Ardurra Group: Advancing Industry M&A Best Practices

Ardurra Group: Advancing Industry M&A Best Practices

We’re delighted to announce that the recipient of this year’s M&A Best Practices Award is Ardurra Group (Miami, FL) (ENR #75).

Overview: Ardurra Group can trace its founding to 2017 when private equity firm RTC Partners (New York, NY) began acquiring several engineering firms across the Southeast and Gulf Coast. Ardurra, based in Metairie, Louisiana, was the third firm acquired. Since then, the firm has grown rapidly to over 1,850 employees with offices in 22 states and Puerto Rico and revenues of over half a billion dollars. Ardurra serves multiple national markets, including water/wastewater/water resources, transportation, public works, environmental, and aviation with a multi-disciplinary portfolio of services. The firm is backed by Littlejohn & Co. (Greenwich, CT), an integrated private equity and special situations investor focused on North American middle-market industrial and services companies.

M&A Credentials: Ardurra has completed 26 acquisitions, so the firm’s leadership and management team know a thing or two about how to make and—importantly—how to integrate acquisitions. Ernesto Aguilar, PE, the firm’s president and CEO, has been at the helm from the early days and continues to play a critical role in each and every acquisition the firm makes, with a particular emphasis on the candidate courtship/management phase.

M&A Best Practice Described: Indeed, the best practice that Ardurra management chose to highlight in their application for this year’s M&A Best Practices Award pertained to candidate courtship and management. Management believes that when considering M&A, it’s essential to adopt a structured approach. Ardurra employs a simple, yet from their perspective, highly effective framework for evaluating potential acquisitions. They refer to this internally as the “3F Rule.”

This framework consists of three key factors (printed and edited with permission by Ardurra management)…Read more