Four months before the call that nearly ended it, Nick Muscari's company was the one getting praised at every weekly meeting. Great gross margin. Strong cash flow. The favorite little side company. Then the parent distributor collapsed, the assets went to a competitor, and Factory Cleaning Equipment was set to be liquidated.

ㅤ

Kyler Nixon sits down with Nick Muscari to walk through a company takeback, front to end. Nick had 48 hours to decide whether to try buying the business, one phone call to the original founder, and two weeks to close the deal in cash. The reopening took about 45 minutes. Nobody missed a paycheck.

ㅤ

This one covers what it actually takes to save a business on a deadline, why a profitable company can still end up on the chopping block, and what Nick is building now that the ropes are off.

ㅤ

👤 Guest Bio

Nick Muscari leads Factory Cleaning Equipment, a floor-cleaning equipment dealer and service company with locations in Aurora, Illinois and the Carolinas. He started in the distribution industry at Jon-Don in 2008 in customer service, worked his way into sales and sales management, and later joined Factory Cleaning Equipment to build its sales team. In May 2025, he helped the original founder buy the company back and relaunch it as Factory Cleaning Equipment, LLC.

ㅤ

📌 What We Cover

• How Factory Cleaning Equipment went from being the praised, high-margin division to days away from liquidation
• The 48-hour window to decide on the buyback, and the dinner six months earlier that made the founder pick up the phone
• Closing the deal in cash inside two weeks, reopening under a new name with about 48 jobs saved
• Rebuilding a field sales team in 2020 while everyone else went inside, showing up with a mask on instead of cold calling from a desk
• Why a locally based industry makes national expansion the wrong play, and the decision to drop 11 locations and refocus on Chicagoland and the Carolinas
• Promoting a driver and a service technician into territory managers, and why the next leaders were already on the route
• Where Nick is placing his next bet: autonomous floor-cleaning equipment

ㅤ

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Factory Cleaning Equipment
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

What does it actually look like when a small distributor decides to go deep on one product instead of wide across a whole market? That's the question at the center of this episode. Kyler Nixon sits down with Kevin Fielder from Iron Mountain Refrigeration & Equipment, a Wisconsin-based commercial refrigeration distributor that has deliberately stayed in its lane while the industry around it keeps expanding in every direction.

ㅤ

The conversation moves from private-label brand strategy to frontline service culture to the case for owning your local market before you try to compete nationally. If you've been wrestling with whether to niche down or grow out, this one will give you something to think about.

ㅤ

👤 Guest Bio

Kevin Fielder is part of the sales and business development team at Iron Mountain Refrigeration & Equipment, a family-owned commercial refrigeration distributor based in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. Iron Mountain stocks and sells their own private-label brands, PeakCold and ProCool, directly from their 50,000 sq. ft. warehouse, and recently added True Manufacturing to their lineup as an authorized highline distributor. The company serves restaurants, bars, cafes, convenience stores, grocery stores, and anywhere else commercial refrigeration is a daily necessity.

ㅤ

📌 What We Cover

• Why Iron Mountain chose to stay strictly in commercial refrigeration rather than expanding into adjacent product categories, and how that decision shapes everything from warehouse operations to customer retention
• The mechanics of owning your own private-label brand: controlling manufacturing, cutting out middlemen, and being able to troubleshoot product issues in-house over the phone
• How Iron Mountain partnered with True Manufacturing to serve the premium-tier buyer without losing focus on their core house brands, PeakCold and ProCool
• A real customer service story involving a wrong-door refrigerator, a same-day swap in February, and no restocking fee
• How leadership culture determines whether frontline reps will make a judgment call or wait for permission, and why Iron Mountain runs a non-revolving-door team
• The Wisconsin initiative: a deliberate local-first growth strategy built around trade shows, Tavern League of Wisconsin events, and face-to-face relationships before going national
• Why running a 30x20 booth next to a 700-foot competitor at a Las Vegas trade show isn't a growth strategy, and what to do instead
• Exploring Spotify advertising for targeted local reach, and Iron Mountain's upcoming podcast, Keeping It Cool with Iron Mountain

ㅤ

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Iron Mountain Refrigeration & Equipment
• True Manufacturing
• Tavern League of Wisconsin
• Jasmine Widmer at Industrial Supply (Episode 29 of Darn Good Distributors)
• Spotify advertising for B2B local reach

Most distribution leaders say they're open to change. A lot fewer have actually been forced to rebuild a 70-year-old company from the inside out, with no industry background, during a pandemic, before buying out their own family to take ownership. That's the situation Marlee D'Arco walked into when she joined Safety Services, Inc. in 2019.

ㅤ

On this episode, Kyler Nixon and Marlee go deep on what change management actually looks like inside a real distribution company: not the textbook version, but the version where people quietly check out, where the acquisition team is shocked they can wear jeans, and where the only way to create lasting change is to build it around a clear answer to "why us?"

ㅤ

👤 Guest Bio

Marlee D'Arco is President & CEO of Safety Services, Inc. (SSI), a third-generation, woman-owned industrial safety distributor headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, founded in 1948. Before joining SSI, she practiced law, ran a healthcare marketing firm, and worked as a specialty pharmaceutical sales representative at Allergan. She joined SSI in 2019 as Chief Strategy Officer, drove a full technology and operations overhaul through COVID, and completed a family buyout to become owner and CEO in 2022. SSI is a nationally certified Women Business Enterprise (WBE) and distributes PPE, safety training, engineered fall protection systems, and gas detection instrumentation.

ㅤ

📌 What We Cover

• How Marlee entered a third-generation family business with no industry experience and the early distrust she had to earn her way through
• Why she became obsessed with SSI's value proposition before COVID hit, and how that obsession set the company up to survive the commodity crunch that followed
• The signals that too much change is happening at once, including how they usually don't get voiced directly but show up in energy and morale
• Her framework for self-selection: making objectives and requirements clear enough that people opt in or opt out without a blowup
• The three criteria she used when acquiring a local competitor: technical skill, margin insulation, and low competitive density
• What she learned the hard way about communicating before a change, not after
• The "blended family" dynamic that comes with an acquisition and how cultural differences play out in surprisingly small ways
• Her warning to independent distributors who are digging their heels in: reluctance to change is probably the fastest way to erode what you've built

ㅤ

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Safety Services, Inc. (safetyservicesinc.com)
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• No BS Strategy by Alex M H Smith