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Diane Hendricks, the chairwoman of roofing supplies ABC Supply, recently topped Forbes’ latest list of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women” for the seventh year in a row with a net worth of $20.9 billion.
Hendricks, 77, grew up on a dairy farm in Osseo, Wisconsin before she built ABC Supply with roof contractor and her late husband, Ken Hendricks, in 1982.
ABC Supply brought in $20.4 billion in revenue last year and has more than 900 branch locations, according to Forbes.
How did Diane Hendricks turn her life around?
In an interview with Forbes last year, she revealed that at age 10, her passion to work in the city and her parents’ work ethic on the farm, made her dream of her own career.
She got pregnant at 17, and finished her senior year of high school while living at home.
Three years later, she filed for divorce from her high school sweetheart, and worked odd jobs as a single mother, while also building a real estate career.
“That’s when I really started to look at a career, a career I’d always dreamt of having, which was being in business,” said Hendricks.
She married her husband in the 1970s and built their Beloit-based company, which hit $1 billion in annual sales for the first time in 1998.
Hendricks is still based near Beloit, which has less than 37,000 residents.
She’s transformed many historic buildings and older businesses in Beloit, spent millions of dollars on local projects to rebuild abandoned properties and bring in new businesses to the state, according to Forbes.
In 2017, Hendricks opened a local career center to host skill workshops for middle and high schoolers, on topics like coding and construction, to expose teens to “the value of a job”.
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