 EBJ
BUSINESS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
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Welcome to EBJ’s annual business achievement awards and executive review issue for 2003. This year’s crop of winners offer some familiar faces and some new medalists, but each recipient merits recognition for performance in what many of our executives continue to characterize as challenging times for the environmental industry. So congratulations to the winners, thanks to all the companies for submitting nominations and see you in San Diego for the official awards ceremony at the Environmental Industry Summit in March.
SMALL FIRMS (<$20 MILLION)
Gold Medal: Panther Technologies for revenue growth of 185% to $9.7 million, accompanied by 250% growth in net profitability. The engineering company’s success in 2003 continues a pattern of growth in revenues and profitability since it was formed in 1999, culminating this year in the firm’s third consecutive appearance on Entrepreneur’s list of Top 100 fastest growing companies in the United States. It’s backlog for 2004 already includes over $10 million in field services for Fortune 500-size companies, in addition to over $1.5 million in projected product sales of its PermeOx Plus, which is a calcium peroxide-based, slow-oxygen-release product for in-situ treatment of dissolved phase hydrocarbon contamination in groundwater.
Silver Medal: Sullivan Environmental Solutions, dba Sullivan Consulting Group, for achieving 3,000% revenue growth over the past two years, earning the company top honors as the San Diego Business Journal’s recognition as the fastest growing company in San Diego. The company has formed key strategic partnerships with Tetra Tech and Jones & Stokes, received a meritorious citation from AEP for its composting technology, and was named the General Services Administration’s Small "Prime Contractor of the Year" for 2003.
Bronze Medal: RJM Waste Equipment Co., a provider of solid-waste handling equipment, for growing revenues to $10 million this year after its launch in May 2002, despite the sluggish state of the economy in general, and the solid waste industry in particular. RJM employs more than 120 associates in 8 States, has designed a complete line of products (some quite innovative in design and resource conservation), has expanded from the east coast to the west coast and has re-tooled and started up more than 100,000 square feet of manufacturing plant capacity in South Carolina, North Carolina and Arizona.
Honorable Mention: A.D. Marble & Co., a woman-owned consulting firm, for 21.4% revenue growth $5.74 million to $6.97 million during the fiscal year ending on November 30, 2003, and for gaining recognition by Zweig-White as one of the "Hot Firms–100 Fastest Growing A/E/C Firms" in 2003 (No. 58) and by the Philadelphia Business Journal as the ninth-ranked firm on its Woman-Owned Businesses list.
Honorable Mention: Environmental Waste Management Associates LLC for increasing the typical property value of sites cleaned up under its two-year-old Secur-It program from $800,000 to $2 million. According to EWMA, many of these clean-ups involved chlorinated solvents and uncertainties that other environmental contractors cannot address on a guaranteed fixed-cost basis because insurers do not regularly insure cleanups under $2 million.
Honorable Mention: Focus Contracting for reaching revenues of $1 million since its startup in May 2003 by Brian Delaney and Eric Likens, former executives of past EBJ Gold Medal award winner Compass Environmental.
Honorable Mention: InteGreyted International LLC for continued success in penetrating international markets through its innovative GlobalNetEHS, a global organization of hundreds of EHS experts managed by InteGreyted as a core element of its global EHS consulting practice. Through GlobalNet, international work now represents approximately 20% of InteGreyted’s total revenue, an average increase of 50% per year over the last three years.
MEDIUM FIRMS (<$100 MILLION)
Gold Medal: S.M. Stoller Corp. for executing a dramatic turnaround over the past several years, growing from 40 employees in the mid-1990s to over 400 employees today. The loss of a major DOE contract in 1995 prompted the exodus of hundreds of employees at the 40-year-old company. Several key employees acquired the company through private funding and initiated a turnaround plan that today has brought Stoller to the $75-million level in annual revenues today. In the past 18 months, Stoller has been awarded nearly $400 million in new contracts, including some of the largest let by DOE to small businesses: multiple contracts for DOE’s Pantex Plant in Texas; a $22-million contract at DOE’s Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site; a $33-million contract at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory’s CERCLA Disposal Facility; prime contractor responsibility, exceeding $128 million, at DOE’s Grand Junction Office; and a $200-million contract at DOE’s Nevada Test Site.
