Trinity Hunt Launches Industrial Maintenance and Repair Platform

Trinity Hunt Partners has formed Steadpoint Industrial Services, a new industrial maintenance and repair platform, through an investment in Northline Industrial, a Michigan-based repairer of factory robots and other production equipment, marking the first institutional capital for the founder-owned business.

Northline Industrial fixes the machines that keep factories moving. When an industrial robot, a servo motor, a welding power supply, or a computer-controlled machine tool fails on a plant floor, Northline diagnoses the fault, replaces the failed parts, and returns the unit tested and warrantied — typically at a fraction of the cost of buying new.

Northline also sells remanufactured and new equipment when a repair is not worthwhile, and it dispatches technicians to customer sites for on-location troubleshooting through its field service group. Its customers are manufacturers and distributors, along with the maintenance and purchasing managers who keep their production lines running, across the automotive and general industrial base of the upper Midwest and Southeast.

Northline operates through five brands. Robot World Automation handles robotics repair, field service, programming, and complete rebuilds; Talentline Services places industrial labor through staffing and outsourced-workforce arrangements; Northline South, acquired in 2019 and based in Bowling Green, Kentucky, specializes in welding machines and weld-process equipment; McBroom Industrial Services, an Indianapolis operation acquired in 2020, adds precision spindle repair, machining, and AC/DC motor rebuilds; and Northline NC, out of Winston-Salem, extends the company’s electronics and robotics repair into the Southeast.

Northline is a factory-authorized repair center for Lincoln Electric and Miller welding equipment — along with ESAB, Victor, Fronius, OTC Daihen, Nasarc, and Tregaskiss — performs complete system testing including load-bank and live-weld testing, and includes a detailed service report with every repair.

Northline was co-founded in 2006 by Chuck Baase and its technicians average more than 19 years of repair experience. The company serves more than 375 customers a year across locations in Michigan, Indiana, and North Carolina. Northline is headquartered in Detroit.

“The people who have grown with Northline over the past 20 years are what make this business what it is,” said Mr. Baase. “We wanted a partner who not only understood our business, but who genuinely cared about the people who make it run. This is exactly what we found in Trinity Hunt Partners, and we are excited about what this partnership makes possible.”

To lead the platform’s next phase, Trinity Hunt has installed two executives with buy-and-build backgrounds. Courtney Pernat joins Steadpoint as chief financial officer. She was most recently CFO of Summit Companies, a fire and life-safety business assembled through dozens of acquisitions under a succession of private equity owners; during her tenure the company was held by BlackRock Long Term Private Capital, and she helped guide it through its 2025 sale to BDT & MSD Partners. Ross Morgan joins as chief development officer after heading the mergers-and-acquisitions function at Mariani Premier Group, a residential landscaping platform backed by CI Capital Partners. Both platforms trace to CI Capital’s buy-and-build playbook — the firm assembled Summit before its 2021 sale and acquired Mariani in 2020 — giving Steadpoint two executives versed in acquisition-led growth.

The market Steadpoint is entering is both large and stubbornly fragmented. The U.S. maintenance, repair, and operations market was worth roughly $93.2 billion in 2025 and is on track for about $94.7 billion in 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence, with industrial MRO the biggest slice at about 45 percent of the total. Growth is steady rather than dramatic — a compound annual rate in the low single digits through the early 2030s — but demand is durable, tied to industrial automation, aging equipment, and a rising premium on keeping plants reliable.

Fragmentation is the defining feature. The typical U.S. industrial facility buys MRO products and services from more than 120 separate vendors, and the supplier base is a patchwork of a few large distributors alongside thousands of small, regional repair and field-service shops. That structure is what makes the sector attractive to a buyer willing to consolidate it.

For Trinity Hunt, Northline offers a recurring, relationship-driven revenue base — plants that come back for the same repairs year after year — and a technical workforce that is hard to replicate. The firm intends to grow Steadpoint through both acquisitions and organic initiatives, layering a more institutional sales engine onto Northline’s relationship-based approach while it pursues repair-and-maintenance companies across the country. The platform fits Trinity Hunt’s long-running pattern of backing founder-owned services businesses and building them into national operators.

“Automation and advanced manufacturing are driving growing, consistent, and recurring demand for industrial MRO services, and we saw a clear opportunity to build a national platform in this space,” said Garrett Greer, a partner at Trinity Hunt Partners. “Northline has built a proven business anchored by mission-critical MRO capabilities, technical expertise, and an unwavering commitment to its people. That combination provides an exceptional foundation for the platform’s next phase of growth through this investment.”

Trinity Hunt invests from $15 million to $70 million of equity in founder- and family-owned companies that have revenues of at least $10 million and EBITDA of at least $2 million. Sectors of interest include business services, healthcare services, and consumer services. In February 2024, the firm held an oversubscribed closing of Trinity Hunt Partners VII LP at its hard cap, with $700 million of capital commitments.