Maguire Canada turns 10

Time flies, as they say, when you’re having fun. Which might be why it feels like just yesterday that plastics auxiliary equipment supplier Maguire Products Canada Inc. was founded – even though the Vaughan, Ont.-based firm is actually celebrating 10 years in business this month.

“We officially began operating on August 1, 2007, with a staff of five people,” said Maguire Canada general manager Brian Davis. “Our goal was to supply the Canadian market with the entire range of equipment from U.S. equipment makers Maguire Products and Novatec Inc. and provide engineering service.”

The impetus for the company came from Aston, Pa.-based Maguire Products. “Maguire Products had previously been represented in Canada by an Ontario sales agency, but saw an opportunity to better support the Canadian plastics auxiliary market by establishing a subsidiary company,” Davis said. “Maguire Products’ founder and president Steve Maguire always appreciated the importance of the Canadian market, which isn’t always true of other American companies.”

From the very start, key members of the Maguire Canada staff included industry veterans Davis, Robert Hodge as senior technical sales manager, and Wayne Travell as service manager. The trio was already well-known in Canada’s plastics auxiliary equipment sector. “By 2007, we had about 120 years of combined experience between the three of us, much of that relating specifically to resin storage, resin conveying, and resin conditioning,” Davis said.

No sooner was Maguire Canada up and running in its 10,000-square-foot service centre and warehouse than it received an added boost from an aggressive advertising campaign funded by Maguire Products. “We definitely got off to a great start,” Davis said. At which point the Great Recession slowed everything down for everyone. It could have spelled an early end for the new company, but didn’t. “Our people really shone during the recession,” Davis said. “We aggressively went after whatever business we could find, from selling couplings and single lengths of pipe to moving silos. We established and then nurtured good relationships and it paid off: Post-recession, our growth curve has been from 15 to 25 per cent annually.”

Davis credit’s Maguire Canada’ success to more than just hard work, however. “We’re also very fortunate to represent two well-known and respected auxiliary brands in Maguire Products and Novatec,” he said. “We believe we have the number one resin blender in the industry with the WSB gravimetric batch blender, which revolutionized the blending world when it came out in 1989, and it remains one of our primary calling cards. The same is true of the Novatec resin dryers we sell: We can knock on the door of any plastics processor in Canada and they know the Novatec brand name for resin drying.”

Maguire Canada currently has eight employees, which keeps things tight-knit and hands-on, Robert Hodge said. “We have a smaller staff size than some of our competitors, but we have great chemistry between us,” he said. “We have two on-staff service technicians, but every member of our staff knows our product portfolio inside-out and can handle regular service issues.”

In the end, Davis said, Maguire Canada’s success can be traced to one prime directive. “Customer service is our main goal,” he said. “Satisfying our customers is not only the right thing to do, but the right message to send to the industry. We’re in a service industry, and we’ve seen competitors come and go because they didn’t keep their customers satisfied.”

And even as the firm celebrates a decade of doing business, Hodge said, it definitely doesn’t feel like a decade. “We enjoy what we do, which has made the past 10 years seem to go by very fast,” he said. “It’s been a real privilege to serve our customers for the past 10 years and we look forward to doing so for many more years to come.”