She grew up on a working farm in the heart of “America’s Dairyland”
Now she’s the richest self-made female billionaire in the U.S.
When you grow up in Wisconsin, you’re more than likely working on the family farm.
And more than likely it is a dairy farm.
In fact most of the milk we drink here in the U.S. comes from the state of Wisconsin.
No wonder it’s known as America’s Dairyland.
But Wisconsin didn’t start out as the dairy capital of the U.S. Most of the farms here produced wheat. At their peak, Wisconsin farms were producing as much as 27 million bushels of wheat.
However in the late 1860’s, wheat farms began suffering from mass soil depletion and insect infestations. All of this lowered the quality of the wheat and crop yields.
Something had to be done.
With a little (more like big) push from the state’s Dairymen’s Association, farmers made the switch to producing dairy products.
This means if you were born in Wisconsin anytime in the in 1900’s, your family was in the dairy business.
And that Dear Reader is exactly what Diane Smith’s parents were … dairy farmers.
Nine Sisters A Milking
Diane was born in 1946 and raised in the picturesque city of Osseo, Wisconsin.
Well, it’s not exactly a city, more like a small town. There’s only 1,793 people living there. And if you visit Osseo, there’s not much to do. You might drive to the Buena Vista scenic overlook located off highway 52.
It’s here you’ll find a monument dedicated to Nicholas Bourlier De La Chavelle, a young man who decided in 1865 it was time to step away from society and live the rest of his life in a cave.
Or maybe you’ll eat at the Norske Nook restaurant founded in 1973. It serves food that taste just like what grandma might cook if you were Norwegian.
Mostly what you’ll find in Osseo are dairy farms.
And that is where Diane grew up. She is one of nine sisters.
Although she and her sisters weren’t allowed to milk the cows or drive tractors, (men’s work according to her father), Diane did have a list of daily chores. One of those chores included watching over her five younger sisters.
If you can’t do actual farm work, then you start daydreaming of other careers. When Diane was 10, she knew being a farmer wasn’t her “thing.” She remembers thinking, “I don’t want to be a farmer. And I don’t want to marry a farmer.”
What she really wanted to be was a businesswoman … one who wore a blue suit and worked in a big city like Minneapolis (only because it was the closet one to where she lived).
A Rabbit to the Rescue
Diane’s dream of being a businesswoman came to a sudden halt when in 1964 at the age of 17 she got pregnant.
She even jokes that during her days attending Osseo-Fairchild High School, her favorite subject was boys. She says, “I became pregnant by my first love at age 17 and did what my parents’ thought was the right thing. I married him.”
Back then if you are pregnant while still a teenager, you weren’t allowed to attend high school. So Diane had to finish her senior year at home.
During the day she would study and do class work. Then at night, when all the kids were in their homes, she’d go to the school to take actual test and exams.
Shortly after graduating … in fact one month before her 18th birthday, Diane gave birth to her son Brent.
Diane and her high school sweetheart wanted their family to grow up in Osseo, just like they had done. But they were having a difficult time finding jobs. So the couple moved to Janesville where her husband found work at the Chrysler plant. Diane got a job on the assembly line of the Parker Pen Company.
But who wants to spend eight hours a day assembling ink pens when you can be a waitress instead. And that was her next job.
It certainly didn’t line up with her childhood dream of wearing a suit and working in a big city, but at the time it was the best she could do. It was a struggle to find good jobs.
That wasn’t her only struggle either. Diane’s marriage was falling apart. Three year later the two filed for divorce.
At the age of 21, Diane was a single mom, raising a child on her own.
And she needed more money than waitressing offered. So Diane did what every girl thinks of doing (NOT) … she got a job working as a Playboy Bunny at Lake Geneva’s newly built Playboy Club.
If it seems odd there’d be a Playboy Bunny Club in Wisconsin, you’re not wrong. The truth is, when Hugh Hefner decided to open the first Playboy Club ever, he picked Lake Geneva Wisconsin.
In 1968, with local dignitaries standing by, Hugh Hefner cut the ribbon for the official grand opening of the new Playboy Club and Resort.
