Watsco

I'm talking about, Ian, is

Watsco.

They spent $550 million to buy Granite Group.

And it was their second acquisition of this year for Watsco.

But what made this one really interesting and what I'm currently working on and some research with Jonathan on, our colleague Jonathan, uh, the absolute King of distribution research, I must add, uh, uh, is why they're doing it.

And this one is different because now there are not only a lot of companies interested in the plumbing world, but the, the industrial plumbing world in general.

So, Plumbing, this bread and butter durable industry that there's a lot of companies in it.

Now you got two of the major players from different camps here going after plumbing.

There's several out there that are interesting.

I know you've written about Watsco before.

That's the one that's always hung around my list.

Never pulled the trigger.

So they'll go to a distributor and they say, we have $100 million purchasing power here.

Johnstone Supply or Watsco, what deal can you make for us? And that alone right there sometimes gives them 10%, 5% on an annualized basis.

And then the other is actually Service Titan.

Software procurement discounts, not only Service Titan, but a couple other big ones too.

Yeah.

And I hit the Grangers, MSC, Global Industrials, Fastenal, Watsco, you know, pretty much a quarter just to kind of see, you know, who's hiring for what.

And just anecdotally, I didn't pull any numbers for this podcast, Ian.

I might do it for a story yet this week.

Lots of companies have been able to grow, um, sustainably with good returns doing more programmatic, smaller acquisitions.

And you can think of, you know, like, I don't know, it's like Watsco and Ropers of the world and these, you know, HEICO.

It's done however 100-plus acquisitions in its time.

So, um, those companies have been enormously successful.