Donald Graham 'a complete businessperson'

Donald Graham is an inventor, innovator and businessman, but not in the traditional sense. His companies played a leading role in advancing the conversion of packaging to plastics, but they did much more than that.

Today, Graham Engineering Corp. is known for its blow molding machinery. But back in 1960, he founded the business in the basement of a rented farmhouse in Dover, Pa., near Philadelphia. The company quickly grew into a true design engineering house, taking on challenges in a wide range of industries.

Graham himself was a mechanical engineer. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1955, simultaneously studying for a master's in industrial engineering and business management, which he earned a year later. It was one of the first multidisciplinary degrees and the forerunner of UM's Tauber Institute for Global Operations.

From the start of Graham Engineering, he brought in skilled engineers to work on customer projects and built a well-known reputation for taking on challenging work. As new areas opened up, the company put multiple people in charge of them. It wasn't just Donald Graham running the show.

"It's a very different kind of profile. And even before things got large enough that they broke out to become separate organizations from Graham Engineering, they were individually run," he said.

The classic family-owned machinery business story of an entrepreneur who builds up a company and stays in charge for decades … well, that doesn't apply to Donald Graham.

"From the very beginning, it's not my company and what I was doing. It's what a group of people were doing with individual companies," he said.

He carried that approach to Graham Packaging Co., Graham Architectural Products and Graham Group, including Graham Capital, an investment company.

As of the end of 2011, those legacy operating businesses generate about $3.5 billion in annual sales and operate in more than 90 locations around the world.

Now Donald Graham, 85, is going into the Plastics Hall of Fame.

According to a history on the Graham Group website, he was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., where his father, Samuel Graham, was a scientist and professor in what is now the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resource and Environment. His mother, Sybil Graham, co-authored a textbook in 1920 used to develop unified curricula for social sciences in U.S. high schools.

Early in college, Graham played football and hockey. After injuries ended his goal of playing professional sports, he focused on engineering.

After graduating, he worked in Saginaw, Mich., at Baker Perkins, which made bakery equipment and chemical processing machinery. A stint in the U.S. Army brought him to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, where earned an accreditation in the chemical weapons group. He moved on to Read Machinery Corp. in York, Pa., where Graham was chief engineer for specialty products.

His next move got Graham into architectural products. He went to Read's parent company, Capitol Products, as vice president of technology. Capitol Products was an extruder of aluminum windows, doors and other building products.

He left Capitol and founded Graham Engineering in 1960. He was 27. The company sold window design and tooling packages. In 1964, Graham began to manufacture window tooling. By 1970, the company was manufacturing windows. Graham Architectural Products was formally incorporated in 1976. Three years later, GAC built a 56,000-square-foot expansion in York to increase its window production.

Specialties included aluminum windows for high-end commercial applications and windows designed for historic building renovations, including sound-proof and blast-proof windows. The windows had internal plastic components acting as a thermal break.

"We found that as a niche," he said.

Graham said in the early 1970s, the owners of large buildings began to replace old steel windows and old aluminum windows that were not energy-efficient.

But Graham Engineering did much more than building products. The engineering firm got involved with raised flooring for big computer systems and designed and built equipment for extruding and tapering large tubes for flagpoles and lighting.

Graham Engineering made a device that would transfer parts between machines, a forerunner of an industrial robot. "That's a case where we did not pursue or we would a robot manufacturer today," ​ he said.

It was a diverse range of activities.

"A series of companies broke out that followed very different fields," Graham said. "We were in general processing machinery. We were in medical, particularly dental equipment. We were into elevated flooring for the computer industry. We were in the forerunner of automation."

From the beginning, other key people ran the different businesses. Some were hits and they grew. Some got dropped or sold.

"Developing the way we did, where we were splitting into different industries and pieces from day one," he said. "We've had a very stable management team. Many have retired after 35 or 40 years with the same company."

Donald Graham stressed that, rather than a traditional story of a founder growing a business, Graham Engineering was "more of how a professional engineering, financially oriented individual uses an engineering company to branch into all these things."

Today, Graham Engineering in York, Pa., makes wheel machines, shuttle and shot pot extrusion blow molding systems and accumulator-head blow molders. The company has diversified by acquiring extrusion systems maker American Kuhne in 2012 and sheet line manufacturer Welex in 2013.

But it all started with the rotary wheel.

You have to be a certain age to remember when motor oil was packaged in a cylinder of paperboard with a metal top and bottom, known as the composite can. It's part of the distant past, back when gas station attendants checked your oil and cleaned your windshield. Today's plastic oil containers make the job much easier to dump in a quart of oil, no spout or funnel required.

Graham Engineering played a key role with the conversion to plastics thanks to the continuous extrusion blow molding machine known as the rotary wheel. The company had created Graham Container Corp., operating it as a regional bottle developer and manufacturer — and over the years won business with major consumer products makers. The rotary wheel was the key. That was another example of the company branching out and moving into disruptive technology.

