CEO of firm that bought PGT for $3.1B opens up about deal, future

Matt DeSoto didn’t start his CEO tenure 11 years ago at Miter Brands, what’s now one of the largest vinyl, aluminum, and fiberglass window firms in North America, as an acquisition CEO.

Back then, in 2013, the central Pennsylvania-based window business had four manufacturing facilities and some 1,400 employees. Not that DeSoto, whose father worked for a Miter predecessor brand named MI Windows, didn’t see opportunity in growing by acquisition. He did. And the company, he says, looked at a dozen or so acquisition targets. But it waited, mostly, DeSoto says, because he didn’t think Miter was ready. 

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“I wasn't sure if the leadership team had earned the right to acquire a business,” he says. “I thought it might be a little too much for us to handle and (that) we needed to work on our own business a bit.”

DeSoto’s thought process on acquisitions has since shifted — dramatically. It acquired Tacoma, Washington-based Milgard Windows in 2019, which essentially doubled the size of the business, to 5,000 employees and 10 manufacturing sites. It also led to the name MITER, an acronym that stands for Manufacturing, Inspiration, Trust, Experiences and Relationships. 

Then, on March 27, 2024, Miter closed on an even bigger acquisition, one with much deeper impact in Florida and the region: it bought Venice-based PGT Innovations in a $3.1 billion deal that required nine separate offers, and, including dinner meetings, napkin sketches and wouldn’t-it-be-great-chats, went back at least seven years. Miter officials decline to disclose total company revenue figures of the company today. DeSoto says the PGT deal, much like the Milgard purchase, doubled the company’s size, to now some 20 sites and 10,000 employees; PGT posted $1.5 billion in revenue the year prior to being sold.

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DeSoto, in an early December interview, reflected on the deal and looked ahead to the company’s goals, objectives and challenges in 2025. “We have acquired what we thought we acquired and that’s a really great core business,” he says. “There are some integration challenges and we are working through those. We are working right now to earn everyone’s trust. We are learning about each other.” 

Talk about it

One lesson DeSoto says he and the leadership team have learned, or re-learned, with the PGT deal, is to over-communicate — particularly when handling the sensitive topic of layoffs and what will happen with the acquired company’s headquarters. 

One hiccup in particular in that area happened in November, when the company laid off 225 employees at PGT unit NewSouth Windows in Tampa. Those layoffs, the company said in a letter to state and local officials, were “due to a discontinuation of a product line.” DeSoto elaborated on that, saying production of that line makes more sense to do in the company’s Dallas facility, for labor and distribution purposes.

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Miter has also laid off and shuffled positions at its Venice headquarters since the acquisition, with DeSoto saying “we had too many team members for the demand and volume of orders.” 

DeSoto stresses the job cuts were right for the balance sheet but mishandled in the communication department. People found out about the changes through second and third sources, and it left an uncertain and bitter taste, DeSoto says he learned. So much so he flew from Pennsylvania to Venice the week of Thanksgiving to meet with senior PGT leaders and quell anxieties.

Own it

In meeting with those leaders DeSoto says he told them Miter bought PGT not only for its product lines, distribution channels and customer relationships but for its people and their institutional knowledge in the window and doors business in Florida and the Southeast. “I’m not the smartest guy in the room, but I’m smart enough to know that with an acquisition like this of course we’re going to depend on what we have in Venice,” DeSoto says. “We are not leaving Venice. If anything we are going to be putting more investment into Venice. The mistake was not communicating it correctly.”

One way to correct that, DeSoto says, will be to provide more autonomy for the Venice/PGT unit of Miter. That’s how the company handles operations for other units. “We’re going to push management into the hands of the local people,” he says. “We do not believe in a command and control environment.”

The economic environment also concerns DeSoto going into 2025. The window and door market in 2024, he says, was “good but not great” and he’s hoping the market, especially new home starts, picks up significantly in 2025. He’s also on a mission to grow market share for the PGT unit, which, he says, has slipped a bit since the pandemic. That covers product lead time, installation, service and more. “We have the best product in the market,” he says, “but we lost some consumer confidence in us.”