This link is meant just for you at Talentfoot — a few early, outside thoughts on the CEO search, put together on my own time and shared privately rather than posted anywhere public.
Fifty years of keeping America's equipment running is a rare thing to find behind a CEO search. This is my outside view of the opportunity — what draws me to it, what I can piece together about the business from public information alone, and a small demonstration of how I tend to think through problems like the ones a business like this runs into.
I don't have visibility into what's actually working day to day — this is my guess, from outside, at what's probably already a strength. Worth confirming, not taking as given.
Custom repower kits for discontinued engines — like the John Deere 318 kits that replace Onan engines out of production since 2003 — solve a problem OEMs have walked away from. Probably one of the harder things for a generalist competitor to copy.
The site says it plainly: "We don't hide behind chatbots." In a category where a wrong shaft size can mean a $900 return, that phone expertise is probably preventing a fair number of bad orders and returns.
Showing real stock depth ("In Stock: 833+") on product pages is the kind of detail a pro checks before buying. Publishing it at all is probably doing some quiet work on conversion.
The blog publishes real buying guidance — repower walkthroughs, engine comparisons — the kind of content that tends to win search traffic in this category. Someone here already understands this; it looks like a scale problem more than a strategy problem.
Direct eCommerce, a serious eBay presence, phone sales, a dealer program, and a Powersports adjacency already underway. Most of the pieces for growth already exist.
Family-owned since 1974, a long-tenured team, customers who come back for decades. Probably the most important thing to protect, whatever else changes.
Six things I noticed on the live site, offered as questions rather than conclusions. I don't know what's already been tried, budgeted, or deliberately deprioritized, so I'd want to check each of these against what the team already knows.
The homepage's meta description is applied sitewide as a default — including on the blog's best content. A May 2026 guide on repowering the John Deere 318 carries the homepage's generic description instead of one that would win the click for "John Deere 318 repower," a search made by people holding a credit card.
The homepage title tag is similarly generic, and the site still carries a legacy meta-keywords tag — a signal that SEO hasn't had an owner in some time.
Unique, intent-matched titles and descriptions for every category, product, and post — generated at catalog scale with AI, reviewed by the team, and pushed live through BigCommerce. Realistically a few weeks of work.
Product naming is SKU-and-spec-first — great shorthand for a pro who already knows the part number. But does it work as well for a homeowner with a dead mower who's never seen a shaft-size spec before? If even a slice of that traffic is bouncing to YouTube to translate, that's real demand the site isn't capturing yet.
Dual-audience product pages: keep the full spec block sacred for pros, add a plain-language layer for everyone else. Section 03 shows exactly what that looks like.
Phone support runs Mon–Fri, 8:00am–6:00pm EST. Worth asking: is the customer whose mower died mid-cut only shopping during business hours? If landscapers are ordering at 9pm, or a homeowner is browsing Saturday morning, then some of the week the site's biggest conversion asset — expert guidance — may be going unused.
An AI fitment assistant grounded in the actual catalog and the team's own guides — answering after-hours questions, capturing the lead, and handing anything uncertain to a human at 8am. The goal is more coverage for the phone team, not a substitute for them. Working proof below.
The "Repower Old Equipment" selector (manufacturer → model) is the right instinct, minimally executed. It doesn't handle the messy real question ("my Onan died, what fits?"), doesn't remember the customer's equipment for the next visit, and doesn't connect fitment to maintenance parts.
A "My Equipment" garage tied to customer accounts: register your machines once, and every future visit filters the catalog automatically — engines, belts, blades, oil kits — to what fits. A single fitment lookup turns into an ongoing reason to come back.
"Get the latest updates on new products and upcoming sales" is a generic promise for a category that actually has strong lifecycle logic behind it: every engine sold comes with a known, predictable maintenance schedule.
Engine-model-based lifecycle flows: buy a Kawasaki FR730V, and next spring an email arrives with the exact oil change kit, filter, and plug that fit it — one click to reorder. The catalog already sells oil change kits and tune-up kits; the connection to purchase history is the missing wire, and it's recurring revenue.
A guide like the JD 318 repower walkthrough contains everything needed for a YouTube script, an email to past 318 parts buyers, social posts, and FAQ schema on the four kit product pages. Today it lives one life as a blog post.
A content multiplication pipeline — the same system I built and ran in production at RSG — where every guide the experts write gets automatically drafted into five more formats for the team to approve. The expertise the team already has keeps working long after the post goes up, rather than getting used once and forgotten.
Adopting something like this would be a real decision for a company that's run on trusted people and phone relationships for fifty years. I'm not suggesting it should happen on day one, or at all, without the team's own read on it — this is just meant to show what's technically possible right now.
This is an example of how I'd approach a question like Observation No. 03: an assistant that answers what customers actually ask, drawing only on the team's own public guides and catalog pages, in the team's own voice.
Ask it about repowering a John Deere 318. It asks whether your Onan is a B-series or P-series, since that determines the flywheel adapter. When it doesn't know something, it hands you to a human rather than guessing.
A production version would be grounded in the live catalog, real-time inventory, and order history, with after-hours conversations logged for the morning queue.
Picking up the question from Observation No. 02. Same product, same spec block preserved for pros — plus a plain-language layer to test with less technical buyers. Toggle between the live listing and the rewrite.
Title is the description — quick to parse if you already know the spec. Worth asking whether it's just as quick for a homeowner, or whether it sends them to YouTube first.
Six directions that seem worth exploring, roughly ordered by how quickly they could show results. None of this is a committed plan — the real sequencing would depend on what I learn once I'm actually inside the business.
There are thousands of "dead engine, good machine" searches — every discontinued Onan, Tecumseh, and legacy Briggs is a keyword cluster with buyers behind it. Scale what the blog already does by hand: AI-drafted, expert-approved guides mapped to kit pages, published on a weekly cadence.
Why it seems worth exploring: the expertise is already in the building; only the throughput is missing.
Worth noting: the catalog already sells oil change kits and tune-up kits — that's a real signal someone here is already thinking in this direction. Every engine sold has a known maintenance schedule; wiring purchase history to that existing kit catalog turns it into automated, engine-specific reminders instead of a product line customers have to remember to shop for on their own.
Why it seems worth exploring: the building blocks already exist; this is mostly about connecting them to what a customer already bought.
The after-hours assistant (Section 03), plus agent-assist for the phone team — instant cross-reference lookup, order history, and fitment data on the rep's screen mid-call. Coverage grows, call times drop, and the humans stay the heroes.
Why it seems worth exploring: it's the JD's named priority, and I've already built these systems in production.
The dealer program and the landscaper customer base deserve a real B2B motion: negotiated pricing tiers, fleet equipment garages, net terms, and a dedicated inside-sales cadence for repair shops that buy every week.
Why it seems worth exploring: repeat commercial buyers are typically the highest-value segment in this category, and the phone-sales DNA here already seems built to serve them well.
The eBay muscle is proven. Extend deliberately — Amazon and Walmart where margins survive, protected by the fitment expertise generalists can't match. In parallel, drop-ship relationships widen the catalog without widening the warehouse.
Why it seems worth exploring: channel-by-channel P&L discipline is the playbook I've run twice at scale.
If it's of interest to ownership: Powersports already looks like an early bet — worth an honest look at how it's performing before deciding whether to expand it or step back. Beyond that, fragmented regional parts distributors and niche fitment-data assets could be natural bolt-ons for this infrastructure and customer base.
Why it seems worth exploring: the customer base likely trusts SEW with more than just engines.