INDEPENDENCE, Kansas -- Even as the ink dries on contracts to buy two struggling convenience store and gasoline wholesale chains, Florida billionaire Jeff Greene is finding additional places to invest his money, most notably in discussions to buy into the Tampa Bay hockey team and elsewhere in convenience stores.
"The wholesale basis is on a very low margin," Greene, who purchased the bankrupt Crescent Oil and Appalachian Oil (Appco) chains this summer from Titan Holdings Corp., Texas, told The Miami Herald.
Appco, he said, "took on too much debt" and "[image-nocss] grew very rapidly through expanding to locations that were underperforming." Despite the challenges in both the retail locations and wholesale, Greene said he sees plenty of potential there.
Independence, Kansas-based Crescent Oil's bankruptcy has made way for Greene's new c-store companySunshine Energy LLCto launch a new brand in Kansas City, reported The Kansas City Star. Sunshine Energy purchased most of Crescent Oil's assets and stores for $11 million on September 4. It then bought Appco's 30-or-so c-stores and gasoline contracts for $6.25 million.
"This is ground zero right here in Kansas City where we will roll out this new brand," Bret Berlin, president of Sunshine Energy, told the newspaper. "We want to change the mix, to be community-based, catering to local needs. If the customer wants a particular type of beef jerky we will carry that, a certain energy drink, a coffee flavor. We want to build a relationship."
In the meantime, Berlin said Sunshine Energy is ready to grow some more.
"We only purchased strong assets," Berlin said. "We want to make sure that we are a strong company going into the future and didn't want to purchase any assets that contributed to the downfall of our predecessor."
The acquisitions give Sunshine Energy about 170 c-stores that it owns or operates, and another 100 that it supplies in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia. It hopes to re-brand many of those locations as Sunshine Energy stores in early 2010.
It plans to sell about 200 million gallons of gasoline a year from Shell, Conoco, Phillips 66, Valero, CITGO and Marathon.
Grand Slam Convenience, in downtown Kansas City, is one of 340 stations in six states that Crescent had supplied for nearly a year before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and cutting off fuel shipments for a couple of weeks earlier this year.
Crescent later re-established shipments to Grand Slam, so now Sunshine Energy is technically Grand Slam's middleman. Whether that will continue remains to be seen, said the report.
"We are meeting with Bret on Friday to see if we are going to be able to do business together," Joe Sacco III, owner of Grand Slam, told the paper. "Our sales rep from Crescent went the extra mile. On the other hand, we had so many problems during their bankruptcy...and couldn't use any credit cards for two or three weeks. So we lost a lot of business through that."
Meanwhile, Greene, who was No. 355 on the 2008 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, worth $1.4 billion from real estate and investments, has focused on Tampa Bay, Fla., where the co-owners of the National Hockey League team, the Lightning, have been battling and attempting to buy each other out.
Greene, for whom Mike Tyson served as best man at his wedding in 2007, said he has been talking with co-owner Oren Koules about a deal. "I've really shied away from sports teams. I thought they were just bad investments, and I've always been a bread-and-butter businessman," he said.
But when he was approached about becoming involved with the Lightning, he found "that there could be a good business opportunity."
When asked whether he was a big or little hockey fan, Greene said, "I'm a little hockey fan." His main interest was a business deal.
But then his public relations man, who was on the call, reminded him that he grew up in Massachusetts in the heyday of the Boston Bruins, when superstar Bobby Orr led the team to the Stanley Cup championships. "I loved that," said Greene. "Hockey was a big deal then....and I'm very excited about the possibility of coming in and helping turn this team around."
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