The first warehouse had a minivan in its origin story. Kelcey Lehrich remembers an employee named Chris driving to Chicago on his first day to collect a couple of pallets of merchandise. Back in Ohio, shelving and a label printer helped make the operation a warehouse, although Lehrich has been generous enough to admit that the word was generous. This was the infrastructure behind an ambition to buy businesses, keep them, and make them work better together.
It is a useful place to begin with Lehrich, the Cleveland-area co-founder and CEO of Akron-based 365 Holdings. Buying companies can sound like an occupation conducted entirely in spreadsheets. Someone still has to fetch the boxes. His career has involved both activities, and much of his thinking has changed in the distance between them.
By 2025, he was describing a different arrangement from the one he had spent years assembling. More responsibility would live inside the individual businesses. A company built around bringing work together was learning which work needed its own home.
A partnership before a platform
Lehrich and his business partner, Justin Scheeff, did not begin with an e-commerce thesis. They spent roughly six years running small offline businesses together, including payment processing, home services and time clocks sold to government agencies. They could earn a living. Building an organization that could grow beyond the two of them was another matter.
“We were more self-employed partners than we were business owners,” Lehrich said. The distinction carries the weight of those early years. Revenue might increase while the people responsible for producing it remained the same two people. A collection of businesses could amount to a collection of jobs.
His background in business brokerage gave him experience around transactions before 365 existed. The eventual move online came through a search for something to buy, rather than a revelation about the future of shopping. In 2017, the partners acquired an outdoor-gear business that became Steel River, financed with an SBA loan. Knives were an unlikely entrance to a portfolio of consumer brands, but an entrance is useful even when it lacks ceremony.
“It’s not a magic wand.”Kelcey Lehrich, on the work of bringing businesses together
A holding company in need of a name
Another acquisition followed soon afterward. With more than one e-commerce business, the partners needed a company above the companies. The naming exercise was brief. Lehrich has told the story without attempting to improve its glamour: they needed a name, had little time to worry about it, and chose 365 Holdings.
There is something refreshing about a business name that arrives after the business. The customers already exist. The inventory already demands attention. The legal structure catches up with the work. Nobody needs a brainstorming retreat to establish that there are 365 days in a year.
He would also come to question the category attached to the enterprise. In his view, e-commerce describes a way of distributing products. A food company remains a food company when someone orders dinner ingredients through a browser. That distinction changes the buyer’s question: understanding an online checkout does not automatically mean understanding the company behind it.
It also makes growth less abstract. Goods must be purchased, advertising paid for and orders fulfilled. More sales can require more cash before they produce it. The acquisition has to make sense as a working business, beyond the agreeable appearance of its revenue chart.
The customer beyond the product
An early organizing idea was the market-based brand: a business defined by the people it serves. A single product offers one reason to buy. A recognizable customer community can give a company reasons to develop other products, publish useful material and earn another visit.
The marketing implications were substantial. In 365’s writing about media, customer communities were supposed to revolve around members’ problems and goals. Educational material could help people use what they bought. Recurring themes could give the audience a reason to return. The brand would have something to say between transactions.
This is a demanding assignment for a seller. A product listing needs a photograph and a price; a relationship needs continuing attention. There is also a test of manners. A community that exists only to admire a company’s merchandise has the conversational range of a shop window.
Lehrich’s thinking placed that work close to the business itself. When a company knows whom it serves, product development and communication can inform each other. The customer becomes a person with a continuing interest, rather than a fleeting visitor whose appearance on a dashboard has to be purchased again.
What one roof could do
The early 365 model brought a long list of functions inside the organization: warehousing, customer support, advertising, design, web development, finance and parts of production. Small brands could use capabilities that each might struggle to support alone.
Cost mattered, but so did control. An outside provider has its own priorities and procedures. Owning more of the work gave 365 a closer hand in the customer experience, from a marketing message to the package arriving at the door. In the original model, employees could work across brands while the portfolio supported the cost of the team.
The attraction is easy to understand. A small business often has to choose between specialist help and what it can afford. Sharing resources offers a way to soften that choice. It also creates a practical management question: how much can several different businesses share before their differences begin to matter more?
The paperwork earns its place
His account of 2021 gives the shared operation some texture. An enterprise software implementation took 18 months. Earlier warehouse systems had been replaced repeatedly. The leadership team established a weekly operating rhythm, and dedicated roles reduced the number of boxes on the organization chart occupied by the founders.
Lehrich used the idea of management debt to describe shortcuts that eventually required repayment. Anyone who has inherited a spreadsheet understood only by its creator can appreciate the interest rate. The investment was in making work repeatable and intelligible to people beyond the original improvisers.
This is an achievement with little photogenic appeal. A clearer responsibility chart will seldom win the room’s attention. Yet it addresses the problem the partners had encountered years earlier: the owners doing too much themselves. Building a company meant building the capacity for other people to decide and act.
Friends with the same awkward questions
Lehrich found another kind of shared resource through John Wilson, the northeast Ohio entrepreneur behind the Wilson Companies. They met through Twitter. Their businesses operated in different markets, but they recognized similar questions about managing a portfolio.
There were gatherings for particular industries. A person who owned several companies had problems that crossed those boundaries: hiring leaders, organizing finance, deciding what to centralize, allocating money and attention. A restaurant owner and an e-commerce operator could have more to discuss than their products suggested.
The two co-founded HoldCoConf. Its first Cleveland gathering in 2022 brought together more than 100 holding-company entrepreneurs, founders and executives. The event gave a physical address to conversations that had started online.
For Lehrich, community has therefore been both a commercial idea and a practical part of entrepreneurship. Meeting another owner can make an unfamiliar management problem less lonely. The benefit does not require everybody in the room to sell the same thing.
Giving the businesses their own room
The shift he described in July 2025 brings the earlier story into focus. The centralized model had given way to a more traditional decentralized holding company. Individual businesses took responsibility for their operations and marketing, while a smaller group of functions remained shared at the holding-company level.
He also described an ambition to diversify beyond consumer products. The acquisition question was increasingly about the quality of the business, rather than whether it fitted a particular brand category. That leaves room for the next version of 365 to differ from the last.
A permanent home still needs judgment about who does what. Putting a business in a portfolio does not settle its product decisions or customer relationships. Delegation brings those decisions closer to the people responsible for the particular company. It also asks the owner to relinquish work once collected at the center.
Many brand functions pooled inside a shared platform.
Operations and marketing sit with each business; selected corporate functions remain shared.
Long ownership, with room to reconsider
The long-term ownership idea was never a promise to keep every brand forever. In its explanation of durable capital, 365 explicitly allowed for selling a business when another owner would be a better home. The intention was to avoid an investor timetable dictating the decision.
That approach extended to staff through career development and profit sharing. Time could support investments in people, infrastructure and products that would be difficult to justify over a brief holding period. Patience still needed a business capable of rewarding it.
Lehrich has also treated his own development as part of the job. Coaching, self-awareness and emotional intelligence recur in his public conversations. They fit an occupation in which the quality of a decision depends partly on recognizing the person making it.
The minivan belongs to an earlier chapter. Its lesson survives: a business has physical work, particular customers and people who must make it function. Lehrich built a structure to help several businesses do that work together. Experience gave him reasons to change the structure. Keeping the companies for the long term has meant leaving room for his own thinking to move.