George Grengs stayed at the office as long as he could. Eventually, though, he recognized the time to retire was upon him.
Valterra Products’ co-founder, who started the company in 1981 with his brother-in-law Dennis Lunder, retired from day-to-day operations at the end of 2022. He will remain a company consultant for the next year. He said waking up the first January workday and not going to the office was quite different. After 41 years he said life is all about new beginnings, new routines, and new goals.
The move to retirement was in process the past two or three years. When Dometic bought Valterra in the spring of 2021, Grengs said he agreed to retire after 2022. At age 71, Grengs said “the time had come to move on.”
“Some of my friends retired maybe 10 years ago, they didn’t exactly like their work, but I always loved working at Valterra,” he said. “I love the people. I love the products. I love the everyday business challenges.”
Looking back over four decades at the company’s helm, Grengs said the move to bring in private-equity firm Scott Capital in 2013 set Valterra in motion for a decade of growth and expansion.
“They brought sophistication regarding finances, they brought the financial power and interest in acquiring companies and set up a great process for guiding the business as well,” he said. “They gave us tremendous support, intellect and business savvy.”
Grengs said the company chose Scott Capital because the firm did not have a set timeframe to promote a sale. Some financial companies looked to monetize a deal in two or three years, and Grengs said Scott Capital did not set a timeframe with Valterra.
I have a lot of friends that golf, so that is one way I am really going to work on my friendships that have been laying fallow for so many years because business or family always took precedence. That is going to be a lot of fun.
“When the business took off during Covid it was clear to all of us that it was time to sell,” he said. “Our business was so strong, and it fit in with my timeline for retirement.”
Valterra’s manufacturing plant was working at over 100% capacity during 2020, with each injection molding machine running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“Actually, at one point we had to take some of our molds and tooling to a U.S. manufacturer to help get extra production,” he said. “It really was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see our factory running that strong.”
From 2013 until the company’s sale to Dometic, Valterra grew six-fold. Grengs said the supplier went from a smaller company to a large one very quickly.
Among the many changes over the eight years, Grengs said the acquisition brought Valterra a larger physical footprint. For the company’s first 30 years, nearly all its employees were based in Mission Hills, California, and Tijuana, Mexico. Today, Valterra has staff across North America, from British Columbia to Florida and California to Maine.
“It really did change the makeup of the company tremendously,” he said.
Bringing so many new companies and products into the fold presented integration challenges, Grengs said, some more challenging than others. He said folding in companies’ manufacturing presented some challenges because of product complexities and supply chain relocations. Other import-oriented acquisitions were made easier because Valterra simply focused on sales, marketing, and customer service operations, he said.
Others, he said, were nearly untouched by acquisition.
“Then you have a company like Go Power,” he said. “The reason we bought Go Power is the tremendous opportunity we saw in the solar power business coupled with an incredibly strong management team. We gave them support in many ways but all the credit for their tremendous growth goes to the Go Power team. We treated them as a standalone operation, and they performed incredibly well.”
As Grengs plannd his free time in retirement, he said two trips are in the works for him and his wife to visit friends and family in Mexico and Scotland. There will be time to work on his golf game, too—Valterra gave Grengs golfing lessons as a retirement gift, and his back has recovered well enough from a late-1990s operation to let him back on the course.
“I have a lot of friends that golf, so that is one way I am really going to work on my friendships that have been laying fallow for so many years because business or family always took precedence,” he said. “That is going to be a lot of fun.”
