General Manager - Custom Injection Molding MFG

General Manager

Custom Injection Molding | Full Site P&L Ownership | Florence, South Carolina Area

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer
Location: Florence, South Carolina area | On-site, full-time
Site: ~150 employees | ~$25M annual sales | 65,000 sq. ft. production + 50,000 sq. ft. warehouse
Employment: Full-time, direct hire | Relocation assistance available

About the Company

Our client is an established, professionally managed U.S. custom injection molding company with multiple domestic manufacturing facilities and more than three decades of experience serving OEM customers.

The company currently generates approximately $75 million in annual revenue and has a clear, funded growth plan to reach $125 million and beyond, supported by recent capital investment in additional capacity and expanded manufacturing capabilities.

Capabilities include conventional injection molding, structural foam, gas-assist molding, insert and over-molding, painting and decorating, welding, and full assembly. Facilities are IATF 16949 and ISO 9001:2015 certified, with a deliberately diversified customer base spanning industrial, medical, appliance, filtration, material handling, consumer products, lawn and garden, sports and leisure, defense, and automotive markets.

The Opportunity

This is the company's largest manufacturing site, and the General Manager has full ownership of the operation: production, quality, safety, materials, maintenance, shipping, people, and the P&L that ties them together.

Reporting directly to the CEO and serving as a member of the senior leadership team, the General Manager will inherit a plant with real momentum.

This is not a turnaround. The site's two most recent months were its strongest of the year in both sales and product shipped, while past-due backlog has declined approximately 70% from its peak. Delivery performance has stabilized, the leadership bench across process engineering, quality, finishing, and plant finance has been rebuilt over the past two years, and a multimillion-dollar site expansion is underway.

The mandate now is to build on that foundation and scale the operation from approximately $25 million toward $50 million in annual revenue while maintaining operational, financial, quality, and safety discipline.

Position Summary

The General Manager holds full operational and financial accountability for the site.

This leader will establish the operating cadence, own safety and quality performance, drive on-time delivery and margin improvement, develop the plant leadership team, and represent the facility with key customers.

This is a hands-on operating role. The person who succeeds here will be visible on the floor every day, understand the equipment and processes, know the people running them, and use real-time ERP and operating data to run the business rather than waiting for a monthly report.

Key Responsibilities

Operations

• Own daily production performance across all shifts, including schedule attainment, on-time delivery, throughput, scrap, downtime, and labor efficiency.

• Drive capacity planning, press utilization, tooling readiness, scheduling, and material flow from receipt through shipment.

• Lead continuous improvement across injection molding, secondary operations, decorating and finishing, and assembly.

• Direct maintenance strategy, preventive maintenance programs, and overall equipment reliability.

• Establish operating rhythms and accountability that translate plant data into action.

Financial & P&L Ownership

• Own the site P&L, including revenue, gross margin, operating income, and cost performance.

• Build and manage the annual operating budget in partnership with the Plant Controller and corporate finance.

• Develop, justify, and defend capital investment requests and ensure approved projects deliver their expected return.

• Use margin, cost, and variance analysis to identify issues and drive corrective action.

• Balance growth, customer requirements, capacity, labor, and capital deployment to improve long-term plant profitability.

Quality

• Own site quality performance, including customer PPM, escapes, corrective action closure, and audit results.

• Maintain ISO 9001:2015 and IATF 16949 certification and lead the facility through customer and registrar audits.

• Reinforce disciplined PPAP, APQP, corrective action, and new-program launch processes alongside engineering, quality, and program management.

• Build a culture in which quality is owned by operations rather than delegated to the Quality department.

Safety

• Provide visible personal leadership toward a zero-incident culture.

• Lead the site's safety committee and reinforce accountability at every level of the organization.

• Own OSHA compliance, incident investigation, training, and the behavioral programs behind sustained safety performance.

People & Leadership

• Lead and develop the site leadership team across production, quality, engineering, materials, maintenance, finance, and HR.

• Strengthen the supervisory bench and establish succession plans for critical positions.

• Set staffing plans, improve retention, and maintain consistent standards of accountability across three shifts.

• Build a culture that combines urgency, accountability, teamwork, and respect for the people doing the work.

Customer & Commercial Leadership

• Serve as the senior site contact for key OEM customers, including customer visits, audits, escalations, and operational commitments.

• Partner with sales, estimating, engineering, and program management on quoting, new-business feasibility, program transitions, and launches.

• Ensure commitments made to customers are operationally achievable and consistently delivered.

• Contribute to enterprise strategy, budgeting, growth planning, and capital allocation as a member of the senior leadership team.

Required Experience

• 12+ years of progressive manufacturing operations experience, including at least three years with full accountability for a production facility or significant multi-department manufacturing operation.

• A genuinely hands-on manufacturing background. You have personally run a production floor and understand how manufacturing performance is created at the machine, process, and people level.

• Experience in plastic injection molding is strongly preferred. Candidates from other high-mix discrete manufacturing environments, including molding, stamping, machining, fabrication, composites, and complex assembly, will also be considered.

• Strong working command of an ERP or MES used to run the business, including scheduling, inventory accuracy, BOM and routing discipline, and the connection between shop-floor activity and financial performance. IQMS experience is a plus.

• Meaningful quality systems experience. ISO 9001:2015 experience is required; IATF 16949 experience is strongly preferred. Experience should include internal audit programs, customer audits, and corrective action.

• Demonstrated safety leadership, including the ability to describe a safety culture you personally helped build and the measurable results achieved.

• Plant-level financial ownership or demonstrated readiness to assume it, including budgeting, capital planning, cost management, margin analysis, and manufacturing variances.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to be equally credible with an OEM customer, the CEO, and a production team at shift change.

• Bachelor's degree preferred; equivalent manufacturing leadership experience will be considered.

Preferred Experience

• Custom or high-mix injection molding.

• Adjacent polymer processing experience such as blow molding, rotational molding, thermoforming, extrusion, compounding, or composites.

• Leading a manufacturing site through a significant growth ramp involving additional capacity, equipment, headcount, or manufacturing capabilities.

• Value-added secondary operations such as painting, decorating, welding, or assembly.

• New-product introduction and manufacturing launch experience.

• Southeastern U.S. manufacturing experience.

Who This Role Is Built For

This opportunity is best suited to a manufacturing leader whose career has been built inside production facilities and who wants genuine ownership of a growing operation.

The successful General Manager will combine the financial discipline of a P&L owner with the instincts of a plant operator: someone who can discuss margins and capital allocation with the CEO in the morning, meet with an OEM customer at lunch, and walk onto the production floor that afternoon to understand why a press, tool, process, or shift is missing its target.

Backgrounds centered primarily on distribution, logistics, transportation, third-party logistics, warehousing, or corporate/staff functions without direct manufacturing-floor accountability are not aligned with the requirements of this position.

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