By: Deborah Johnson Wood
Land & Sea Products, a Grand Rapids-based manufacturer of biodegradable holding tank treatment for boats and RVs, was in dire straights not more than three months ago. The firm had contracted down to two part-time and two full-time employees. But today the company is up to 11 employees, has developed a new service for other manufacturers, is in the process of expanding its line of cleaning products, and just ordered $200,000 of additional equipment.
Jay Ross, a former employee of Land & Sea and now a partner in Focus Opportunities LLC, received a call to come back and help save the company. Ross and his partners saw some opportunities to grow the business and offered to buy it. They sealed the deal in September.
“Through the process of mixing the holding tank chemicals and putting it into plastic bottles, we also silkscreened the name on the bottles,” Ross says. “We said why not do this for ourselves, so we looked for contract printing jobs and found a lot of them in Grand Rapids.”
Ross says one of the firm’s new clients, Haviland Enterprises, regularly needs millions of containers printed, creating a need for the new equipment to keep up with demand. Another client from Chicago ships 500-gallon totes of product to Land & Sea, they print the containers, fill them with product and drop-ship them to the client’s customers.
Ross has hired three new full-time plant workers and brought the previous part-time workers on full time. He plans to hire two sales reps within the next few days and is also considering adding a second shift.
A line of environmentally safe cleaning products, Absolute Green, will soon join the company’s other products and services.
Source: Jay Ross, Land & Sea Products
Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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