Seeger Metals & Plastics has roots in Toledo going back 125 years. What’s the secret to its longevity? Hard work, good fortune and the serendipity of birth.

By Tim Triplett,
Editor-in-Chief

• Quick Facts
  
• Sons of a Seeger the Secret to Succession

Seeger Metals & Plastics has roots in Toledo going back 125 years. What’s the secret to its longevity? Hard work, good fortune and the serendipity of birth.

Seeger Metals & Plastics Inc., Toledo, Ohio, has already beaten the odds by maintaining a healthy business into its fourth generation of family management. The transition to the fifth generation, however, presents the Seegers with some issues they’ve never had to deal with before.

The company’s history dates back to Valentine Seeger, who founded the venture in 1881 at age 26 as a brass finisher, later adding brass goods and castings, copper and brass tubing, brass sheet and babbitt metal. He changed the company’s name to the Toledo Brass and Iron Works in 1897, and in 1908 installed a nonferrous foundry.

His son, Valentine Jr., took over the business during WWI, and it thrived throughout the 1920s. In 1936, he handed the reins to his son, Valentine Seeger III, who incorporated it under the name Seeger Brass Co. and fought to keep it afloat during the Great Depression. An Army reserve officer in 1941, he was called to active duty during WWII. His mother, Dorothy Neukom Seeger, managed the company in his absence—an unusual role for a woman in the 1940s.

When Seeger returned from military service in 1945, he closed the struggling machine shop and foundry and turned the business into a pure distributorship. Over the years he grew the company at a slow, steady pace, gradually adding new product lines and services. With the assistance of son-in-law Doug Wiemer in 1965, the company added industrial plastics to its offerings.

Bruce Seeger, great-grandson of the founder, joined the firm in 1972, assuming the president’s role, like his great-grandfather before him, at age 26. As part of its 100th anniversary observance in 1981, the company changed its name to Seeger Metals & Plastics Inc. to better reflect its mission.

Today, the company derives 80 percent of its revenues from metals sales and 20 percent from plastics. Its 13 valued employees serve roughly 300 active accounts, processing orders from over 10,000 pounds to under 100 pounds.

Seeger is a classic niche marketer, selling plastics, copper, brass and other specialty metals in a tight geographic market within a 200-mile radius of Toledo. Bruce Seeger considers his company’s small size and nimbleness to be a competitive advantage. He doesn’t attempt to compete on price vs. large competitors, but rather to cultivate relationships with even the smallest customers. Using a combination of common carrier and his own trucks, Seeger strives for a level of responsiveness that larger companies can’t muster.

“Our niche is service, speed of delivery and personal attention,” he says. “I even jumped in the truck the other day and ran to Fort Wayne to make a sales call and drop off some material myself. Many smaller customers like dealing with smaller service centers because you can talk to the guy who owns it.”

The company moved to its present location in 1978 after a century at its old site, which is now part of the Toledo Mud Hens minor league baseball facility. The 30,000-square-foot service center houses a 36-inch slitter, a 12-foot shear, three plate saws, two cut-off saws, four bandsaws and miscellaneous material-handling equipment.

Seeger’s product line includes brass rod, sheet, bar and tubing; copper sheet, bar and tubing; stainless steel, aluminum and bronze. “We’re mostly into rod and bar. The big reroll mills tend to dominate the coil side of the business now,” Seeger notes.

It was actually a request from a customer that led Seeger into the market for plastics 25 years ago. Spray gun maker DeVilbiss was buying brass rod from Seeger, but having a hard time getting plastic for other parts. Seeger made connections with plastics mills and expanded into a new growth market. Plastics are used for many of the same applications as bronzes, such as bushings or other wear parts.

Stocking plastics and specialty metals offers Seeger certain synergies because they can use the same material-handling equipment, saws and shears to process both types of orders. “Twenty-five years ago machine shops didn’t want to know anything about plastics, but demand and technology have exploded and now they all use plastics. Many of the same customers will buy brass, stainless and plastics all in the same purchase order. We serve the same clientele with both products,” Seeger says.

