Buchanan Electric goes dark
Former Top Growth company closes doors
James E. Buchanan Electric Inc. had been riding high with skyrocketing growth earlier this year when something apparently went wrong. The 140-employee company, which had been on track to hit $20 million in revenue in 2006, suddenly shut its doors in October. Its Uxbridge headquarters was quiet at press time, with offices empty but intact and company trucks sitting idle in the parking lot. The Buchanan Enterprises sign remained, listing five divisions the company had assembled in recent years to create a comprehensive commercial and residential electric contractor, with no clue as to the company’s fate.
A Texas company poised to acquire Buchanan last summer says that deal was called off. Buchanan Electric founder, President and CEO James Buchanan, did not respond to numerous phone and e-mail messages. But competitors, including one who assumed a Buchanan Electric phone number to pick up displaced customers, say the company is out of business. "They shut their doors suddenly," says Debra Medalia, manager at Adco Electric in Needham, who answers the phone at the number previously used by Buchanan residential division Responsive Electric. Adco, she says, has nothing to do with Buchanan but merely took over the phone number.
Keith Sanborn, former Buchanan executive vice president heading up its communications division, says he left the company in early October. He is now a vice president at The Burnham Company of Worcester, which purchased the communication division assets of Buchanan Enterprises from TD Banknorth on Oct. 5 according to Sanborn. He declines to comment on what happened to the Buchanan Electric empire.
Sanborn had joined Buchanan Electric in 2002 when the company bought his Manchaug-based commercial voice and data firm, AcuLan Performance Cabling. Buchanan Electric, which James Buchanan started in the back of a pick-up truck in Worcester in 1992 and grew to $1.5 million in revenue three years later, was WBJ’s No. 1 Top Growth company in 2005.
Christina Strickler, president and founder of The Burnham Co., located at 35 Armory St., confirms she started her company, which specializes in network infrastructure and cable installation, after buying Buchanan Electric assets from TD Banknorth. Burnham, which has 20 employees, also hired the employees formerly in the Buchanan communication division, she says.
SEC records indicate that Buchanan Electric and its subsidiaries were about to be bought out by Texas-based company, RPM Advantage, under a May 2006 purchase and sales agreement. The deal called for RPM, which is incorporated in Nevada and is a provider of wireless and fixed-based information delivery services in the security industry, to acquire all outstanding shares of stock in Buchanan in exchange for 1 million shares of RPM, valued at $17 million. Buchanan Electric would have become a wholly owned subsidiary of RPM and was to operate out of Houston, TX and Buchanan’s Uxbridge facility.
A spokesman for RPM said last week that the deal did not go through. Neither RPM’s public relations office nor its CEO Robert Pressler had returned phone calls at press time to supply more details on the scrapped deal.
SEC filing of Buchanan Electric’s financials show it had refinanced its outstanding lines of credit with TD Banknorth in June of 2005 requiring interest-only monthly payments. TD Banknorth would not comment on whether it had called Buchanan’s loans.
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