Chair & Owner, ABC Supply · Richest Self-Made Woman in America · Beloit, Wisconsin
She was seventeen years old, assembling pens on a factory line at Parker Pen in Janesville, Wisconsin, with a baby at home and a marriage that would not last. She was the daughter of dairy farmers — one of nine sisters in Osseo, Wisconsin. She wanted to wear a suit to work. She wanted to live in a city. She finished high school at home because the school would not have her.
She is now worth more than twenty billion dollars. She built ABC Supply with her late husband Ken from a single roofing supply store in Beloit into the largest wholesale distributor of building materials in America — over a thousand locations, twenty billion dollars in annual revenue, twenty thousand employees. When Ken died in 2007, she took full control and doubled the company’s revenue in a decade. Forbes has named her the richest self-made woman in America for seven consecutive years.
Then she opened a career center in Beloit. For middle schoolers and high schoolers. Teaching coding, construction, the value of a job. The woman who started on an assembly line built the room where the next person on the assembly line learns what comes next.
On the Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma, a facility is being built on the same principle. The front door is a tool store. The building is the career center. The assembly line runs through all five stations.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Diane Hendricks holds rank eighty-three because she is the richest self-made woman in America who built her fortune in the building materials industry — the exact industry CrowdSmith’s workforce will serve. Her biography begins on a dairy farm and passes through an assembly line, a real estate license, a roofing contractor, and a company that now supplies the materials for the construction trades nationwide. She opened a career center in Beloit to expose teenagers to the trades and to the value of work. The ranking reflects her industry alignment, her biographical resonance with CrowdSmith’s mission, and her demonstrated investment in workforce development at the community level.
March 2, 1947 · Mondovi, Wisconsin. Raised in Osseo, Wisconsin
Daughter of dairy farmers. One of nine sisters. Seven children. Married Ken Hendricks (roofing contractor) in 1975. Ken died in 2007 at age sixty-six.
Osseo-Fairchild High School (1965). Completed senior year studying at home after becoming a mother at seventeen. Real estate broker’s license at twenty-one.
Assembly line worker, Parker Pen Company, Janesville, Wisconsin. Waitress. Custom home sales. Real estate broker.
Co-founded 1982 in Beloit, Wisconsin, with Ken Hendricks. Started as a single roofing supply store. Now the largest wholesale distributor of roofing, siding, windows, and gutter materials in North America. Over 1,000 locations. Approximately 20,000 employees. $20.7 billion in 2024 revenue. Ranked #18 on Forbes’ list of America’s largest private companies.
Approximately $22 billion. Forbes’ richest self-made woman in America for seven consecutive years.
Extensive revitalization of Beloit, Wisconsin: Phoenix mixed-use building, Ironworks Hotel, startup hub in former industrial foundry, Hendricks Center for the performing arts (former library building donated to Beloit College), career center for middle and high school students teaching coding and construction, Beloit International Film Festival co-founder. Film producer: “The Stoning of Soraya M.” (2008).
Diane Hendricks grew up on a dairy farm in Osseo, Wisconsin, one of nine sisters. Her father did not believe in girls doing farm work. She wanted to be outside. She wanted to wear a suit. At seventeen, she became a mother. She finished high school studying at home because the school would not accommodate her. She took a job assembling pens at the Parker Pen Company in Janesville. She filed for divorce at twenty-one. She earned her real estate broker’s license and began selling custom-built homes.
In the mid-1970s, while selling houses, she met Ken Hendricks — a high school dropout who had taught himself the roofing trade. They married in 1975 and began buying old houses, fixing them up, and renting them out around Beloit. In 1982, they pooled their credit lines to open a single roofing supply store. Diane handled sales and operations. Ken handled supplier relationships and contractor service. The focus was always the same: take care of the person who walks through the door.
ABC Supply grew to a hundred locations by 1994. It crossed a billion dollars in annual revenue by 1998. Ken died in 2007 after a fall at their home construction site. He was sixty-six. Diane took full control. Under her leadership, ABC acquired Bradco Supply in 2010 and L&W Supply in 2016 — the company’s two largest acquisitions. Revenue grew from three billion to more than twenty billion. She has been named the richest self-made woman in America every year since 2017.
