Announcing the 2024 Best Post-Transaction Performance Awards Recipients

Announcing the 2024 Best Post-Transaction Performance Awards Recipients

Introduction and context: The 2024 Best Post-Transaction Performance Awards will be presented at the Texas and the South M&A and Business Symposium in Houston in a few weeks. These are the third of the three annual awards in our Excellence in Acquisitive Growth Awards series designed to recognize the most accomplished acquirers in the AE and environmental industry. The Best Post-Transaction Performance Awards specifically recognize those acquirers that have delivered the most meaningful positive business impacts through their acquisitions.

We created the Awards series for two reasons. First, to recognize those acquirers that are leading the way in improving how consolidation happens in our industry. Second, as a way to share best practices so that collectively the industry achieves better outcomes from M&A in terms of client satisfaction, employee engagement, and value for investors.

Industry consolidation continues at a transformational pace of over 450 transactions a year. So, it’s in the best interests of all industry stakeholders—project owners and firm shareholders, managers, and employees—that consolidation takes place in an excellent manner, creating greater value, more reliability in operations, enhanced client service, and improved resource allocation.

Performance defined: This Award establishes the only industry objective benchmark to assess post-transaction performance—the Acquisition Performance Indicator (API). The API takes a holistic view of an acquisition—it does not focus just on financial indicators. Rather, it assesses performance in the areas of revenue, profit, backlog, and voluntary turnover in the 12 months following the date of a transaction. The revenue and profit elements indicate top- and bottom-line improvements—and speak to return on investment. The backlog element is an indicator of sales and marketing improvements. The voluntary turnover element reflects improvements in employee engagement and a direct reflection of integration success. 

Ideally, acquirers seek to achieve a positive API with each acquisition. And in a perfect world, each contributing factor (revenues, profits, backlog, and voluntary turnover) would show a positive result. However, for the second year in a row, only half of the applications for the Award logged positive outcomes in each of the four contributing factors. This goes to show just how difficult it is to get everything pointed in the right direction in the first year post-transaction.

We would like to thank all of the firms that submitted applications for this year’s Award, and we recognize them for their pursuit of excellence in acquisitive growth. Their intentional commitment to improved performance will result in better outcomes for project owners, firm shareholders, managers, and employees. 

The 2024 Award recipients: This Award has three different size categories, recognizing the meaningful variations that exist in the post-transaction performance environments for large, medium, and small acquisitions. The first size category is for acquisitions of over $50 million in revenue, the second is for acquisitions of between $10 and $50 million, and the third is for acquisitions up to $10 million. The Award recipients in each size category are as follows:

• $50 million-plus: The Award recipient in this category is Tetra Tech (Pasadena, CA) (ENR #3) for its January 2023 acquisition of the UK’s RPS Group. Tetra Tech is one of the industry’s most accomplished acquirers, having made 57 acquisitions domestically and overseas since 2007. Last year’s Award recipient in this category was TRC (Windsor, CT) (ENR #16). 
• $10 million to $50 million: Tetra Tech is also the Award recipient in this category for its July 2019 acquisition of another UK firm, WYG. Of Tetra Tech’s 57 acquisitions since 2007, 18 have been overseas. Last year’s Award recipient in this size category was Salas O’Brien (Irvine, CA) (ENR #39).
• Less than $10 million: The Award recipient in this category is 100% employee-owned KCI Technologies (Sparks, MD) (ENR #56) for its July 2020 acquisition of Hulsey McCormick & Wallace (HMW), headquartered in South Carolina. KCI has made 20 acquisitions in the United States since 2008. Last year’s Award recipient in this size category was Englobe (Montreal, Canada).

We congratulate the corporate development and integration teams at both Tetra Tech and KCI for their commitment to excellence in acquisitive growth. In recognition, Morrissey Goodale will be making a $1,000 donation to an AE industry-related 501(c)(3) organization to be chosen by each of the firms. 

In next week’s Word on the Street, we’ll be reporting the lessons learned from the cumulative dataset of 2024 Best Post-Transaction Performance Awards applications. 

Connections and sharing best practices: You can network with and discuss M&A best practices with corporate development and integration executives from Tetra Tech, KCI, and other Excellence in Acquisitive Growth Awards recipients at the Texas and the South M&A and Business Symposium in Houston on October 16-18. 

To contact Mick Morrissey, you can email him at [email protected] or call/text at 508.380.1868.