Fluidmaster Inc. has been busy solidifying its presence in the international market.
The San Juan Capistrano-based manufacturer is by no means a newcomer to global markets. It has been distributing its products abroad for many years, and it claims the title of the world’s largest-selling brand of toilet-repair products.
It wasn’t until recently that the company began acquisitions as part of its international growth plans. It started with a focus on Europe in a bid to get closer to a big customer base there. Fluidmaster completed three buys in the past three years, deals that helped boost revenue by about 30% to $200 million. The additions also brought the company’s overall workforce to about 1,400 employees across operations in the U.S., Mexico, China and the U.K. About 130 work in Orange County.
Fluidmaster’s growth story is not “finished yet,” said Chief Financial Officer Stephen Dixon, who has helped oversee the deals and integration of operations during the five years he’s been at the company.
Dixon was honored in the private-company category of the Business Journal’s annual CFO of the Year Awards, held at the Hotel Irvine Jamboree Center on Jan. 28 (see related stories, pages 1, 4, 5 and 7).
A strong brand name at home has been helping the company gain market share abroad, Dixon said.
“It’s a great brand, both here in the U.S. and around the world,” he said. “We’re finding out about the second part as we expand. We’ve done a fantastic job here in the U.S., and we think we can replicate that in the rest of the world.”
Fluidmaster’s latest move landed the company in Slovenia, a key strategic step, Dixon said.
“The business that we bought was a [noncore] division of an otherwise tier-1 automation company,” he said of Postojna-based Kolektor Liv, part of Kolektor Group, a $600 million corporation. “It was low cost … and what was attractive to us was that the company has two important brands: Liv, and a western European brand, Schwab, [which] serve 30 markets. And the location—if you draw a 1,500-kilometer circle around Slovenia, you get all the way to Spain and Russia.”
Dixon said the European market overall—though driven largely by the “800-pound gorilla” Geberit Group—is a bigger playing field than the U.S. “just by the way they manage their toilet function.”
The Slovenia deal followed a couple of buys in the U.K.
The first acquisition in Fluidmaster’s 57-year history came in 2011, when it bought Opella Ltd. in Hereford, England. Fluidmaster also set up a captive insurance entity that year to better manage its global risk exposure.
Fluidmaster followed some months later with a deal to buy U.K.-based CMI, its own European distributor.
“They’re now Fluidmaster U.K.,” Dixon said. “It was only at the end of 2013 that we consolidated all that into one location from two and into a common branding.”
An increased overseas presence has pushed the company to set up an intellectual property holding company in Ireland, as well as utilize hedging practices to protect itself from foreign currency fluctuations.
Dixon earned a bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His career has included stints at Coopers & Lybrand and Ryder System Inc. He came to Orange County in the late 1990s to work at BAX Global Inc. in Irvine, and later worked for Clarient Inc. and Alphatec Spine Inc., among other companies.
Fluidmaster’s brand had gotten Dixon’s attention long before he had an opportunity to join the company.
“I live in San Juan Capistrano, where the company is located,” he said. “I would commute on the 5 Freeway every day, and I’d see Fluidmaster and think, ‘I wonder what those guys do.’ ”
He said “serendipity” must have played a part, when a colleague learned the CFO at Fluidmaster was retiring and asked if Dixon would be interested.
Dixon started in 2008, working on basics before Fluidmaster was ready for its more recent acquisitions. Among the first tasks for him and his team was the consolidation of the company’s scattered North American operations.
Another key project overseen by Dixon: implementation of the ERP system, which took six months in North America operations and was followed by adoption in the U.K. and China. Next is Slovenia.
“That’s phase four,” Dixon said. “We’ll do that this year and complete it by the end of 2014. We’ve got a team here who knows exactly how to do this.”
