI over the past year by Brand Addition, the largest distributor company in Europe. Seizing on the opportunity, Fandos recognizes that the promotional products world is flat and globalization is an important key to success. In addition, as the founder of Facilis Group, Fandos is a proponent of the industry moving forward with new technologies and new ideas.

“Chuck shuns complacency and refuses to stand still while the world around him evolves,” said Tim Andrews, president and CEO of ASI, upon revealing the Person of the Year award at the ceremony last night. “Realizing that the promotional marketplace was evolving, and that resourceful companies would have to innovate to succeed, he adopted a new technology platform and grew it into a collective powerhouse. And when it came time to make the tough decision to sell the company he built from the ground up, he negotiated the smartest possible deal, one that allowed him to preserve jobs while giving him a license to succeed on a global scale.”

Read a profile of Fandos from Counselor’s State of the Industry issue.

Watch the interview below.