Silver Medal: Cape Environmental for enjoying 135% revenue growth from $14 million in 1999 to $33 million in 2003, and for graduating from the 8(a) Small Disadvantaged Business Certification Program. During 2003, Cape was ranked 124th by ENR and 24th on ZweigWhite’s Hot Firm 2003 list, was recognized as one of the fastest-growing Hispanic-owned firms in the United States, and received six nominations as Small Business Prime Contractor of the Year by its clients. The company recently won one of the prime contracts under the Air Force Center for Environmental Excellence’s $4-billion Worldwide Environmental Restoration and Construction contracting initiative.
Bronze Medal: Delta Environmental Consultants for adding significant new contracts resulting in 100 new hires, acquiring too small companies to expand geographic coverage, and recording the highest gross and net revenues in the company’s history. In addition, Delta continues to enjoy success in its international business through the Delta-managed Inogen Environmental Alliance, a global partnership with seven other firms in Latin America, South America, Europe, and the Far East.
Honorable Mention: Safety and Ecology Corp. for dramatic revenue growth from $670,000 in 1995 to $48.2 million in 2003, being among the first small businesses to form an SBA-approved Mentor Protégé relationship with a disadvantaged business, and sponsoring a "higher education" initiative under which senior management pursues Masters of Business Administration degrees with company assistance.
Honorable Mention: Red Oak Consulting, a Malcolm Pirnie division focused on providing management and information technology consulting services to water and wastewater utilities, for booking more than $30 million in new work for existing and new Malcolm Pirnie clients since its formation in February 2003.
Honorable Mention: MHF Logistical Solutions, a hazardous and radioactive waste transporter, for appearing on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private U.S. firms for three consecutive years.
Honorable Mention: Environmental engineering firm Parametrix for increasing from 350 employees over a year ago to just under 500 employee-owners today and for geographically expanding into Boise, Albuquerque, and Denver.
Honorable Mention: Geologic Services Corp., a 100% employee-owned consulting firm, for extending beyond its Northeast and Mid-Atlantic territory through the establishment of a new California office, and for the continued growth of its sister software firm Perillon (see page 29).
Honorable Mention: BEM Systems Inc., a hazardous waste engineering spin-off of Louis Berger Inc. in 1990, for sustaining 20% annual revenue growth and high margins through implementation of its client-focused Project Management/Quality Control system (PMQCS).
LARGE FIRMS (>$100 MILLION)
Gold Medal: Oakleaf Waste Management LLC for checking in at No. 78 on Inc. magazine’s 2003 list of the fastest-growing private companies. Sales grew 1,800% over the past five years to nearly $200 million, and the Connecticut-based company now offers equipment and waste collection, recycling services, management, contracting and auditing services to more than 70,000 locations in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico and Mexico. In April 2003, Charterhouse Group International invested $30 million of equity capital in Oakleaf stating: "Oakleaf is a very exciting outsourcing business with a strong, highly experienced management team. We see a continuing growth trend within this multibillion niche in the waste services market. This industry’s fragmented nature presents numerous opportunities for future acquisitions."
Silver Medal: Envirocon for achieving 20% revenue growth during 2003, exceeding the $100-million level for the first time. Earnings remained strong in 2003 and will exceed the company plan by 36%; the company has averaged 31% annual growth since 1998. Funded backlog at the end of 2003 was projected to be $200 million–a 60% increase over 2002. In addition, during 2003, Envirocon successfully entered the "Brownfield Remediation/Cost Cap" market by negotiating two projects with a combined value of $100 million. One project includes the turnkey remediation and redevelopment of a former steel mill site in California; the other involves the remediation of a historic sediment repository that resulted in arsenic contamination of a primary drinking water aquifer.
Bronze Medal: Tetra Tech for achieving 17% growth during 2003 despite the global "meltdown" in the telecommunications engineering market. The company also posted a 54% improvement in profit from last year, in spite of a weak private-sector market. Tetra Tech’s historic financial discipline was demonstrated again during 2003, as it purchased two companies with combined annual revenue of $340 million, while only increasing net debt by $20 million from last year. The company joined the billion-dollar club this year, with revenue and funded backlog both surpassing that mark and establishing records for the firm.
Honorable Mention: ENSR International for growing its international business by 32% in net sales last year, and for increasing its international staff by 28%. ENSR now has offices in 17 countries, with strategic partners in seven more, and it has completed environmental projects in over 100 nations worldwide.
Honorable Mention: PBS&J for increasing revenues from $58 million in 1998 to $136 million in 2003, and for taking on major projects in the Everglades and making significant contributions to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Map Modernization Program.
