Shipbuilding is sort of Mark Lamarre’s family business. “It was just in my blood,” says the new chief executive officer of Seaspan Shipyards. “I spent a lot of Saturday mornings with my dad in the shipyard.” Lamarre, who joined the company in July 2018, represents the third generation of his family to have found a calling in building ships. His grandfather did so during the war; his father started in the industry as an apprentice.
The yard Lamarre used to run around on Saturday mornings was the machine shop at Bath Iron Works, now a subsidiary of General Dynamics Corp., one of the world’s largest defence contractors. Lamarre would go on to work as a management development intern at Bath Iron Works in the 1980s.
“It seemed like the natural thing to do when I got out of college,” says Lamarre, who attended the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
That internship role included rotating assignments in all major areas of the company, an opportunity that afforded Lamarre the chance to establish a broad-based understanding of a business in which he would ultimately go on to spend more than two decades. In total, he has spent 25 years and counting in the shipbuilding industry.
“It’s an easy business to be proud to be involved in,” explains Lamarre. “We’re playing a role in national defence and coastal protection, and there’s been a lot of pride in my household related to the business.”
In a career spent almost entirely in the shipbuilding arena, Lamarre has collected a vast amount of experience across a wide range of positions.
At various times at Bath Iron Works, for example, he worked as a production engineer, as director of production trades – where he oversaw the training and development of 3,200 members – and as director of operations for the firm’s air warfare destroyer program.
He also took a five-and-a-half-year detour into technology between extended stints at Bath Iron Works, first at KAO Infosystems in Massachusetts, followed by three years at Globalware Solutions, where he oversaw operations at the $175 million multinational.
Lamarre was the director of international programs at Bath Iron Works when he was recruited in 2014 to lead the Australian Shipbuilding Co. (ASC) as its chief executive officer.
“The game plan that I used at ASC is going to be very relevant to what we’re doing here,” says Lamarre. “There’s a lot of similarities, actually, between what’s going on there and what’s going on in Canada in terms of restarting an industry.”
Both Australia and Canada went for many years without building a new naval or coast guard ship. Both industries had slowed down significantly, and both are seeing “very, very significant” levels of investment now, says Lamarre.
“My first two weeks prior to joining ASC, the minister of defence said in Parliament that he wouldn’t trust ASC to build a canoe. So that’s where we started with our relationship. We had to rebuild from there.
“We’re not starting from where we started in Australia,” adds Lamarre, noting Seaspan Shipyards’ strong relationship with the Government of Canada, which has awarded several billion dollars’ worth of contracts to the company under its National Shipbuilding Strategy.
The program is so large that it will command Seaspan Shipyards’ attention in the short term. But Lamarre has his sights set globally.
“I have full confidence that we can be internationally competitive,” he says.
Getting there won’t be without its challenges.
When Lamarre started in Australia, the industry had a reputation for delays and cost overruns. The industry in Canada has similarly earned a reputation for being expensive.
“We set ourselves about refuting that and actually smashed that notion. We’ll be doing the same thing here,” says Lamarre.
Enter his game plan. Though he is less than a year into his role with Seaspan, Lamarre has already brought in a handful of people who collectively have 350 years of shipbuilding experience among them and who each have 40 to 50 ships under their belt.
“I have the benefit of having a network of people who, like me, have failed at retirement,” says Lamarre.
He is also spearheading a complete evaluation of Seaspan Shipyards’ cost and organizational structures and is aiming to meet international benchmarks for cost and efficiency.
“We will be globally competitive for shipbuilding and ship repair, we will rightsize ourselves … on our cost structure and our organization, and we will be going after international work when the time is right,” says the CEO.
“We need to be demonstrating to our stakeholders that we are doing things that internationally competitive shipyards are doing, and they’ll see our journey and know when we arrive.”
