How Schaedler Yesco Turned a Family Firm Into an ESOP Powerhouse
Schaedler Yesco ranks #37 on MDM's 2025 electrical distributor list. Its real story is a century-old family firm that became employee-owned without selling out.
Part of Distributor Playbooks — strategy teardowns of every company on the 2025 MDM Top Distributors lists.
Three brothers selling light fixture parts out of Philadelphia in 1924 is not the kind of origin story that usually survives a century, let alone lands a company at #37 on Modern Distribution Management's 2025 Top Electrical/Data/Security Distributors list. Schaedler Yesco Distribution did both. What makes the company worth studying isn't just the longevity. It's the ownership structure the family built to get there, and the strange, quietly effective real-estate arrangement it uses to open new branches.
From sibling partnership to fourth generation
Harry, Andrew, and William Schaedler founded Schaedler Brothers in 1924, plating and assembling light fixture parts before the company incorporated in 1944. The second generation arrived with Tom Schaedler Sr. in 1946. By the 1970s and '80s, Jim, Henry, and Tom Schaedler Jr. had joined, and the firm had added industrial automation and data-communications divisions to keep pace with what electrical contractors actually needed on jobsites. The defining merger came in 1999, when Schaedler Brothers combined with York Electrical Supply Co., a Pennsylvania competitor that happened to share the acronym YESCO, to form Schaedler Yesco Distribution. A fourth generation, five Schaedler descendants in all, had fully joined the business by 2011, and Greg Schaedler succeeded his father Jim as CEO in 2021, per the company's own timeline. In 2024 the company marked 100 years in business, a milestone MDM covered as Schaedler Yesco going "from hometown seller to a regional leader".
That arc, sibling shop to fourth-generation regional distributor, is common enough in electrical distribution. What isn't common is what the family did with ownership along the way.
The insight: family control, employee-owned capital
Schaedler Yesco describes itself as "family- and employee-owned," and that phrasing is doing real work. At some point the company adopted an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, broadening the capital base beyond the Schaedler family while keeping operating control inside it. The family holds the CEO seat and the board; the ESOP gives every employee, from warehouse staff to branch managers, a direct stake in the company's value. It's a structural bet against two more common paths in a sector that has spent two decades consolidating under private equity: sell to a strategic buyer and disappear into a national platform, or sell to a PE sponsor and get flipped again in five to seven years. Schaedler Yesco did neither. It diluted family equity into employee hands instead of outside capital, which locks in a workforce with a genuine ownership stake while leaving the Schaedlers running the company they still bear the name of.
It also explains a detail that would otherwise be a throwaway line: the company has been named a Best Place to Work in Pennsylvania for 16 consecutive years and won a national Top Workplace Culture Excellence Award in three categories in 2024. Culture programs are cheap to announce and hard to sustain. An ESOP gives one a financial reason to be real.
Growing branches without building all of them
The second unusual choice shows up in how Schaedler Yesco expanded its footprint. Starting in 2006, the company began opening branches jointly with two unrelated, non-competing distributors: APR Supply, an HVAC and plumbing wholesaler, and Industrial Piping Systems (IPS), a PVF distributor. Rather than each company building and staffing its own facility in a new market, Schaedler Yesco, APR, and (in some locations) Rumsey Electric co-locate under one roof, sharing overhead while each partner sells its own separate product line to its own customers. Trade press covering APR Supply's 2018 Supply House of the Year award called out "longstanding joint ventures with distributors Schaedler Yesco, Industrial Piping Systems" as a point of pride for that company too. It's a capital-efficient way to plant a flag in a new town: three independent, family-run wholesalers splitting the real estate bill on a branch none of them could justify alone. Nothing else in the MDM electrical rankings runs on quite this model.
The acquisitions did the rest
Layered on top of the ESOP and the joint-venture branches is a steady acquisition cadence: B&R Electric (2008), the electrical division of H&S Supply (2008), Gertz Electric (2009 and 2011), Service Electric Company's Pittsburgh-area branches (2010), Queen City Electrical Supply (2015), two Rexel locations including the company's first branch outside Pennsylvania, in Johnson City, New York (2020), and, in 2023, a five-location purchase of YESCO Electrical Supply of Youngstown, Ohio, an unrelated company with a coincidentally identical name, plus Clarion Electric Supply. That last pair of deals pushed headcount past 480 and gave the company its current footprint of 29 locations across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. Farrah Mittel, who has led the company as president since 2019 following Matt Brnik's 2004-2018 tenure in the role, was named the National Association of Electrical Distributors' 2024 Women in Industry Trailblazer for that stretch of growth, another sign that day-to-day leadership sits with a professional executive even as the Schaedler family holds the boardroom.
Distribution runs on unglamorous fundamentals: what's on the shelf, what's in the truck, and whether the branch nearest the customer actually opened this decade. Schaedler Yesco's centennial is a reminder that the ownership structure behind those decisions matters just as much as the decisions themselves.