Who’s shaking up the industry today and making it a unique, successful, challenging and innovative sector? The members of the 2016 Counselor Hot 25. Check out their stories.

It’s not that Daniel Baker didn’t want to be a marketing manager – he just wanted to be a rock star and commercial pilot first. “I came out of adolescence with the burning desire to be a professional musician,” says Baker, who now oversees marketing for Debco Solutions (asi/48880), a supplier based in Ontario.

Years later, he enrolled in a local flight college. Impractical pursuits? Hardly. Baker, now the number-one marketer behind his company’s campaigns, says his business judgment is better informed because of earlier career pursuits – not the least of which is enhanced creativity. That’s in part the reason Baker’s pet project since joining the firm three years ago – a database system capable of processing over 9 million bits of information – provides unprecedented insights about growth potential the company hadn’t seen before. That’s allowed Debco execs to better understand customer “buying habits, geographic tendencies, product lifecycles and hundreds of other meaningful insights,” says Alex Morin, Debco’s executive vice president.

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