David Kietzke, the president and chief executive of Professional Plastics Inc. in Fullerton, never expected he would be in business for 32 years.
He also never expected his company would be one of the five honored at the Business Journal’s 17th annual Family-Owned Business Awards at the Hotel Irvine on June 21 (see related stories, pages 1, 4, 5, 6 and 8).
“I thought that I wouldn’t have to say anything when all the other awards were given,” he said.
Then he heard the announcer describe his company prior to naming the honoree in the large-company category.
“What am I going to say to this crowd?” he recalled asking himself.
Professional Plastics is a third-generation distributor and fabricator of plastic sheets, rods, tubes and films. It employs about 300 companywide and has annual revenue of about $125 million.
“We started the company on a shoestring,” Kietzke said, referring to his father, Larry, brother, Mike, and himself.
Darrell White, the Newport Beach attorney at Weintraub Tobin who nominated Professional Plastics for the award, said the Kietzkes were unable get loans for their new company despite their business experience and market knowledge.
So the three of them each contributed $15,000 to the venture in 1984, David Kietzke said. He also said that he, his wife Kathryn, and two small children lived off credit cards for about four months while Professional Plastics built its clientele.
“We really didn’t have a long-term plan when we started the business,” he said.
Family Matters
Kietzke said he and his brother started their careers working for their father in warehouses at a plastics maker and distributor.
He worked for a competitor of his father’s company for a short time because he wanted to experience life away from home, but eventually he came back to the family fold.
They decided to create a new company in August 1984, and “we opened for business on Oct. 21,” he said.
“We had some trepidations, but we put a lot of thought into opening the business.”
They started as a distributor of plastic materials. David Kietzke’s strength was in sales, and he quickly obtained clients in the aerospace and semiconductor industries, White said.
Kietzke’s father and brother focused on managing the company’s operations, according to White.
The company revenue grew from $7.3 million in 1992 to $53 million in 2001.
Early on Internet
Professional Plastics developed a long-term plan when it chose to invest in internet marketing in 1997, a year prior to the launch of the internet search engine Google, White said.
Professional Plastics’ website was “rudimentary, as were other sites at the time,” he said, but it was the basis for the company’s expansion into international sales.
The Kietzkes developed an e-commerce website for the plastics industry and created price calculation tools. That marketing and pricing information helped grow the company during the 2000s, White said.
The company diversified in 2007 by adding fabrication equipment—panel saws, routers, grinders, molding and laser cutters—to produce custom plastic products.
They also started to expand operations through acquisitions in 2012, White said. They acquired Planet Plastics, a plastic fabrication company in Chino, and its sister company Paragon Plastics, a retail plastics supplier in Santa Ana.
“We’re not afraid to look at anything,” Kietzke said. “If it fits with our company and clients, we will consider it.”
Today the company is the sixth-largest supplier of engineering plastic shapes in North America, White said.
It has 19 distribution centers, including sites in Singapore and Taiwan, and sells to nearly 30 industries, such as defense, commercial construction, life sciences, telecommunications, power generation and transmission, and movie production.
“We still have some gaps in coverage across the U.S. and in Asia,” Kietzke said, “so we’re open to a potential acquisition.”
Next Generation
More than a dozen employees have worked for the company for at least 20 years, Kietzke said.
“We built everything on our family’s integrity and honesty,” he said. “And we want everyone to know that our employees become part of our family” and that they care about them.
The Kietzkes had to lay off employees, sell underperforming sites, and sell the packaging films division when demand for plastics dropped during the recession that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.
They conserved money and kept the business running. By 2004 the economy rebounded and Professional Plastics resumed its growth.
David Kietzke became chief executive when his father retired in 2006.
The third generation of Kietzkes joined the company when David’s sons, Brent and Jeremy, started working for their father in 1998. They are both currently listed as managers with the business (see related OC Insider item, page 3).
“The third generation (of Kietzkes) is in place,” David Kietzke said, and the company’s future looks bright.
