Organic growth and acquisitions drive gains
Coming off his company’s record year for revenue, Leslie Doggett remained philosophical, if not optimistic, about addressing the twin challenges of a pandemic and plunging oil prices.
His company, Leslie Doggett Industries, was Houston’s ninth-largest private company by revenue last year. It grossed $1.8 billion in 2019 on the combination of 20 percent organic growth and the acquisition of companies such as Lone Star Ford (now Doggett Ford) in 2018 and the 2019 purchase of El
Paso-based heavy-duty trailer dealer Truck Enterprises and the Great Dane Trailer distributor for the El Paso, Laredo and McAllen/Pharr region.
The Ford dealership paid dividends early, as Doggett said the store is the state’s fastest-growing Ford dealership and the country’s second-fastest. Doggett, which broke ground on a new $24 million, 62,000-square-foot Doggett Ford dealership facility last August, is slated to open it in September.
The dealership also complemented a company that started off as a Toyota forklift seller in 1993 and has since expanded to 37 heavy-industry dealers selling products such as Freightliner trucks and Link-Belt cranes.
“Prior to the Ford store, we were all business-to business,” said Doggett. “The Ford store was our first expansion into the consumer side, and it’s worked just fabulously well for us.”
Granted, Doggett Industries has seen its monthly revenue drop about 25 percent since March as the pandemic caused business spending to retrench while reducing oil demand. Additionally, Doggett Industries’ business units have all had to adapt from an operational standpoint, whether taking the temperatures of all employees when they walk into the facilities, spraying down all serviced vehicles with disinfectant or fogsterilizing new Ford vehicles.
Still, Doggett, whose company has reduced its workforce by about 13 percent since last year to approximately 1,300 people, said the combination of steady Ford vehicle sales and Harris County construction continuing to be considered an essential business will likely prevent sales from eroding further, boding well for the company if or when business conditions resume a sense of normalcy.
“We’ve been really fortunate on the construction side, and the service and parts businesses have stayed relatively strong,” he said. “Road and bridge is a big part. If oil and gas are doing well, we do better. If it’s not doing better, we get along just fine.”