Bill Canady explains how OTC Industrial Technologies consolidated 30 brands into a single billion-dollar company backed by Genstar Capital. The company prioritizes supplier partnerships through timely payments and collaborative training, and plans to expand its vendor network at an upcoming May conference.
So if you go back 3 years ago, you'll find a company with tremendous brands, tremendous partnerships. Today, we are now OTC Industrial Technologies to the world versus 30 different brands out there. Our customers look at us and they know that they're getting a billion-dollar company backed by an extraordinary partner in Genstar, which really allows us to, to not only make promises but keep those promises with it. We have to do 3 things. So the first is we have to give exceptional opportunities to our folks, to our employees. The second, we have to be outstanding partners both to our customers and our suppliers. And third, we have to give a superior return to our investors, right? And if you look at right in the heart of that, it is partnering with our customers and our suppliers.
Well, we understand, again, as a distributor, that suppliers are critical partners for our business. We want to engage efficiently. We want to pay our suppliers on time. We want to have a productive relationship. We also expect that they're going to work with us, provide us training, provide us new products, and provide us the things that help us So some of the characteristics we look for in a supplier is someone that wants to partner with us.
We like winning, and we want them to win too. And it's important for them to win so that they continue to see the growth in our company and that they're able to grow their bottom line as well.
With our current suppliers, this is a great chance for us to focus, focus on partnering with them and what can we do better, and meet new suppliers, right? We have tremendous access to factories across the United States and the opportunity to bring additional suppliers into our network network is an opportunity, right? We have a lot of adjacencies as you think about how we touch a factory floor, and I'm looking forward to seeing other suppliers that are coming to see other Genstar industrial businesses. I think there'll be some opportunities to help us grow together in some new areas.
The conference in May is exciting times, and it's exciting for us because we get to meet new vendors. There's a lot of new technology out there, and there's a lot of new vendors that we haven't met. And so a lot of these vendors have a chance to become our primary vendors and to help us grow and grow along with us as well.
If you were to go back and look at us, our original plan was to get OTC to about $1 billion, $1.5 billion. Well, we've achieved that. Now, if you look at our next growth piece, it's to take our 3 segments, and we believe each segment in and of its own right is over $1 billion. So we believe our company triples over the next 5 years. We're going to need partners who can handle that. We're going to need partners who are willing to invest in us as we are investing in them. And if you look at the history we have in many of our suppliers, we've gone back decades. It shows that we don't just change for the sake of change. We do have to have the best, just as they have to have the best, and we think we represent that for it. So I think anyone who gets on board at this point is going to see not only great business already, but the ability to triple this thing over the next 5 years.
