Stan Sewitch
What I Do
I provide service as an advisor to companies who want to improve their results while improving quality of life at the same time, for everyone in their organizations.
My experience is best suited for these areas:
- Strategy
- Organizational design and development
- Compensation design
- Leadership development and coaching
- Conscious culture creation
What I’ve Done
I started working at age 12, doing residential landscape maintenance (pulled weeds and mowed lawns). I advanced quickly to dish washing and janitorial work.
Worked my way through college in many jobs: retail, restaurants, household moving, making ice cream, bar tending, live-in aid to a paraplegic, bouncer at a strip joint, dancing bear in a medieval themed restaurant and running a processing plant in the salmon fisheries of western Alaska.
Earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from San Diego State University in 1976.
Worked as a psychiatric aide in a mental health ICU unit on the graveyard shift. That was an education.
Entered Corporate Land in 1979, at Martin Marietta Aluminum, in human resources and safety.
Earned a master’s degree in organizational psychology from California State University at Long Beach in 1981.
Held human resources, quality assurance and manufacturing management roles between 1981 and 1989, with Smith International, TRW and Mycogen Corporation. Got fired from Mycogen. Pissed off five vice presidents in two years, and that apparently was enough to do it.
Began my entrepreneurial adventures. Founded HRG Inc., in 1989, providing the full range of outsourced human resources services. Grew that company to 20 people and was acquired in 1999 by McGladrey, a national accounting and consulting company. Led the southern California consulting division P&L, equaling four offices and 35 people, until late 2004.
Also, concurrent with the HRG years, founded a software company publishing PC-based HR information systems. That died after two years of “Partneritis”, entirely self-inflicted. Founded and led a biotech diagnostics company in 1991, whose technologies were sold 12 years later.
Left McGladrey in 2004 to return to independent consulting as HRG, and to form KI Investment Holdings, a small private equity company investing in new businesses that could grow profitably over the long-term while creating middle class careers. Invested in six businesses between 2006 and 2011. Two have failed. Three have been acquired. One remaining organization is progressing as of this writing (stay tuned).
Was invited in 2012 by my absolute all-time favorite consulting client to join its senior leadership team as it engineered the company’s evolution through a critical phase. Became VP of Global Organization Development for WD-40 Company, leading the global human resources function, and retired from that role in January of 2021, having had the pleasure and honor of being part of its cultural and economic journey as an advisor and then tribe member, over a 20 year period. The company remains a client.
I’ve served on 13 private company boards, representing revenue rates from start-ups to $200 million, and advised others. I have served as an advisor to public company boards. I’ve volunteered on two non-profit boards, one of which (The Corporate Directors Forum) included responsibility for creation and delivery of educational programs for directors of public and private companies.
For ten years, I wrote a weekly column on business, leadership and life, for the San Diego Daily Transcript, a business paper that ended its 130 year journey in 2015. I have published two volumes of selections from that weekly column, called “Notes from the Corporate Underground”. Volume I is “Paradise is Not for Sissies” (2005) , and Volume II is “Work for a Jerk and Love It” (2015). I published a book in 2023 about WD-40 Company’s journey to create a highly engaged culture, called “Engage! How WD-40 Company Built the Engine of Positive Culture”.
I call myself a business psychologist because I’ve made human behavior within the context of creating economic inter-dependencies my life’s work. I’ve seen a lot of what can go right, and what can go wrong. I’ve personally contributed to both categories throughout my working life.
I have limited capacity. It’s just me. If I can’t help you, I may know someone who can.