DES MOINES, Iowa — Convenience-store retailer Yesway, which acquired the Allsup’s Convenience Stores Inc. chain last year, is closing its Des Moines, Iowa, headquarters and its Allsup’s corporate office in Clovis, N.M., and opening a new headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, Yesway CEO Tom Trkla said in a statement provided to CSP Daily News. Despite closing the Clovis office, the company plans to expand its presence in New Mexico.
- Tom Trkla is one of CSP’s 2020 Power 20.
Yesway has come a long way since 2016 when it acquired more than 150 c-stores in Iowa, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming. In November 2019, Yesway acquired Allsup’s—the largest acquisition in its history—and jumped from 150 to 421 stores in one transaction. The move also catapulted Yesway up more than 20 spots in CSP’s annual Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by number of retail outlets. Yesway is No. 17 on the 2020 Top 202 list.
Following the acquisition of Allsup’s, “we are taking an important step forward in realizing our vision of operating as one company,” Trkla said. “We will be establishing a new headquarters office location in Fort Worth, Texas, where we will align our teams and collaborate in the same space.”
Along with the Des Moines and Clovis offices, Yesway is also closing its Abilene, Texas, office. It will keep its Beverly, Mass., office open for corporate shared services. BW Gas & Convenience Holdings LLC, doing business as Yesway, is an affiliate of Beverly-based Brookwood Financial Partners, a real estate and private equity investment and asset management company.
“We believe co-locating team members in central workspaces is crucial to accomplishing our long-term goals and to creating opportunities for the type of collaboration and improved operational efficiency across and within our teams to position us for sustained growth into the future,” Trkla said.
“We will have a huge continued commitment to the state of New Mexico and will always have a presence in Clovis,” he said. The company will establish a new satellite office in Clovis, relocating from the existing building that is owned by the Allsup’s, but which was not part of the acquisition, to a Yesway-owned location near an Allsup’s store.
“Over the course of the next few years, we plan to invest over $30 million in replacing existing older and smaller footprint stores with new 5,000-square-foot stores and adding new stores to markets in which we currently have a presence, such as Vaughn, Roswell, Alamogordo, Gallup, Honda and Ruidoso,” he said. “Each new store that we add to a community will result in the creation of approximately 10 new jobs.”
Trkla said the company will help dislocated employees. “We understand moving and closing several of our corporate offices will mean disruption to our teams and their lives,” he said. “We have not made these decisions lightly and we appreciate and value everyone’s contributions. We are committed to treating all our employees with care and respect during this transition, which we anticipate will include further reductions and take place in several phases over the course of the year. We are supporting those employees who will not make the move to our new Fort Worth headquarters, many of whom were offered the opportunity to do so and declined due to personal reasons, with career outplacement assistance to help them find their next opportunity.”
Yesway sent a letter to Curry County, N.M., Commission Chairman Ben McDaniel notifying him of the decision to move, according to a report by The Eastern New Mexico News.
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