Best mates Craig Vincent (left) and Mitchell Plaw head the $500 million-plus quiet Waikato achiever The Profile Group. Photo / Supplied
For a shy business, Profile Group makes a big public statement with its enormous, impossible-to-miss sleek building beside the southern lanes of the Waikato Expressway near Cambridge.
Many motorists have wondered who occupies the design award-winning building, but because Profile Group isn’t big on signage on its properties, the question tends to be left hanging.
The answer is that the building is the glass manufacturing plant and flagship headquarters of a family of companies recognised for innovation and leadership in manufacturing aluminium windows and doors. Its best-known brand is probably APL or Architectural Profiles Ltd.
What really distinguishes the Profile Group - aside from its salute to quality architecture in manufacturing - is that this family of seven businesses (eight if you include biodiversity restoration sanctuary Takapoto Estate) together form the country’s only integrated aluminium supply chain for window and door solutions.
With its own design and development arm, APL Window Solutions, its own aluminium extrusion and sheet-metal operations under the Inex brand, its own powder coating operation Colour Works, its own finishing operations, its own truck fleet, and 74 licensed manufacturers throughout New Zealand, the group taps the strength of each unit to support the whole.
By bringing home from Asia the manufacturing of most of its component needs, and with its debut into glass three years ago, the group - annual revenue $500 million-plus - is now effectively self-sufficient.
Or as chief executive Craig Vincent puts it, with its own internal supply chain, Profile Group is “a closed shop”.
“The group’s strength in looking after itself and effectively having a closed shop and focusing on ourselves rather than being all things to all people has been successful,” he says.
There’s also a plastics business, PPL Plastic Solutions, though only 50 per cent of its production is aligned to the windows and doors businesses. Founded to make the gaskets that go around panes of glass, it also makes plastics for other industries such as the marine and building sectors.
Two businesses operate under the Inex brand name – Inex Independent Extrusions, New Zealand’s largest aluminium extruder, which supplies aluminium for about 70 per cent of the country’s doors and windows, and Inex Metals, specialists in general aluminium extrusions and sheet metal.
Majority owned by the Plaw family – managing director Mitchell Plaw and Vincent are best mates from their young days who’ve been working together since Vincent joined in 1988 – Profile Group is another of those quiet Waikato success stories, operating in a region littered with top commercial pedigrees which often duck the spotlight.
Claiming 45 per cent of the New Zealand market for aluminium windows and doors, the group has replicated its model in Australia – except for glass - and also exports to the Pacific.
It directly employs about 1000 people in New Zealand, mostly at its four Hamilton sites. Additionally, its 74 licensed manufacturing shops provide an average of about 20 jobs each, says Vincent. Some are small family businesses employing a handful of people, others are big operations with up to 150 staff.
Wairoa-born Vincent, previously a refrigeration and electrical engineer, agrees the group’s preference for a low profile is partly a symptom of the Waikato business culture.
“It’s a little bit of that Waikato ethos. There are a lot of fantastic businesses here. It’s an amazing place to do business.”
The enterprise, which marked its 50th year in 2021, had to shed its shyness last year when it was named supreme winner of the Waikato Business Awards and won two gongs at the Property Industry Awards for its new “green” Hautapu headquarters.
Described as a “flagship sculpture” by property award judges and set amid plantings and water features, the building is the first stage of Profile Group’s plans for the 50ha site beside the expressway.
Within seven years, Vincent, who has shares in the non-APL companies (APL is 100 per cent owned by the Plaw family), plans to have relocated all the Hamilton operations at Te Rapa to the site.
While APL is “the backbone of everything we do”, the new glass business is the group’s “rock star”, he says.
“It sets the benchmark for all the other business units for quality and performance.”
That’s largely because the plant is fully automated, so it had a “head start”.
While AGP, or Architectural Glass Products, has competitors, it’s the only glass operation in New Zealand that “efficiently runs on fully automated lines”, says Vincent.
Adhering to the closed shop principle, AGP only makes glass products for the group’s window and door fabricators.
APL owns 75 per cent of the glass business.
Vincent says he and Plaw resisted going into glass production for years – “we’d only heard horror stories”.
They had been customers of industry heavyweight Metro Glass, with which “we had a great relationship”, but in the building boom of recent years, the glass industry struggled to meet demand.
“We got into it because our customers were having challenges getting quality product delivered on time to fabricators [so they] could ensure house lots of windows and doors were supplied to builders.”
Decision made, the challenges began.
First was designing the glass plant. Then they needed expertise to run it.
Vincent was introduced to Dave Bunting, a Kiwi who had left Metro Glass to work for US giant Guardian Glass, for whom he was managing a big glass plant.
Former Metro Glass chief executive Brent Martin also came on board.
Bunting, just 34 when he returned to New Zealand to join Profile, is “amazing” and AGP is his baby, says Vincent.
“If we didn’t have someone like Dave with his discipline and structure running it, it would have been a failure.”
