TentCraft: Anatomy of an Acquisition
When it comes to M&A activity, 2024 turned out to be a year of thoughtful, strategic decisions. One company that pulled the acquisition trigger was Traverse City, Michigan-based TentCraft, which closed its acquisition of World Class Displays in the fourth quarter.
TentCraft’s president, Matt Bulloch, notes that he had been looking at potential companies to acquire for a few years, but nothing ever felt right, or the deal would fall through before it could close. This one, he says, was a matter of the right company, at the right time, and all the proverbial stars aligned.
Bulloch says it was his vice president of manufacturing who first came across World Class Displays as being for sale with a business broker. “I’m actually not completely sure how he came across it,” he laughs, “but their busy season almost perfectly aligns with when we’re dead.”
The problem, he notes, is that TentCraft tends to be incredibly busy during the warmer months of the year — unsurprising given they specialize in outdoor tents and displays. But that leaves them scrambling to fill capacity in the cooler months of the year.
“It's tough to have a world-class business when 25% of the year you suck,” he jokes. “And, so for years what we've tried to do in the winter is pick up some contract work, some print on demand fulfilment for the Vistaprints and Zazzles, you know, just to use capacity. And we and we would offer special pricing to our real big customers, where if they would order their big orders for all their different teams and all their different regions, they would we would give them extra discounts if we could produce it over the winter when we're slow. But it was still hit or miss.”
And that’s where World Class Displays comes in.
“They're a trade show manufacturer,” he notes, “so they're really busy in the winter and the early spring during the traditional indoor trade show season. That's normally when we're kind of sucking wind.”
It also helps that the two companies have very similar processes, with Bulloch noting that they already work with aluminum and fabric for their own tents and outdoor displays, so being able to shift capacity back and forth between the two facilities will help ease the burden during busy season, and help fill all that capacity both companies had during their down times.
It also helps, Bulloch notes, that World Class Displays is located far more centrally in the United States — in Marion, Iowa. “We're pretty far north, in northern Michigan,” he says, “so [shipping] takes a long time and is expensive to get things to and from Michigan. Iowa is a very strategic location for us.”
And if location, equipment proficiencies, and complimentary timelines weren’t enough, the cultures ended up being a great fit as well.
“The former owner [of World Class Displays] is a really good guy,” Bulloch says. “But he wasn’t incredibly growth minded.” He continues that the owner had other businesses he was more focused on, ultimately, and had just taken World Class Displays as far as he could. “He said ‘I think it would be better off with another owner taking care of my people.’ That was really important to him.”
As part of the process, instead of only the owners talking during the sale process, Bulloch invited them to Michigan to tour TentCraft and speak to his current employees, so they could get a better idea of the culture, and make sure they would mesh on that front. And the end result, he says, “you know it’s every cliche about acquisitions, but we are really hoping this is one of the deals where one plus one can equal three.”
Another thing Bulloch is looking forward to as part of the merger of the two teams is the ability to capture more business from some of his customers. He mentions one example where TentCraft produces the signage for the outdoor portions of a trade show for a construction equipment company, but they have never gotten any of the indoor display business. Now, he says, with World Class Displays in the mix, he hopes they can start to see projects where they are producing all the event graphics for an event of that type.
And while he plans to keep both companies running under their own names, since both have strong brand recognition and reputations in their spaces, he hopes in the future that when the phone rings, it won’t matter if it’s a TentCraft or a World Class Displays person that picks up the phone — they’ll get the same service and experience, the same great products, and which team produces it won’t even be an afterthought for their customers.
It's still early days for the merger, and 2025 should be a year of integration and getting the teams all on the same page. But Bulloch sees great things ahead, and it should make TentCraft an exciting company to watch.
Toni McQuilken is the senior editor for the printing and packaging group.
