Robert Aliota B.S. '89
Pursuit of Happiness Guides College Alumnus along Entrepreneurial Path
April 27, 2009
The pursuit of happiness is one of the most oft-quoted phrases from the United States Declaration of Independence, and it is the subject that’s at the heart of many stories.
It’s more than a story line for Robert Aliota, 1989 graduate of the North Carolina State University College of Management and owner of Carolina Seal, Inc., a strategic sourcing and services company that specializes in the supply of engineered rubber, metal, plastic and foam parts. It’s a personal philosophy that Aliota credits with enabling him to build his Charlotte, N.C., based company.
That philosophy got him featured in an article – “How Positive Psychology Can Boost Your Business” – that appeared this spring in BusinessWeek magazine’s SmallBiz publication.
“The response (to the article) has been just great,” Aliota said. He and his 14-year-old distributorship came to the BusinessWeek reporter’s attention courtesy of David J. Pollay, a long-time advisor who is also a syndicated columnist, coach, and president of The Momentum Project. Pollay told him that he felt the magazine’s readers would be inspired by Aliota’s approach to business challenges.
Simply put, Aliota said he prefers to focus on his strengths and work in partnership with others who have complementary skills.
Case in point: A few years ago, a competitive seal supplier secured some business with ExxonMobil, an account that anyone in the industrial seal industry would be eager to support. Drawing on his personal optimism and natural desire to help, Aliota was very receptive to assisting when his competitor asked if Carolina Seal would be interested in helping ExxonMobil with o-ring applications. He knew from his experience with the other company – both had a piece of a Tennessee chemical company’s business – that there were complementary differences between the two firms. Carolina Seal specialized in proper material selection and chemical compatibility issues related to O-rings, while the other company had exceptionally strong engineering expertise related to gasket applications. Aliota and his counterpart focused on these core competency advantages rather than viewing one another as competitors. After a few meetings to discuss respective roles – and to learn more about one another’s company philosophies and business practices – a new relationship was underway.
This positive approach soon paid off. The other distributor called with an offer to introduce Aliota to his contact at ExxonMobil. It seemed the energy giant needed some expertise regarding specific O-Ring sealing applications, and Aliota’s rival was happy to help ExxonMobil out by bringing on Carolina Seal for that piece of the business. Today, ExxonMobil is one of Carolina Seal’s best customers, and the once-rival company is now considered a very close ally and partner to Carolina Seal.
Aliota applies the same positive approach to his staffing decisions, too. Approximately seven years ago, he’d hired one of his closest friends and roommates from NC State, Scott Strong, to be a salesman for Carolina Seal. While Strong did well, Aliota could sense he wasn’t making the most of his natural talents to best impact the company. “He was definitely the right person, but was in the wrong role for where we needed to take our business,” Aliota said.
He and Strong discussed ways the company could better utilize Strong’s natural strengths, especially his extraordinary aptitude for details and processes. So Aliota moved Strong into the operations manager position, where he has been thriving ever since. And while Strong continues to use his communications skills to support the company’s sales efforts overall, Aliota hired another salesperson to pick up from where Strong left off.
This approach to life and business – focusing on the positive and leading with your strengths – led to his involvement in the Business Week SmallBiz article about the positive psychology movement.
Aliota said that he believes “it’s true that part of how we act is due to the temperament we were each born with. I’ve always been a positive-minded person. But a good part of how we act as adults is heavily influenced by the type of thinking we expose our minds to and the type of people we surround ourselves with on a daily basis. The environment we put ourselves in has a significant impact on the type of person we turn out to be. This can work for us or against us depending on the choices we make.”
Aliota credits Pollay with teaching him the fundamentals of the science of positive psychology. Pollay is something of a pioneer in the field, Aliota said. He was one of the first graduates of the master’s degree program in Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a founding associate executive director of the International Positive Psychology Association. Pollay is best known for his philosophy, The Law of the Garbage Truck. His forthcoming book, Beware of Garbage Trucks!, teaches business leaders and their employees how to let the negative things they can cannot control pass them by, so they can keep their focus on what’s important.
