LPG Spotlight: Acorn LPG

Anyone who’s run a business knows that it keeps you busy. Now imagine running a business while enrolled in college full time. Sounds like a lot, right?

That’s the life of Seth Dimacchia, owner of Acorn LPG in Ravenna, Ohio, and business student at Cleveland State University.

Dimacchia’s father, Jason, founded Acorn in 2004 after working in the propane industry for over 20 years. Growing up, Dimacchia always wanted to join his father’s business and, eventually, take it over from him.

“But it came on a little quicker than I had hoped,” Dimacchia says.

Once his father’s health started to decline amid his battle with dementia, Dimacchia realized he’d have to step in much sooner than he expected.

“Back in 2020, we all kind of sat down – me, my mother and my father – and we realized that he was kind of losing his way, and we needed to start checking into his health,” Dimacchia recalls. “And my father even looked at me and said, ‘I need help in the business.’”

So, fresh out of high school, Dimacchia took over Acorn in 2020, and it was like “drinking from a fire hose.”

“I didn’t know the propane industry. I really didn’t know what I was really getting into,” he explains. “It took a good year-and-a-half to two years to really get everything organized and understand what the deal was with our customer base and everything like that. There was a lot of cleaning up to do and modernizing.”

One of the first areas Dimacchia modernized was the company’s website, which was “right out of the early 2000s” and “really hard to look at.”

Dimacchia has also modernized the business through implementing Otodata sensors to help with tank filling and by automating customer orders in a way that generates reports, schedules and routes on his computer as soon as a customer places an order on the company website.

However, there’s one part of the business Dimacchia has no desire to automate: customer service.

Since Dimacchia’s father started the company, Acorn has been dedicated to being customer oriented. For Dimacchia, part of that is always having a human – not a robot or artificial intelligence – answering the phone.

“We take great pride in [customers] being able to reach us at the phone,” Dimacchia explains.

Although phone calls with customers take up a lot of time, to Dimacchia, that is time well spent, and he says his customers value that service.

Set to graduate college soon with a Bachelor of Business Administration and a minor in accounting, Dimacchia is going to have more free time on his hands, but he doesn’t intend for it to stay that way.

Instead, Dimacchia plans to focus more energy on Acorn, increasing his working hours, growing the business, developing its commercial and industrial customer base, hiring more employees and, throughout it all, honoring his father’s legacy.

“I really would just like to give praise to my father and what he started for me and our family,” he says. “He sacrificed a lot over the years, and unfortunately, tragically, passed away and didn’t get to see the fruits of his labor. So, I’m just very grateful that he built this company for us and that I’ve been given this opportunity to run this company.”

Company profile: Acorn LPG

Year founded // 2004
Headquarters // Ravenna, Ohio
Founder // Jason Dimacchia
Owner // Seth Dimacchia
Bobtails // 2
Annual gallon sales // 250,000
Employees // 2

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