Maxey Cos. Inc. merging with Pennsylvania firm

FORT COLLINS – Trailer manufacturer Maxey Cos. Inc., a staple of the Fort Collins business community since 1969, is merging with Pennsylvania-based MGS Inc., the local company has announced.

The move comes as retired Maxey founder Loren Maxey and his longtime business partner Fred Urben cash out their ownership stakes.

MGS, a trailer manufacturer headquartered in Denver, Pa., has purchased the operating assets of Maxey, though Maxey’s former owners retain the company’s real estate. Loren Maxey’s son Carl Maxey, meanwhile, has taken his proceeds from the sale to buy shares and become a partner in MGS along with that company’s president and owner Andy Gehman.

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Terms of the cash deal were not disclosed.

Carl Maxey said Maxey Cos. will become a division of MGS but still operate under the Maxey branding. The company will remain in Fort Collins and likely, he said, grow from its employee count of 37.

Maxey manufactures all kinds of trailers, from livestock trailers to pizza oven trailers. The company also makes things like snowmobile trail grooming equipment and truck bodies.

“Their product offering and our product offering, there’s a little bit of crossover but not a lot,” Carl Maxey, the president and general manager of Maxey Cos., said.

Loren Maxey, who won a Bravo lifetime achievement award from BizWest last year, has been retired but retained majority ownership of Maxey until the deal with MSG. Gehman’s own father had similarly gotten out of their family business a few years back.

Carl Maxey said the merger was a way to allow his father and Urben to cash out while keeping the company focused on moving forward and growing. Maxey Cos., which will do about $7.5 million in sales this year, joins a MSG firm with a projected $24 million in 2014 revenue.

Carl Maxey met Gehman a decade ago while serving on the National Association of Trailer Manufacturers board of directors, and the two had struck up a friendship, even doing some contract manufacturing for each other’s companies over the years.

As part of the merger, Maxey will add MSG products to its manufacturing operations in Colorado, while MSG will do the same with Maxey products in Pennsylvania to help both expand their reach and cut down on distribution costs. MSG, for example has a large clientele in California that Maxey will now service, while Maxey sells its pizza oven trailers all over the globe and will be able to produce them now at both locations.

“The vision going forward for us is to grow the manufacturing operation,” Carl Maxey said.