Chris LeBel’s career didn’t start with a business plan. It started in the Air Force, where Chris just loved flying planes. Part of the training however was electrical engineering, a subject unfamiliar to him. Chris dug in and learned everything he could, turning this weak area into something of an expertise.
After the Airforce, Chris worked in the electrical space but soon felt like the Maine market was vastly underserved by the top electrical and automation product lines. Chris set out to remedy that by founding Industrial Automation Supply (IAS). Where most distributors competed on price and catalog size, Chris built IAS to compete on engineering depth, customer relationships, and doing right by the people on both sides of the counter. He built a team around him of application engineers that became extensions of their OEM clients teams. This evolved into establishing a full panel manufacturing division of the company and it wasn’t long before their facility was bursting at the seams. Chris was faced with a critical decision - double down his investment into the business and find a much larger facility to keep up with demand, or explore the option of finding a new owner for the business with the necessary resources and capital to help give the company what it needs to continue growing. Chris partnered with Highland to think through this decision.
Chris’ team was like family to him, and he treated them all that way. The secret sauce to IAS was not their technical or product expertise, but instead the family-like culture created where everyone would do whatever it takes for clients, for vendors, and just have a general figure-it-out-always attitude that permeated the company. So when Chris met with Highland and we started discussing his different options, the number one requirement for Chris was that his team would end up in a better place with more opportunities and advancement potential. Highland worked with Chris to curate a smaller list of potential investor groups that would strategically make sense, have the necessary financial capacity, and most importantly provide for a comfortable and prosperous home for his employees. In fact, we nicknamed the entire process “Project CARE” because every conversation, every decision, every priority kept coming back to the same theme: Chris’s care for his employees. This process became our chance to make sure his team and his customers were as well-cared-for in the next chapter as they had been in the past.
With Highland’s guidance, Chris ultimately chose Airline Hydraulics Corporation (“Airline”) as the next owner for IAS. From the first meeting with Airline, where they flew Chris, his management team, and Highland on a private jet to meet the broader Airline team in Philadelphia, it was clear this was the right choice. Through their employee-owned (ESOP) structure, Airline’s president Mark Steffens made it clear that his goal was to turn every single one of Airline’s long tenured employees into millionaires one day. IAS was not appealing because of it’s regional dominance and value-add capabilities, but there was a perfect match of cultures and Chris could feel comfortable passing the reins to Airline’s leadership team.
Chris will stay on with the company for a transition period but will start to cut back on his days in office in order to spend more time with his wife, kids and grandkids. It has been quite the success story after a career of integrity and putting other people first – if anyone deserves this time off it is Chris LeBel.
