The product catalog isn’t as thick as it was, and MSA has de-emphasized things like safety glasses and mine lights, removing the words “mine safety” from its name, to focus on four main areas. He says by concentrating on construction, fire service, oil and gas, and general industry, MSA — which spends about 4 percent of its revenue on R&D — can develop new, meaningful products for those areas. These range from fall protection harnesses and accessories, where MSA has launched 50 products over the last three years, to a five-year, $50 million effort to develop a new self-contained breathing apparatus for firefighters, which included 12 patents.
Applying your knowledge
Former MSA CEO William Lambert, who today is chairman, came up through the engineering group. He used that background to focus on R&D and determine where MSA could focus down. Vartanian wants to do the same thing with his sales background, narrowing the company down to core geographies and improving topline revenue.
“When you look at, for instance, Europe, we sell to all the countries in Europe, but 80 percent of our revenue comes from four key areas,” he says.
With just 20 percent coming from the rest of Europe, that’s a lot of time and effort for fewer results. By focusing on France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Nordic region, Vartanian believes there’s more headroom to grow, such as more sales to the fire service in Britain.
“When I was a sales rep and I had 20 targets when I started the year, I didn’t get a whole lot of work done on all 20,” he says. “But if I narrowed my focus down on, ‘Here are three key customers in my territory that I really want to grow the business with,’ I could spend a lot of time with those three customers.”
By doing extra things for a smaller number of customers, Vartanian would pick up some of that business after a year or 18 months.
“I believe that holds true with our business overall on a global basis,” Vartanian says.
Another example is Russia. While it’s a huge market with lots of opportunity, it also comes with issues such as corruption that is counter to the company’s core value of integrity.
“As we start to look at the business and the market, it’s just not attractive for us to try to compete there, whereas we could go to Saudi Arabia and do a lot better,” he says.
Because of that, MSA took a strong sales leader in Russia and moved him into the Middle East market.