Vincent recalls signing the $30 million order at a German trade fair for what was billed as a turn-key glass plant.
“I remind him [Dave] so many times that it’s so far from a turn-key operation, and if we didn’t have a Dave Bunting supported by Brent, this would be a complete failure.”
With the Hautapu land and the showpiece headquarters mopping up about $150m, the added cost of the glass plant and working capital brings Profile’s investment there to about $200m so far, says Vincent.
What Vincent and Plaw didn’t know at the time of designing the glass operation, but were able to deal with thanks to its automated nature, was that a new glass industry law was in the pipeline. It decreed that from November last year, all building glass had to have a special coating (called Low E) which keeps heat out in summer and warmth in during winter.
“If you try to deal with Low E manually, the quality just dives. It’s so easy to put a fingerprint or scratch on it so you need to run it on automation.”
The building has three glass lines running its full length. Up to eight staff are dedicated to each line.
The glass itself comes from Indonesia – with some also from Guardian in the US – in packs of sheets measuring 5.1m by 3.3m. It has to come through the Port of Tauranga because truckloads can be too high for bridges en route from Auckland. The sheets are offloaded, cut and processed to order then reloaded onto trucks at the other end, all by automation.
The Profile campus today would be beyond the imaginings of Mitchell Plaw’s parents Ian and Val, who started the business as Vantage Aluminium in 1971. They’d been building caravans on the family dairy farm not far away and saw an opportunity to provide window joiners with 5m lengths of aluminium when all that was on offer were kitsets.
Ian Plaw died in 1973 but his wife employed a general manager to continue the business.
Mitchell Plaw had finished school by then and joined the business, asking Vincent to come on board in 1988. He was the 13th employee. By then, powder coating had arrived, giving customers colour choices.
Plaw is “the entrepreneur”, says Vincent, while he is “very practical”.
“With Mitch’s entrepreneurial spirit, it was quite easy for us to just go and do things.
“When you talk about success – and I don’t say this lightly – as a group we are a so non-typical corporate for our size. For 30 years a board meeting was Mitchell and I in a car or on the phone.
“We didn’t have a plan, we had an idea and a vision. We haven’t sat down and written a strategic plan as such – that’s not us. It’s about looking after people and your customers.”
By 1990, “things exploded for us”, Vincent recalls, and accountant Guy McDonald joined. A new brand, First Windows and Doors, was launched.
In 1994 competitor Altherm was bought out. It came with 10 fabricators and took the company’s brands to three. The business was renamed APL and started its own powder coating operation, Colour Works.
In 1998 Bill Seiga joined. He was “critical” to the company’s development as he had an extrusion background. Inex was the result.
“When we took control of the first parts of that vertical integration, we took away a whole lot of barriers frustrating us at the time, whether it was supply or bringing new product to the market.
“Between the small group of us, we just decided to do things. The strength of private business is that you aren’t constrained by a whole lot of parameters … Our success is about supplying high-quality product and service to 74 manufacturers around the country.”
Does he think business is more constrained today?
“Yes, and a big part of that is a lack of entrepreneurship. There’s lots in tech but when you come to what we would call typical Kiwi No 8 wire-type manufacturing, developing systems and relationships with people, you actually have to go out and be face to face with people and create a genuine supply chain.
“A large part of our business is about technology but it’s also physical relationships. I’m not convinced people are brought up today in a manner which fosters that.”
Vincent doesn’t see teenagers raised in a way “that exposes them to go and learn to make things”.
“Not like we used to. We’d take an old lawnmower and turn it into a grass cart. It expanded your mind, the way you thought out how to do things.”
As a result, New Zealand manufacturing is in “woeful” shape. Vincent says there is not enough encouragement for young people to make “genuine, hard, tactile type products”.
“Schools don’t inspire them to be in manufacturing.”
He says Plaw and he weren’t academic – “we got School C and pretty much left school”.
But these days kids are “taught to be academics”.
“If you don’t end up with people with functional skills, then manufacturing does suffer.
“Why is half our workforce Filipinos? Because we can’t get people in New Zealand. They’ve all been taught to be academics.”
So what’s next for the Profile Group?
Vincent says its bi-folding doors got the business into Australia, where the appetite for sliding windows and doors was jaded. Could it add glass to its toolbox over there?
“We can see the opportunity but probably not. From a distribution perspective, it’s so big. The scale could be there to do it in selected markets but at the moment we’re focused on getting this one right.”
Meanwhile, Profile has signed a technology agreement with a large US company keen to develop a thermal window system - and Vincent’s eye is firmly on the economy.
“It’s certainly softening. For ourselves, we can see the market by the middle of next year being a good 20-25 per cent down in New Zealand.
“We are already going down but Australia is six or nine months ahead of us. We are predicting the worst in Australia will be at the end of this year, with building consents dropping off.
“In New Zealand, we will stay reasonably busy but not in peak demand like the last two years which were record years. I think from October to October next year we will see the bottom of it from a trading perspective.”
Results from Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Infratil dragged the market down.