Seeger’s small slitter has proven effective with plastics as well, and opened the door to new plastics customers. “Basically there wasn’t anyone in the plastics industry that had a slitter,” he recalls, pointing to one customer who has been ordering vinyl strip for 40 years. “We can get very tight tolerances on our slitter.”

Despite record high prices for red metals, margin percentages are shrinking because distributors can’t pass along all the increases. The business environment has gotten continually more competitive, with industry consolidation creating larger rivals with a presence in Toledo. “Even the steel guys are now trying to sell red metals,” Seeger says. Competition is squeezing selling prices for plastic products, as well, he adds. “Plastics was good for awhile, then everybody got into it. It’s a battle just like metals anymore.”

Valentine Seeger III was a founding member of the Copper and Brass Servicenter Association, which was formed in 1950 during the Korean War to give distributors a louder voice in Washington and secure their role in the supply chain. Like his father before him, Bruce Seeger has been actively involved with CBSA, wrapping up a two-year term as its president this spring. Under his leadership, CBSA has opened its membership to smaller distributors in response to industry consolidation. Seeger credits his involvement with CBSA for helping develop and maintain valuable relationships with both suppliers and peers.

Seeger is gratified by the history and tradition of his company and his family’s long legacy of success. Indeed, hanging on the wall in the office is a photo of the potential sixth-generation leader, young Nicholas Valentine Seeger, age 2. Pointing to his first grandchild with pride, Bruce comments: “Who knows?”

Sons of a Seeger
the Secret to Succession
The Seegers have been in the metals business in Toledo for 125 years and counting—an unusual feat that no doubt ranks their company among the oldest family-run businesses in the country. What has set the Seeger family apart? Perhaps, more than any other factor, the serendipity of birth.

Since its founding in 1881 by Valentine Seeger, the company has been managed by a patriarch with a single son. Valentine Seeger had one son and several daughters. His son, Valentine Jr., had one son and two daughters. Likewise, Valentine III had two daughters but just one son. (Breaking with tradition, he decided to name him Bruce “so as not to saddle the poor kid with that name.”)

None of the daughters have had any interest in the business, so for four generations the next successor has been obvious and well groomed to take over. For the fifth generation, however, the situation is not so simple.

“This generation is the first with two [male] siblings in it,” notes Bruce Valentine Seeger, current company president. Today, sons Lee and Dean are both actively involved in day-to-day operations, working shoulder to shoulder with their father. As Bruce looks ahead toward retirement, he acknowledges the dilemma he faces in structuring the next generation of company leadership.

Indeed, experts say, one reason so few companies survive to the third or fourth generation is because their patriarchs would rather sell out than choose a successor from among children they love equally.

To explore their options for estate and succession planning, the Seegers joined the University of Toledo Center for Family Business. The center offers a forum for members of non-competing family firms to meet periodically and share their experiences and challenges from a common perspective. These “affinity groups” allow participants to confidentially discuss best practices in dealing with family business and interpersonal issues. The university also has experts that offer legal and financial advice on strategies for business succession and retirement.

Like Bruce, his sons spent their childhoods helping around the warehouse, washing trucks, taking inventory, filling orders. “Growing up in it, whenever you needed a job, you had one,” Bruce recalls.

Lee, the eldest son, always aspired to work for Seeger Metals and Plastics. Dean, the younger, considered a career in architecture before opting for a degree in industrial distribution from Purdue University. Presently, under their father’s watchful eye, they are in the process of defining their own roles in the company. “Dean is a problem-solver. He likes working with the equipment on the operations side. Lee is most often at his desk buying and selling. But they have to be cross-trained. In a company this small, everybody does a lot of jobs,” Bruce says.

Which will be the next president of Seeger Metals & Plastics? “My dad always said I’d have to pick one, and that’s a problem,” says Bruce, who is not convinced that choice must be made. “My accountant suggested making them co-presidents with their own niches.”

Family business experts urge companies like Seeger to form an independent, outside board that can offer objective counsel on important management decisions—especially in cases where co-presidents may disagree.

“If I didn’t have two sons in the business, I might consider cashing it in. They have both said, ‘Dad, it’s too bad we’re here. Otherwise, you could cut the stress out of your life and sell this place.’ But we have a niche, and I’m pretty proud of the fifth generation.”