Gresco Utility Supply: The Distributor That Also Sells Drones

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

Gresco Utility Supply lands at #16 on the electrical list in Modern Distribution Management's 2025 Top Distributors report, the trade publication's annual ranking of North America's largest wholesale distributors. What earns Gresco its spot isn't a bigger truck fleet or a deeper conduit aisle. It's a second company operating inside the first one: a division that sells drones, LiDAR sensors, and inspection robots to the same rural electric cooperatives that buy its wire and hardware.

Sixty-five years of serving co-ops nobody else wanted

Gresco has supplied "Cooperatives, IOUs, Municipals, and Contractors across the Southeast" since 1960, according to its profile with the Florida Municipal Electric Association, where it has held associate membership since 2016. That's the unglamorous core of the business: power distribution equipment, tools and safety gear, lighting, telecom hardware, sold to electric co-ops and small municipal utilities that the national distributors often treat as an afterthought. Gresco is headquartered in Wildwood, Florida, and runs multiple warehouse locations to keep that inventory close to customers who can't afford a truck to sit at a weigh station for two days when a line goes down.

Steve Gramling serves as President and CEO. It's a model that looks conservative on paper: a regional player, deep in a channel (rural electric cooperatives) that private equity roll-ups have mostly ignored because the customers are small, price-sensitive, and loyal to whoever shows up.

The pivot nobody expected from an electrical supply house

In the early 2010s, Gresco stood up Gresco Technology Solutions (GTS), a subsidiary headquartered in Forsyth, Georgia, according to coverage of its 2021 partnership with Censys Technologies. GTS wasn't a side hustle. It became a full distribution arm for unmanned aircraft systems, LiDAR, and robotics aimed squarely at grid inspection, then expanded its reach nationally, per reporting on its 2024 partnership with GeoCue.

The partner list reads like a who's-who of utility-inspection technology rather than a single proprietary product line. Censys Technologies brought long-range, beyond-visual-line-of-sight drones in 2021. GeoCue added TrueView 3D imaging sensors and LP360 processing software in 2024. Thread's UNITI Workspace software plugged in that same year to automate flight planning and imagery upload for line crews. Ali Ahmed, GTS's Director of UAS, framed the Thread deal as part of "delivering cutting-edge drone solutions" to utility customers already on Gresco's books for conduit and connectors.

Here's the timeline that matters:

The insight: two distributors sharing one customer list

The pattern worth naming plainly: Gresco isn't diversifying into technology the way most distributors do, by adding a smart-thermostat SKU to an existing catalog. It built a parallel distribution business, with its own subsidiary brand, its own technical specialist (Ahmed's UAS title didn't exist at a typical electrical house a decade ago), and its own vendor roster, then pointed it at the exact customer base the core business already had relationships with. A line crew supervisor at a rural co-op who orders switchgear from Gresco on Tuesday can order a beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone survey package from the same company on Wednesday.

That's a genuinely different playbook than the acquisition-fueled consolidation most of the MDM electrical list is running. Gresco isn't buying smaller electrical houses to add branches. It's importing an entirely different product category, aerial and ground robotics, into a relationship built on decades of trust selling copper and PVC.

The trade-off underneath it

The risk in that model is real and worth stating rather than glossing over. GTS's strength is curating best-in-class partners rather than owning proprietary technology, which means Gresco carries no lock-in advantage over a rival that signs the same OEMs. Censys, GeoCue, and Thread can all sell through other channels; nothing stops a competing distributor, or the utilities themselves, from going direct. Gresco's bet is that the relationship and the service layer, jobsite training, flight planning support, inventory proximity, are harder to replicate than the hardware. For a company that has kept small electric cooperatives as customers for sixty-five years, that's a bet grounded in an actual track record rather than a hope.

It also means running two different sales motions inside one building: a low-margin, high-volume commodity business and a specialized, consultative technology practice. Keeping both sharp, without one starving the other of management attention, is the harder problem than winning either deal.

Every company on this list runs on the same unglamorous plumbing: catalogs that describe what's actually in stock, branches that put it close to the customer, and data that tells a distributor what its next move should be. Gresco just proved that plumbing can carry more than pipe and wire.