D&H Distributing this month said goodbye to its headquarters of 67 years and moved into a much bigger one with room to grow and better support its manufacturer and vendor partners, and its employee owners.

The SMB-focused distributor packed up its 800 employees, and within one week moved into two buildings, 240,000 square feet of space, located on a 50-acre campus, which it bought in January and subsequently renovated.

D&H’s Dan Schwab

“We had just outgrown the [previous] facility,” Dan Schwab, co-president at D&H Distributing, told Channel Partners. “We literally had no room to hire more people.”

With 77% more capacity in its new headquarters, D&H can now hire the 30 positions it had to put a freeze on; in fact, the company can double in size, or grow to more than 1,500 employees.

The positions it’s hiring for include sales specialists, particularly around Pro AV systems and security, and customer support for partners.

D&H had two things in mind when it built its new facility: Design an open, modern space built to support collaboration for its own teams as well as training and education for its co-owner employees, and to foster better training and support for reseller partners.

“In its previous location, D&H was restrained, particularly its labs and video facilities, in how often we could do customer online webinars, boot camps, training sessions where customers come to our headquarters,” said Schwab. “We built a modular space, an Innovation Lab,  that’s three to four times larger, so the training can occur on a much more frequent basis – whether that’s certification programs, education programs, working with vendors on solution sales – so the Innovation Lab allows us to help our partners continue to grow their businesses.”

D&H, a 101-year old company, has been 36% employee-owned since 1998.

The SMB-focused distributor is growing in other ways as well. It recently announced that it launched a new South West Technology Conference, held in Houston on Oct. 24.

The latest geography event, The Technology Conference: South West, joins the distributor’s other Technology Conferences – West Coast, Mid-West, and Mid-Atlantic.

D&H isn’t the only distributor with expansion aspirations. In October, Ingram Micro celebrated a move to a new facility in South Carolina for its growing unified communications and collaboration business (UCC). Ingram Micro’s UCC business has been growing double digits year-over-year, according to the distributor.

Two acquisitions, South Carolina Netxusa, acquired in 2016, and The Phoenix Group, acquired in 2017, now reside at the new facility, as well as additional teams including Ingram Micro’s Large Format Printing and DCPOS business.