Roadmap to Success
An Interview for CEO Magazine North America
CEO Larry Schorr is leading the organizational restructuring of SIMONA AMERICA’s operations, which has put it in better stead for the future.
SIMONA AMERICA Group CEO
After Larry Schorr sold his Ohio based company, Boltaron Performance Products, to SIMONA AG in 2014, the SIMONA management team in Germany not only invited him to carry on as its CEO—a position he had held for ten years prior to the transaction—they also asked him to head their existing company in the USA and another company they had recently added to their US assets, Laminations, Inc. Under Schorr’s leadership, the company acquired a third manufacturer, Premier Material Concepts, LLC in 2018 and established a single management structure for all North American Operations—the SIMONA AMERICA Group. Today, they are a leading global manufacturer and distributor of thermoplastic semi-finished sheet materials, as well as pipes and fittings.
“When I took on the appointment, it was an interesting time because I obviously knew my own business very well, but I was taking on two other companies that were less familiar,” Schorr told CEO Magazine in an exclusive interview. “So, it took me a little time to understand those businesses and, in fact, part of our strategy was to combine them into one management structure in three locations, so I spent the next couple of years bringing them together. My experiences managing several other private and public companies, and my 35 years as a director of a multi-billion-dollar NYSE company, helped guide me through this process.”
With three operating companies in North America the SIMONA AMERICA Group is the US subsidiary of SIMONA AG, a diversified plastics manufacturer offering sheet products focused on providing thermoplastic solutions and world class customer service to US-based, as well as international clients, in diverse markets. In 2018, SIMONA AG as a whole enjoyed revenues of $493 million worldwide. SIMONA AMERICA Group made up more than 28% of global sales with revenues of $134 million.
“The opportunity I saw at that moment was to try to gently but systematically create a single culture of success,” Schorr recalled on his appointment as CEO and a member of the Global Management Team of SIMONA AG. “We had a European culture that was existent in our parent company, we had different flavors of American culture that had developed in the new subsidiaries of SIMONA we had acquired, and we had the culture my partners, Dr. Dean Li, Adam Mellen, and I, had created in SIMONA Boltaron. When you get the culture right in a company, everything else seems to work out as well.”
Read the full article at https://www.ceo-na.com/primezone/a-roadmap-to-success/