Frank Seeley AM FAICD and Seeley International is featured in the February / March edition of in-business magazine. The article is below.
Few regrets: Frank did it his way
His initial success was to develop the world’s first all-plastic cooler from his garage at home in Adelaide. From there he set up a manufacturing operation which made 1000 coolers in the first year.
He followed up that success with the world’s first all-plastic rooftop cooler, a breakthrough enabling the whole rooftop cooling market in Australia to grow from 12,000 units installed each year to around 70,000. Plastic coolers are now the industry standard.
Today, Seeley International employs 300 people at manufacturing operations at Lonsdale and in Albury, NSW, sales offices in each mainland state, in the USA and throughout western Europe. Seeley exports to more than 100 countries and its brands are market leaders in evaporative cooling and ducted gas heating in Australia – some, internationally.
But the path has not been smooth. Frank has survived economic crises and having his business completely destroyed by fire – twice.
That was in the ‘good old days’ of a low dollar, tariff barriers and many other measures. Given his time again, would Frank Seeley build his enterprise the same way?
“Absolutely! While there’s no question that viable manufacturing in Australia today is much, much tougher than ever before, the opportunities are also far, far greater than at any time in the past,” he says. “And these opportunities are being harvested by those people who are courageous enough to embrace radical change!
“What hasn’t changed, and probably never will, are the characteristics of those who create opportunities and then transform them into resounding successes.
“Such people are more lateral in their thinking. They’re more inquisitive, more impatient and altogether more tenacious. They simply won’t take “no” for an answer, and with those qualities, they can conquer any challenge in the world and WIN!
“And South Australia has more than its share of these people, so if you wish to be amongst them, then remember the motto of the original SAS, ‘Who Dares, WINS’ and have a GO!”
This is Frank’s conviction, but his attitude to risk is not that simple. Risk motivates him, but he evaluates it ruthlessly.
“There are FOUR questions here, so let me answer them one at a time, so none of us get confused. And to be clear, in my answer, I’m assuming we are talking about calculated risk, as opposed to irresponsible or even irrational risk,” he says.
“For me, calculated risk is INSPIRING. Risk is the elixir of the entrepreneur’s life! If all we want is certainty, then we’ll have to settle for death and taxes, which personally, I find tedious and extremely dull.
“In assessing new opportunities, it helps to have a healthy dose of realism, tinged with a little scepticism. If you want to avoid being seriously, or even terminally hurt, you must remove the glittering gift-wrapping, before you can start to assess the opportunity. This
process is akin to the discomfort of peeling onions, where you must go on stripping away the useless layers, before you can begin to make an objective assessment of the quality of the core opportunity.
“When evaluating opportunities, you must start with the ‘onion treatment’, and once you arrive at the core, you must then start probing it – from every possible angle. This is the start of the due diligence process, and to arrive at the right conclusion, will necessitate that the accountants and the entrepreneurs work together, and when they both do it right, it will result in healthy professional tension!
“To minimise risk requires first the ‘onion treatment’, then the combined and opposing skills of the ‘dreamers’ (entrepreneurs) and the ‘schemers’ (accountants), to which then must be added the elements of conservatism and constraint, and all of this must ultimately be garnished with just the right amount of ‘gut feel’.
“Get that right, and you’re ready either to roll or to fold!”
Successive innovation stages have built the Seeley business. Inevitably, the winning ideas that became breakthroughs were not alone. Frank fostered a creative innovation culture where idea generation was the objective.
“We stopped counting (projects), somewhere in the thousands. However, not any of those discards were ever failures, because we learned valuable lessons from every single one,” he says.
“Thomas Edison’s discards on the way to inventing the light globe amounted to 6000 or 7000, yet he defended all of them as being steps in the pathway to bringing us all into the light.
“My approach is that innovation is not a destination but a journey and, rightly viewed, every apparent failure is key and critical to finally succeeding – and of course the innovation continues on.
“Just consider the light globe as it was, as it has more recently become, and as it is today – and thanks not just to innovation alone but to evolutionary innovation, because when innovation ceases to be evolutionary, it dies.”
The Seeley International business grew in a series of stages. Frank has never considered the building work ‘done’.
“For Seeley International, there have been many tipping points, because for an-ever evolving business like ours, ‘making it commercially’, occurs over and over again, and each time at a higher level,” he says.
