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TRANSACT IONS FIRST RESERVE ANNOUNCES ACQUISITION OF CHA CONSULTING, INC. FROM LONG POINT CAPITAL First Reserve announced the acquisition of CHA Consulting, Inc. from Long Point Capital. CHA provides a wide range of design, engineering, and consulting services to customers across a variety of end markets including utility infrastructure, energy, industrial, transportation, environmental, facilities, water, sports, and aviation. Founded in 1952, CHA is a highly diversified, full-service engineering firm with a broad range of capabilities and a talented team of more than 1,000 employees. The company has cultivated a loyal, recurring base of public and private customers with a geographic presence across the U.S. and Canada and a client focus driven by trust and collaboration. Jeff Quake, managing director at First

Reserve, commented, “The investment in CHA is a continuation of our theme of investing in middle-market growth companies that we believe will benefit from long-term macro trends including the upgrade and replacement of aging infrastructure across the United States and Canada. We are pleased to partner with CHA management to grow the business and deliver its full suite of service offerings to all of its diversified end markets.” Mike Carroll, president and CEO of CHA, added, “This is an extremely exciting time for us at CHA. After a long and highly successful relationship with our previous financial partner, Long Point Capital, we are excited to begin this new venture with First Reserve. First Reserve has 35 years of proven operational excellence and investment expertise and has amassed significant market knowledge and

relationships. This investment validates the successful results of CHA’s strategy to be a leader across the markets we serve and be an acquirer of choice. This new partnership will allow CHA to continue to serve our clients with the same focus and attention for which we are known and help us to recognize our strategic growth goals. Our employees are committed to CHA’s future, which is represented by deep ownership within our management team.” “It has been a pleasure working with the CHA management team,” said Ira Starr, managing director at Long Point Capital. “The company has developed into a full-service engineering firm while maintaining its client-focused business model, and we are confident the company will continue to flourish with its new financial partners.”

CONFERENCE CALL, from page 7

night. Through the process of adjusting to the new “lower for longer,” we really learned our business, our market and what was important to our clients, stakeholders, and em- ployees. We also saw it as an opportunity of a lifetime to make acquisitions and pivot to new services/markets. “When clients/friends see what we post and comment to colleagues, or know who we are before we walk through the door, marketing is doing its job – generating awareness and interest.” TZL: While M&A is always an option, there’s something to be said about organic growth. What are your thoughts on why and how to grow a firm? GG: Even if you’re making acquisitions, it doesn’t pay out unless you grow the firm you acquired. Our presidents fo- cus on growing their respective groups organically, but also through synergy between the groups to help gain more mar- ket share, vertically integrate, and also bring our expertise to each to help entry into new markets. TZL: Do you use historical performance data or metrics to establish project billable hours and how does the type of contract play into determining the project budget? GG: Yes. We switched to an ERP system and this has giv- en our leadership a lot more data than we had before. With the oil price, our clients went from being schedule driven to cost driven. Using past project man-hours, we can become more accurate on project budgeting based on variables such as project tonnage or number of control loops. TZL: What’s your prediction for 2018? GG: The upstream oil and gas market for deep-water is trending in the right direction. Last year was our worst year of the downturn, while 2018 will be a return to growth and profitability. Our backlog is now reaching levels we’ve seen before.

program to develop business acumen and future leaders so we can grow. TZL: Measuring the effectiveness of marketing is diffi- cult to do using hard metrics for ROI. How do you evalu- ate the success/failure of your firm’s marketing efforts when results could take months, or even years, to mate- rialize? Do you track any metrics to guide your market- ing plan? GG: Most of our tracking KPIs and monitoring is done dur- ing specific marketing campaigns. Marketing campaigns al- low us to see how effective our campaign efforts are. We can measure how effective LinkedIn is at bringing traffic to the website and generating awareness for the specific service. Success with marketing is typically through word of mouth. When clients/friends see what we post and comment to col- leagues, or know who we are before we walk through the door, marketing is doing its job – generating awareness and interest – especially when other avenues besides Google searches are bringing people to the website or when a new client contacts us. As far as measuring lead generation, the only path we currently have is if someone contacts us through the website. “Ownership is the key ingredient for our business. We do this via restricted stock grants and options. The plan was developed more than five years ago and is still in progress.” TZL: They say failure is a great teacher. What’s the big- gest lesson you’ve had to learn the hard way? GG: The oil price crash was a big wake-up call for GATE. We had 15 years of continuous growth. All we had experi- ence with was a business that was growing. Our clients quit spending about 60 percent of their capital budgets over-

THE ZWEIG LETTER June 4, 2018, ISSUE 1251

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