Perspectives

Mike Apperson: The RLG story began in 1991 when the original Resource Label location was founded in Nashville, Tennessee as a pressure-sensitive label company. Since that time, RLG has grown into a leading label and packaging solutions provider with a network of 25 locations servicing over 10,000 customers across a variety of industries. Core to the RLG story is our focus on providing customers local, high-touch services, combined with a national platform that provides full geographic reach, products and cost benefits to our customers. While our growth has been rapid, and even accelerated recently after Ares’ investment, our focus on thrilling our customers and helping them grow has remained our top priority.

MA: The North American label sector is highly fragmented and is comprised of more than 2,000 companies. Most of these companies are single-location, family-owned operations with owners who have built their legacy in the business. The challenges of the pandemic and the current inflationary environment have created enormous operational pressure which is causing business owners to consider being acquired. Additionally, we believe scale has become more important, due to the significant investment needed to compete with state-of-theart technology and the economic benefits in raw materials, operations and security of supply. Finally, customers are working to simplify their supply chain, ensure consistency in packaging and capitalize on economies of scale. Given these factors, we believe RLG’s scale and having a financial partner such as Ares allows us to continue to benefit from M&A-driven growth in addition to strong organic growth.

MA: With 26 acquisitions now complete, I believe that RLG has a reputation as an acquiror of choice in the industry. Our M&A philosophy is to bring great companies into our system. We don’t position an acquisition as buying a company; rather, we want them to join our family. We generally maintain the legacy and brand name of the former owners when they become part of the RLG family because we believe there is value in the name, reputation and how they do business.

In welcoming a new member to the RLG family, we aim to take a light-touch, customized approach that focuses on maintaining their culture and customer relationships. Our goal is to supercharge what they’re doing and provide access to best practices and high-quality IT capabilities. We believe this approach creates a “win-win” situation and is differentiated from the alternative which tends to be more centralized and disruptive.

MA: This was RLG’s first major step-out into the online label channel. This channel is sizeable, fast-growing and serves smaller customers than we typically serviced, and we believe there is an opportunity to win on service and delivery times, which we view as core to our DNA.

Given the differences in the go-to-market approaches, we felt acquiring a leader in the space made more sense than building it on our own. StickerGiant was an ideal fit given its leadership position, culture and focus on 1-2 day delivery model. Acquiring StickerGiant has been quickly allowing RLG to transform our service model to meet the needs of smaller, short-run customers and has added significant digital capabilities to serve one of the fastest-growing parts of the labels sector.

MA: RLG has experienced increasing growth since the Ares Private Equity Group’s investment despite a challenging market environment. In an effort to drive strong growth, we partnered with the Ares Private Equity Group’s investment and value creation teams to continue investing in RLG’s infrastructure, particularly in talent, M&A capabilities and technology enablement. Additionally, we have been encouraged to expand into new adjacencies, such as online labels and stickers through StickerGiant. We believe these investments have enabled us to grow organically and inorganically at a high rate. Importantly, while we’ve grown significantly, we have maintained and even strengthened RLG’s “Have Fun and Get it Done” culture, which we believe has helped reduce employee turnover.

MA: Sustainability is top of mind for us as a company and is quickly becoming a requirement for conducting business. More importantly, we believe it is the right thing to do. To be successful, we view it as critical that our team members are connected and contributing to our sustainability effort. We have implemented structural programs that support ESG and allow us to monitor relevant KPIs. Also, we have dedicated key personnel and resources to support our efforts in this area. Our goal is to make sustainability a key part of the RLG culture.

From an organizational perspective, RLG has implemented a Sustainability Champions program to promote best practices across the network, implemented sustainability scorecards at each of our facilities and worked to implement sustainability continuous-improvement programs throughout the organization. We believe these efforts are bearing fruit, and RLG is being recognized at the forefront of our industry. As part of a recent TLMI industry conference, RLG was awarded a Calvin Frost Sustainability Leadership Award and has also received a Gold EcoVadis rating for the RLG Canadian location.