Rita Sherwood

Rita Sherwood has had over 30 years of operational experience including as co-owner of a business, business consultant, product manager, corporate recruiter, and technical sales representative.

For the past seventeen years, Rita has been co-owner of a local manufacturing company where she had functional responsibility for the Sales & Marketing team and the Commercial team and was responsible for setting overall budget, KPIs and P&L.  Rita has driven transformation of selling channels and customer focus.  Rita’s accomplishments include the following:

  • Improved overall working capital by developing and instituting new credit and collections policy, setting up credit card payments, realigning inventory and establishing turn goals.
  • Revamped pricing approach, implementing activity-based costing ensuring competitive market prices.
  • Realigned customers based on potential, alignment and profitability; structuring service levels based on tier.
  • Wrote the Quality/Procedure Manual (QPM) and work instructions to obtain ISO 9001:2008 and received recertification to 9001:2015.
  • Facilitated Sales training to build high performing, cohesive and customer focused solutions sales team.
  • Identified new vertical opportunity based on excess capacity and customer need, initiated and executed plan resulting in $600K in revenue in the first year.
  • Generated work instructions to ensure consistency in RFQs and order entry resulting in a decrease in RMAs of 30% and increased customer satisfaction.
  • Implemented ERP/CRM system for effective operations and sales pipeline management.
  • Created synergies between design and manufacturing departments to capitalize on marketplace opportunities decreasing shipment time by 25%.
  • Increased social media presence resulting in a 400% increase in overall views, 120% increase in clicks and 65% increase in conversions.

Prior to Cleveland Steel Tool, Rita served as a business consultant, acting as President, General Manager or Sales Manager of approximately 30 different organizations.  She assessed overall strategy, focusing on Sales, Marketing, Working Capital, and Operations to drive improved sustainable performance.  One client was a $40 million food distribution company that hadn’t achieved profitability in several years. Rita spent 24 months as Interim President, where she worked with the team to achieve breakeven within 9 months and profitability within 18 months, completed a sale-leaseback on the property and refinanced with the bank due to significantly improved performance.

Rita started her career at Lincoln Electric Co. where she was a product manager overseeing a $650 million in product lines with double digit sales growth year over year. She developed and managed channel relationships and led cross-functional teams to introduce new products to the marketplace. Prior to becoming a product manager, she ran a sales territory, and achieved 15% revenue increases each year.  During this time, Rita spearheaded the re-formulation and customer testing of a hardfacing consumable product designed to improve life of limestone crusher blades.  The initial order was for $1,250,000 and this product is still being sold today.

Rita is a co-inventor of a method for measuring and improving organization effectiveness.  US Patent 8,538,796 issued September 17, 2013.

Rita obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering and a Master of Business Administration from Case Western Reserve University Weatherhead School of Management.