Content area
Full Text
When Greg Grosch co-founded White Cap Industries Inc. in 1976, he zeroed in on customer service, often helping customers carry their materials out to their trucks and surveying the parking lot along the way.
"I referred to that as crude market research, but it worked," said Grosch, chairman, CEO and president of White Cap, which he founded along with his father, Erv, now retired. "We saw at that time contractors were having to make five or six stops before they could get to their job sites."
That started Grosch on the path toward taking the company from a standalone store in Santa Ana whose primary product was White Cap - a plastic material Erv helped develop that was placed in freshly poured concrete to prevent random cracking. At the end of the trail the younger Grosch envisioned a one-stop shopping center for professional contractors.
Today the Costa Mesa-based company boasts an inventory of more than 25,000 items of specialty tools and materials used by professional contractors from cement finishers to roofers. The stores are chock full of hand tools - power tools, nail guns and anything else needed on a job site.
White Cap - which is projecting pro-forma sales of $220 million for the fiscal year that ends March 31 - now has 733 employees spread over 29 store locations and its Airway Avenue headquarters. The company is fresh off an initial public offering that netted $73 million, money used to refinance debt and position the company for an aggressive expansion plan.
Challenges Ahead
It's a road full of challenges, since much of the future gains are expected to come in new markets and in the face of stiffening competition.
Most of White Cap's outlets are in California, but the company also has a presence in Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. White Cap not only wants to grow in its existing markets, but also enter Texas and other Sunbelt states, Grosch said.
But White Cap also stands to benefit from a growing trend in the construction industry that amounts to a refined version of Grosch's parking-lot research.
...