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With transactions like BrightView, the exit strategies are more limited as there are not as many private equity companies with an appetite for a business this large,” Edmonds said.
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“This is a partial exit strategy for KKR & Co. Ron Edmonds, president of The Principium Group, an advisory firm serving the lawn and landscape industry in the areas of mergers & acquisitions and exit planning, said the offering could be a sign that KKR wants to sell BrightView. So, BrightView’s acquisitions alone in just a year combined for enough revenue to be the fifth largest landscaping company. For some perspective on the size of those acquisitions, Gothic Landscape, which ranked 5th on the Top 100 list, generated $182 million revenue last year. The company posted $68 million in 2017 revenue and ranked 19th on the Top 100 list.īrightView included in its filing that it has acquired eight businesses with more than $188.2 million in total revenue since Jan. BrightView especially has been active, making a number of acquisitions, most recently scooping up Environmental Earthscapes, a Tucson, Arizona-based firm that operates as The Groundskeeper. In the past few years, mergers and acquisitions activity has been high in the green industry, which you can read more about here. The $100 million does nothing to pay down debt.” It’s more capital to invest in acquisitions. “Or there will quickly be a secondary offering. “The $100 million is testing the IPO waters and my guess is will get amended for a much higher amount,” he said. While ServiceMaster, former parent company to what is now LandCare, was a public company before being taken private in 2007, BrightView will be the first pure-play, publicly-traded commercial landscape service company in the U.S., Corbett said.īrightView has filed for an IPO of $100 million but Fochtman said that could grow.
Brightview landscape registration#
The company did not comment beyond a statement confirming the filing. You can read the S1 registration here. “The IPO validates the tremendous investment made by KKR and other private equity groups in the sector over the last five years.” “I think this is incredibly positive news for KKR and BrightView as well as for the commercial landscape industry,” said Brian Corbett, founder and managing partner of CCG Advisors, an investment banking firm based in Georgia and Tennessee that specializes in the commercial landscape industry. MSD is still a minority shareholder of BrightView according to the SEC statement. The company, based in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, employs 22,000 people.įormed in 2014 when KKR, parent company of Brickman, acquired Valle圜rest from Michael Dell’s MSD Capital, the combined companies rebranded as BrightView in 2016. “Having a publicly owned company, owned by both individual and institutional investors, shines a very bright light on our profession,” he said.īrightView reported a revenue of $2.3 billion in revenue last year, making it the highest grossing landscape company in North America and No. “A successful IPO and ultimately a publicly owned company puts landscaping on the map in a big way."įochtman said it was one thing to have private equity firms investing in the green industry, but BrightView’s move adds to the number of eyes on landscaping. “In the big picture, this totally legitimizes the green industry and profession,” said Tom Fochtman, founder of Ceibass Venture Partners, an investment banking firm based in Denver. And some industry insiders say the move is a positive for the landscaping and lawn care world. With news of BrightView filing for an IPO yesterday, it makes official what has been widely speculated throughout the industry – the company going public.
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