Weathering the Storm to Reach New Heights

In the summer of 2005, Pete Doyle experienced two life-changing events.

The first occurred when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, resulting in one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history. As a resident of Pensacola, Florida, Doyle had a front-row seat to the destruction of his neighborhood and communities across the region.

For Doyle, owner of Engineered Cooling Services in Pensacola, this once-in-a-century storm also led to a significant event in his journey as a business owner. The hurricane’s widespread damage to local businesses and infrastructure created an instantaneous increase in demand for his company’s HVAC and chiller services.

Having opened ECS with 10 employees in July 2002, Doyle and his team had already experienced Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and now his company’s services were needed by not only their current customer base but also countless other commercial businesses along the Gulf Coast.

“We were still a young company, and after these two hurricanes, we were truly drinking from the firehose when it came to the amount of business we were attempting to manage,” Doyle said. “We essentially leapfrogged five to 10 years of normal growth in about one year — and it quickly became apparent that we needed to evolve from an event-driven business to a process-driven business.”

To successfully sustain this level of growth, Doyle began to look at opportunities to hitch his company’s wagon to a larger organization that could support it with funding, training and other strategic resources.

In 2007, Doyle sold ECS, becoming Service Logic’s fourth commercial HVAC acquisition as the company continued building what is now the largest privately held HVAC/mechanical company in the United States. Thanks in part to that decision, ECS currently operates eight offices throughout the Gulf Coast and employs more than 300 people.

“Once we made the deal, Service Logic encouraged and assisted us to grow the business, and that allowed us to become the company we are today,” Doyle said. “They’ve got the right recipe for folks who are driven and want their business to succeed and reach its full potential.”

A Wealth of Opportunities to Improve and Grow

Service Logic brings a range of resources, expertise and support to help enhance the operations and growth prospects of acquired companies. These benefits include:

• A national footprint and expanded market reach

• Operational synergies

• Access to industry-leading technology

• Shared resources and expertise

• Financial stability and backing

• Professional development and training

• Long-term growth opportunities

As a Service Logic company for the past 15-plus years, Pete Doyle and ECS have a deep appreciation for these benefits and everything else that comes with being part of a growing network of like-minded business leaders.

“Before Service Logic, we were on our own navigating the complexities of managing and building ECS,” Doyle said. “After the purchase, Service Logic immediately surrounded us with good people who were willing to share their knowledge, empowering us to make more informed decisions and enhance our mission.”

At the time of purchase in 2007, ECS joined Service Logic’s blossoming network of acquired business units, which included Tolin Mechanical, Piedmont Service Group and Midwest Mechanical. Today, the list of Service Logic companies is quickly approaching 50.

“The guys at Tolin were a huge catalyst in helping us get ECS to a more sustainable point, which is a great example of Service Logic’s openness to having their business units engage and help each other improve,” Doyle said. “They had spent the time researching and implementing a new accounting system, which we set up at ECS. They’d been there and done that, which let us take those learnings and activate them.”

Let’s Scale Your Business

Interested in learning more about how your company could benefit from joining the Service Logic family? Hear what other Service Logic business unit presidents have to say about the competitive advantages of Service Logic’s Acquisition Program.