The News: How would you describe the Emcor group of companies?
Guzzi: Emcor stands alone in its breadth of services, vertical market experience, geographic reach, and presence. We build, power, and service the sophisticated facilities and systems that help our clients increase productivity and optimize their businesses. That's the Emcor advantage.
The News: Where do you see the growth coming in the next few years for Emcor?
Guzzi: Our goal is to increasingly balance our contracting business with a base of earnings that will allow us greater business options and to be more selective during down times. We have and will continue to create organic growth in the facilities management market. We expect this to become a larger part of our business. We are positioned to service a greater number of customers on a very large scale. We can pull the very best portions of our company together to service the blue chip companies from the front end during construction and all the way through service management. We have grown our reputation as a complete, end-to-end facilities services company.
The News: Emcor is one of the few large operating companies that made it through the roll-up and consolidation boom and bust. To what do you attribute the company's success?
Guzzi: Emcor has been successful because it never operated as a consolidator, to buy things just to buy them. Emcor has been an operator. We only acquire companies that add to our service and construction expertise. The second thing is that we have an ownership mentality, regardless of whether all the owners remained or not. The CEOs of all the companies are treated as CEOs - as owners. This makes a huge difference in the success of a contracting company. Also, we spent a lot of effort building a brand, focused on the fact that we have a lot of smaller companies that needed to identify themselves in order to service a national market. Training is a big effort; we spend a lot of time with management construction practices. We intend to be the very best in our field.
The News: What are your thoughts on any future consolidation efforts in this industry?
Guzzi: A lot of utilities have been in, and are at different stages of getting out. I really hope we don't see much more roll-up consolidation in this industry. As a result of consolidation, there are a lot of very good contractors that aren't in business any longer.
The News: What about Johnson Controls' recent acquisition of Cal-Air?
Guzzi: I think Johnson Controls' acquisition of Cal-Air is more an indication of having designs on getting deeper into facility management, than it is a motivation to get into the contracting business.
The News: Any acquisition plans at Emcor?
Guzzi: In order to prosper, we will continue to investigate the best opportunities in a local market. We really treasure the local owner and the influence that company exerts. We will always look at the right opportunities to increase our array of services or expand owner relationships.
Publication date: 08/22/2005
