“I send my technical people out into the field (to ask) did the product meet your need? Is there anything more that we need to do to this product? We’ll get back to our innovation centers, we’ll redesign the product and try to have it back out to that customer in a two- to three-week time frame with our generation II product,” Crum says.
Seaman technicians go to a customer’s job site, learn how that customer is applying its products and work to make improvements to better suit the application.
“That’s going to be a culture shock because they tend to be more internally focused,” Crum says.
“A lot of times companies have R&D folks that do all their R&D inside the company. And our philosophy is that it’s just as important, or more important, that the technical people get out and see the actual applications,” Crum says.
This comes from his belief that there is no substitution for hands-on experience in the field.
“To win the customer you have to be externally focused, and you’ve got to be able to solve their problem on their turf. And then once you design that product, in the first 10 days that a new product is introduced, you go back out and you follow that product into the field, and see how it’s working for them.”
That, Crum says, will apply to all levels in the organization. He says the company will go as far as to track the technical days an employee spends in the field. For instance, Crum says the vice president of innovation and business development may be out in the field 35 or 40 percent of the time versus in the office. Business development managers may be out 60 to 70 days a year. Innovation and technology folks, the people making the products, will spend two or three days a month out in the field, and chemists or textile engineers will be out once a month to better understand how customers are applying Seaman Corp. products.
Attracting the talent to accomplish that mission, however, is a challenge, according to Crum.
“You know, we’re doing all the things that we can think to do to acquire that talent, whether it’s a modern work environment, whether it’s in the screening process to understand the person and what their technical skills are, but more importantly also what their social skills are,” he says.
“Are they introverted or extroverted? We’re not saying that every person — technical person — that we hire has to be an extrovert, and quite frankly you’re probably not going to find that. But it’s a very rigorous screening process.
“And I don’t know that we have the answer yet, I mean we’re working on it. Sometimes we can recruit directly. Sometimes, we have to pay the recruiters to bring the talent to us so that we can see where that talent is.”
Crum says the company is well-positioned from a staffing standpoint today, but the emphasis is on building good bench strength for the future.
“We’ve got to make sure that our atmosphere brings the right talent into Seaman Corp. and Wooster, Ohio, and that they feel that they’re in a progressive company,” he says.
Change of scenery
The advantages of combining multiple departments of a company under one roof are often related to the conclusion that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
As Crum sees the modern work environment, it includes a $5 million upgrade to Seaman’s office headquarters, which includes an open office environment to house the company’s newly formed innovation and business development department. The physical move brings the innovation, technology and business development aspects of the workforce into one area of the corporate headquarters.