Honorable Mention: Kleinfelder for increasing gross and net revenues in its environmental business by 11%, despite flatness in other areas of its business. The company anticipates that projects associated with perchlorate cleanup will grow from 3% of its gross environmental revenues to 13% next year.
TECHNOLOGY MERIT AWARDS
Awarding medals for environmental technology and environmental information innovation is touchy, given the multitude of applications, systems, and engineered solutions. So, rather than pick winners, EBJ has decided to issue merit awards for those nominations that caught our interest for innovation in products, projects, market penetration or IT applications.
ARI Technologies Inc. for the development of a patented thermochemical conversion technology that was initially applied to the destruction and recycling of asbestos, but has been re-engineered for the destruction of PCBs and other organic wastes, the immobilization of RCRA metals and surrogate radionuclides, and the recovery of lead from lead-based paint (see page 8). During 2004, ARI expects to commission Europe’s first commercial asbestos processing facility.
Thermal Remediation Services, Inc for effectively deploying an innovative in situ thermal remediation technology called Six Phase Heating (SPH), or Electrical Resistance Heating (ERH). The ERH technology has proven effective in dozens of projects at rapidly remediating soil and groundwater impacted by chlorinated solvents and petroleum hydrocarbons, often at NAPL concentrations.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for a variety of innovations, including: FRAMES, a flexible, holistic software approach to understanding how industrial activities affect people and the environment; the Chemical Testing Chamber, which identifies how hard-to-measure chemicals, such as "sticky" semi-volatiles, change in the environment; and a more "fish friendly" culvert test bed that will provide scientifically sound information that can be used to develop better designs for new and retrofitted culverts that can facilitate fish migration (see page 16 of the EBJ Executive Review 2003 issue).
Soil-Therm Equipment Inc. for developing and deploying thermal and catalytic oxidizer systems with the new Jet-Therm combustion burner process technology, which was demonstrated this past year to achieve virtually 100% destruction of VOCs from soil-vapor extraction, multi-phase extraction, and chlorinated emissions control applications.
Exergy Technologies Corporation for developing the Advanced Electrodeionization wastewater recycling technology, which substantially reduces the cost of operating ion exchange resin systems, and the Membrane Electrolysis wastewater recycling system.
Bioscience Inc. for the new Microcat line of products for reducing sewer blockages and odors caused by the buildup of fat, oil and grease (FOG). Microcat products are made up of combinations of bacterial cultures, enzymes, surfactants and other ingredients that are added into grease traps, lift stations, manholes and also at the wastewater treatment plant to break down FOG into carbon dioxide and water.
MBA Polymers Inc. for continuing its deployment of a series of automated mechanical processes for recycling complex mixed plastic wastestreams. MBA says that its systems it require less than one-tenth of the energy to make the same plastics compared to virgin plants, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and can divert billions of pounds of waste from landfills.
Envirologic for extending its work under the U.S. Navy P2 Afloat Initiative in the research and development of new bioremedial wastewater treatment technologies. Under this initiative, Envirologic developed a process using its NavalKleen Microbial Treatment technology to launder oil-soaked wipers and rags, thereby providing procurement savings, waste disposal savings, and submarine interior space redeployment.
Enviroquip, the U.S. licensee for Kubota’s patented submerged membrane bioreactor technology, for receiving orders for ten projects totaling more than $5 million and for being selected as the basis of design on 15 projects with an estimated value of $15 million.
O2Tube Technology Inc. for its patent-pending electrolysis cell, which the company claims as the first device capable of economically delivering oxygen deep into water-saturated silty clays where hydrocarbon contamination lies. The O2Tube pneumatic draft pump creates a recirculation zone around each well, recirculating approximately 35,000 gallons of oxygenated groundwater. The available oxygen causes bacteria to multiply and release enzymes that degrade contaminants like BTEX compounds, polynuclear aromatic compounds, and MTBE.
PROJECT MERIT AWARDS
Black & Veatch for several large design projects involving the implementation of membrane systems in water and wastewater treatment plants. These include: design of the largest ultrafiltration (UF) project in North America, a 70-million-gallon-per-day (mgd) facility in Minneapolis, Minn.; design-build of the largest (20 mgd) U.S. water treatment plant integrating microfiltration (MF) membrane technology with advanced pretreatment processes, in Bakersfield, California; design of a 30-mgd submerged UF system that also incorporates pretreatment coagulation and post-membrane granular activated carbon based on pilot study results, in Scottsdale, Arizona; design and construction support for a reverse osmosis (RO) water softening plant that’s the largest of its kind in Missouri; and the study, design, and construction of the two largest membrane (UF) water treatment facilities in the world–72 and 90 mgd–both in Singapore.