Hendricks did not leave Beloit when the money arrived. She invested in the town. She transformed abandoned industrial buildings into mixed-use developments, hotels, performing arts centers, and startup hubs. She opened a career center for middle and high school students — workshops teaching construction, coding, and the practical skills the school system was not providing. She told Forbes her aim was to expose teenagers to the value of a job. The career center is the detail in the biography that connects most directly to CrowdSmith: a billionaire who built in the building materials industry and then built a room where teenagers learn the trades.
| Dimension | Diane Hendricks | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| The Assembly Line | Started at seventeen assembling pens at Parker Pen with a baby at home | Station Zero is designed for people who arrive with nothing but willingness — the entry ramp before the five stations |
| Building Materials | ABC Supply is the largest wholesale distributor of roofing, siding, windows, and gutter materials in North America | CrowdSmith produces the workforce that installs those materials — every Fabrication credential holder is an ABC Supply customer |
| The Career Center | Opened a career center in Beloit teaching teenagers coding, construction, and the value of a job | Five credential tracks, WIOA-funded cohorts, and a retail tool store that doubles as the intake funnel — the career center at industrial scale |
| The Front Door | ABC Supply was built on personal relationships with contractors — take care of the person who walks through the door | The retail tool store is CrowdSmith’s front door — free coffee, a tool in the window, a conversation that IS the intake |
| Building at Home | Stayed in Beloit and rebuilt the town — hotels, mixed-use, startup hubs, performing arts | Building on the Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone — where the data says the gap is deepest |
| Self-Made | No inheritance, no degree, no institutional backing — dairy farm to $22 billion | No consultants, no staff, no institutional backing — one man, an AI, and a thirty-eight-chapter binder |
My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing to one hundred forty-seven people on the same day. You are receiving this letter because the man I work with believes that a woman who started assembling pens on a factory line at seventeen and built the largest building materials distributor in America would understand what he is building on a level that very few people on this list can match.
You were one of nine sisters on a dairy farm in Osseo. You had a baby at seventeen and finished high school at home. You worked the assembly line at Parker Pen. You earned a real estate license at twenty-one. You met a roofer, married him, and opened a single supply store in Beloit in 1982. ABC Supply now has over a thousand locations, twenty thousand employees, and more than twenty billion dollars in annual revenue. When Ken died, you took the company and doubled it. Forbes has called you the richest self-made woman in America for seven straight years. And then you opened a career center in Beloit to teach teenagers the value of a job.
That career center is the reason you are holding this letter.
CrowdSmith is a five-station maker facility preparing to open on the Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma, Washington, inside a federally designated Opportunity Zone. The stations run in sequence: hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics. The retail tool store in the lobby is stocked with donated inventory at zero acquisition cost — a tax deduction for the donor, a training exercise for the fellow who cleans and curates them, and a revenue source from day one. The credential tracks — Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, Systems — are funded through WorkForce Central under WIOA, alongside a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline. The facility is designed to replicate across three thousand locations.
The building also houses an invention pipeline. Forty-four concepts have been evaluated to date through a proprietary methodology called SmithScore. The pipeline funds the patent, the prototype, and the trademark — the inventor keeps full ownership, no equity taken. Station Five produces robot-demonstrated manufacturing proof. Five credential tracks map to five roles on an invention team. One dollar produces both a credential and a patent.
You built ABC Supply on one principle: take care of the person who walks through the door. CrowdSmith is built on the same one. The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee. A person walks in because they see a tool in the window or they smell the pot. Someone behind the counter tells them what it does. A conversation starts. That conversation IS the intake funnel. Nobody walks into CrowdSmith because they read about a workforce credential program. They walk in because they saw something in the window. You know how that works. You sold houses the same way before you sold shingles.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry — ten thousand membership contracts sold, every one face-to-face. He built CrowdSmith through sustained dialogue with an AI in a methodology he calls SmithTalk, producing a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven financial models, and the letter you are holding. No consultants. No staff. One building. He is a man who started with nothing and built the architecture anyway. You know what that looks like.
The complete operational architecture is published at crowdsmith.org. The financial models are available upon request. Every person who earns a Fabrication credential at CrowdSmith enters the construction trades — the same trades ABC Supply has served for forty years. The facility produces the workforce your industry needs. The career center you built in Beloit was the proof that you care about where the next generation of tradespeople comes from. CrowdSmith is that career center at scale — with an invention pipeline, a five-station progression, and a front door that never closes.
She could have left Beloit. The money made it possible to leave anywhere. Twenty billion dollars buys a zip code in any city on the planet. She stayed. She bought the abandoned buildings. She turned a foundry into a startup hub and a library into a performing arts center. She opened a career center for teenagers because nobody had opened one for her.
The assembly line at Parker Pen was not her career. It was her starting position. The woman who stood at that line at seventeen with a baby at home did not know she would build a twenty-billion-dollar company. She knew she wanted to wear a suit. She knew she wanted something different from the dairy farm. She did not have a credential. She did not have a mentor. She had the line, and she had the willingness to show up.
The building on Portland Avenue is for the person standing at that line right now. The one who does not know what comes next but is willing to show up and find out.