At age 10, Diane Hendricks stood at a farmhouse window in Osseo, Wisconsin, watching her parents work the dairy fields, and made herself a promise. She don’t want to be a farmer and also don’t want to marry a farmer. She pictured a blue suit, a nice car, and a life built on her own terms. Decades later, that girl from the farm is worth $21.7 billion, as reported by Forbes making her America’s richest self-made woman for the seventh year running, and the richest self-made woman in the world for the fourth time. That net worth, Forbes notes, has nearly doubled in just two years.
Her fortune flows almost entirely from ABC Supply, the roofing and building materials giant she co-founded with her late husband Ken in Beloit, Wisconsin, in 1982 and has run alone since his death in 2007. Once a small roofing supply business, ABC Supply now spans more than 900 locations across the country, pulling in $20.2 billion in annual revenue. She ranks 122 in the world today.
A difficult start that shaped everything
Growing up as one of nine sisters on a dairy farm, Hendricks knew from early on that her ambitions outgrew her surroundings. But life did not make it easy. She got pregnant at 17 and finished her senior year of high school while living at home. Three years later, she filed for divorce from her high school sweetheart and found herself a single mother navigating the world alone. She took whatever work she could find including a stint as a Playboy Bunny waitress while building a real estate career on the side. “That’s when I really started to look at a career, a career I’d always dreamt of having, which was being in business,” she told CNBC.
It was through selling custom homes for a builder that she met Ken Hendricks, a roofer. They married, and in 1982, the couple launched ABC Supply out of Beloit. The company crossed $1 billion in annual sales for the first time in 1998.
Building an empire, one acquisition at a time
When Ken died in 2007, Diane took over as chairwoman of a company already well on its way to becoming an industry leader. She became ABC’s sole owner in 2013 and has since led its two biggest deals: the acquisition of rival Bradco in 2010 and building materials distributor L&W Supply in 2016.
Today, ABC Supply is one of the largest wholesale distributors of roofing, siding, windows and other exterior and interior building products in the United States. Beyond ABC, Hendricks also controls Hendricks Holding Company, a privately held entity with businesses in trucking, insurance, manufacturing and recycling.
Investing in the town that built her
Hendricks has never left Beloit, a city of fewer than 37,000 people. She has poured millions into restoring the town, buying and transforming historic buildings, rebuilding abandoned properties, and bringing new businesses into the state.
In 2017, she opened a local career centre offering skills workshops for middle and high school students on subjects like coding and construction, a programme designed to show teenagers what a trade career can look like. “Children are like, ‘Wow, is that how a welder works?'” she said. “They can go to vocational school and become a welder that’ll pay $50,000 a year. Those are good jobs. Really good jobs.”
She has also served on the boards of several Wisconsin organisations, including Forward Janesville and Beloit College, and is an underwriter of Wisconsin Eye Public Affairs Network, the first privately funded state public affairs network in the country.
Success that has not come without scrutiny
Her rise has not been without controversy. A 2016 report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed she had not paid state income tax from 2012 through 2014. ABC Supply’s tax director explained that this was a result of the company’s shift from a C-corp to an S-corp, a legal structure that, under Wisconsin law, allowed ABC Supply to elect out of state tax-option status once all federal taxes were settled.
But for the girl who once dreamed of a blue suit and a city life, the scoreboard is hard to argue with. From a dairy farm in Osseo to the very top of the Forbes list Diane Hendricks built exactly the life she pictured.