Updated 4/2/12 at 4:39 p.m.
Transfer Technology International Corp. (TTIC) has signed a letter of intent to acquire Royalty Lawn & Landscaping Inc., a full-service landscape company in the Tampa Bay area. Terms will be disclosed after closing. Upon closing, Royalty will become a wholly owned subsidiary of TTIC.
TTIC, which recently announced that it would undergo a name change to Enviro-Serv Inc. and enter a new strategic direction, plans to build a portfolio of businesses in the Southeast that offer year-round services, such as pest control management, lawn and landscaping care, pool maintenance, air conditioning/refrigeration installation and repairs through an “aggressive acquisition strategy.”
Christoph Trina, chairman and CEO of TTIC, based in Tampa, Fla., told Landscape Management he hopes the company will have 10 firms “locked and loaded” as wholly owned subsidiaries of Enviro-Serv by the year’s end. The acquisitions may come from any of the industries the holding company is targeting, but the pest and landscape markets are of particular interest to Trina, who served as president of X-Terminate Inc., a pest management firm that operated for five years in Florida until it was shuttered in November 2012 to focus on this new business model.
Trina said property maintenance businesses are attractive because they can thrive year-round in warm climates. “They’re also highly fragmented and often undercapitalized and may not know how to monetize the business through stock,” he said, noting Enviro-Serv’s wholly owned subsidiaries will retain their management staffs and individual brands, while garnering the benefits of being acquired by stock, having access to capital and cross networking with each other.
“We figure, as a holding company, this model is sound and can hold water,” Trina said. “We’re just starting out, but a lot of smart people have looked at the model and agree and it seems to have a lot of legs.”
