Edges Electrical Group Chose Cooperation Over a Buyout

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

Edges Electrical Group lands at #40 on Modern Distribution Management's 2025 Top Distributors list for the electrical vertical, one of the few names on that ranking still standing on its founding family's terms rather than a private equity term sheet. The company's path there runs through a 2014 merger, a 2023 outside CEO hire, and a 2024 decision to double down on independence by joining a buying group instead of selling out. That sequencing, not any single branch count or SKU catalog, is the story worth reading.

Two Rivals, One Name

Edges did not start as Edges. It started as two separate companies covering opposite ends of Northern California: Electrical Distributors Co., founded in San Jose in 1948, and Granite Electrical Supply, based in Sacramento. In December 2014 the two merged, and the combined entity took the name Edges Electrical Group, per Electrical Marketing's coverage of the deal. At announcement, Electrical Distributors was running about $70 million in sales, Granite about $58 million, and the combined company projected a jump into the low 60s on the Electrical Wholesaling Top 200 with 11 locations under Scott Lehmann and Bob Powers.

The stated logic was geographic, not defensive. Bay Area contractors were already working Sacramento Valley jobs and vice versa, so two regional distributors kept tripping over each other's customers. Merging solved that without either side buying the other out. It's a quieter version of consolidation than the roll-up stories dominating the rest of the electrical channel: two family-scale operators recognizing that a shared name beat a shared competitor.

The Outside Hire

A decade after the merger, Edges made a leadership move that a lot of family-adjacent distributors avoid: it hired a CEO from outside the company entirely. In May 2023, Isaac Madarieta became president and CEO, a role tED magazine covered as Edges reaching "its next level of success." Madarieta's resume is unusual for the seat. He started as a journeyman electrician in Idaho, worked his way through distribution roles including VP of Operations and COO, then spent time on the manufacturing side in agricultural irrigation, running channel management for North America.

That irrigation-industry stint matters more than it looks. Agricultural irrigation runs on the same playbook electrical distribution does: seasonal demand, dealer networks, a manufacturer relying on channel partners to actually move product and service it after the sale. Edges didn't hire a career electrical-industry lifer to run the next chapter. It hired someone who had sat on the manufacturer's side of a channel relationship and knew what that counterparty wanted from a distributor. By the time he took over, Edges was running 12 branches and roughly 350 employees, per the same announcement.

Buying Group, Not Buyout

The real strategic tell came seven months later. Effective January 1, 2024, Edges joined AD's Electrical US division as a new owner-member, according to AD's own announcement. AD is a member-owned buying and marketing cooperative, not a strategic acquirer. Distributors who join it pool purchasing volume, share e-commerce infrastructure, and get access to a wider supplier network, but they keep their own name, their own P&L, and their own equity.

That distinction is the piece of this profile that would not show up on a company About page. In electrical distribution, a family-owned business with roughly $360 million in sales, per 2022 figures reported by CB Insights, and an EW Top 150 ranking sits squarely in the size band where private equity buyers and national roll-ups (Sonepar, Rexel, WESCO among them) have spent the last decade shopping. Selling was an available option. Edges took the other one: it bought scale through cooperative membership rather than selling scale to a strategic buyer. CEO Lehmann called AD "the perfect partner to match our future needs and goals," and president Matt Russello framed it as alignment on vision, language that reads less like an exit and more like a hedge against needing one.

The Bet Underneath the Bet

Joining a buying group is not free of trade-offs. AD membership means sharing category strategy and technology roadmaps with other independent owners, some of whom compete for the same regional accounts Edges serves. It also means Edges's growth ceiling is now partly a function of AD's collective bargaining power with manufacturers, not just its own branch expansion. Edges made a parallel bet on operational technology in July 2024, selecting Blue Ridge for supply chain planning, per Blue Ridge's press release, aimed at tightening inventory allocation across its 12 locations and channels. That is the unglamorous work behind the buying-group strategy: cooperative purchasing power only pays off if the branches underneath it can actually execute allocation and fill rate at the SKU level.

The pattern across the last decade of Edges's history is consistent even as the moves look different on the surface. Merge instead of compete. Hire a channel operator instead of promoting a lifer or handing the keys to a financial sponsor. Join a cooperative instead of taking a buyout offer. Each choice traded a faster, more dramatic outcome for a slower one that kept the company's name on the door.

Every distributor on the MDM list runs on the same unglamorous infrastructure underneath the branch count: a catalog that has to be right, inventory that has to be where the order says it will be, and data that has to move as fast as the trucks do.