A 'road-MAPP' for building a plastics association

The first couple years for the Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors, in the late 1990s, were decidedly lean.

Troy Nix, who's been the executive director since the beginning, remembers occasionally sleeping in his car on business trips in those early days to cut costs: "Things were always really tight."

This year, as the group marks its 20th anniversary, those days are in the rearview mirror. Nix and other MAPP officials say it's in a solid position, with more than 380 companies as members.

But the early days were a struggle, Nix said, with MAPP "nearly going out of business in the late '90s."

In an interview about MAPP's 20th anniversary, Nix laughed when asked about stories told by others in the association that he sometimes turned his car into a hotel room on work trips.

"Yeah, sometimes you have to do what you gotta do, that's all I'm going to say," he said, chuckling. "I don't know that I'm necessarily proud of it."

The group formally opened its doors with Nix and two other paid staff in April 1997, aiming to fill what it saw as a niche in the plastics industry that other associations were not covering.

MAPP said it would target business services for small- and medium-sized plastics injection molders and other processors.

It grew out of an Indiana state government program to support its local plastics industry. At the time, MAPP was one of more than 30 local and state-level plastics industry groups that sprang up around the country, Nix said, but few of them remain today.

MAPP has survived. Nix credits a very entrepreneurial board of directors who stuck with the idea.

Today MAPP wants to maintain a laser focus on business services, like conferences, plant tours, joint purchasing and online networking, where people share ideas on subjects such as complying with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations or tracking down hard-to-find grades of plastic.

"I look at this as we're a Google to the United States plastics industry," he said. "But our Google is putting people in contact with each other so they can solve their problems."

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2006 was a pivotal year for the group, as it achieved a critical mass of about 100 companies and made some big changes, including launching its own magazine, Plastics Business, said Lindsey Hahn, one of the founders and an ​ early president of the group.

"In 2006, when we finally got to the level that we could support advertising dollars and actually have enough numbers and a big enough mailing list that we could generate enough revenue to create our magazine, that's kind of when we started getting the exponential growth," said Hahn, who's also an executive at Metro Plastics Technologies Inc. in Noblesville, Ind.

Today, MAPP has about 380 member companies.

"With the magazine and more visibility, we started getting more visibility from our suppliers, who then saw us a good marketplace," Hahn said. "Then we could get sponsorship. It just kind of leveraged itself."

The group also launched a much more interactive web portal and changed its name from Mid-American Plastics Partners to the Manufacturing Association for Plastics Processors to signal to the industry that it was a nationwide group.

Nix said up even up through those 2006 changes, it had been difficult. Writing in MAPP's magazine, Nix said that was a time when the association was "still struggling for membership and lacking cash assets on the balance sheet."

Financially, things are different today, said Benjamin Harp, MAPP's president and the chief operating officer of Polymer Conversions Inc. in Orchard Park, N.Y.: "Our financial strength is excellent."

Federal tax forms that MAPP is required to file as a non-profit showed $636,000 in revenue in 2015, the last year figures are available, compared with revenue of $537,000 in 2012.

In 2015, $548,000 of its funding came from membership dues, with most of the rest, about $71,000, from advertising. It produced a modest surplus that year of $36,000.

Since 1998, MAPP has been managed and operated by a company formed by Nix, First Resource, which employs all the staff.

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MAPP started as an offshoot of a state program in the mid-1990s to strengthen its local plastics industry. Nix at the time was working as an economic development specialist for the Indiana Business Modernization and Technology Corp., a quasi-government agency. Since he came to BMT from the plastics film extrusion sector, he was assigned to plastics.

Under the BMT, clusters of local plastics executives in the state began to meet to talk about common problems. Nix said workforce development was the key issue.

Once the meetings began to attract a lot of plastics companies, a small group of those executives decided to take it to another level. Concerned that they'd lose state funding, they decided in 1996 to explore if they could strike out on their own.

Hahn, who was one of the leaders, said the group recruited Nix to be MAPP's first employee and its executive director. Hahn doubted MAPP would have formed without that initial state funding.

"If it hadn't been for that initial startup, the state funding, the idea of a plastics trade association in Indiana would never have started," Hahn said.

Board members said Nix was instrumental in keeping MAPP going, especially in the lean early years.

"Troy was really the driving factor behind the association, he really got it going," said Ryan Richey, a MAPP board member and executive vice president at injection molder Precision Plastics Inc. in Columbia City, Ind. "If Troy hadn't been involved, the association would not have survived."

Harp said the board also has a strong commitment.

"I've been on the MAPP board in excess of 10 years and they are some of the strongest entrepreneurs I've met," Harp said. "Their passion to make products in the United States is unmatched."

Executives said it was hard at first for companies in their very competitive industry to feel comfortable sharing information.

"Toolmakers and molders are kind of secretive," said Hahn. "After a while they discovered there aren't that many secrets. We all have the same problems and we all look for the same solutions."

MAPP today has regular plant tours, where one company will open its doors to executives from competitors. They'll all look at how the company is using technology and compare notes on common problems.

"That's very hard for people," said Richey. "You think, 'Are people going to come in and look at my process, and they might see who my customers are, and then they're going to start calling on them?'"

But he said the association has a gentlemen's agreement that "I'm not going to come and poach your customers or poach your specific process."

"What people realized pretty quickly is that most people in this industry are extremely honest and straightforward and realize that's a line that shouldn't be crossed," Richey said.

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MAPP leaders see the group continuing on the same path, with some changes to adapt to the times.

Richey, for example, said the group is working on initiatives to get young workers — managers and staff under 40 — more involved and understand how they communicate, and what they want out of a trade association.

Harp, as well, said the group wants to grow, but he also worries it could become too big and risk losing some of the tight-knit nature that makes it work.

"Our challenge is being able to continue to provide the same experience that we provide today 10 years from now," he said.

Nix said the association debates whether it should do more political lobbying, but in general feels its best role is to support larger trade groups, like the Plastics Industry Association in Washington, feeding information to more politically oriented groups and supporting their political activities.

"The structure and the DNA of the organization was done so that we wouldn't step on anybody's toes," Nix said.

In a MAPP document outlining what the group sees for itself in 2020, it listed as its first purpose the belief that "American plastics companies can compete and win if we help each other understand today's best practices."

MAPP leaders also see the group continuing to push beyond its historical base in the Midwest.

Today, its top four states for members still are from the Midwest — Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan — but MAPP said more than 50 percent of new members who joined in 2017 are from outside its historical Middle America base.

"With the continued growth, I think they're going to see this as the expansion of a mostly Midwestern-based association now into a countrywide organization," Richey said.

He thinks the group could look back at the 20th anniversary as a key moment in its development.

"I think when they look back they're going to see that the 20th anniversary was really the first time in the history of MAPP when they said, 'This is going to be a long-term, viable association,'" Richey said. "There's a good asset base behind the association. They're able to do more things now than they could 10 years ago."