Dear Stephen:
I’ve been in the tile and stone industry for a long time, and lately I feel as though you need a scorecard just
to keep track of who owns whom.
I did a little research, and just since 2023, AEA Investors acquired TileBar; International Designs Group acquired Trajus Surfaces, including European Granite & Marble and MARVA; AHF Products acquired Crossville; The Home Depot acquired International Designs Group, which included Construction Resources and Cancos Tile & Stone; Fireclay Tile acquired Heritage Marble & Tile; Transom Capital acquired Virginia Tile and combined it with Galleher; Artivo Surfaces acquired Tom Duffy and later Walker Zanger and Anthology; Construction Resources acquired Opustone; and this year Fireclay acquired Fox Marble.
What surprises me is what seems to happen after some of these acquisitions. I always thought private equity came into an industry, combined companies, and cut costs, but some of these businesses seem to be doing exactly the opposite. They are opening showrooms, entering new markets, buying more companies, and hiring people. CEOs who were running one company a few years ago are suddenly running much larger organizations.
So who actually makes money when all of this happens? Obviously the founders and investment firms can do very well, but do CEOs and other senior executives participate too? And for the rest of us working in the industry, is all this money creating better career opportunities, or should we be wondering what happens when these companies eventually stop buying businesses and start looking more closely at all the people they hired?
Signed,
Who Owns Us Next?
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Dear Who Owns Us Next:
I think you’re asking the right question, but I would spend a lot less time worrying about who is buying whom and a lot more time figuring out how you can benefit from it.
First, not every transaction you mentioned is private equity. Some are strategic acquisitions, and the motivations can be very different. But whether the money is coming from an investment firm or a corporate buyer, I cannot remember another time in my more than 40 years of recruiting when this much money seemed to be moving around tile and stone. Companies are being bought, combined, opening showrooms, entering new markets, and hiring people. If you happen to be working for one of them, I would look for the opportunity before I started looking for the danger.
And yes, some people can make a lot of money.
Start with the people who own equity, because that is where the biggest payoff generally occurs when these transactions work. Founders may sell all or part of their businesses. Investors are hoping the company will eventually be worth considerably more than they paid for it. And CEOs and other senior executives can have equity, incentive plans, or other ways of participating in that growth.
I have no idea who owns what in any of the particular companies you mentioned, nor is it any of my business. But if I were a senior executive being recruited to help turn a relatively modest company into something three or four times larger, I would want to understand whether I had some skin in the game. If everyone sitting around the table is talking about what the company could be worth five years from now and they want me to help get it there, salary and bonus would not be the only things I would be asking about.
I also would not assume an acquisition means the CEO is about to be shown the door. Sometimes exactly the opposite happens. A good CEO suddenly has more capital, more companies, more employees, and a much bigger job. If that executive was successful running one business, the new owners may want to see whether he or she can run four or five of them.
The same thing can happen farther down the organization. A regional sales manager can get a national opportunity. A salesperson can suddenly have more products, customers, or territory. Someone who had nowhere else to go inside a smaller family-owned company may suddenly have a career path that did not exist six months earlier. There are worse problems to have.
There is also an enormous amount of poaching going on, and that is something I would pay very close attention to. Once a company has money and decides it wants to grow quickly, one of the easiest ways to do it is to hire people who already know the designers, dealers, and customers. Why spend five years teaching somebody the tile business when you can hire somebody who already knows it?
Tile and stone has become one of the strongest recruiting categories at The Viscusi Group, so I see this firsthand. We have recruited for many of these companies over the years and, when we are not recruiting for them, quite often we are recruiting people from them. Good tile salespeople know who the recruiters are, and the smart ones usually take the call—not because they necessarily want to leave, but because they understand the value of knowing who is hiring, what the market is paying, and where the next opportunity may be.
This feverish activity has been very good for headhunters too, and I am certainly not embarrassed to say that. What the poaching really tells you, however, is that while investors may be buying companies, they still need the people who know how to sell the product and have the relationships that made those companies valuable in the first place.
If you are one of the people getting those calls, listen without being foolish about it. I am not suggesting you change jobs every time somebody waves another $20,000 in front of you, because eventually you end up with a résumé that looks like a subway map. But repeated calls from recruiters are telling you something about your value in the marketplace. You should know what that value is even if you are perfectly happy where you are. Sometimes the best time to find out what you are worth is when you do not need another job at all.
If your own company is acquired, I would not sit around asking everybody whether your job is safe. Get involved. Take on more responsibility. Learn the other businesses they are buying. Get to know the new management. If there is a bigger territory, look at it. If they acquire another product category, learn it. If there is an opportunity to work across several companies, volunteer.
The person desperately trying to preserve exactly what their job looked like before the acquisition may eventually have a problem. The person helping management figure out what the new company should look like is usually in a much better position.
There is one caution: hiring binges do not go on forever. Eventually someone is going to look at the combined organization and discover three sales leaders, two CFOs, several marketing departments, and perhaps six people calling on the same designer. At that point, companies begin making sense of what they bought. That does not mean everybody gets fired, and it certainly does not mean you should panic. It means this is the time to make yourself more valuable, not merely more comfortable.
So yes, the founders may make money. Some CEOs may become very wealthy. The investment firms certainly hope to. And the headhunters are having a pretty good time too.
But there is no reason all this activity should only benefit the people buying and selling the companies. Know what you are worth. Take the right calls. Get closer to the revenue. Make yourself important to whatever your company is becoming. And if you are senior enough to be recruited to help create all that additional value, ask whether you get to participate in it.
The smartest question in tile right now may not be, “Who owns us next?”
It may be, “What will I own when they do?”
Stephen Viscusi
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Stephen Viscusi is the founder of The Viscusi Group, an executive search firm specializing in the furniture, furnishings
and interiors industries. For more than 40 years, The Viscusi Group has recruited executives and sales professionals for manufacturers, dealers and showrooms across furniture, flooring, rugs, textiles, lighting, kitchen and bath, tile and stone, and other
interior-product categories. Visit www.viscusigroup.com.
© Stephen Viscusi 2026