Echelon Supply and Service: How a Hose Roll-Up Erased a Name

Part of Distributor Playbooks — strategy teardowns of every company on the 2025 MDM Top Distributors lists.

Echelon Supply and Service ranks #7 on Modern Distribution Management's 2025 Top Distributors list for Hose & Accessories, with $150 million in vertical revenue per MDM's report. The name is only three years old. Everything it's built on is much older, and the more interesting story is how a single founder's 42-year-old company became the shell for someone else's platform.

A one-man hose shop in DeWitt

Jay Bernhardt started JGB Enterprises in the first week of January 1977, working alone out of a building on Moore Road in DeWitt, New York. The company was profitable enough to clear $1 million in revenue within two years, and by the early 1980s it had pushed into defense contracting, eventually becoming, by its own account, the largest specialty hose supplier to the U.S. military. Headquarters moved to nearby Liverpool, New York in 1984, where it has stayed ever since. By 2017, four decades in, JGB employed more than 250 people and generated roughly $125 million in sales, according to a company history recounted in BIC Magazine. Bernhardt himself brought more than five decades in the hose industry to the job, including stints at Hewitt-Robins and Goodall before he ever started his own company, per Rubber News.

That is a genuinely rare arc in industrial distribution: one owner, one name, four decades, no roll-up, no rescue. It ended in December 2018, when Bernhardt sold JGB to private equity firms Graycliff Partners and HCI Equity Partners in a buyout with undisclosed terms, according to deal records on Mergr.

The platform gets built, fast

What HCI did next is the part worth studying. Rather than simply run JGB as a standalone hose distributor, it used the company as the anchor for a bolt-on strategy, adding three distinct regional players in under fifteen months: HosePower Canada in June 2021 (six locations out of Whitby, Ontario), All-Serv Industrial in December 2021 (based in Louisiana, with additional Gulf Coast sites), and Berg-Nelson Company in March 2022, a Long Beach, California hose and gasket supplier founded in 1951. HCI managing partner Doug McCormick called Berg-Nelson "a well-respected, founder-owned company" that gave the platform "expanded distribution footprint" on the West Coast, per Oridian Capital's summary of the deal. Each acquisition filled a specific geographic gap JGB didn't have on its own: Canada, the Gulf Coast, Southern California.

Then came the part that makes this a genuine strategic choice rather than a routine roll-up. In 2022, HCI retired the JGB Enterprises name entirely, along with HosePower Canada's and Berg-Nelson's original brands, and consolidated everything under a new identity: Echelon Supply and Service. Then-president Kevin Kilkelly framed it as necessity, not cosmetics: "By merging under one strengthened banner... Echelon Supply and Service is better able to grow our footprint, offerings and service channels," he said, per BIC Magazine's account of the rebrand.

The trade nobody talks about in roll-ups

Here's the insight worth naming directly: most acquirers in distribution keep the acquired name, or at least the best-known one, because brand equity with existing customers is expensive to rebuild. Family-owned and heritage distributors lean into "since 1977" precisely because incumbency and trust are the moat, especially in defense and mission-critical supply where switching vendors carries real qualification risk. HCI did the opposite. It took a 45-year-old brand that was, by its own telling, the largest specialty military hose supplier in the country, and dissolved it into a name nobody outside the industry had heard before 2022.

That's a bet that structural flexibility beats brand equity when you're building a multi-region platform rather than defending a single territory. A shared name means no acquired company's sales force has to explain why they're now selling under someone else's legacy brand, and it means the next acquisition slots in without a turf fight over whose name survives. The cost is real too: whatever relationship equity JGB had built over four decades with military program offices and industrial accounts had to be re-earned under an unfamiliar name, right as the company was also absorbing three other cultures at once.

Professionalizing the platform

The next moves look like a PE sponsor buttoning up governance rather than chasing more logos. In January 2025, Echelon promoted Matthew DeKay, its CFO and Executive VP of 13 years, to president, with board chairman Bob Hund citing DeKay's "focus on operational excellence, customer success, and team collaboration," according to PRWeb's release. Promoting the internal CFO rather than recruiting a new operator signals a company settling into steady-state growth after three years of integration work. Six months later, in July 2025, Bluehenge Direct Lending provided debt financing as part of a refinancing led by HCI that replaced the company's prior M&T Bank facility, described as "growth-oriented capital to optimize Echelon's balance sheet," per Bluehenge's announcement.

Seven years after the founder sold, and three years after his company's name disappeared from the market, Echelon now shows up at #7 on MDM's national hose ranking under a brand built to hold four companies' histories at once, not just one man's.

Behind every distributor on that MDM list sits the same unglamorous machinery: branch networks, supplier catalogs, and the product data that ties them together. This series looks at how the companies that run it actually win.