Working with MAPP, MBS can provide helping hand to smaller firms

Terry Minnick has been in the plastics industry for almost his whole life — from spending a decade at Dow Chemical Co. out of college to being vice president and general manager of American Tourister to running and owning Pro Corp.

Pro Corp. and Apogee Plastic Technologies Inc. were combined to form Summit Plastic Solutions Inc., which he ultimately sold in the mid-1990s.

Minnick said that at that time, there was a need in the market for consultants who were experts in the business side of molding to advise an injection molding company. In 1998, Minnick founded Molding Business Services Inc. for recruiting, mergers and acquisitions, and other consulting services: "I was just a one-man band, and it started to catch on," he said.

Now, MBS has grown to 12 employees and 86 injection molding company sales.

"I was looking for something to do and, like I said, the only thing I really knew was injection molding, but I didn't want to own another customer injection molding business," he said. "I was [looking for] something I could do that I could utilize all that experience I had built up."

When he was running the multimillion-dollar company, he said, there wasn't a resourceful organization around to help the business: "I didn't know where to turn."

But then MAPP came along — about a year before MBS began.

"If you look at what we do, we offer these services — mergers and acquisitions, advisory, recruiting — and we offer those to molders," he said. "Quite frankly, the very, very small molders like one-man bands or a two-man shop, they probably cannot afford our services. A huge company — a billion-dollar company or a $500 million company — they have substantial resources that they wouldn't even need us. They have in-house counsel and all kinds of resources.

"We really identify that our target market is molders in that sort of $5 [million] to $50 [million] range," Minnick added. "And that's what MAPP does. They help those midsized molders."

MBS partner Jonathan Soucy said every MAPP member is a potential client "in one way or another, either through recruiting or a business owner who might want to buy a business."

MBS has been a corporate sponsor at the annual MAPP Benchmarking and Best Practices Conference, and it has a company booth at the event.

"It's very cost-effective for us," Minnick said. "[If] we just meet one recruiting client, one client who might have an interest in buying or selling a company, then it pays our cost of exhibiting 10 times over. It's a great thing for us."

Minnick has been on the MAPP board of directors for the past two years.

"It's a really activist organization," Minnick said. "If you're on the board, you make a commitment that you can be involved and you're going to go to meetings, you're going to help other members, you're going to be actively involved."

Minnick added that MAPP offers the ability for companies to learn from one another, whether it's about best practices, automation, apprenticeship programs or hiring new talent.

Soucy offered a similar testimonial: "It's just a really well-run organization, whether it's conferences or the plant tours or the different things they do. It's a spirit of mutual benefit and not really one of competitiveness between the processors at all. They're there to help each other."

Minnick said the relationship between MBS and MAPP is highly valuable.

He added: "I will say what I tell people: Being in MAPP almost makes me want to own a custom injection molding business again — but not quite."