Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center recently inked a multimillion-dollar, long term deal with Bernhard LLC to design, build, operate and manage a new high efficiency energy system that will heat, cool and monitor energy usage on the hospital’s 1.2-million-square-foot campus.
Though a nondisclosure agreement prevents Bernhard officials from discussing deal specifics, company CEO Steve Nathanson tells Business Report it’s “one of the biggest contracts in the state that would rival anything on a national scale.” For its part, OLOL estimates the deal will enable the hospital to save $2 million a year on its utility bill.
Bernhard’s deal with OLOL is not unique. Increasingly, the three-year-old company—created by Jim Bernhard’s private equity firm, Bernhard Capital Partners—is taking on ever-more ambitious projects in the field of energy services and solutions for a growing list of well-known clients. Among them: St. Jude Hospital in Memphis, the new $1 billion terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, and Disney World.
This month, the company is rebranding, rolling out a new website and a new name—Bernhard Energy Solutions—to better reflect what it does and where it wants to focus its growth.
So far, the growth has been impressive. The company has more than 2,000 employees in 27 offices across the country, and revenues have increased more than 17% annually. By the end of 2018, Nathanson expects revenues to be “well over $500 million,” though not yet $1 billion, and the company’s backlog to be nearly $2 billion.
“My vision is to bring another Fortune 500 company to Baton Rouge,” he says.
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