Love at First Date
Not every young kid wants to tell their friends, “Hey my mom is a Playboy Bunny.” Or maybe some do.
But a Playboy Bunny doesn’t wear a blue suit. In fact what they wear doesn’t resemble a business suit at all.
So Diane left that job to take a position as a sales agent with a contracting company, where she specialized in selling construction projects. This got her one step closer to her vision of being a businesswoman, wearing that pretty blue suit.
But something unexpected happened.
Watching new properties being built from the ground up, Diane found herself falling in love with real estate. So she got her real estate license.
Turns out she was pretty good at it too. Soon after getting her license, Diane was selling real estate all over the southern part of Wisconsin.
That’s how she met roofing contractor Ken Hendricks.
Like Diane, Ken at dropped out of high school when he was in the 11th grade. He had spent a large portion of his childhood hauling and laying shingles alongside his father, who was a roofer.
So it made perfect sense to Ken that rather than spend time sitting in classes all day, he’d be better off starting his own roofing company. And that’s exactly what he did.
In fact Ken managed to turn his roofing company into a Wisconsin dynamo. He wound creating two companies that were well-known throughout the state. By 1970, he had 500 employees for working him.
What Diane didn’t know when she met Ken was that he would soon become her husband. You could say it wasn’t love at first sight.
Instead Ken was more interested in setting Diane up on a blind date with one of his friends.
But that date never came about because every time Ken called, they never talked about his friend. In fact they talked on the phone every night for three weeks straight.
Eventually he worked up the courage to ask her out. Diane says, “By the time I saw him, I knew he was the one.”
In 1976 the couple got married. It was marital business bliss. That’s because the newlywed couple decided to go into business together flipping houses.
Within three years of working together, Ken and Diane had bought close to 200 homes.
Their business was booming. But Ken started to notice something that would turn their little business into a giant multi-billion success.
Second-Rate Trash
Being in the roofing business so long meant Ken had traveled to lots of places and worked on a variety of buildings repairing roofs … like the once popular Kmart stores, and military bases.
However no matter what kind of roof he was installing and no matter where the job site was located, Ken noticed two things about the roofing industry …
(1) The supply chain was sporadic, making it difficult to get the right materials for each job
(2) Places that did have the supplies often treated roofers as second-rate trash
Ken says, “It got me deep in my gut that hard-working, honest roofers like my father were treated like lowlifes. I wanted to change that image.”
That’s when he and Diane started plotting how to create a new kind of supply chain, not just for roofers but the construction industry itself. Their business philosophy would be centered around treating ALL customers with respect.
And plot away they did. They worked on their plan for two years, which included buying existing small supply stores and turning them into construction supply centers.
In 1982, they pledged everything they owned to get a bank loan in the amount of $900,000. Ken and Diane used that money to buy three stores in what they considered perfect locations.
They called their new stores American Builders & Contractors Supply (ABC). The stores sold everything from siding, windows, doors, tools, and equipment.
Nailed It
The new business model Ken and Diane cooked up for supplying construction workers with supplies was a big hit.
When I say big I mean it too. Their model worked so well that by 1983, they had six stores located throughout Wisconsin. And just one year later, they had 25 locations.
And the hits … I mean stores kept coming. In 1985, they were operating in 37 locations. The next year they had expanded to 50 stores.
The amount of money they were making was growing just as rapidly too. In 1986 they did a whopping $183 million in sales. That put them on Forbes list of fastest growing companies.
By 1998 the couple had more than 100 store locations and reached a record breaking $1 billion in sales.
Today, ABC Supply is the largest wholesale distributor of roofing supplies in the U.S. and ranks 23 on Forbes list of the largest privately owned businesses.
The company makes so much money that Diane Hendricks is the richest self-made female billionaire with a net worth of $11.6 billion.
As for her husband Ken, sadly he died in 2007 in of all things … a roofing accident.
Diane has continued to run the company ever since his passing, which now generates over $14 billion a year in sales.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.”— Helen Keller
That's so cool. I haven't seen a location but at some hardware stores here, they do offer ABC equipment rental. Now I'll always think of Ken & Diane Hendricks.
There are two ABC locations just up the road from me in Arkansas. Very cool.