Manufacturing
Built to last
How Richard Seaman improved Seaman Corp.’s strategic planning to help guide his company to short- and long-term success
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Akron/Canton | February 2009
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Richard Seaman
CEO, Seaman Corp.
How much strategy goes into your strategic planning? Richard N. Seaman wasn’t satisfied with his company’s strategic planningprocess, so he built a better one.
“I’ve been in strategic planning, and I’ve been a victim of it,where you go off-site and you spend three-quarters of your timebasically arguing about the validity of the size of the market orwhat a competitor is doing or what your position is in a market,”Seaman says. “Then you don’t really get to have good strategicdiscussions.”
Seaman, the president and CEO of Seaman Corp., developed arobust strategic planning process that has dramatically improvedthe company’s efficiency by reducing the amount of wasted time.The process has also increased Seaman’s agility, allowing quickreactions to market and industry changes.
In 1976, when Seaman took the helm of the company his fatherfounded, the family business was earning about $10 million in revenue. In the 1980s, he began experimenting with the strategic planning process that would eventually become weaved into the fabricof Seaman Corp.
“It’s like any of these business processes,” he says. “There areall kinds of consultants out there, and there are probably 90wrong ways to do these things and one or two right ways to doit. But to do it and keep it fresh and meaningful — particularlyas the business organization is growing — you have to havethat process change going forward.”
And change it did. The process evolved significantly through theyears, as Seaman tweaked it for maximum efficiency.
Today, Seaman Corp.’s revenue has crested $100 million and thecompany’s high-performance fabrics are used around the world.Here’s how Seaman gets his company to put on its strategic thinking cap.
