Headquarters: Neenah, Wisconsin
Founded: 1849
Revenues: $974 million (2007)
Employees: 3,200 in 54 locations across the country
Ticker: Private
Web Site: menasha.com
What It Does: Packaging and product promotion for a variety of industries
In May 2005, Menasha Corporation was teetering on the brink of chaos. It was inefficient, too diverse, and strategically unfocused. Mix in a departed CEO and a change in board chairmanship and its future looked murky indeed. Fortunately, Arthur Huge was in the building.
Huge, who had joined the company in 2001 as treasurer, vice president, and chief financial officer, stepped up to serve as Menasha’s CEO.
“Every day was another day to figure out ways to make the business operate better,” he says of his challenge. “When you come into a situation like we had, where we had lots of different businesses and not a lot of strategic focus, my whole mindset was to get the company into a position where the parts of the company can act more like a whole instead of acting like a whole bunch of different cards in a deck.”
Huge’s experience in the steel and shipbuilding industries, where his responsibilities included recapitalization, restructuring, and reorganization, prepared him for righting Menasha’s ship. He credits those earlier career stops with teaching him the discipline to use lean manufacturing and Six Sigma processes to continually cut waste out of a company’s business systems.
Over the next 18 months, Huge directed the transformation of Menasha, which had become a somewhat unfocused conglomerate of small companies. Under his leadership, Menasha methodically divested itself of nonperforming businesses. After a series of restructurings, closures, acquisitions, and start-ups, Menasha now comprises four independently operated companies primarily producing packaging and product-promotion materials, under the direction of a corporate office that handles centralized business functions:
• Menasha Packaging Company: corrugated packaging and point-of-purchase displays
• Orbis Corporation: returnable plastic packaging and returnable-material handling services
• Leverage Point Media: in-store consumer marketing and promotion products and services
• Cortegra: pharmaceutical labeling and packaging.
Since becoming CEO, Huge has returned the company to an appropriate level of profitability, which he defines as “about a 12 percent return on invested capital on an after-tax basis.” The company’s earnings before interest and tax have more than tripled in the last three years.
Though Menasha has turned around, the challenges for company and CEO continue. At the end of 2005, Menasha made its largest acquisition ever, purchasing the North American operations of U.K.-based Linpac Material Handling. This increased its existing Orbis business by 40 percent. Menasha also invested in equipment that can run lighter-weight liner board and reduce waste, began working with customers to design products that use fewer resources, and focused on recovering and processing increased amounts of recycled material in its Orbis operations.
In addition, Menasha has begun manufacturing reusable plastic packaging in China for that country’s automotive market. “The demand for the returnable plastic packaging in China is fairly small at the moment,” Huge notes, adding that “navigating our way through the legal and governmental structures in China has been a very interesting process.”
An entrepreneur’s key strength, Huge believes, “is to engage all the brain power in the company. The way I do that is by asking a series of questions or trying to gather a common set of facts among the participants before making a decision. There’s no such thing as failure—only a lack of information.”
