Over the past decade, platform acquisitions have reshaped large swaths of industrial distribution — but not all roll-up stories look the same.

Some platforms centralize aggressively, standardizing everything from systems to strategy. Others take a lighter touch. And a growing number are trying to strike a more nuanced balance — preserving what makes local distributors great while still scaling a national enterprise.

One of the most interesting examples of that approach is Singer Industrial.

Today, Singer is a diversified platform of industrial rubber, fluid power and automation distributors — spanning more than 55 operating companies, over 110 locations across the U.S. and Canada, and roughly 1,500 employees. But behind those numbers is a portfolio of businesses with deep local roots — many of them multi-generation distributors that have been serving customers for 50, 75, even more than 100 years.

Dallas-based Singer’s leadership believes those legacies aren’t something to be standardized away — they’re something to be protected and amplified.

In this episode of the MDM Podcast, I’m joined by Pete Haberbosch, President of Singer Industrial, to unpack what that philosophy looks like in practice. Pete describes Singer’s operating model as “coordinated autonomy” — a framework that blends shared services and alignment at the platform level with real decision-making authority at the local level.

We talk about how that model shapes Singer’s M&A strategy, how the company thinks about leadership development and succession, why culture and trust matter as much as scale, and what Singer is seeing across the industrial markets it serves as we look toward 2026.

Listen to the full episode via the audio player above, and you can find our complete library of podcast episodes here.