Changes at Diamond Triumph

The past few months have seen a number of changes at Diamond Triumph Auto Glass, Kingston, Pa. Speculation has been rampant in the industry and on the AGRR Magazine message forum as to what all these changes mean, for the company and for the industry. The July/August issue of AGRR contains an in-depth interview with Doug Boyle, chief executive officer, and Karen Christopher, president, the new top management at the company.

Here is an excerpt from that interview that provides insight into how the new management team views the changes.

Boyle explained that the company doesn't have projections for the year ahead, "because it all depends on the market opportunities." He said the company might do a large acquisition or maybe a whole bunch of small ones.

"There are a lot of great businesses in our industry," Boyle said, "but they have one or two locations and they're coming to us and saying they can't compete in this environment anymore; they say 'work with us to give us a job in the future and we'll help you in this marketplace.' We see a lot of this and it's very interesting to us."

According to Boyle, there are still some attractive mid-sized companies available for acquisition. "We have maybe three to six mid-size companies we are looking at right now across the country. But we're seeing more inquiries coming from the one- to two-shop size, which to us is a more interesting strategy because we think we can get a lot of good people in our organization by going that route," he explained.

"Also, we're looking at our product segments," he continued. "We're doing some flat glass out of our Scranton location and through our Settles locations, and we're looking to do more. We want to get more into fabrication and flat glass and many of these smaller shops which we've just been talking about are in both segments which we think is great. If you have a mild winter like we did this year, then your people can be working on the flat glass when they can't do the auto glass and vice versa. There's a different skill set and there's a training gap you have to get through to do that. But we think as a company we would be much stronger if we had that offset."

Boyle said that being a full-service operation is a smarter business strategy. "It's harder to manage from a people perspective, but we think it's a more sound business model in the long term. It's less risky."