Tony Ciampaglio
Tony Ciampaglio
Operating Partner – Boston
Tony Ciampaglio is an Operating Partner with Building Industry Partners. After 35 years in the building products industry, Tony has a proven track record of implementing superior human capital management practices to drive exceptional business results.
Tony’s career began in the gypsum sector, where he spent over a decade learning the business and climbing the ranks at a several manufacturers/distributors, including National Gypsum. In 1992, he joined Arkay Supply, a drywall distributor, as a co-owner. Eight years later, he sold the business to Strober, which created Strober-Arkay. In just six years, Tony’s leadership of the gypsum business helped drive Strober from being a regional player with $400 million in revenue to the largest LBM distributor in the U.S. (as ProBuild) with over $6 billion in sales.
In 2009, Tony left ProBuild and continued his entrepreneurial endeavors as a co-owner of New England Building Supply (NEBS). NEBS was a fledgling business in a state of receivership at that time, and after just 60 days with Tony’s oversight, the company turned a profit. Tony proceeded to grow sales from $18 million to $42 million – and generate double-digit net income as a percent of sales - in just over four years and during the worst recession in the industry’s history. In 2013, Kodiak Building Partners purchased New England Building Supply at which point Tony joined the company’s Board of Directors. Tony retired in 2015 and continued serving on the company’s Board until Kodiak’s sale in 2017.
With an average hold of just under five years, Tony has delivered a 12x return and IRR of 69% on the businesses he has bought and sold, including Arkay Supply and Mid-Cape Lumber, a regional lumber supplier which he joined as a co-owner in 2012 and again helped transform the business before exiting. Tony is as much known for building “people first” cultures as he is for turning businesses around and generating returns on investment. As an owner and as a Division Manager at ProBuild, for example, Tony’s teams consistently boasted the highest sales per employee, highest payroll per employee, lowest payroll to sales, demonstrating his philosophy of rewarding employees for their contributions to the bottom line.
Tony has been a volunteer for the Bobby Nichols Fiddlesticks Charity Foundation for the past four years and is currently a member of its Board of Directors. He currently splits his time between Boston, MA and Fort Myers, FL.