Create Jobs, Eliminate Waste, Preserve Value. Those six words explain a lot: Why Ken Hendricks is worth $2.6 billion, how he came to be a walking textbook on identifying and exploiting business opportunities and why he is our Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year.
Hendricks was a high-school dropout who joined his father in the roofing business, reshingling houses on weekends, and starting his own firm which grew into a 500-man multi-state operation by 1971, a time when most roofers were still local. After selling off that business to have more personal time, he started ABC Supply, which has become the largest U.S. wholesaler of roofing supplies, with annual sales approaching $3 billion.
About half of ABC’s growth derives from the acquisition of struggling independent distributors; the rest is split between buying and improving successful distributors and starting new ones. Bankers, lawyers, suppliers, and friends convey news of companies whose owners have died or that are succumbing to high labor costs or poor management. Sometimes it’s the owner who makes the call.
Hendricks believes almost anything can be salvaged. I ask him for reasons not to buy a business, and he swats away the question. “Wrong location? Move it,” he says. “Wrong people? Replace ‘em. Wrong industry? I don’t believe it. I’ve got a company in the machine tools industry, and we’re doing great. I’d happily go into the coal business. It’s how you look at something and how it’s managed that make the difference.”
Hendricks calls himself a “mature billionaire,” meaning he built his fortune day by day, dollar by dollar. “It hasn’t really affected my life,” he says. “I don’t even know I have it.”
Photo by ABC Supply.
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