HEAT TREATMENT.

• Author: Barnes, Marc
• Position: Brief Article

With fire and its owners ire, Accu-Form Polymers shapes itself into our Small Business of the Year

His red-hot temper -- perhaps appropriate for a man whose business is melting and molding plastic -- caused Pat Renfro to blow off a rural corner of booming Wake County in favor of Eastern North Carolina's hinterlands. "My father had a temper, and my grandfather before me had a temper," he says, making no apologies. "A man who doesn't have a temper isn't going to have what it takes to bootstrap a company.

If anger hadn't made him move his company from Wendell to Warsaw, a tiny town of 3,000 in rural Duplin County, he might not have quadrupled his work force, seen sales explode from $300,000 to $5 million a year and diversified into building kayaks. And without doing all that, Accu-Form Polymers Inc. wouldn't be BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA'S Small Business of the Year.

His success at growing his company outside the state's fertile crescent -- the Triangle, Triad and Charlotte regions -- impressed this year's judges: BNC Editor and Publisher David Kinney; Joan and Owen Maxwell, owners of Elizabeth City-based Regulator Marine Inc., last year's winner; and Brent Lane, director of the N.C. Department of Commerce's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. The competition was sponsored by Winston-Salem-based BB&T Corp.

Renfro, 38, has deep roots in eastern Wake County, but these days he goes to work down Water Tank Road to the Warsaw plant, which makes products ranging from the cases salesmen use to pack goods for trade shows and the consoles in Highway Patrol cruisers to tops for boats and golf carts. After false starts and temper-fueled delays, he finally found his place -- and peace -- in a poor county that's big on small business. "This town wanted me," he says. "Not like Wendell. Wendell wants to be a bedroom town for Raleigh, and that's it."

At 6-1 and 190 pounds, Renfro still has a physique that fits a high-school football field, where he once burned off the aggression that's been both his bane and boon. What gives him away is his hair, mostly missing, he says, from worrying it away. Walking through the plant, walkie-talkie on his hip, he trades jibes with workers. In his office, close by his desk is a shelf with 13 trophies he's won racing a modified pickup truck on Eastern North Carolina's dirt tracks -- his latest escape.

He went to work at 14, farming tobacco, like his daddy and his daddy's daddy before him. With the aid of a $13,000 agricultural loan co-signed by his father, he cropped a few acres owned by Bill Johnson outside Wendell. He cleared $4,200. The next year, he borrowed $23,000, this time on his own.

At N.C. State University, he studied agricultural-equipment technology. During the summers, he went back to Johnson's farm. But during the school year, he worked at PMW Products Inc. in Raleigh. His job was to pull still-hot plastic from molds. Making things this way intrigued him, so he tried his hand at every task, taking it all in.

But after getting his associate's degree in 1983, he took a job as an agronomist with F.D. Bissett and Sons in Spring Hope. Working for one of the world's largest sweet-potato producers, he mixed and applied fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, graded produce and supervised two 150man crews who dug up the crop. He also met and married Bridget Sherrod. On their first anniversary, their son, Patrick, now 15, was born. But there was no letup in what he says were 80- to 100-hour workweeks.

He returned to PMW Products in 1986, advancing from setup man to supervisor in three months. But he worried about the company's financial future. By early 1987, he and PMW salesman Bobby Averitt had figured a way out. "We scratched up some money - I had been saving since I was 8 - and started Advanced Plastiform." He and Averitt owned 20% each; silent partner Irv Vaughn had the rest. They set up shop in Raleigh, and his wife stayed at home with the kids - a daughter, Megan, was born in 1988 - in a Zebulon subdivision.

Vaughn sold his interest to a couple from Boston, who wanted to expand production. Renfro didn't think the company was ready. There were other clashes over customers and suppliers. In late 1989, Renfro's temper boiled over. "I went to their banker and said, 'Here are my shares of stock. I want off the note.'" He estimates he lost as much as $60,000.

"It taught me something: Control your own destiny. You do that, you can be successful. And I learned."

It meant starting over, this time with a one-man company he named Accu-Form Polymers. Borrowing $14,000 from a local bank, he rented time on a small vacuum former in Fuquay-Varina. To keep the business going, he sold his home in Zebulon and moved his family into a $200-a-month rental house in Wendell. "You couldn't stand up in the bathtub without hitting your head. At that time, I told Bridget, 'When I am successful, I will buy you a nice house.'"

After molding the pieces in Fuquay-Varina, he finished and assembled them in his driveway. To keep groceries on the table, he ran a punch press on the night shift at Siemens Power Transmission and Distribution Inc. in Wendell. The impossible schedule lasted about a year, until late 1990, when he missed a call from an important customer. "I told Bridget that we would have to stand or fall now. I said that I wasn't meant to do this for the rest of my life, that there's something better. And she said OK."

To make Accu-Form a full-time venture, he needed a plant and equipment. He rented part of an old tobacco warehouse and got a $120,000 Small Business Administration-backed loan from First Citizens Bank in...