Blue Sage Capital has sold Frontier Waste Solutions to an investment group led by Concentric Equity Partners and Summer Street Capital Partners.
In April 2017, Blue Sage partnered with John Gustafson and Trailcreek Capital Group to form Frontier Waste to acquire Texas-based Access Disposal Services and K2 Waste Solutions. This initial platform was followed by numerous add-on acquisitions including Midwest Waste Services (Azle, Texas); Panther City Disposal (Fort Worth, Texas); Riata Disposal (Dripping Springs, Texas); H&L Rural Trash (Cleburne, Texas); Triple H Dumpster Service (Liberty, Texas); and certain assets of Waste Connections (College Station, Texas).
Today, Dallas-headquartered Frontier Waste is a provider of municipal solid waste services to the municipal, residential, commercial, and industrial markets. Frontier has 14 operating locations throughout Texas and serves the Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, and Texoma metropolitan areas.
“Without Blue Sage’s able assistance from the day that we jointly named the company and hired our first employees, we could never have accomplished what we did while growing our company to over 480 employees in 14 locations from the Texas/Oklahoma border to the Gulf of Mexico,” said John Gustafson, the CEO of Frontier. “Blue Sage was instrumental in helping us establish our initial key performance indicators, secure debt capacity, close sixteen proprietary acquisitions, drive strong organic growth through greenfield locations, and improve route density by winning contracts within our growing footprint.”
During Blue Sage’s 5.5-year ownership term, Frontier grew its run-rate revenue by over 15x and its EBITDA by over 30x.
“It is certainly bittersweet to part with our friends at Frontier,” said Peter Huff, a co-founder and managing member of Blue Sage .“It is extremely rare and rewarding to work alongside a management team and co-founders as talented and dedicated as John Gustafson, Drew Pozatek, Bill Killian, Tim Henderson, Alek Orloff, and the many others that worked together to build Frontier into such an outstanding company.”
“Frontier was a true labor of love for our team at Blue Sage,” said Eric Weiner, a partner at Blue Sage. “Blue Sage’s investors greatly appreciate everything Frontier has done for our firm.”
Austin, Texas-based Blue Sage specializes in partnering with founders, families, and management teams as the first round of institutional capital for businesses in the niche manufacturing, environmental solutions, or specialty services industries. The firm typically invests from $20 million to $40 million in control buyout investments and recapitalizations of companies with $4 million to $15 million in EBITDA and $20 million to $200 million in revenue.
“Frontier presents a great business model developed by a very experienced management team,” said Frank Reppenhagen, a partner at Concentric. “ In less than five years, John and his team established Frontier in all the major population centers in Texas through their commitment to providing exceptional service to their customers. Local service, backed by reliable equipment and a stabilized workforce, puts Frontier in a position to achieve coverage state-wide and beyond as a next objective.”
Chicago-based Concentric is the direct investing arm of Financial Investments Corporation, an asset management firm and family office with over $2 billion in capital under management. Sectors of interest include business and consumer services, tech-enabled services, banks, insurance services, value-added distribution, and niche manufacturing.
Summer Street is an investor in lower middle market companies with a specialization in the environmental and business services sectors. The firm was founded in 1999 and is headquartered near Buffalo in Orchard Park, New York.
© 2022 Private Equity Professional | December 6, 2022
