Nickolas Reinhart has always been driven. He starts his day before 4:30 AM with a workout. He started his first business when he was 15. He is listed in Guinness World Records as having created the largest retail plastic storage container, which is sold at Home Depot. And he has had a vision of building generational wealth — which he is now doing via Nickolas Asset Management (NAM), his family office — since he was 21.
“I’m a 44-year-old guy, and I have a lot of energy,” says Reinhart, who is founder and principal of NAM. “I’m a strategist at heart. I’ve always been a long-term planner. I always wanted to build something that would last hundreds of years, not just one or two years.”
Reinhart has been observing family enterprises — both his father’s and other families’ — since his childhood. He formed his family office in 2018 as a way to keep control over his investments.
“When you get to a certain point, you can either work with an existing firm to manage your investment portfolio, or you can keep control over your own capital and put a process in place that fits how you want to see your capital deployed,” Reinhart says.
Focus on manufacturing
The question of where to deploy his capital led him to focus on manufacturing investments.
“This is a great way for me personally to keep deploying capital, because I understand how to do this – how to leverage shared services such as engineering, HR and finance, along with the tradesmen and women in our business,” Reinhart says. “This is how we have been growing.”
NAM focuses on U.S.-based plastics manufacturing, investing in companies that make products such as injection molding, rotational molding and resin manufacturing. NAM currently owns 10 facilities in North America and has about 1,000 employees. NAM also owns non-manufacturing businesses such as engineering services and 3D printing.
NAM uses real estate as a longer-term investment vehicle. The family office’s real estate portfolio includes agricultural and residential real estate, as well as industrial land that includes the land where the operating businesses are located.
“We keep some real estate and some operating companies to guarantee we always have businesses in the future,” Reinhart says.
An entrepreneurial history
Reinhart learned about manufacturing and family enterprises from watching his father run another family’s business. He joined the engineering department of that business when he was 22, then went to work for a business his father bought after his previous employer retired.
“I really loved doing the building: developing products, client relationships, putting the infrastructure in place,” Reinhart says.
He then put those skills to use founding his own business, buying a vacant building in Sycamore, Ohio, and turning it into a manufacturing facility.
When his father passed away in 2017, Reinhart inherited his business, which was struggling. He took it over and ultimately sold it to a private equity firm – his first exposure to how PE works. After exiting that business in 2022, he shifted his entire focus on Nickolas Asset Management.
“The goal is to responsibly grow and buy things that we plan to keep forever,” Reinhart says.
A technology-driven industrial business
At the heart of NAM’s business model is a platform called Sequent, which has multiple complementary businesses underneath it.
“We have full engineering design, sales, finance, IT, HR — a complete back office turnkey solution for any small manufacturing company,” Reinhart says. “We find companies that have great products and a great facility but lack the financial backing to add the resources necessary to professionalize the business.”
NAM’s new product development vehicle, called Faster, helps companies develop and deploy new products quickly: “Basically from a thought to a product that’s on the shelves at a retailer in 12 weeks,” Reinhart says.
Once a product has been developed, NAM has platform companies that can manufacture, warehouse, and ship it to clients. NAM also has a sustainability business, called Melds, that makes recycled resin from post-consumer, post-industrial scrap and sells it to NAM’s manufacturing companies. And NAM recently purchased Krevera, which offers autonomous manufacturing hardware and software for plastic injection molding.
Identifying investments
Reinhart often looks for deals to buy companies where the owner wants to retire and has no successor in the wings.
“We don’t have a buy-side advisory firm that works for us,” Reinhart says. “I generally will just look around myself, pick up the phone, and call the owners to see if they have any interest in having a conversation about selling their business.”
Reinhart looks for “heavy power” when identifying potential acquisitions: “cranes, silos, concrete, older industrial assets that might be underperforming today,” he says. “We buy these older industrial assets – large buildings that have a great infrastructure. I can quickly take that great infrastructure and apply new technology, new machinery, new equipment, new revenue streams into these old assets. We can get 10x to 15x the revenue in less than 12 months.”
Regional focus
Northwest Ohio, including Reinhart’s hometown of Findlay, is the focus of the family office’s investments. One reason, he says, is that he enjoys doing business in his home state. But the location is also practical.
“I think Ohio is one of the most strategic ship locations in the country,” Reinhart says. “You can reach 60% of the U.S. population in a one-day transit. And culturally, Ohio is a manufacturing state: good communities, good culture, a good workforce. Along with that, there are a lot of older assets: factories that at one time were booming that have been sitting or have shrunk over time because of the loss of business to lower labor cost countries.”
In the eight years since he started Nickolas Asset Management, the family office has acquired eight manufacturing sites and 10 distribution centers.
“It’s definitely not a passive job. It’s a very intense operational job,” Reinhart says.
He plans for his two sons, who are currently 25 and 17 years old, to continue the family office. And he has also set up co-investment opportunities for some of the family office team members.
“We’re deploying capital for multiple generations,” Reinhart says.