ABCO: A Lesson on Meeting Change With a Winning Plan

As the New York City metropolitan area expanded rapidly in the decades following World War II, so too did ABCO HVACR Supply + Solutions. The business was founded in 1949 as ABCO Refrigeration Supply Corp. by Jules Gottlieb, a commander of a Navy minesweeper in the Pacific theater during the war. When he returned home, he was determined to build a customer service-oriented, sales-driven wholesale distribution company. With an agile engineer's intellect and a savvy skill at sales, Gottlieb believed that each and every customer was ABCO's most important customer. Along with his partner, George Moncher, who joined the organization several years after its founding, ABCO became the dominant New York City-based refrigeration wholesaler distributor.

But what happens to a business when the pace of development slows and the customers' needs change? It takes more than a rich history and tradition to continue growing and moving a company forward. For ABCO, this time came in the late 1980s as the economy and the region's growth slowed. ABCO was still successful at what they did, but they were too limited — in both their scope and their geography. When Michael Senter joined Gottlieb, Moncher and Gottlieb's son, Jon, in 1992, they recognized that ABCO had to evolve and grow if it was going to remain successful.

"Their love of the business and enthusiasm for disciplined engineering and relationship-based sales were contagious, but limited in scope to core refrigeration customers in metro New York," says Senter, CEO of ABCO, speaking of the Gottliebs and Moncher. "Expansion had not yet reached across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey nor had our talents varied greatly from a focus on refrigeration equipment, parts and materials."

With the core philosophies of Gottlieb and Moncher firmly intact, ABCO in 1992 began ITS expansion. The business moved beyond its refrigeration roots into air-conditioning and heating equipment, parts, accessories and knowledge. Today, ABCO is about 600 percent larger than it was in 1992 with 17 full-service facilities and branches serving markets from Boston to Washington, D.C. ABCO also features a narrow aisle, high ceiling, 90,000-square-foot central distribution center in Queens, NY, that provides around-the-clock service to its customers and branches.

It is among the largest distributors of DuPont refrigerants, Mitsubishi Heating and Air Conditioning equipment, Luxaire Heating and Air Conditioning equipment and Mueller copper. ABCO also is a distributor for such traditional refrigeration product lines as Copeland compressors, Bohn equipment, Russell equipment, Tecumseh compressors, as well as walk-in boxes from TAFCO, Crown Tonka and AmeriKooler.

ABCO also recently added a new division — ABCO Engineering Resources — focused primarily on serving the engineering and architecture communities as well as providing sophisticated engineering support to air-conditioning and refrigeration contractors throughout its market. Even as ABCO expanded, however, Senter is quick to point out that great customer service has always remained a hallmark. "We needed to be as dedicated to the requirements and interests of air-conditioning contractors as we were to refrigeration contractors," he says. "But that expansion of focus had to feature great customer service and technical support or we would fail to establish lasting value among our customers."