STL Distribution North America (STLD) looks set to change hands by the end of the year in a management buyout.

A six-strong executive leadership team at the Elizabethton, Tenn.-based wholesaler is preparing a bid for the company following an 11th-hour withdrawal by an anticipated purchaser.

The leaders at the distributor—with annual revenues of around $40 million—had expected to introduce the new owners at STLD’s Fall Invitational weekend, which drew representatives of leading retail accounts from 14 states and Canada. Instead they found themselves announcing that they were pursuing funding to take over the operations from the owner, global nonprofit ministry Biblica.

STLD President Glenn Bailey (pictured) said that the anticipated purchase—to an interest outside the Christian products industry that has not been identified—had fallen through earlier in the month because of “complexities of the transaction,” but that he did not know the details behind the backing out of the deal.

STLD was put up on the block last year after Biblica—which had acquired the operation in a 2007 merger between STLD’s parent company, Send The Light, and the International Bible Society—decided that the retail service did not fit with its global Bible publishing and distribution ministry programs.

Founded in 1974 as Appalachian Bible Co., the business’s name was changed to STL Distribution North America in 2005 when it was acquired by U.K.-based Send The Light.

Of his team’s invitation by Biblica to submit an offer Bailey said: “There is no deal, there is no financing, there is no agreement by the board to accept any deal, but there’s a commitment that we will work together to try to work out an arrangement by the end of the year.”

Announcing the development to retailers at the invitational, Bailey said that with a total of 150 years in the Christian products industry and 75 of them at STLD and Appalachian Distributors, the leadership team was well equipped to take over the business.

“We have no illusions about how difficult it is to operate profitably in the Christian supply chain,” he said. “We are not naïve about the difficult challenges that we face.” But he believed that “a healthy, competitive STL is good for the Christian supply chain,” he said. “It’s good for you. I don’t think you want to live in a world where there is only one wholesale distributor.”

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