Executive Insider: Tiffani Claussen

After spending much of her professional career in various chief financial officer roles for manufacturing companies, the biggest promotion of Tiffani Claussen’s career happened earlier this summer.

Five years into her employment at Strafford-based Amprod LLC, the Branson native was promoted in June to CEO. She’s now in charge of a company that employs over 400 people with divisions including American Products, DustShield, EnSight Solutions and Watson Metal Masters. Evansville, Indiana-based Koch Enterprises Inc. bought Amprod in 2022.

Claussen succeeded 17-year Amprod employee Bill Hammitt, who retired after starting at the company as its chief operating officer and then rising to CEO in 2022. Her new job comes just a few months after she was promoted in October 2023 to general manager of Watson Metal Masters in Springfield. She started at Amprod as its CFO.

“Taking the GM role was really my first full responsibility for operations,” she says. “I was hoping to have a little more time in that role. But Bill has retirement plans, so I am still continuing to learn every day from all the folks here. They are very kind and generous and sharing with me how things operate and really how the pieces all come together.”

Claussen is still in the process of filling out her large office space in Strafford at 597 Evergreen Road, home of American Products. While a couple dozen books and family photos line the top of one of her cabinets, she’s still trying to figure out what – if any – additional furniture should occupy some of the room’s vacant spots. It’s a work in progress, she admits.

Activity was low-key on a recent Monday at the 150,000-square-foot facility that produces telecom shelters, enclosures and cabinets. There’s good reason for that, Claussen explains, as most of the plant’s roughly 230 manufacturing employees work 10-hour days, Tuesday-Friday. She says it’s to better accommodate the four-day school week of the nearby Marshfield R-I School District, which is among other local rural school districts that have changed to the shortened school week model. She led a task force that developed the employee schedules.

“My intention is to visit everybody on whatever site I’m at that day, every day,” she says, noting the facility for EnSight Solutions is next door to American Masters. “So, I’ll make the rounds through here first thing in the morning and then head over to EnSight, try to get to see as many people as I can. I just try to connect with people and really understand their challenges that they might be facing and make sure that we’re doing the best thing that we can for all our team members.”

Declining to disclose annual revenues, Claussen says the company produces $40 million-$50 million worth in product out of the American Products facility every year to clients such as Corning Inc. (NYSE: GLW) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T). Amprod is in hiring mode, she says.

“There aren’t as many people as what we need,” she says, adding the company currently has about 20 openings for jobs such as machine operator and electrical assembler. “We are definitely always looking for good people.”

A 1995 graduate of Missouri Southern State University, Claussen earned a bachelor’s in administration with a focus on finance. She began employment in public accounting at The Whitlock Co. and earned her CPA certification. But while she enjoyed getting involved in auditing work, she decided after a couple years to move to private accounting and worked for nearly 10 years in the Houston, Texas, area for companies in the oil and gas service industry.

By around 2007, the draw of family brought her back to the Branson area, and Claussen worked for a couple years with Bill Dunton at Dunton & Associates, which would later become Abacus CPAs LLC. It was at Dunton & Associates where she met Tyson Petty, who worked in its information technology department. The two became friends and Claussen notes him as one of her professional influences.

Petty says when he worked for the CPA firm, he heard one of its clients – plastic tube manufacturer Bore-Flex Industries Inc. in Mountain Grove – was looking for a CFO, and he suggested Claussen. She was hired for the position, which started her work as CFO for several companies over the next 15 years. That included then-Teters Floral Products Inc. in Bolivar, where Petty and Claussen’s employment path again intersected.

Petty, who is now co-owner of Mammoth Technology, a managed IT service provider that launched earlier this year, says he’s never felt Claussen needed to break through a glass barrier.

“She comes from that financial background, but she has a personality, and she legitimately seems to care about people, but yet still manages well,” he says, adding a lot of people struggle to manage and be friends with employees. “When she got the CEO job out there, I was happy for her, but not shocked. She’s really a person that has done her time and has earned it. I guarantee if I walked around that place, they like her and respect her.”

Noting he’s worked to inspire his employees over the years, Petty says he’s also proud that Claussen sees him as an influence.

“She has a lot of talent, a lot of abilities. She’s just not always saw it herself, and I tried to instill confidence,” he says. “I didn’t need to motivate. I just needed to make sure she knew how valuable she was and how good she was.”

Paula Ankrom, office manager at Amprod, says she’s noticed Claussen to be patient, thorough and thoughtful in her leadership approach.

“She absorbs information. She’s not afraid to get out there and work hands on,” Ankrom says. “She’s not one that just expects for others to do, but she is very involved in doing as well.”

Claussen likes to think she learns from everyone she’s around. She credits Hammitt as a mentor but also acknowledges guidance she received from Dunton.

“What he taught me was to think outside the box,” she says of Dunton. “He is very creative, and sometimes that doesn’t go with accounting, but he’s creative in a good way. He was a good leader, somebody that I learned a lot from as well.”

Even a job that didn’t turn out to be all that Claussen hoped for proved to be a learning lesson. She worked for a little more than a year in 2017-18 as controller and director of administration at Johnny Morris’ Wonders of Wildlife National Museum & Aquarium.

“It was great to see Wonders of Wildlife, but I just learned that really wasn’t a passion for me in that industry,” she says. “I enjoy manufacturing. I enjoy understanding the inputs and the outcomes and how to make things kind of work together. It’s just like a big puzzle.”

Away from the office, Claussen says she loves to frequent spots such as northwest Arkansas but also is an avid reader.

“I love to travel outdoors, kayak, hike, any of those types of things. But most of all, it’s usually spending time with family,” she says, noting that includes her children: Kyler, 27; Kalissa, 23; and Kinsey, 22, who is set to start her senior year at Avila University in Kansas City.

As Amprod looks ahead, Claussen says company leadership is holding strategic discussions such as expanding its customer marketplace to the solar and energy industries. Physical plant expansion also is a future consideration, but upsizing the workforce is a more immediate goal.

“We have some capacity right now, and we have some ability to ramp up still if we bring more people on,” she says. “We’ve got some new equipment that we brought in to make us more efficient. The whole idea is to be able to service our customers’ needs and use every inch as efficiently as we can before we have to think about adding on.”