Doug Grimm has been bought and sold seven times in his business career.
He was on the Chrysler-AMC merger team in 1987. He was at Metaldyne for a series of acquisitions in the early years of the new millennium. He worked on merger and acquisition teams with assorted companies in the late ’90s.
But there is being a part of a merger team, and then there is being one of the main characters in the process. That’s what happened to Grimm last year, when Citation Corp. — which he led as CEO — began the process of purchasing Grede Foundries Inc., which Citation acquired through bankruptcy proceedings.
The merger, completed in January, resulted in a new entity: Grede Holdings LLC, a metal component supplier with 3,000 worldwide employees. Grimm is now the chairman, president and CEO of the new company.
As the head of the newly combined company, Grimm has been in charge of facilitating communication, combining cultures, setting standards and making sure that the process of merging two companies into one goes as smoothly as possible.
It’s a lot easier said than done. Even for a leader who has been on the buying and selling end of mergers and acquisitions as often as Grimm has.
“The biggest thing was continuing to convince customers, banks, employees and everyone else from the beginning that this was the right thing to do,” Grimm says. “It’s constantly getting in front of people and taking them through the rationale of the business case, why we brought these companies together.”
Grimm and his leadership team laid out the case to all of the parties involved: employees keep their jobs in a tumultuous economy, Grede’s suppliers receive a more reliable customer and Grede’s customers receive a more reliable supplier on their end.
But talking everyone through the merger was only the first step. Employees, in particular, needed to see the plan in action if they were ever going to support it. Grimm couldn’t just preach to his employees — he needed to open a dialogue and give employees throughout the company a hand in forming the new Grede enterprise.
“Everyone in this economic environment over the past couple of years is very skeptical as change happens,” Grimm says. “So it’s constantly giving them the messages that you want them to hear, and that takes some time.”
