Calolympic Safety

Calolympic Safety has supplied personal protective equipment from Corona, California since 1958: respirators and hearing protection, protective clothing and gloves, fall protection, first aid, and gas detection instruments the company also repairs and recalibrates. Its customers are industrial operators and municipalities across Southern California, served by a small team where tenures run twenty-five to forty years. The company built its vendor relationships the old-fashioned way, paying invoices in a week in an industry that routinely takes sixty days.

Dale Bermond left a Fortune 500 medical supply company about forty years ago to take over what was then a tiny operation, and never left. At 74, he was thinking about succession, not a payday. Larger competitors had courted him for years, but he believed a roll-up would absorb the customer list and cut his people, and he told buyers that without the right successor he would rather leave the company to the employees. His terms were fixed before any conversation got serious: every employee stays, benefits stay, and the buyer shows up in person.

The business came to Rejigg in November 2025 and drew 22 buyer conversations, with Rejigg screening out nine before they ever reached the owner. Interest came from across the country, and every serious buyer got the same test: come sit in the Corona office on a Monday morning and talk to the staff. Nigam Dudhat connected on May 1, 2026, and the owner assumed he was another remote caller until he learned Nigam lived twelve minutes down the road. He was in the office that Monday at 7 a.m. A string of meetings through May built the relationship, the two sides agreed on a structure in July, and the deal closed on August 26, just under four months after the first hello.

Nigam Dudhat is a Corona local with a marketing background, which happens to be the one capability the owner said the business lacked. He had been through this before: years earlier he acquired a distribution business from a retiring owner whose only condition was keeping a longtime employee, and she still works for him today. That story answered the owner's central question before it was asked. Rather than push for the keys, he studied the books first, visited the company often, accepted the employee terms without negotiation, and structured a gradual buy-in that keeps the owner involved while a new generation takes the business forward.