Distinctly durable- Diversified Plastics gears up for bigger share of manufacturing market

The company may be called Diversified Plastics; http://www.diversifiedplastics.net/ but don’t expect to find any of its products on the shelves of Wal-Mart. If you want to see some of the goods that are manufactured by this 27-year-old, Missoula-based operation, you’d probably do better to look inside the motors that run the automatic doors at the front of the store. There, perhaps, you’d find a few unremarkable plastic gears that help draw the door back and forth for the stream of customers walking through. Gears made by Diversified Plastics.

By JOE NICKELL Western Montana InBusiness http://www.mtinbusiness.com

“Most of the stuff we make, nobody ever sees,” laughs Brad Reid, the 38-year-old owner of Diversified Plastics. “It’s not very sexy, I guess.”

The offices of Diversified Plastics are only marginally easier to notice than its products, and hardly more sexy. The company’s corrugated metal, 23,000-square foot building sits just off North Reserve Street in Missoula, surrounded by a partially paved parking lot. Inside, the decor is strictly business, from the array of magazines on the reception table – titles such as “Modern Plastics,” “Injection Molding,” “Plastics News,” and “Plastics Technology” – to the bare-bones, office-beige assemblage of desks, file cabinets and computer monitors. Clearly, Diversified Plastics isn’t out to wow clients with its posh digs and instantly recognizable products.

Rather, this is a company that focuses on a humble niche in the plastics market: small-volume, mission-critical parts for industrial machines. Diversified Plastics manufactures an array of mechanical components, primarily for clients in the wood-products and food-processing industries. The components run the gamut of industrial doodads, from the aforementioned gears, to conveyor wheels, bearings, drilling augers and lugs. Chances are, if it’s made of plastic, and can be machined or injection-molded – and especially if function is more important than form – Diversified Plastics can make it.

“There are companies who focus on the customer-facing, cosmetic plastics manufacturing,” says Reid. “And there are other companies who focus on chasing Ford and Chevy, hoping to make 7 million parts this year and sell them for 3 cents apiece. I’m sure that works out for some people, but we tend to chase the low-volume, higher-expense industrial components. We end up competing with a lot fewer people nationwide.”

That’s meant a steady stream of business for the operation – a stream that started flowing back in 1976, when Brad’s father, Rod Reid, began making custom plastic parts for lumber mills in his garage. Ironically, at the time, the elder Reid was a salesman for an industrial steel components manufacturer.

“All his clients in the wood-products industry kept asking him if it was possible to get the parts he was selling made in plastic,” says Brad Reid. “So he decided to make them.”

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Diversified Plastics, Inc.

3721 Grant Creek Road

Missoula, MT 59808

http://www.diversifiedplastics.net

Phone: (800) 321-0084 or 406-543-6653 — Fax: (406) 728-4074

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Originally called Diversified Products, the company initially seemed, to the rest of the Reid family, like an excuse “for dad to just make stuff and sell it, whatever he felt like making,” recalls Brad Reid. “I can recall some pretty tough family conversations back then.”

But soon enough, as word spread of Diversified Products’ plastic alternatives to steel components, demand for the company’s products grew. In the mid-1980s, the company was incorporated under the name Diversified Plastics, Inc. Today, it employs about 30 full-timers in Missoula – many of them long-time employees of the company.

“It’s been a family business all the way through,” says Brad Reid, who took over executive management of the company from his father last November. “Pretty much from high school through college, I worked here every year. Since I got my degree (Reid earned his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Montana State University), I’ve been here full-time for sixteen years. For a long time, I was the production manager, my sister was the operations manager, my brother-in-law was the sales manager.”

Reid says the company hardly has trouble selling its products from Missoula – despite the fact that only about a third of the company’s clients are located within the state. Neither is shipping products from Missoula to distant clients a problem: with orders typically ranging from one to 10,000 parts, most are shipped via UPS.

Rather, the toughest challenge facing Diversified Plastics is finding qualified employees who are willing to tough out Missoula’s cost of living.

“When I bought my first house in 1991, it was $54,000,” recalls Reid. “Now a starter home is more like $154,000. These guys (employees at Diversified Plastics) might be making anywhere from eleven to seventeen dollars an hour plus overtime. I’m thinking, ‘his wife has to be making that same amount of money in order to be able to buy a house here.’ ”

“My big goal,” continues Reid, “is to pay people enough so that they can buy a house. It tugs on me if I have employees here who just can’t get ahead enough to do that. It makes me feel like I’m not providing for my family. But with the cost of buying a house so high here, it’s really hard when you’re talking about what’s essentially a working-class industry.”

Reid is pinning his hopes for growing the company – and employee compensation – on a new class of equipment that the company hopes to begin manufacturing this year. While he’s somewhat mum on the details, Reid says that the products “are something that our clients in the wood products industry have been asking for for years, and we’ve finally just about figured them out. Once we get up to speed, we could easily be looking at doubling the size of the company in a year.”

In the shorter term, Reid says the company has a goal of hitting $3 million in sales this year – a goal that is still well within sight, provided he and his employees continue hustling aggressively for sales and production capacity.

“When you get your business going good, and you get 30 employees going full-time, you start to think, ‘we’re getting pretty stable,’ and you start to relax,” says Reid. “That’s when somebody else is gonna come along and take your business out from under you. Every day, I try to focus my efforts on acting like we’re a brand-new company, working aggressively, listening carefully to what customers want. I don’t ever want to find myself sitting still.”

Joe Nickell is a reporter for the Missoulian. You can contact him at [email protected].

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