Northern Composites

4 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 10 to meet the changing needs of its customers. About three-quarters of Northern’s business these days is tied to the aerospace industry. We recently spoke with Northern Composites’ General Manger Richard Hewett. He told us more about what Northern has been up to since we first featured the company in the pages of Business View in 2019. Hewett notes that for the past 58 years, Northern has been a manufacturer’s rep and a distributor of products. “Then in 2016,” he notes, “we broke away from one of our anchor suppliers and partners: a company called Richmond Aircraft Products. They had gone through multiple acquisitions, and it didn’t work for us anymore. We launched our brand in 2016, and that was a pretty dramatic change of position for us. All of a sudden, we were a manufacturer, and we weren’t contractually tied to a territory as we had been for the last 50 years, and so off we went, wondering what was going to be next.” What came next was measurable growth. “It became pretty apparent,” says Hewett of the period of 2019-20, “we needed some help to promote our products in other parts of the country. We had historically been an eastern United States company, and now we were free to sell wherever we wanted to.” A more organic growth, putting warehouses in other places, might well have been feasible. Yet Northern Composite’s leadership wanted to move more quickly than that, as Hewett notes. Thus the company started looking for people who might be interested in selling its products. After many conversations with a lot of different people, it was evident that there were people who were interested but who were, in fact, much more interested in owning Northern rather than simply selling its brand. Northern Composites is a valuable brand indeed, and these other people wanted a piece of that pie, Hewett reveals. Northern Composites leadership determined that selling was the route to take. They approached Generational Equity, which specializes in promoting and selling companies of Northern Composites’ size (< $150M). Northern was finally able to do a deal with Krayden in January of 2021 which enabled the company to operate more or less autonomously. A productive partnership It is a prosperous partnership, as Hewett observes, with Northern Composite able to take advantage of Krayden’s infrastructural strength, including 55 sales staffers throughout North America, multiple locations in the States, Canada, and Mexico, and warehousing space closer to customers. It’s a nice distribution network Northern can tap into. “That was the intention all along, and it’s working out well,” says Hewett, whilst at the same time acknowledging a few bumps in the road that aren’t anything truly significant to worry about and are only normal, after all. Such is the nature of any merger, he adds,