The family of companies under the umbrella of local private equity firm Bernhard Capital Partners is expanding again. Lafayette-based ATC Group Services, a full service environmental consulting and industrial hygiene company and one of four BCP portfolio companies, has announced it will acquire Environmental Compliance Services of Agawam, Massachusetts.
Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the next two weeks, were not disclosed.
The acquisition will expand ATC’s footprint nationally, giving the company a presence in nearly all 50 states and increasing its employees from 1,700 to more than 1,900 across more than 100 locations nationwide.
ATC specializes in environmental consulting and engineering, industrial hygiene, construction materials testing and inspections, leak detection and monitoring. ECS, which was founded in 1982, provides a range of similar services, and was particularly strong in the northeast, the one area of the country where ATC lacked a robust presence, ATC CEO Bobby Toups says.
“This was really a geographic acquisition to give us more coverage into upper New England,” he says. “We felt we needed a little stronger presence in the petroleum storage tank side of the business and they give us that presence up there.”
The acquisition is the third for ATC this year. In April, it acquired Sage Environmental Consulting, which specializes in environmental engineering and technical consulting services, and Dexter Field Services, which provides leak detection and repair, monitoring and other specialized technical environmental services. With the ECS acquisition, Toups expects company revenues to grow from $183 million to more than $240 million.
“Having worked closely with ATC in the past, I am confident that they are the best partner to accelerate our growth moving forward as we expand into new markets,” says ECS President and CEO Mark Hellstein in a prepared statement.
ATC is one of four portfolio companies created by BCP, an energy focused private equity firm that has raised more than $750 million in capital commitments from institutional investors around the world.
The firm was established in 2013 by Jim Bernhard and several of his top executives from The Shaw Group after that company was sold to CB&I. Read a Business Report cover story on BCP from earlier this year.
—Stephanie Riegel