“It started to happen when I took an order for a thousand of the world’s first all-plastic portable coolers, (which had not yet been produced) to a tool maker who had never worked for me before, and obtained six months credit for tooling for components that were altogether revolutionary.
“It happened again 10 years later, when we made and sold 150,000 coolers.
“It happened yet again, when, with the world’s first all-plastic rooftop cooler, we grew the Australian market from 12,000 to 70,000 units per year.
“And again, when we produced the world’s first inverter rooftop cooler, which can cool a whole home from the cost of running a single light globe.
“And yet again, with the launching of the world’s first six star ducted gas heating range.
“But it happened transformationally, when, after a gestation period of some 17 years, Climate Wizard emerged as the global game-changer for air conditioning at every level.
“And it will happen again, when Seeley International becomes a one billion dollar company, within the next few years.”
Frank has had “so much brilliant advice” he has trouble choosing the best when asked.
“Winston Churchill’s three word message to the students at Eaton, still rings in my ears: ‘Gentlemen, never give up! Never give up! NEVER give up!” he says.
He has drawn “great strength” from a simple poem, entitled ‘Don’t Quit’, author unknown.
Also significant is noted Australian sales manager, Max Young’s adage: “There’s no substitute for humility in business”, and the Bible verse, Romans 8:28: ‘All things work together for good, to those who love God’.
“As a practicing Christian, this, above all else, has strengthened me throughout all of my business career and it empowers me to go onwards and upwards, in creating new and even more exciting innovations into the future,” Frank says.
That strength has sustained Frank when things haven’t gone to plan.
“How much time do you have? I’ve made mountains of mistakes!” he says.
“Probably the biggest I ever made was in 1989. I have called it ‘the Multi Cultural Con’, whereby an Israeli, married to an Australian but cohabiting with an American and living in Greece, stole $5 million worth of portable coolers from us, at a time when interest rates were so high that with penalties added, we were paying 25%!
“During the three and a half years it took us to get most of the goods back, the perpetrator died (I didn’t send flowers!) and for the first two years of that time, Seeley International was constantly on a knife edge. “I sure learned some valuable lessons about bankers – not, I might add, our present bankers, with whom we have a wonderful relationship. That was the worst mistake, but it wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last.
“When it comes to regrets, I feel somewhat like Frank Sinatra. ‘…I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention’.”
“I deeply regret the times when I, or we, haven’t learned from our mistakes because the benefit which should have been derived was lost, and lost forever, and that is unforgivable!
“Apart from these, the only regrets I have relate to when I have let people down, let God down and let myself down. Those are the things that I do really regret.
“There’s an old adage, which says ‘What we learn from history, is that people don’t learn from history’.
Whilst that is so often very true, it is also completely unacceptable, and at Seeley International we are totally committed to turning that situation around.
“We are winning, but only by way of example, from the top.”
Any successful business gets acquisition overtures and Seeley is no exception – but Frank highlights and interesting conundrum.
“I’ve often said, in answer to questions about selling and/or retiring, that I will do it, on the day that I stop having fun! That day has not yet come, and so far, it’s not even on the horizon,” he says.
“Actually, although I love this business, I have always been ready to entertain selling to realistic suitors. Of course, all those who have made approaches, have professed strongly to be realistic. However, the problem is that the idea of ‘dressing up’ the business for sale has never appealed to me, and therefore we have remained committed to growing and developing all that we have.
“This is good news for our customers and the industry, but for would-be purchasers, it’s always been a problem.
“In spite of telling these people that P/E ratio was never going to cut it, inevitably all such suitors have been incapable of breaking free from such conventional thinking.
“Hence, we go on doing what we know and love so well, and with increased family involvement. While the option of selling has never been taken off the table, the likelihood of it happening appears to be diminishing.”
Frank calls himself a “passionate believer in Australian manufacturing” and believes there is a huge future for it, “provided you do two things”:
• You have to innovate, and go on doing it, like there’s
no tomorrow!
• And you’ve got to automate, and do so in exactly the
same way!
“If, instead of bemoaning the sad state of affairs, the detractors of Australian manufacturing open their eyes to the vision of the future for our manufacturing industry, which waits to be embraced by the bold, then they too, could become part of the new Australian innovation revolution, rather than discovering all too late, that it has already passed them by,” Frank says. “There’s no better place in the world than Australia, to get this happening. And there’s no better state to lead that charge than South Australia. I should know, because at Seeley International that’s exactly what we’re already doing!”