At City Electric Supply’s recent Connect event in Nashville, TN, which drew more than 2,000 employees and vendors, the company proudly celebrated its 75 years of growth in the United States and its home in England. Near the entry to the CES Connect exhibit hall the company constructed a museum-like exhibition area that highlighted the dozens of employees with at least 10 years of service in a huge mural and recreated the first CES counter, which Tom Mackie, the company’s founder, built out of “an old door, tea chests and some red bricks,” according to a company publication. Mackie, a RAF navigator during World War II, launched City Electric Supply in 1952.
John Gray and Blair Feidler, the co-CEOs for CES, took some time out from their busy schedules at the CES Connect event to chat with Electrical Wholesaling about what’s next for the eighth largest distributor in North America. Click here for more info on City Electric Supply's 2026 Connect event
Gray and Feidler have worked for CES for decades. Gray has been with CES for almost 40 years, and Feidler is a 29-year-old company veteran. They learned the ropes at CES along the company’s traditional training route to their present roles, working as truck drivers, warehouse workers, salespeople and branch managers before moving into executive management posts with the company. Feidler replaces Andrew Dawes, who retired in April as co-CEO.
Gray and Feidler have known each other for years and say they enjoy competing with each other. Feidler says he has been Gray’s “wing man” as the two have worked together to increase CES’ footprint in the United States.
“John and I are extremely competitive,” says Feidler, “We're competitive in life, have different football teams and we're competitive in business. It's very healthy for our business. That's the spirit we love.”
“I met Blair early in his career at CES and saw a drive in him that can’t be taught,” Gray said in the press release announcing Feidler’s promotion earlier this year. “I’ve watched him grow — and had the privilege to be part of that growth — ever since. Like Andrew (Dawes) and me, he began in the branches and advanced through operations. I look forward to partnering with Blair and continuing the culture and values that make CES special.”
Feidler began his CES career in 1997 as a driver and warehouse associate at the Monroe branch in North Carolina. Within a year, he was promoted to operations manager, then to outside sales, and by 2000 became branch manager, opening what’s called the CES Westinghouse branch in Charlotte.
Over the next two decades, Feidler advanced through several positions as district manager, regional manager and vice president of operations. In his most recent role, he has overseen the growth of more than 150 branches across 11 states.
Feidler also led the development of the CES One-Line Service, described as a first-of-its-kind panelboard and switchboard assembly service powered by a partnership with a top industry vendor and supported by CES fulfillment centers across North America.
In his four decades with CES, Gray has helped the company establish its foothold in the United States, going all the way back to when Tom Mackie, the company’s founder was opening CES’ first branches in the country in Florida back in the 1980s, and then the Carolinas and Tennessee.
While the company has grown to approximately 700 branches in the United States, Gray and Feidler agree that many of the company’s key growth and management strategies remain the same. They are both big believers in the value of managers learning the business by working from the ground up through delivery, warehouse, sales, local management and in adding branches where there’s a need, and not to just fill in gaps in a map.
City Electric Supply’s aggressive branch growth strategy is well-known throughout the electrical industry, but Gray and Feidler says they now only open up a cluster of branches in a new city when there’s a need in the market for more locations and they have the personnel who know that local market.
Gray and Feidler says the company has branches in 32 states now but still wants to open up more locations in markets that offer their desired set of growth circumstances. There was a time, they say, when CES opened up some branches in some areas that didn’t necessarily offer the best prospects for growth, or when they didn’t have a strong group of managers to run these new branches. Feidler says the company now has a strong bench of managers to operate new locations.
They say in 2007 CES opened up quite a few branches to expand geographically. “The good side of what we did in 2007 was throw on a lot of darts, which gave us presence in many states,” says Gray. “The bad thing about that is for 10 years it was very painful.”
The company continues to enter select markets with a cluster or “pod” of locations because they have found that when there’s only one location in a market, it can quickly become isolated and the growth can be painfully slow. Gray and Fiedler believe that branches in contiguous market areas or states tend to grow faster because they can use each other as a resource.
Many of these local pods rely on one of the company’s fulfillment centers which back up local inventory. The company now has six fulfillment centers : Toronto, ON; Jacksonville, FL; Charlotte, NC; Fort Worth, TX; Las Vegas, NV; and Indianapolis, IN. These fulfillment centers are essential to ensuring CES can consistently fulfill orders within a single day, reinforcing the company promise that "same day is better than next day."
The company has also made a major investment in branch manager training and has a National Solutions Division that offers a broad package of resources that local managers can tap into, including logistical assistance with large projects, lighting solutions, marine solutions, EV infrastructure, government contracts and utility/power work.
CES Cares
City Electric Supply is also a big believer to giving back to the local communities it serves, and to the end it created CES Cares in 2016 , the company’s social impact division to unify its charitable and volunteer efforts. Since its foundation, CES Cares has raised more than $5 million in charitable donations. At the CES Connect event, the company sponsored a build-a-bike competition, where teams from various branches competed to build bicycles for children in need in the Nashville, TN, community.
Future growth
Down the road, Gray and Feidler say CES will continue to expand and they wouldn’t be surprised if the company’s branch count expands from nearly 700 locations to over 1,000 locations. They expect to continue expanding in the industrial market, which has been a major move from its traditional focus on contractor business in the commercial and residential market segments.
Other big investments will be an ERP system upgrade and the continued expansion into digital operations so customers will be able to find technical and pricing information on products, requests for proposals, order status and other critical daily information.
When asked what keeps him up at night, Gray says he is always thinking about new ways to grow. “You're always looking at different ways to grow,” he says. “Because something works today doesn't mean it's going to work tomorrow. So you have to be aware of that.
“But on the reverse side, just because it works today doesn't mean it won't work tomorrow. I think we've got to have just a bit of a blend of probably both those mentalities. I believe in change, but I don't believe in change for the change’s sake. I believe in change if it moves the needle.
“We always have to remember who we are, what we are and what made us successful. But we need to continue to look at things that we believe will move the needle.”
About the Author
Jim Lucy
Editor-in-Chief
Over the past 40-plus years, hundreds of Jim’s articles have been published in Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter on topics such as the impact of new competitors on the electrical market’s channels of distribution, energy-efficient lighting and renewables, and local market economics. In addition to his published work, Jim regularly gives presentations on these topics to C-suite executives, industry groups and investment analysts.
He recently launched a new subscription-based data product for Electrical Marketing that offers electrical sales potential estimates and related market data for more than 300 metropolitan areas, and in 1999 he published his first book, “The Electrical Marketer’s Survival Guide” for electrical industry executives looking for an overview of key market trends.
While managing Electrical Wholesaling’s editorial operations, Jim and the publication’s staff won several Jesse H. Neal awards for editorial excellence, the highest honor in the business press, and numerous national and regional awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He has a master’s degree in Communications and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J. (now Rowan University).