First in the Office: Kendra Story
- Company: ABC Supply, Beloit, Wis.
- Tenure with company: 26 years
- 2007 gross sales: $2.6 billion
When Ken Hendricks and wife Diane founded ABC Supply in 1982, they convinced daughter Kendra, then a college graduate with a newly minted accounting degree from the University of Arizona, to come home and work for the fledgling company.
The 22-year-old bid goodbye to Tucson’s sunny skies and returned to Beloit, Wis. “I was the only full-time ABC associate in Beloit, because dad and my stepmother were still involved in contracting,” Kendra Story says. The Hendricks opened ABC Supply with three stores, selling roofing and other exterior building products.
A great many deals have been done in the 26 years that Story has served as CFO, though that was a title she did not hold until 1997. “I was very much hands-on and had a chance to see everything at ground level,” Story says. “In the beginning, it was payroll, paying bills, producing financial statements so we could do deals–many less back then.”
Story became CFO when she and her father spent two weeks on the road talking to bankers and investors to raise $100 million in a public bond offering, which was paid off in 2004. “People expected to talk to the CEO and CFO, and that was me,” Story says. The title change also reflected her burgeoning duties, which had grown as the company expanded.
Seven departments report to Story, but she says her greatest value to the company (“certainly, we make payroll,” she says) comes from providing a financial structure that lets ABC Supply keep on growing. “That was our mission from day one,” she says. “One of my goals in arranging financing is flexibility. Having enough room in those loan structures to move forward is key.”
For instance, Story says that when she and her dad we went out to do the large acquisitions in 1997, they chose to do the bond because “they put no restrictions on the amount of debt–our leverage was able to be pretty significant, even if we underperformed,” she says. “You don’t want to go looking for a new bank when you are in default with your current bank. We’ve never done that.”
In the immediate future, Story says she sees the need to better predict risk in financial markets and interest rates. What a good CFO does, says Story, is allow operations to get on with the business of the company, knowing the financial house is in order.
