A Waterville truck body manufacturer that has been among Maine’s fastest-growing companies in the past several years has been sold, the Michigan-based company that bought it said Monday.
F3 MFG Inc., which makes lightweight aluminum truck bodies and headache racks that dealers add to trucks, was purchased by The Shyft Group, a publicly traded specialty-vehicle manufacturer, for an undisclosed amount of cash. Truck bodies attach to a truck chassis for product or equipment storage.
F3 founder Bill Cleaves was not immediately available to comment on why the company was sold. Samara Hamilton, a spokesperson for Shyft Group, said Cleaves will stay on as general manager while two other owners will be consultants. She said F3 partnered with Shyft because Cleaves wanted to grow the business even more.
Shyft said it bought F3 to expand its geographic reach in the northeastern and midwestern United States. Shyft had $757 million in sales in 2019 from its 15 manufacturing operations in nine states, mainly in the western and southwestern United States, and two other countries.
The remainder of F3’s management team will remain in place as will 200 employees in Waterville, according to Shyft, which said it will keep F3’s DuraMag and Magnum brands and combine them into the Shyft Specialty Vehicles business unit. It will not continue using the F3 MFG name.
F3, which stands for “Final 3,” a nod to all three owners wanting this to be the last company they own, was among Inc. Magazine’s annual list of America’s 5,000 fastest-growing privately held companies in 2018 and 2019, when sales rose more than 50 percent each year to reach $25 million in 2019. F3 was the third fastest-growing company in Maine in 2018, according to the Central Maine Growth Council.
Cleaves founded the company in three buildings totaling 11,000 square feet in Liberty in 2009. He took on two partners with manufacturing backgrounds in the fall of 2015. Joyce Galea, who directs sales, and Tom Sturtevant, who handles accounting, joined Cleaves, an engineer. The three jointly owned the company.
They moved the company to Waterville in January 2016, as the city is close to all of their homes and convenient to Interstate 95, according to Cleaves. F3 moved into 50,000 square feet in the former Wyandotte woolen mill in early 2016, and expanded twice since to occupy 140,000 square feet at 977 West River Road.