Business is already booming at TentCraft, and a new strategic acquisition will help the Michigan-based company overcome its usual winter lull.
“We have this punishing seasonality,” founder Matt Bulloch told Vendelux from his office in Traverse City while a snowstorm raged outside. “It’s tough to have a world-class business when 25 percent of the year sucks.
“People say, ‘What about California?’ We get one or two things, but the big nationwide tours, summer festivals, college football or NFL games—there just isn’t that much outdoor event activation [there]. Enter World Class Displays,” he said.
Late last year, Bulloch closed on a deal to buy World Class Displays (WCD), a 43-year-old company that makes booths for indoor trade shows and conventions.
TentCraft focuses on custom outdoor tents. Think a Coca-Cola booth outside a concert, or a Coast Guard recruiting pavilion at a street parade. They not only build the structures, but also design and print the fabrics attached to them. The purchase of WCD has turned TentCraft into a one-stop shop while filling in the winter gap, positioning it as one of the leading event display companies in the country—seasons be damned.
“We have similar processes: Working with fabric, working in assembly, doing art back and forth, except they’re busy when we’re traditionally slow and vice-versa,” Bulloch said.
Spotting a Good Deal
Bulloch, a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, founded TentCraft in 2007 after a brief stint as an analyst at Credit Suisse in Manhattan.
The events company has since grown to serve about 20,000 customers a year. Clients include Verizon, Nike, Target and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
WCD, on the other hand, is a smaller company that has been around for more than four decades. This long history helped Bulloch feel confident about proposing a deal as he sought to take his company indoors.
“Our VP of manufacturing was looking around and found that WCD was for sale through Benchmark International. It’s a great name, it’s been around since 1982. We thought, ‘Would that jumpstart our effort?’ And we came to the determination that it would,” he said.
Bulloch added: “The owner of WCD is a great guy. He wanted more resources for his people, to get them access to systems, technology and marketing horsepower that they didn’t currently have. The deal, once we met each other, came together pretty quickly.”
Bulloch is no stranger to innovation. When events came to a screeching halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, he quickly pivoted to building tents for drive-thru testing centers, drawing inspiration from similar set-ups in South Korea. TentCraft booked $1 million in business in the weeks following March 16, 2020, according to Inc. This allowed Bulloch to keep his staff on the payroll, as workers throughout the country wrestled with dormant employers and backlogged unemployment offices.
The recent acquisition is yet another creative move to keep business flowing. It will also boost staff pay, since they can sell indoor solutions that were previously unavailable to them.
“Both sales teams have access to a whole new universe of products that they didn’t have access to before,” Bulloch said. “What I’ve told both sets of sales people is, ‘You will make more money as a result of our companies being partnered up.’”
Key to sealing the deal was a commitment to U.S. manufacturing, a value that both companies already shared.
“When we manufacture, we’re able to innovate. We can customize in ways other companies won’t. When we customize enough, we get really good insight into what we can do, it gives us a competitive advantage,” Bulloch said.
The WCD team is also bullish on the partnership.
In a press release from November, former WCD President Jason Hauschild said, “Finding the right fit to continue World Class Displays was essential, and TentCraft’s commitment to quality, innovation, and exceptional customer service made them the perfect choice. I’m confident that with TentCraft, our legacy will not only be preserved but strengthened for the future.”
Keeping an Open Mind
TentCraft is in Michigan, while WCD is about 550 miles away in Marion, Iowa.
The integration has already proved fruitful in that TentCraft now has access to storage and shipping in Marion, a much more central location than Traverse City, Michigan.
“We’ll be able to offer storage and logistics solutions on the outdoor side that we were never able to offer before,’ Bulloch said.
But there are a lot of kinks that need to be ironed out as both companies look to merge.
The team at TentCraft uses Adobe Creative Systems for its designs. WCD uses SketchUp. TentCraft uses Salesforce for cloud-based software. WCD uses ZoHo.
“It’s our first acquisition. We’re excited to work with a great team, and we will compare systems and decide what works better,” Buloch said.
“It’s good to go into an acquisition with an open mind.”
