Diane Hendricks did not inherit from celebrities or political figures. Instead, she spent her youth on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, where she learned a work ethic that would later help her build a commercial empire.
For the fifth year in a row, Hendricks, who has a net worth of $11.6 billion, topped Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women. Her riches is mostly based on ABC Supply, a building supplies firm she founded in 1982 with her late husband. She presently serves as the company’s chairperson.
In 2017, Hendricks told Forbes that witnessing her parents manage the farm around the clock instilled in her a work ethic that proved crucial at a young age: she fell pregnant at the age of 17, and had to complete her final year of high school while living at home. She filed for divorce from her high school love at the age of 21, and as a single mother, she scraped by on a succession of odd jobs in offices — rather than focusing on a single vocation and seeking success in it — until finally obtaining a real estate licence.
“Motherhood got in the way quickly, and I grew up quickly,” Hendricks remarked. “It didn’t deter me from pursuing my ambition. In fact, I believe I got even more focused on my goals.”
Hendricks described some of her ambitions as basic, such as relocating to a metropolis and wearing a suit to work every day. Those ambitions were dashed when she met and married roofer Ken Hendricks in the 1970s. The two merged their abilities and co-founded ABC Supply in Beloit, Wisconsin.
The corporation had 100 sites by 1994. According to Forbes, four years later, it earned more than $1 billion in yearly revenue for the first time.
Hendricks has headed ABC Supply on her alone since her husband’s death in 2007. According to its website, the firm currently has over 840 sites and is the country’s 23rd-largest private corporation, according to Forbes. According to ABC Supply’s website, it has bought the assets of 18 other firms in the previous five years, demonstrating its market domination.
Success has not been without controversy. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stated in 2016, the first year Hendricks topped the Forbes list, that she “didn’t pay a penny in state income tax from 2012 to 2014.” According to the news site, she also owed no money in state taxes in 2010.
That is not always illegal: ABC Supply tax director Scott Bianchini tells CNBC Make It that throughout those years, the firm altered its tax classification from C-corp to S-corp. Under Wisconsin state law, businesses may seek to be S-corps on a federal level and C-corps on a state level, which means ABC Supply might opt out of state tax-option status if all of its federal taxes were paid off, perhaps including any cheques made out to Hendricks.
Hendricks is still located in Beloit, which has a population of fewer than 37,000 people. Forbes reports that she has spent millions of dollars on local programmes to rehabilitate abandoned houses and attract new enterprises to the state.
Hendricks created a local job centre in 2017 that holds programmes to educate middle and high school students skills like as coding and carpentry. According to Forbes, the program’s goal is to teach kids the “importance of a job.”
“Children say, ‘Wow, is that how a welder works?'” she said. “They may go to vocational school and become welders, which pays $50,000 per year. Those are excellent positions. Excellent work.”
