Hubertz focused on finding new business for Wisconsin's Vision Plastics

Delavan, Wis. — When he was just 19 years old, Craig Hubertz was already learning the ropes of how to make sales for a custom injection molder. That was in 1972.

"I've been doing this since I was in college, working part time in plastic and going to college to get my degree," said Hubertz, the CEO of Vision Plastics Inc. "My professors knew that if I wasn't in class, I was making a sales call in Detroit."

Now that he's 66, he'd like to get off that treadmill. But he's not quite ready to retire.

"One of the factors that keeps me up at night is, oh boy, if the sales don't improve, I'm in trouble," Hubertz said during a recent visit to the company's headquarters in Delavan.

The CEO's outgoing, friendly demeanor softened the impact of the words.

It's fortunate, too, that Hubertz has help. His son Adam is Vision's president — and Adam has a knack for recruiting new business. That's been a valued skill in 2019, thanks to some unexpected developments.

Craig Hubertz has decades of experience in the crowded market of Wisconsin-based custom injection molders. He worked for 13 years for an automotive molder; that was the job that helped pay his way through college at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. Then in 1985 he joined his father and siblings in starting Plastronics Plus Inc., an automotive molder in East Troy, Wis.

Plastronics Plus grew rapidly and had 14 injection presses in a 20,000-square-foot factory within five years. Hubertz left that business after Newcor Inc. of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., bought the company in 1997.

Vision Plastics was founded in 1997, but Hubertz didn't join until 2001. He became a partner in 2002, and Hubertz bought the company a few years later.

When he joined Vision, the company had six employees. Vision grew rapidly, expanding three times, largely for a local customer that needed specialized molding capacity and automation to compete globally.

"This customer had a buyer, he's no longer there, who was yelling at me over the phone, 'You've got to get more equipment; I need more capacity!'" Hubertz said.

The most recent addition, in 2013, added 18,600 square feet, three new all-electric presses, robots and an overhead crane to the Delavan headquarters plant.

At its high water mark, Vision had 180 employees at two plants, in Delavan and Elkhorn, Wis. Today the two plants employ about 140.

"When our big customer was running lights out, we could barely keep up," Hubertz said, and it accounted for more than half of Vision's sales. But then a customer experienced a string of problems, and Hubertz started to see a slowdown.

Suddenly, Vision had spare machine time on some specialized molding cells. Craig and Adam had to find new customers to fill the gap.

"I went to them and said, 'You know, I'm having trouble making ends meet because you're not utilizing the machine time I made available to you on a dedicated basis.' Their first reaction was, 'Well, go out and sell it to somebody else.' I said, 'I can't; this is unique tooling to your product. It's machinery ordered to make your unique process parts,'" Hubertz said.

But Vision quickly learned to use its capabilities for other customers.

"We brought in a mold engineer, we brought in a tooling engineer, a mold designer, a program manager, a part designer, a product engineer … we built a staff of six people, six engineers, to bring in and manufacture their product line," Hubertz said. "Really, we assembled a lot of engineering and talent."

Thanks to its engineering expertise, Vision designed a mold and automated assembly system for a sporting goods product that he feels has a lot of potential.

"Unless you come up with some really 'wow'-type new product or process, it's hard to find good customers," he said.

Hubertz feels better about Vision now than he did during the Great Recession.

"For us in plastic molding, a good customer is somebody that really knows what they want, they've had some of your fellow competitors, to know how well they're treated by you," he said.

"My son has done a good job of developing new businesses with new customers, so if there is a slight downturn, I think we can weather it better," he said.

What's Hubertz's No. 1 priority right now?

"Continuing to find new customers that can use our services and growing the current business with our current customers. That's been my single focus since day one. You're always looking," he said.

"I'm still kind of semiretired. And it will be that way, because my son doesn't want me to call it quits," Hubertz said. "And when I sit in on sales presentations and conversations with engineers, he's very good. He knows the business. I'm very proud of him. I've been fortunate that way. I've got four good kids."

Hubertz joked that a lot keeps him up at night.

"Primarily that I don't lose my family wealth that I was able to build up over 40 years," he said. "It's the biggest worry — we've got to keep sales pumping to pay the bills."

But he urged me to ask his son the same question, so I did and recieved a slightly different answer:

"It's how do you recruit talent? How do you retain it?" Adam Hubertz said. "That and where are you going to find the next sale. I read something when I got into this industry that you can expect that every 10 years, your top customers are going to flip-flop, things are going to change."