Family Owned Companies: Merritt Aluminum Products

For this issue’s Family-Owned Companies feature – an annual ColoradoBiz staple we’re focusing on family businesses that are at least 50 years old, a fact that, by itself, makes them exceptional: According to a study by the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, the average lifespan of a family-owned business is 24 years.

The five companies profiled below stand out for another reason: They’ve all survived beyond the original founder to ownership by subsequent generations. In fact, two of them – O’Meara Motor Co. and Warneke Paper Box – are now in their fourth generation. How rare is that? According to the Small Business Administration, only 30 percent of family businesses in the U.S. survive into the second generation, only 12 percent to the third generation, and only 3 percent into the fourth and beyond.

If these Colorado businesses have one trait in common, besides their longevity, it’s their adaptation to changing times, and the ability of new generations of ownership to see the business through fresh eyes and new possibilities, while paying heed to what has worked for previous generations.

Merritt Aluminum Products

Founded: 1951

Third generation

Fort Lupton/Henderson, CO

Website: www.merrittproducts.com

Before co-founding a livestock trailer manufacturer, Everett and Guinevere Merritt were high school sweethearts. “When they graduated, my grandfather went to work in the logging business up in Oregon,” says Chairman and CEO Taylor Merritt, Everett and Guinevere’s grandson.

That led to several startups, including a sawmill that failed and a trucking business that hauled cattle to Portland from ranches in eastern Oregon. Everett connected with the owner of a small welding shop in Portland, and serendipity struck. “Both of them concluded that they didn’t really like the business that they were currently in,” says Taylor. “Over breakfast one morning, they concluded, ‘Hey, why don’t we just trade trade businesses?’”

That was the start of Merritt Equipment Company, which opened a Colorado location in 1969 after establishing a foothold manufacturing livestock trailers. The headquarters moved to Colorado circa 1980. The business split into two sister companies, Merritt Aluminum Products and Merritt Trailers, in 2016 that have a little more than 300 employees today.

While he swept the floor as a kid, Taylor joined the family business full-time in 2006 and quickly moved into a leadership position.

He says the family-owned dynamic gives him forward-looking flexibility: “I don’t have to look at making numbers for the quarter or the year. I don’t have external pressure from the public markets or from private equity ownership or whatever it may be, so I can sacrifice short term-ism to the benefit of the long term and really be thinking about where we want to go as a business.”

Manufacturing fenders, storage boxes, and other trucking accessories, Merritt Aluminum Products has grown by leaps and bounds since its spinoff from the trailer business, and Taylor forecasts more on the way. “We formalized an M&A strategy in that business in 2023, and moved from the strategic planning side to the action phase of trying to pursue growth via acquisition.”