“I tend to believe it’s a discipline problem and/or an awareness problem,” Aliota says of the reason why so many people are unhappy. “There is a long list of things in life that we have no control over. Any amount of time you spend worrying about the things you have no control over is time you’ve just taken away from things you can control. This is a strongly emphasized point in how we run our business.”
His approach seems to be working. Although many distributors that serve the original equipment market (OEM) are suffering sales slumps of 20 to 30 percent, Carolina Seal’s sales are up 13 percent compared to the same period in 2008, Aliota said. “Despite the push backs in demand from our current OEM customers, we have been fortunate enough to increase brand new sales by more than the decline from existing customer sales.”
Not bad for a business school grad who knew nothing about the industry until his brother-in-law offered him a sales position in the Carolinas for his Wisconsin-based industrial distribution company. Aliota was in hardware and software sales at the time, and had developed many good relationships with companies in the Carolinas and throughout the Southeast.
His sister’s husband – himself a former salesman – was impressed with Aliota’s drive and work ethic. But having already decided on the entrepreneurial route for himself, Aliota, at age 29, was not interested in leaving his current job just to go work for someone else again. He was committed to starting his own business, even though he wasn’t sure what type of business it would be.
“Through a series of conversations that took place while my wife Susan and I were vacationing with my sister and brother-in-law, we meshed our ideas and came up with a plan for me to start a similar type of industrial distribution business in Charlotte, where Susan and I live. This is how Carolina Seal was formed,” Aliota said.
His brother-in-law introduced Aliota to key suppliers and began to give him a crash-course on the sealing industry. “Shortly after, my brother-in-law’s business started to boom,” Aliota said, and the crash course got cut short. “Even so, I credit him for providing me invaluable insight, support and introductions to suppliers” that helped him get started, he said.
But Aliota said he knew it was ultimately his job to grow sales and build a customer base, which he did with cold calls, knocking on the doors of area manufacturing companies to solicit their business. He worked out of a home office with two empty plastic shelves in his garage, a one-page flier that described his product offerings and a fresh box of business cards.
While opportunities initially came slowly, the business did grow, requiring a number of moves to increasingly larger rented warehouse spaces. In 1995, nearly 10 years after starting the company, Aliota and his wife moved it into their own 20,000 square foot distribution facility in South Charlotte, and now employ 13 people.
Reflecting on the challenges of learning about and growing a business, Aliota said he was used to doing things that didn’t come easily to him. The one-time president of the NC State College of Management’s Economic and Business Society and active member of Alpha Kappa Psi, the nation’s oldest professional business fraternity, said he had challenged himself, while in college, to take on activities that intimidated him, such as public speaking and event planning. “Something told me, back then, that it was important to go outside my comfort zone to grow,” he said.
He was so comfortable with that approach that he never really thought about what he’d do if Carolina Seal didn’t get off the ground. “I didn’t have a Plan B,” he said. “I couldn’t allow myself to even think about the option of failure. If there’s one thing I would tell today’s graduates, it’s this: If you’re going to commit to doing something, do it all the way – and give it your all, regardless of the job at hand,” he said.
During a recent round of meetings in the Raleigh, N.C. area, Aliota stopped in at his alma mater, where he had the opportunity to reminisce with current members of Alpha Kappa Psi. He also met with one of the college’s faculty members, Jonathan Bohlmann, associate professor of marketing in the Department of Business Management.
One of Bohlmann’s recent research projects shows that nice guys finish first in business. The article, “The Effect of Interactional Fairness on the Performance of Cross-Functional Product Development Teams: A Multilevel Mediated Model” was co-authored with Tianjiao Qiu of California State University, Long Beach, and William Qualls and Deborah E. Rupp of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was published in the March 2009 edition of the Journal of Product Innovation Management.
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