How Franklin Empire Stayed Independent as Rivals Consolidated

Part of Distributor Playbooks — strategy teardowns of every company on the MDM Top Distributors lists. New to the 2026 lists.

Franklin Empire lands at #23 on Modern Distribution Management's 2026 Top Distributors list for electrical, one entry in a vertical MDM tracks across the biggest names in North American wholesale. What makes the Montreal company worth a closer look isn't its size relative to that list. It's that Franklin Empire is still there at all, competing as a privately held, family-run business in a Canadian electrical market that has been almost entirely swallowed by consolidators.

The market it refused to sell into

Canada's electrical distribution sector is roughly 98 percent consolidated, a figure that puts the country's independents in a smaller box every year. Wesco, Sonepar, and Rexel, three global platforms with European or American parent balance sheets, sit atop the market, with Guillevin close behind. Marketing groups and independents have been squeezed to roughly 16 percent share, the lowest in a decade. Against that backdrop, Franklin Empire is described in trade coverage as Canada's largest privately held independent electrical distributor, a title it has held onto while dozens of peer companies sold to national or global buyers.

That is the insight worth naming plainly: Franklin Empire's competitive position is not a product line or a warehouse footprint. It is the fact that a fourth-generation family business chose to keep growing on its own balance sheet instead of taking a national's check, in a sector where almost nobody else made that choice and stuck with it.

Roots in Montreal, ownership that never left the family

Franklin Empire traces its history to 1942 in Montreal, and the company marked its 80th anniversary still under the ownership of the family that started it. Today the business is run by co-presidents Bernie and Clifford Backman, with Cara Backman in marketing and Les Backman in administration, a leadership bench that reads more like a family office than a distributor competing head to head with Sonepar and Wesco for the same electrical contractors and industrial accounts.

That continuity shows up in staff tenure as much as ownership. Franklin Empire points to employees retiring after 50 years with the company, a retention pattern that is unusual at any scale and particularly notable in a channel where consolidation often means new ownership, new systems, and turnover every few years.

The buying-group workaround

Staying independent while competing against platforms with continent-wide purchasing scale requires a substitute for that scale, and Franklin Empire built one early. The company has been a founding member of AD Electrical Canada since 1993, the buying and marketing alliance that pools volume across independent distributors, and has since added membership in AD Industrial & Safety Canada. Co-president Bernie Backman has credited that membership directly: it supplies the buying power to contend with the nationals along with networking and best-practice sharing the company would not generate alone.

This is the mechanism, not just the sentiment. A buying group lets a family-owned regional player negotiate rebates and terms closer to what a Wesco or Sonepar gets from suppliers, without surrendering equity or decision rights to do it. It is the structural piece that makes the independence strategy viable rather than just admirable.

Growth by bolt-on, not by greenfield blitz

Where national competitors have been opening dozens of new branches a year, Franklin Empire's expansion has run through a small number of carefully chosen acquisitions of companies that share its ownership structure and culture. In 2012 it acquired Electra Supply, picking up Electra's Cambridge headquarters plus branches in London and Windsor, Ontario, and roughly 30 employees, a deal paired with an exclusive Siemens Automation and Control distribution appointment for southwestern Ontario. At the time Franklin Empire ran 20 branches across Quebec and Ontario with about 400 employees and $25 million in inventory.

In February 2026 the company announced a definitive agreement to acquire O'Neil Electric Supply, a Toronto-area distributor with three branches in Woodbridge, Scarborough, and Cambridge and about 150 employees. O'Neil, founded in 1965, is itself family-run and, like Franklin Empire, a member-owner of Affiliated Distributors. Franklin Empire's own materials framed the deal around preserving O'Neil's existing teams and local expertise rather than folding the company into a centralized operating model, and around succession planning for O'Neil's ownership, the kind of continuity pitch a national roll-up rarely makes credibly.

By 2026 the company operates 23 branches and five assembly and repair shops across Quebec and Ontario, with more than 600 employees and inventory investment exceeding $50 million.

The trade-off worth naming

Independence has a cost. Franklin Empire cannot fund expansion with a parent company's capital or a PE sponsor's acquisition war chest, so its growth is necessarily slower and more selective than a national's. While competitors have been opening greenfield branches at a fast clip across Canada, Franklin Empire's playbook leans on one or two acquisitions a decade, each chosen for cultural fit as much as geography. That is a real constraint on the pace of growth. It is also, on the evidence of an 84-year run under one family, the reason the company is still choosing its own path rather than executing someone else's integration plan.

Franklin Empire's story is a reminder that distribution's biggest edges are rarely visible on a shelf: they live in who owns the branch network, who negotiates the buying terms, and who decides which company to buy next.