The Louis Berger Group for implementing the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Greenhouse Gas Prevention Program in India, which is designed to provide technical assistance to diverse stakeholders who want to shift to a less emissions-intensive development path. The Berger Team is developing a series of "first-ever" Sustainable Transportation Guidelines, focusing on fuel-switching, vehicle design and transport planning. In developing these guidelines, Berger has worked closely with the city of Hyderabad, which is serving as a demonstration site.
CH2M Hill for optimizing the environmental attributes and performance in a new biomedical research building at Emory University in Atlanta. The building is the first facility of its kind to achieve a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. CH2M Hill has also applied LEED standards for a U.S. Air Force communications and command center, and for the company’s own headquarters in Denver, Colorado.
Marstel-Day LLC, formerly BAHR Environmental Co., for developing recommendations that will allow the Department of Defense to dispose of surplus properties for conservation and historical preservation purposes. The recommendations envisioned a new federal property transfer authority that would permit DOD to convey such surplus real estate to states, political subdivisions of states, or non-profit conservation organizations at no cost. The necessary legislation was enacted, substantially in a form as envisioned by Marstel-Day, in the FY 2003 National Defense Authorization Act.
Schoor DePalma for two awards received in 2003 for environmental projects. The company won the New Jersey Society of Municipal Engineers (NJSME) 2003 Municipal Project of the Year Award for a project in Deptford Township, N.J. Schoor DePalma helped complete a site assessment and cleanup of a contaminated property that was subsequently transformed the property into a state-of-the-art municipal soccer complex for township children. In addition, Schoor DePalma’s client Mount Laurel Township, N.J., was recognized with an award from the New Jersey DEP for its Recreation and Open Space Plan Program, for which Schoor DePalma helped the township obtain Green Acres funding to purchase the land.
IT MERIT AWARDS
EarthSoft for further development and continuing market penetration of its EQuIS environmental data management software. EarthSoft offers a combination of commercial-off-the-shelf software with open source code and data models so that their clients are able to build and modify the applications to their own specific needs. New clients during 2003 for the Massachusetts-based company included EPA regions 3, 4, and 10, the state of Arkansas, and numerous private companies, including BP, British Nuclear Fuels, Glaxo, and Secor. Repeat clients among the consulting and engineering sector included CDM, CH2M Hill, Haley and Aldrich, O’Brien and Gere, Retec, and Tetra Tech. EarthSoft claims that EQuIS is used more than all other commercial software combined for the management of subsurface and soil data.
Environmental Support Solutions (ESS) for capturing $3.5 million in follow-on capital and introducing six new products: Essential Chemical Inventory version 6.0, which tracks inventories of pure chemicals or chemical mixtures and generates SARA Tier I and Tier II reports; Refrigerant Compliance Manager 2003, which facilitates the management of inventories of ozone-depleting chemicals and allows users to import refrigerant equipment data from computerized maintenance management systems; Liability Claims Management Software, which maintains records of accidents relating to third parties, property damage, vehicle accidents and environmental spills; Essential MSDS Manager version 6.0, an Internet-based tool for streamlining MSDS collection and data management; Essential EIS/GEM 8.3, which coordinates the security and management of disaster response and recovery activities; and Essential Performance Manager, which tracks and reports key performance indicators for benchmarking compliance efforts and environmental health and safety goals.
Iconics for releasing ReportWorX, a reporting tool that uses Microsoft.NET technology to push data into Excel worksheets. ReportWorX supports International Language Switching, allowing one report to serve multiple individuals speaking different languages. Data sources include SCADA applications, historians, Microsoft SQL, Access, Oracle, and Plant historians.
About EBJ Business Achievement Awards
EBJ solicited the industry via email, website and word-of-mouth for 200-word nominations for the 2003 EBJ awards. Awards were determined by an internal committee and selected advisory board members. Congratulations to the 2003 winners and EBJ encourages all interested companies to participate next year. (Disclaimer: Company audits were not conducted to verify information or claims submitted with nominations.)
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