One way to quickly create a heavyweight pro dealer is to buy your way to the top. At least that was the plan for private investment firms Angeles Equity Partners and Clearlake Capital Group when they formed their portfolio company American Construction Source (ACS) and then went on a three-month shopping spree.
In September 2018, ACS acquired Meek’s Lumber, a pro dealer with manufacturing capabilities, which ranked 22nd on last year’s PS100 list. Shortly afterward, in October, ACS acquired Colorado LBM businesses Edwards Building Center and Breckenridge Building Center. In November, ACS followed up with an acquisition of Arrow Building Center, also known as Consolidated Lumber (No. 48 on last year’s PS100 leaderboard).
The strategy worked with aplomb. ACS now owns 73 locations across Arkansas, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, and Wisconsin. All told, ACS recorded a combined revenue of $566.3 million in 2018, enabling the newly formed company to firmly land on this year’s ProSales 100 board at No. 14.
While this is about as close to an overnight success that you can get in the LBM industry, Jim Drexinger, president and CEO of ACS, and his team have their work cut out for them, especially as it aims to update and standardize various operational activities. At the ProSales 100 conference in March, he stated, “The opportunities are still tremendous in lean deployment within the building material space. It’s the underpinning of our strategic plan.”
This, according to Drexinger, includes evaluating and, in some cases, restructuring people, processes, and technologies from its newly acquired subsidiaries. If done well, these efforts will help ACS achieve the vision it publicly stated on its website “to create a leading building products distributor with a national footprint and the industry’s best customer experience.”
