The announcement this week that Richard Worthy has purchased Leff Electric Co., Brooklyn Heights, Ohio through a new company, AMP Electrical Distribution Solutions Inc. (AEDSI), is the biggest news story in the electrical market this week.
In an exclusive interview with Electrical Marketing, Worthy said he was glad to be building another business in the electrical market and that the size of the new venture will depend largely upon how many business owners are interested in selling their electrical distributorships to either become platform businesses for AMP Electrical Distribution Solutions or to be part of the expansion efforts of these platform businesses as they expand geographically.
While he chose not to name the financial backers for this new venture, Worthy said he has access to the capital he needs to build a very large distributor. Just how big will in large part come down to how many electrical distributors in different regions around the country decide they want to sell their distributorships and utilize AMP’s financial resources to growth the businesses even bigger. Worthy is certainly off to a good start with the purchase of a very visible company like Leff Electric, which he estimates will top $100 million in sales this year.
As he did in many cases with Sonepar and USESI, keeping the current business owners who want to remain active with their companies and their management teams will once again be a key element of his expansion strategy. Companies that did this within Sonepar and USESI include Cooper Electric, Capital Lighting & Supply, Electrical Wholesalers, Eoff Electric and Viking Electric Supply. Worthy said these companies are also good examples of platform business that had substantial growth after being acquired.
As Worthy analyzes potential acquisition candidates, he says the electrical market really hasn’t changed too much since he started building Sonepar in the 1990s. One big change, he said, is that more companies have invested in ERP systems and are operating much more efficiently. “The industry as a whole is much more efficient,” he said. Working with Worthy at AMP Electrical Solutions as CFO will be Matt Procaccini who also held executive posts at USESI and Sonepar.
While Worthy has kept a low profile in the electrical market after the sale of USESI to Consolidated Electrical Distributors in 2007, his investment earlier this year in Electrical Systems Solutions, a new independent manufacturers’ rep in New England, attracted plenty of attention. Worthy said the company got the Legrand package of product lines for all of New England because Legrand wanted one rep in the New England region to handle Pass & Seymour, Cablofil, Wiremold, WattStopper and OnQ instead of marketing the lines through several different agencies. He said Legrand also goes through a single agent for abroad package of its lines in other major markets, including the Baltimore-Washington region where One Source Associates, Columbia, Md., markets a big package of Legrand lines. Electrical Systems Solutions is run by Marty Mesale, who worked for Worthy at Electrical Wholesalers.
