Partnering with The Gund Company

A Generational Perspective on Sustainable Growth

As The Gund Company seeks to continue to grow, we are looking to partner with companies with a similar perspective on people-first leadership. Our family values are deeply rooted in long-term, generational growth. The Gund Company has grown our business by adding value for our customers and delivering quality, delivery, and service performance. We drive innovation through application engineering to serve customers as consulting engineers with the technical expertise that solves problems. Yet, our desire to take care of our team members as family members for the long term leads to our passion for growth. Thus, we seek opportunities for growth by partnering with other companies of similar values and philosophies.

As a team, we aspire to recognize and serve others so that lives are transformed. We are one family, acting in accordance with our core values to balance taking care of each other, taking care of the customer, and taking care of the business.

Consistent with our organizational Why strategic mergers and acquisitions allow our company to continue its healthy growth, opening up opportunities for our people’s growth and transformation. The purpose of a partnership relationship, merger, acquisition, or joint venture for The Gund Company includes leveraging:

• An opportunity to add value to customers by lowering costs while improving quality, delivery, and service.
• An opportunity to grow in complementary geographic or application markets;
• An opportunity to improve the talent of our team through our culture of continuous improvement that assimilates best practices; and
• An opportunity to drive efficiency through improved information and operational systems that drive profitability.

A partnership with The Gund Company can take many forms:

• Benchmarking Projects – Sharing best practices to allow mutual improvement.
• Supplier Purchasing Group – Combining purchases to negotiate lower costs.
• Production Support – Sharing capability and capacity to meet customer needs.
• Joint Venture – Creating a new company together to take advantage of an opportunity.
• Merger – Combining our companies to create value-added synergies for the market.
• Acquisition – Acquiring either a minority, majority, or entire position in a company.

For healthy, long-term, profitable growth, The Gund Company seeks open-minded companies that think out of the box to create value for customers, team members, and owners. Many of our partnering relationships have started small with either benchmarking or purchasing projects to drive both companies’ improvement. Some partnering projects have resulted in sharing production capability and capacity. And others have resulted in joint venture relationships and acquisitions.

Our imagination only limits the type of partnership for new ways to create value for our customers, team members, and owners. The Gund Company seeks to partner with companies with a shared set of values that can build a solid long-term growth culture. Our company’s culture starts with our “Why.” Our “Why” gives meaning to our actions and purpose to our lives: Whether a partnering relationship or an eventual acquisition, each company must consider the business’s long-term future. Succession planning for a business can be highly challenging for owners. We seek to partner with owners in a very flexible way that allows them to meet their needs.

• First and foremost, we will honor their legacy by taking care of their team members and taking care of their customers in a way that will make them proud.
• We will take care of the business in a way that allows us to honor our commitments to the previous owners and their team members for the long term.
• We will provide all kinds of flexibility in owner role evolution from active management to role specialization (i.e., what they want to do) to consulting to board member role.
• We will provide all kinds of flexibility in the deal structure, from minority to majority to the entirety of ownership. We will allow flexibility in payment forms, including all cash or cash plus earn-out or consulting over time or real estate rental.

If you would like a full introduction to The Gund Company and an overview of our company culture, please get in touch with Michael Marcum.