Profile Article
Corporate Report Wisconsin magazine, May 2006 issue, published by Trails Media Group
Start-Up Helps Business People Manage Change
by Tim Solinger
Sometimes a chance comment can bring complicated situations into focus—and spark an idea for a new product.
In 2002 Patrick Seaton was working as trainer at an educational software company when a co-worker said, "I can't tell you what's going on here, but I can tell you that I'm wearing too many h"
This comment inspired Seaton to focus on the roles that employees play in organizational change. "I started to think about ways for workers to better understand and more effectively approach the execution of their ta" he said.
The result was HATS, a task management and workload distribution training activity and product he developed in his spare time. HATS was designed to help managers, supervisors and workers cope more effectively with "change eve" such as restructurings, layoffs and rapid growth, and to put the right people into the right jobs.
During the next two years, Seaton followed HATS with a succession of other training activities and products in areas including complex change preparation, priority management, and barrier identification and elimination. In July 2005 he left his training job to launch Innovative Management Tools, LLC, located in Milladore, Wis., and develop his own line of training aids.
One of Seaton's first realizations in starting his business was that he was going to have to do it without investor support. He said he came close to obtaining some funding early on but that the investor eventually pulled out. "If not for the continued interest shown by prospects and new customers, I might not have been so willing to push forward without invest" he said.
Since then Seaton has held on-site training sessions for a number of different clients, including small businesses and associations, and he has been heartened by the consistently strong response to his training activities and products.
"Whether a small company of four people or one with more than 1,000 employees, they've all found one or more of the activities to be of potential use."