july2017

174 175 with keen instincts, Dawson went out and sold and sold, and got people interested. Today, he is the Sr. Vice President of Clean Seal. Klotz notes, “We sell to big and small manu- facturers of RVs and, we also branched out into truck, bus, and boat markets over the last two decades.We have an automotive hose division, where we supply fuel hoses, and we’re getting a program for springs going, which we sell to firearms manufacturers. For the future, we’re open to everything.” Clean Seal has a single location in South Bend with about 45 employees; conveniently situated close to Elkhart, where a lot of RVs are manufactured. Competition on the rubber side of the business is intense.Most of those products are a standard profile,widely available. Clean Seal carries many off-the-shelf items, but also sells a good amount of proprietary parts, for when a customer needs a specific shape and size.The customer pays a set-up fee or tooling fee, and the company will custommake the product. “We are strictly a business to business op- eration,” says Klotz. “We try to stay away from the consumer side.We know we can’t service CLEAN SEAL, LLC the individual properly because we have min- imums we have to meet. But we do have dis- tributors out there that we’ll send individuals to when they call. As with any smart business, we’re always interested in what we can add to our product line.We’ve tried a few things in the past and some haven’t panned out, but we really look at what fits with our current custom- ers that we could also branch out into other markets.” Springs are a stretch from what Clean Seal normally produces. “There was a lot of educa- tion involved.When you think of a spring, you think of the standard compression kind– and that’s not something we’re going to get into be- cause they’re already mass produced.We tried to go more toward the custom side, looking at specific needs, where we can help the customer figure out what’s required, and get them some- thing that really works for their application.” In an industry with intense competition, Clean Seal has created valuable relationships with suppliers and customers, and always main- tained a high regard for quality products and quality service over the years. Klotz adds, “With a new product, we would go back to our current customer base and say, ‘Yes, we’re doing such and such.’With springs, we didn’t find that was effective. There wasn’t a need for it. It took a few years to determine we had to go a different direction, and we finally got into a new market arena.”