ABC Supply began as three failing branches and a roofer’s idea about respect
Ken and Diane Hendricks built the country’s largest roofing distributor in Beloit, Wisconsin, on the belief that the people who put roofs on houses deserved more regard.
Beloit, WI
Before there was a company, there were weekends on other people’s roofs. Ken Hendricks grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin, dropped out of high school and joined his father in the roofing business. The two of them reshingled houses on weekends.
He went on to start his own roofing firm. By 1971 it had grown into a 500-man operation working across several states, at a time when most roofers still stayed local. Then he gave the company to his employees so he would have more personal time.
In 1982 he and his wife, Diane, whom he had married in 1975, bought three failing Bird and Sons locations and started over on the other side of the counter. They called the new business American Builders and Contractors Supply. Today it is ABC Supply, headquartered in Beloit, and by 2022 it described itself as the nation’s largest wholesale distributor of roofing, siding and other exterior and interior building products. The company is privately held and family-owned.
The size is the obvious story. The more interesting one is the reason the Hendrickses gave for starting it. Ken had spent his working life as a roofer, and the couple set out to supply contractors while also changing how the public saw the trade.
“It was a difficult time to be a roofing contractor. You sometimes didn’t get the respect that you felt the roofing industry deserved. It was something we decided was going to be a mission in our life, to change that perception,” Diane Hendricks said in a 2021 RoofersCoffeeShop feature, when she was the company’s chairman of the board. “Service is what we promised our contractor customer. Put faith in us and we will be there for you.”
That idea runs through the company’s written values. The first one listed is respect, and the first line under it extends that respect to an industry the company considers too often underappreciated and undervalued.
The early growth was fast. Inc. magazine ranked ABC Supply No. 1 on its Inc. 500 list in 1986, four years after the founding. After that the company was too large to list. By its 10th anniversary in 1992 it was the 12th-largest privately held company in Wisconsin. By 2002 it had 256 stores, and a manufacturing arm, American Construction Materials, had begun production.
Keith Rozolis, who later ran the company, described that stretch plainly. “You have to be big to have an impact,” he said in the same RoofersCoffeeShop feature. ABC became the largest vendor for many of its contractor customers.
Speed had a cost, and Rozolis said that too. “When you race to be really big, sometimes you don’t provide the service you need to because you outgrow your infrastructure, you outgrow your capabilities to serve that business,” he said in the feature.
The company’s answer, as it tells it, was to turn its attention inward, to the people working in its branches, on the theory that associates who are treated well will treat contractors well. ABC calls itself an “employee-first” company, and its stated goal is to be the best company to work for in North America. In 2007, with 384 locations, it was one of 12 companies worldwide to win Gallup’s first Great Workplace Award. It kept winning, and by 2020 it had taken the award 14 years in a row.
Tom Kuchan, who ran the company’s Northeast Region, put the employee side in personal terms. “The most fulfilling part of my job is watching people grow and prosper and be something that they never thought they could be,” he said in the 2021 RoofersCoffeeShop feature.
Ken Hendricks did not keep his attention on shingles alone. In Beloit he owned the Beloit Plaza mall and the former Beloit Corporation manufacturing complex, much of which has since been redeveloped, and ABC Supply took over most of the disused Fairbanks-Morse complex. He and Diane also founded Hendricks Holding Co. to oversee a range of other businesses. He was interested in green building technology and was set to build an environmentally friendly roof for a complex at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In 2006, Inc. named him its Entrepreneur of the Year and put him on its cover.
He died on Dec. 21, 2007, at 66, after falling through a subfloor under construction at his home in Afton, Wisconsin. He left Diane and seven children.
Company president David Luck was named chief executive. In 2010 ABC held its first Founders’ Celebration, honoring Ken and Diane and the values the company had been built on. Luck retired at the end of 2013, and Rozolis succeeded him.
The company kept buying. In 2010 it acquired Bradco Supply, its largest purchase up to that point. It later agreed to buy Norandex Building Materials Distribution, a Hudson, Ohio, distributor of windows and siding that dated to 1946 and had 103 branches in 31 states, its biggest deal since Bradco. Smaller deals filled in the map. The 2012 purchase of Superior Supply brought branches in Bridgeton and Northfield, New Jersey. By 2020 ABC had nearly 800 locations and more than 15,000 associates, had finished expanding its National Support Center in Beloit, and ran a subsidiary, L&W Supply, with more than 180 locations of its own. By 2022 it counted more than 970 locations and over 20,000 associates, and it opened 18 new branches from scratch that year.
That same year it crossed a border for the first time, buying the Monarch Group of Companies, a Calgary supplier of siding, roofing and other exterior materials founded in 1992. The deal brought five Alberta locations, in Calgary, Edmonton, Acheson, Red Deer and Lethbridge, which were to keep operating under the Monarch name.
Some of what it buys is a century older than ABC itself. The company acquired John S. Wilson Lumber Company of West Friendship, Maryland, a family-owned business founded in 1881 that had run a full-service lumberyard there for many years. Its last owners were three brothers, Hugh, Jim and Craig O’Donnell. LBM Journal reported in 2023 that the location would carry on as an ABC Supply branch selling roofing, siding, decking, windows and trim.
The company’s giving tracks its values list, which includes one called simply “American Pride.” ABC has supported Homes For Our Troops with a $1 million yearly donation and a campaign tied to the Indianapolis 500, and it sponsored A.J. Foyt Enterprises’ No. 14 and No. 4 IndyCar Series cars. It recruits military veterans through partnerships with RecruitMilitary and the Army Partnership for Your Success program.
Closer to home, Ken Hendricks was involved in efforts to build a new stadium for the Beloit Snappers, the city’s minor-league baseball team. Construction on a new ballpark in Beloit began in 2020, more than 12 years after his death. The company holds the naming rights. It is called ABC Supply Stadium.