M&A Science · Nov 12, 2026 · 1h 8m · 59m saved
With Greg Holbrock, Vice President of M&A, Winsupply
Winsupply operates more than 680 locally owned wholesale companies and does roughly $9 billion a year in sales, with an M&A team of four people. Private equity firms buy companies to eventually sell them. Greg Holbrock, Vice President of M&A at Winsupply, told Kison Patel on M&A Science that Winsupply does the opposite: it buys 100% of a target on day one, then sells most of the company back down to the people who run it.
"At the end of the day, we don't sell companies. So we're kind of in that niche of: how do we create more entrepreneurs?" — Greg Holbrock
Greg has personally negotiated roughly 10 of Winsupply's more than 20 acquisitions since joining the company's internal-audit team in 2010, after earlier Sarbanes-Oxley and fraud-investigation work at a utility and at Macy's.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 68 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
More than 80% of Winsupply's deals meet or beat expectations, against an industry-wide M&A failure rate Greg puts around 70%
Keeping existing teams in place and leaving headcount calls to local presidents is the reason he gives
Winsupply pays 100% cash and skips rollover equity, because goodwill is capped at about a third of the share price and earn-outs are used in only about 10% of deals
Diligence runs on trust, not a flooding request list — Greg explains why each document is needed before he asks for it
No two sellers are selling for the same reason, from succession fights to simply wanting to take chips off the table
WinFusion grew out of a meeting Greg almost didn't take, on a Dallas poly-pipe distributor that looked outside Winsupply's core business
Greg trusts AI for first drafts, never for final legal language, the same way he says trust with a seller has to be earned
"Dealitis" is Greg's word for wanting to close a deal for its own sake, and he says a banker friend believes a deal has three lives against his own two
1. Not a Private Equity Rollup
Greg spent a decade in internal audit and item-master data management at Winsupply before moving into shared services in 2018 and then into deal negotiation in 2021. That audit and fraud-investigation background, he said, taught him to read a seller's true intent rather than just work through a checklist.
Winsupply is a roughly $9 billion-a-year distributor of plumbing, HVAC, electrical and industrial supplies, built from more than 680 locally owned wholesalers. Greg said the company deliberately avoids being lumped in with private equity because Winsupply never sells its companies — it buys 100% of a target, then sells down ownership to the local management team while keeping at least 51% itself.
Winsupply buys to create owners, not to flip the company
"Our focus is creating entrepreneurs... we believe in capitalism, you go out there and you can be very successful." — Greg Holbrock
Integration happens at what Greg calls "local speed." A target isn't forced onto Winsupply's ERP system quickly if its own systems and financial data are already reliable, because disrupting the customer base is a bigger risk than running different back-office systems for a while.
"We will integrate companies at the speed at which we need to go — I'll call it local speed." — Greg Holbrock
