Robert L. Griggs is the founder and chairman of Trinity Products, a 100% employee-owned manufacturer and one of the nation's leading producers of structural steel pipe. A lifelong Missourian, he graduated from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1977 with a degree in Agricultural Economics. He and his wife Shelly live in St. Charles, Missouri, and their sons A.J. and Bo are both Mizzou graduates: A.J. serves in sales and operations leadership at Trinity, and Bo is the founder and president of National Flatbed Solutions, a freight-logistics company.

In 1979, Robert did something his college friends found daring, bordering on crazy: he and a business associate started their own company, Trinity Products. It began after a boss cheated him out of a paycheck, and he resolved to build a business done the right way. While his contemporaries took entry-level corporate jobs, the young Agricultural Economics major from rural Missouri saw an opportunity in the steel pipe business and grabbed it. Trinity started by serving the heavy construction industry: piling contractors, road-boring contractors, utility contractors, and the caisson industry.

The company grew by continually expanding what it could offer. Robert added fabrication, then high-rise sign structures and billboard fabrication, then coating and custom capabilities, setting Trinity apart from its competition. In 1993 he bought out his partner and took full ownership. Then, in his most ambitious gamble, he built a world-class spiral-welded pipe mill, at a time when the market for spiral-welded pipe was still unproven and almost no other facility of its kind existed. The goal was to become a fully vertically integrated supplier. It worked. Trinity grew from a small fab shop into a company doing more than $250 million in sales, its revenue multiplying more than a hundredfold.

But the real transformation was cultural. In 2001, inspired by Jack Stack and The Great Game of Business, Trinity became one of the first companies of its size to adopt Open-Book Management, sharing complete financials with every employee. Robert's belief was simple: he could not grow Trinity's sales, profitability, and culture on his own. So he and his team became teachers of business, treating employees as experts in their own work, inviting their input, and rewarding results. Today everyone at Trinity, from the shop floor to the office to management, understands the company's income statement. Financials are shared at regular meetings, goals are set collectively, and when they're reached, everyone shares in the profits. That same year, the State of Missouri honored Trinity with the Governor's Achievement Award for Economic Development and the Innovative Training/Workforce Development Award.

Two principles run through everything Robert built. First: don't tell a lie. It's just about the only thing that will get you fired at Trinity. Second: the more you give, the more you get. Robert believes that when you make someone else's life better, your own life gets better as a result, and not just in dollars. He makes a point of knowing the families of his employees and what matters to them, and then helps however he can. Each year Trinity runs a canned food drive for a local pantry. The result of leading this way is a workforce that feels like part of something, and a company people actually want to come to work for.

The final piece is continuous improvement. Beginning in 2010, Trinity embarked on a mission to get better every single day through a program called COSi, the Circle of Success Institute: ask what's not working, make a list, and fix it. Most of Trinity's success since has come from that relentless pursuit of getting better.

Trinity's core values say it plainly: We have a boss, and it's the customer, serve them. Serve our employees through profit sharing. Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement, every day. Control the controllables.

The newest chapter is the one Robert is proudest of. In 2021, rather than sell to an outside buyer, he transitioned Trinity into an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. The people who helped build the company now own it. As Robert puts it, it couldn't be in better hands: the folks who built this are now the shepherds of it.

Robert is a member of the Missouri Manufacturers Hall of Fame, and under his leadership Trinity was named American Metal Market's Pipe Producer of the Year. He is a Vistage certified speaker, and he and Shelly founded the Griggs Innovators Nexus at the University of Missouri, where he mentors student entrepreneurs, judges pitch competitions, and speaks to classes. His proudest title, above all of them, is grandfather of six.