Dennis Beetham: an inspiring business man
There aren’t a lot of companies who can claim such success as what DB Western enjoys. The chemical engineering company, which was founded back in 1975, has claimed a large share of both domestic and international business in its field, which allowed them to cement their position over only nearly 40 years of existence.
DB Western’s success is, however, as much of a product of the quality of their product and the talent and dedication of the whole team behind it as it is the product of the genius and perseverance of its founder, Dennis Beetham.
A lot has been said about Beetham. He is a self-made business man, who learned the value of work early in life, as his large family struggled and he was forced to start working at a very young age, managing his own money and investments so he could improve at his job while he was probably still learning how to read, write and count properly.
Always showing the spirit of an entrepreneur and a penchant for learning and putting his skill to good use, Dennis was handling a skill-saw, doing construction work and even projecting his first building – a doghouse – even before he reached his high school years.
It is thus not surprising that, after he finished his higher education, having earned his BS degree in Math and Physics from the Portland State University, and then a Chemistry Teaching Assistantship and a Chemistry Research Assistantship, from the Graduate School of Chemistry at the Oregon State University and the University of Oregon, respectively, Dennis quickly went on to start working at some of the area’s biggest companies in his field.
In the seven years in which Dennis worked for others before starting DB Western, he managed to rise quickly in his companies’ ranks, and he was behind the construction of six new chemical resin plants in the USA, after having served a technical supervisor for another, a world scale plant, while working in Texas.
The start of DB Western., in 1975, saw Dennis relocating back into his Oregon roots. However, the first UFC and Resin plant which Dennis built under the name of his new company was to be placed in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where it took up most of the raw material sourcing for the local wood products industry.
It wasn’t long before DB Western was expanding its horizons, fabricating an advanced, new generation plant which was shipped to China, which led to similar orders from several other countries, including Belgium, Turkey, Malaysia and others.
It was much later, though, that DBW expanded its facilities to Texas, with the arrival of the new plant in Dupont, which would become the biggest in the world, and the sole supplier for the area’s manufacturers. It is also a family owned enterprise, where some of Dennis’s descendants work.
To date, DB Western has made contributions to the advance of nuclear energy, as well as the pharmaceutical and manufacturing industries of several US states and countries worldwide. Overall, they have built 34 Formaldehyde and Resin plants over the world, which are capable of producing billions of pounds of Resin products.
And as cliché as it may sound to point out, it all started with one man: Dennis Beetham.