Larry Szeliga
Manufacturing Profit Recovery Specialist
Who is Larry Szeliga?

Fifty years inside manufacturing, floor to boardroom.

Larry Szeliga is a Manufacturing Profit Recovery Specialist with fifty years of experience inside manufacturing organizations, from Production Supervisor at General Motors to CEO and Board Member of a global joint venture with Michelin Tire.

His career spans the full spectrum of manufacturing leadership, union floor supervision, quality systems, organizational development, executive management, and independent consulting. He has worked inside and alongside some of the largest manufacturing organizations in the world.

Career highlights

A career built on the floor and in the boardroom.

  • Production Supervisor — General Motors · 80 direct reports, union environment
  • Statistical Process Coordinator — GM Hardware Manufacturing Factory
  • Manager of Quality Improvement Consulting — Chevrolet-Pontiac, GM of Canada
  • Independent Consultant — GM, Ford, Chrysler, Saturn, GE Medical, Colgate-Palmolive
  • COO — OTR Wheel Engineering, Inc. and Blacksmith/OTR LLC simultaneously
  • CEO & Board Member — global joint venture with Michelin Tire
  • United States Army Reserve

Without a traditional undergraduate degree, Larry earned a Master’s degree in Human Resources and Organizational Development, a reflection of the same unconventional approach that produced the CLEAR Process.

Subject matter expert

Five disciplines that form the foundation of the CLEAR Process.

Larry served as a recognized Subject Matter Expert, designated by VP-level leadership at General Motors and multiple client organizations, in five disciplines:

Statistical Process Control

Measuring and controlling process variation.

Design of Experiments

Structured methodology for identifying the factors that drive outcomes.

Problem Solving

Root cause analysis using Toyota’s Five Whys and Ishikawa methodology.

Building Effective Work Teams

Organizational development applied to manufacturing environments.

Cost of Quality

The framework that gave manufacturing a way to measure what defects actually cost.

These are not background credentials. They are the analytical tools that power the CLEAR Process — applied to organizational cost rather than product quality.

What I do

I find the cost your reporting never shows you.

I surface a category of hidden cost that accumulates invisibly in manufacturing operations, in voluntary turnover, productivity loss, and performance gaps, long before it appears in your financial reporting.

I calculate it in plain dollars from your own operational data. I locate its root causes. I work with your leadership team to eliminate it permanently, and I build their internal capability to sustain the recovery without ongoing outside help.

The result is recovered profit margin. Permanently. And as hidden costs are eliminated and standards consistency is restored, employee engagement improves as a natural structural consequence, not as a targeted program.

The CLEAR Process is unique in how it works, it combines a rigorous financial diagnostic with a collaborative organizational approach that builds lasting internal capability rather than ongoing external dependency.

Why hire Larry

Lived experience, not theory.

  • The only practitioner who quantifies hidden operational cost from four inputs in minutes
  • Fifty years solving manufacturing problems from the inside, not studying them from the outside
  • Treats workforce instability as a financial and operational problem, not a culture or HR problem
  • Builds your internal capability, does not create dependency on continued outside expertise
  • Methodology is conservative by design, the number produced is always defensible
  • Works with manufacturing CEOs who are ready to see the number

The Cost of Quality gave manufacturing a framework for measuring what quality failures actually cost. Standards erosion is the same kind of problem, always present, always costly, never measured. The CLEAR Process gives it a name, a calculation, and a recovery pathway.

Get started

Ready to see the number?

The conversation starts with four data points and takes about five minutes. What you learn from it will change how you look at your financial reporting, permanently.