Brian Hoekstra Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Il, Us

Lawson Products is a business to business distributor of consumable maintenance, repair, and operating products with sales of approximately $430M in 2022. Responsible for Lawson’s acquisition strategy and implementation including target identification, competitive analysis, due diligence, deal structure negotiation, acquisition integration, and post-merger monitoring. Led the core team responsible for the acquisition and integration of Partsmaster from NCH Corporation adding $63 million of sales, the largest transaction for Lawson to date. Managed integration team through the process to separate the business from the prior parent organization and fully integrate all functions into Lawson operations including opening a new distribution center and moving existing operations into it, transitioning all corporate support functions to Lawson, assimilating 200 new sales people into Lawson's existing 1,000 person salesforce, and converting the existing ERP system to a CMMC compliant instance.Led a small team in the diligence and synergy review for the acquisition of 2 companies owned by private equity sponsor resulting in the acquisition of approximately $600M of revenue and the formation of the new holding company Distribution Solutions Group (DSGR).

Lake Forest, Illinois, Us

Grainger is a business to business distributor of maintenance, repair, and operating products with operations in the North America, Europe, Japan and China having revenues of $11B in 2018.Responsible for a team who developed tools and metrics to monitor and manage variable expenses associated with the turnaround of Grainger’s Canadian business unit, Acklands-Grainger. Acklands-Grainger results deteriorated over a number of years, falling from an operating profit of $130M in 2013 to an operating loss of $80M by 2017. A project team was assembled to review the business, develop and implement a turnaround plan.My team developed a set of metrics to monitor Ackland-Grainger’s progress towards achieving $40M of variable cost reductions throughout the year. We created tools that helped the team identify functions where achievement of the targets were running behind and assisted those business areas in developing contingency plans and course corrections when necessary. The business achieved the variable cost reduction targets along with the profitability targets for the entire turnaround effort.

Lake Forest, Illinois, Us

Accountable for leading Grainger’s acquisition teams through all aspects of transactions. Grainger had recently completed the largest acquisition in its history, so the focus of the organization turned to optimizing the portfolio of businesses that we already owned.Led a cross-functional deal team through the sale of our Techni-Tool business on behalf of the SVP and President, US Sales and Service. Grainger acquired the business in 2012, but did not fully integrate it. After completing a strategic review, we determined that Grainger was probably no longer the best owner of the business. I led the team consisting of the business operators, internal specialists in finance, accounting, tax, human resources, IT, product management, and supply chain, as well as our external advisors through the process of creating marketing materials, preparing diligence information, responding to buyer requests, negotiating contracts, through to successfully closing the transaction.Also asked by the VP, GM of Latin America to help with the strategic and financial reviews for our Colombian business. Helped the local management team through the process of reviewing their strategic fit within the Grainger portfolio, assessing their strategic options, and determining their financial position which ultimately led to the difficult decisions to close the operation.Over the years, Grainger had identified the multi-family housing sector as a market in which we were under-represented. Led a cross-functional team that developed a product offering, marketing plan, sales and support team, and ended up launching the business in mid-2018.

Lake Forest, Illinois, Us

Responsible for leading and training Grainger’s deal teams as we transitioned from an event-based deal process to a dedicated deal resource model. During this time, Led teams that completed 11 transactions adding over $1B of revenue and operations in Latin America and Europe.Led the cross functional team that completed Grainger’s largest transaction to date, the $480M acquisition of Cromwell, a distributor headquartered in the UK that initiated Grainger’s local presence in the market.During this time, company decided to dedicate full time resources across the functional teams to achieve corporate acquisition goals. As most of these new resources did not have a lot of acquisition experience, I was responsible for training and developing the group over a couple transactions. After this group gained a little experience, we optimized our transaction process by creating standard work throughout including targeting, due diligence, valuation and integration planning. While difficult to quantify, this resulted in improved target selection, streamlined due diligence, and clearer alignment between the value drivers and the integration plans to achieve them.

Lake Forest, Illinois, Us

Responsible for managing the deal teams and the deal processes for Grainger as we restarted our corporate acquisition activities along with assisting our business units with their corporate strategy processes. Managed the team that acquired a majority stake in MonotaRO, Grainger’s publicly traded Japanese joint venture which is currently worth in excess of $3B. At the time of the transaction, MonotaRO was publicly traded on the Mother's exchange, Grainger held a minority interest, the other large minority interest joint venture partner was interested in selling their shares, all while MonotaRO was tying to change their public listing to the TSE-1 exchange which made for interesting learning opportunity for the company.Led the cross-functional team that acquired an 80% majority interest in a Colombian fastener distributor from the founding family. The transaction established Grainger’s first local presence in South America. Developed the terms and financial structure that enabled the creation of Zoro, Grainger’s single channel online business that currently has annual sales of $900M, whose development was assisted by MonotaRO.

Lake Forest, Illinois, Us

Led quarterly corporate forecast, annual budgeting and annual long range forecasting processes including establishing targets, structuring presentations and acting as corporate liaison between senior business unit finance personnel and corporate executive management.

Lake Forest, Illinois, Us

Responsible for ad hoc financial projects as directed by the CFO and managing the capital approval process.

Master Of Business Administration (Mba), Analytic Finance, Strategy

Bs, Finance