The wheel came about because the first plastic oil can back in the late 1960s was made to look just like a round composite can. Graham Engineering took an engineering design job for the plastics division of Gulf Oil.

"Gulf wanted to make an oil can that could go on the same production line and have the same steel top. And we had an engineering contract to make that line," Graham said.

The company's engineers had planned to buy an extrusion system and blow molding machine and put the pieces together.

"And we ended up, because we couldn't get what we wanted in a blow molder, designing the wheel," he said. "But that was not the plan going in."

The rotary wheel was a revolution. A wheel machine can turn out huge volumes of bottles, spinning the molds nonstop past a continuously extruded parison. The molds capture the parison and blow mold the bottles.

The round plastic can never took off. Graham said it was not able to displace the old paper composite can mainly because of cost and challenges with printing on the round shape. But it did usher in the high-speed wheel machine.

In the 1970s, Graham Engineering began selling wheel machines to makers of household products and other consumer goods. The idea was they would make their own bottles and feed them directly to their filling operations.

"We went to sell our machines and trying to convince them to take a corner of their warehouse and get rid of the stored bottles and transportation and buy our bottles and save a hell of a lot of money," he recalled.

But some customers did not want to do backward integration, although they liked the wheel. So Graham Container set up and ran blow molding in many of the operations — in customer plants. "That was particularly attractive since we didn't have any money and we didn't have any plants," Graham said, chuckling.

Graham Container grew quickly. Over the years, the company has served many big consumer products companies such as Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever.

Then the plastic motor oil bottle returned in the 1980s, and this time, plastic took over.

Graham Engineering faced a major challenge: filling speed. A plastic bottle had a much narrower opening than composite cans.

"The whole trick was, the plastic bottle was not economically feasible unless they could run it at a high rate, putting a viscous fluid into a small opening," Graham said.

In 1984, Graham Engineering, with its OCME-Graham filling equipment, solved that problem and swept through the motor oil industry. The company sold more than 50 filling lines.

Graham Engineering formed a joint venture with Boise Cascade, the company that made most of the paper composite oil cans, at plants strategically located throughout the country at the oil producers. Now blow molded plastic bottles were really taking off. "The combination created a rather rapid conversion of that industry to the bottle," he said.

In 1989, the big packaging company Sonoco Products Co. bought out Boise Cascade's interest in the joint venture. Sonoco Graham was born — 60 percent owned by Graham and 40 percent by Sonoco Products. It pioneered plastics recycling in 1990, announcing a $5 million recycling plant in York to do bottle-to-bottle recycling.

Sonoco sold its stake to Graham in 1991, and the company took the name Graham Packaging Co. Today there are hundreds of Graham wheel machines running in about 20 countries, turning out millions of bottles and containers each day. Graham Packaging expanded to make containers from PET and polypropylene, and barrier-layer packaging.

Graham was nominated for the Plastics Hall of Fame by Gina Haines, vice president and chief marketing officer of Graham Engineering.

In 1998, Blackstone Group acquired a majority stake in Graham Packaging. The recapitalization helped the packaging company fund global expansion moves. The deal also provided the Graham family with money to invest in other business ventures, spawning the formation of Graham Partners and three other independently managed private equity firms.

Graham Partners, based in Newtown Square, Pa., near Philadelphia. has held a wide range of companies in its portfolio. Many of them are in plastics, and many of those are packaging- or construction-related.

A major deal came in 2006, when Graham Partners and Apollo Group Management LLC bought packaging giant Berry Plastics Group Inc. for $2.25 billion. In 2012, Berry went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Other plastics-related holdings of Graham Partners, and Inverness Graham, over the years have included residential vinyl window extruder Chelsea Building Products, underground wastewater products maker Infiltrator LLC, vinyl siding maker Mitten Inc., drainage components producer National Diversified Sales Inc. and Supreme Corq, a maker of synthetic wine corks.

In the most recent plastics processor pickups, Graham Partners purchased food packaging thermoformers EasyPak LLC of Leominster, Mass., in November and Tray-Pak Corp. of Reading, Pa., in December.

Graham earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Plastics Engineers' blow molding division in 2012.

Graham has taken his business skills and applied them widely across many industries, said Ira Boots, who was the president and CEO of Berry Plastics when Graham Partners and Apollo Group bought the company.

"Don is much more than a 'plastic person,' if I can use that terminology," said Boots, who also goes into the Plastics Hall of Fame at NPE2018. "Don's a complete businessperson. And that is very unusual in any industry, that you could take somebody who is a deep-dive expert in the industry, and yet has that same expertise, across all businesses."

Graham and his wife, Ingrid, are active in long-term and far-reaching civic and philanthropic involvements.

Donald Graham and the Graham Group companies have been involved in a wide range of areas since he founded Graham Engineering 58 years ago. But there are some overarching themes.

"We have focused on where new technology — and often new materials — were replacing old materials," Graham said. "And companies we own and buy, more and more, are technologically driven. That's because that's where we see the marketplace going."

Read the Viewpoint on the Hall of Fame and find links to other profiles.