September 10, 2026
SESCO Lighting Expands Into Virginia With Acquisition
The Thomas Harris & Co. deal extends a multistate expansion years in motion
For a lighting agency that has operated independently for nearly seventy years, Thomas Harris & Co. is about to undergo the biggest change in its history: becoming part of something much larger than itself.
SESCO Lighting announced it will acquire Thomas Harris & Co., a Virginia-based lighting and controls specification agency, effective January 1, 2027. Founded in 1958 and led for the past 34 years by Steve Clarke and Nancy Clarke, Thomas Harris has spent nearly seven decades as an independent agency serving distributors, contractors, engineers, architects, and end users in Virginia. According to SESCO's announcement, the Thomas Harris team will continue serving Virginia customers while drawing on SESCO's broader resources and manufacturer portfolio.
The Thomas Harris acquisition extends SESCO's geography into the Mid-Atlantic for the first time, a region the company has not previously touched. Genlyte Solutions, Signify's core lighting line, is SESCO's primary manufacturer partner in nearly every market it serves, and the company has a track record of acquiring its way into a state first and picking up the Genlyte line second.
For context, when SESCO acquired The Schneider Company in South Carolina in 2021, Schneider didn't carry Genlyte; SESCO got the line there afterward. The same pattern played out in Kentucky: SESCO entered the state through its 2025 acquisition of Engineered Lighting Sales, which didn't hold Genlyte either, and picked up the territory rights about a year later when Signify realigned them away from LightSpec.
Thomas Harris currently carries Current GLI, not Genlyte Solutions; Old Dominion holds the Genlyte territory in Virginia today. Whether Virginia becomes a third instance of the same pattern is a question for later, not this announcement. What is confirmed is scale: with the addition, SESCO now counts more than 650 employees across 12 states, 34 offices, and 10 resource divisions.
SESCO CEO John Palk and Steve Clarke both offered comments in the release, the kind that accompany most acquisition announcements: a nod to the acquired firm's history, an assurance of continuity for customers, a statement of shared values between buyer and seller. What matters more than the language is where this deal sits in a pattern that has been building since 2022.
A Familiar Shape
SESCO has spent the past several years converting a regional agency into a multistate operator through repeated acquisition.
- It absorbed WHOCO Lighting & Controls and The Schneider Company in the Carolinas in 2021 and 2022, then staffed into Arkansas and Louisiana organically in 2023.
- It picked up Engineered Lighting Sales in Kentucky in early 2025.
- Then two Texas deals in summer of 2025: ERT Lighting, which brought 36 employees and central and south Texas coverage out of Austin and San Antonio, and NEXGEN Lighting Solutions, which added 35 employees and a foothold in the Dallas-Fort Worth market out of Carrollton.
- Smith Lighting Sales in Oklahoma City followed in late 2025.
Each move added territory, and, as the pattern below shows, several eventually added a manufacturer line as well.
What It Means for the Channel
The Thomas Harris deal is less notable for its size than for its direction. SESCO's footprint now stretches from Florida and Virginia west through all of Oklahoma and much of Texas, enough contiguous territory to give the company real regional weight layered on top of dozens of local markets. The “SE” in SESCO originally stood for Southeast. With Virginia added, that territory is essentially complete, and the company's growth has seeped into the South Central U.S.
That scale is the point: SESCO can operate like a local agency in each market while supporting manufacturers regionally, coordinating stocking, staffing, and specification support across state lines in a way a single-market agency can't. For Genlyte Solutions specifically, whose Signify-owned brands SESCO already carries in several of these states, that scale cuts both ways, even where, as in Virginia today, SESCO doesn't yet hold the line.
This one agency can now touch markets encompassing approximately one-third of the U.S. population. That can mean efficient, well-resourced coverage everywhere it reaches. It can also mean a manufacturer's fortunes across a large swath of the country ride on one agency. And if there comes a day when Genlyte and Cooper Lighting Solutions ever combine, that will spur a different type of reckoning.
Lighting is still a local business. SESCO and the other mega-reps consolidating the channel have stayed focused on staffing and market-level coverage rather than treating scale as a substitute for it.
For lighting people in the Mid-Atlantic, the immediate effect is a new name behind a familiar office. The harder question, as with every SESCO deal before it, is what changes once the transition ends and the acquired agency's line card starts to move.
