Don Grigg: Two Broken Plastics Shops, One Exit, and a 24-Year Hold

The Setup Don Grigg finished business school in 1990, ran a division at a brick manufacturer in Sanford, North Carolina, then spent the mid-1990s sourcing metal fabrication deals for a private equity group. By 2001 he wanted his own equity, not a salary. He had a few hundred thousand dollars in personal capital, no sponsor, and a clear thesis: buy small, broken, fixable plastics businesses in North Carolina. In 2002 he closed two of them in quick succession. The Deal Deal one was a plastics recycling company. Six employees, roughly $500K revenue, losing money. Grigg took a controlling interest and injected capital. The insight that unlocked it was counterintuitive: the bottleneck was not finding customers for recycled resin, it was sourcing cheap scrap plastic on the front end. Once he reframed the business around procurement, the economics worked. Deal two was a plastics molding shop. 18 employees, around $2M revenue, also unprofitable. He took a non-majority stake with operational control. The shop did custom rotational and thermoform work plus a sleepy kayak division generating $400K in sales and losing money on every boat. Neither deal used SBA paper. Both were friends-and-family style structures with seller flexibility and Grigg's own cash. Operating Moves On the recycling side, Grigg rebuilt around scrap sourcing relationships, stood up a real sales motion, and scaled to 50 employees and $10M revenue over six years. Illinois Tool Works, the company's second-largest customer, bought it for what Grigg describes as more money than he thought he would ever have. On the molding side he played a longer game: - Installed job-cost accounting so every custom run had a real gross margin number attached. - Refused to kill the money-losing kayak division. Instead he treated it as captive volume that would fill the factory and let the custom business run at 80 to 90 percent utilization. - In 2015 acquired Legacy Paddle Sports out of Asheville, picking up the Native Watercraft and Liquid Logic brands. - In 2018 acquired Bonafide Kayaks, making the combined company the number-four player in the US kayak market. - In 2022 launched Cool Tops Canopy, an aftermarket canopy line for commercial equipment, now running at roughly $3M. Where They Are Now The surviving business, BIG Adventures, does about $22M in revenue across 110 employees. Roughly $15M from the four kayak brands, $7M from custom molding, plus the canopy line on top. Core capability is rotational molding and thermoforming of large plastic parts, with kayak volume subsidizing factory load so the custom work prints margin. The recycling business he sold to ITW went the other direction. Corporate standardization stripped out the creative sourcing model that had made it profitable. Grigg watched it decline from the sidelines. Operating Lessons - Buy small and broken, not healthy and expensive. A bad business punishes good operators; a fixable business rewards ordinary ones. - Find the real bottleneck before you buy. In recycling it was scrap supply, not demand. Most under-managed shops have one of these hiding in...