ALLIANCE – Myers Industries intends to invest in the city.

The Akron-based company, which acquired Trilogy Plastics over the summer, operates between 20 and 25 facilities in small towns across the country. Myers Industries President and Chief Executive Officer Mike McGaugh said the company prides itself on making investments in small communities with strong workforces.

More:Mount Union students to teach English to workers at Trilogy Plastics

"Fundamentally, making stuff, employing people, making people's lives better gets done in towns like Alliance," he said.

McGaugh served as the guest speaker on Tuesday during Alliance Area Development’s meeting at Robertson Heating Supply Co. He told business owners and community leaders in attendance about Myers Industries' values, work and plans for Trilogy Plastics.      

Founded in 1933, Myers Industries started as a tire supply company that grew into a large distribution and material-handling business that owns 11 brands, including Trilogy Plastics, Buckhorn, Jamco Products and Specter, and employs 3,000 workers in its facilities across the U.S. 

McGaugh said Myers Industries specializes in "moderately difficult, moderately engineered products," such as high-performance coolers, kayaks, floating docks, gas cans and surgical carts. This strategy enables Myers Industries to be in the No. 1 or No. 2 market position of the niche markets the company serves, McGaugh said.  

"It allows us to fly under the radar. ... We don't have a lot of Chinese competition because we make big, bulky products," he said. 

Alliance's Trilogy Plastics produces items such as coolers, planters, waste and material-handling bins and tanks using a process known as rotational molding. McGaugh explained that this process is an effective way to make a small number of custom products.  

McGaugh said the deal to acquire Trilogy Plastics came together because Myers Industries and Trilogy Plastics saw eye-to-eye on the values of optimism, integrity, customer focus and can-do spirit. In particular, he praised the leadership of Trilogy Plastics President Daren Balderson and said it was one of the driving factors in his interest in Trilogy. 

Balderson has since been asked by the company to help lead Myers' facilities in Michigan and Indiana. 

"Our fundamental objective is to invest in these companies, use our balance sheet, use our financial capacity to bring in capital that maybe otherwise couldn't have been invested," McGaugh said. 

Trilogy Plastics operates 13 machines and has about 300 employees. 

Myers Industries has made several investments in Trilogy Plastics, McGaugh said, including adding a pulverizer, a machine that takes plastic pellets and grinds them into the consistency of talc and a $600,000 rotational molding machine. 

He also said Myers Industries is investing several million dollars in capital for the facility. 

Like many companies, Trilogy Plastics has struggled recently with finding workers, he said. Trilogy has added incentives such as wage increases, improved benefits and medical care. Still, he said the workers the company does have are highly motivated. 

"The level of energy when I go to our plants here is very high," McGaugh said. "The quality of work is very high. So that's one area we continue to want to have exposure to in Alliance."

Stark Economic Development Board President Ray Hexamer said Stark County expects to see job growth over the next several years. Stark companies received $4.4 million in grants through JobsOhio, he said. This will create more than 1,300 new jobs over the next three years, which represents $54 million in payroll. 

"The last three years have been very strong for Stark County," he said. 

Reach Paige at 330-580-8577 or pmbennett@gannett.com, or on Twitter at @paigembenn.