Industrial services
Ohio Valley, est. 2014
We raise the equity after we agree the deal.
Ironfield buys industrial services businesses in the Ohio Valley one at a time. No fund, no deployment clock, no committee that has never seen your shop floor.
How deal-by-deal works ↓- Platforms bought since 2014
- 9Platforms bought, one at a time, since 2014
- Add-ons 23 · EBITDA $2–12M · Average hold 6.3 yrs · Fund none
A fund has to buy something this year. We don't.
Ironfield is an independent sponsor. We underwrite a business first, agree terms with the owner, and then go to the three to six capital partners who have backed the last nine deals — $8M to $45M of equity, committed per transaction, never out of a blind pool. It takes us four to six weeks longer than a committed fund. In exchange, nobody at this firm has ever bought a company because a fund was running out of investment period.
That has a practical consequence for a seller. We will tell you in the first meeting what we think the business is worth and why, because we have no incentive to keep a process warm. If the number does not work for you, we would rather stop there than spend five months discovering it in diligence.
It has a second consequence for the business. Because each deal is capitalised on its own, the hold period is set by the company, not by a fund's wind-down. Two of our nine platforms are past year eight and neither is for sale.
“The question is never whether we can close. It is whether the business should be sold at all.”Dale Marchetti, Managing Partner
- Businesses we looked at in 2025, and did not buy
- 184One hundred and eighty-four files reviewed. Nine reached a letter of intent. Three closed. The ratio is the model: an independent sponsor that has to deploy cannot afford to say no a hundred and eighty-one times.
Everything we own
keeps equipment
outdoors in February.
Four things have to be true. The rest we can work with.
What actually changes, in the order it changes.
We are not going to tell you we add value. Here is the sequence we have run nine times, with the part that usually goes wrong named.
Payroll, insurance and the bank clear on day one
Nothing about the transaction reaches a crew leader in week one. Same carrier, same bank, same pay date. The thing that goes wrong here is the certificate of insurance a customer needs re-issued; we now pre-clear those before signing.
Job-level margin, within sixty days
Most businesses this size know company margin and not job margin. We put in a costing discipline before we touch pricing, because raising prices on work you have mispriced only makes the error larger.
The second manager the owner never hired
Every one of these companies is one person deep somewhere — estimating, service dispatch, the one foreman who can run a shutdown. That hire is budgeted at close, not argued about in year two.
Fleet and shop capital, unglamorously
Deferred maintenance on trucks and equipment is the most common thing we find and the least interesting to talk about. It is usually two to four percent of revenue and it is why the crews believe the change is real.
Add-ons, once and not before
We do not buy a second company until the first one closes a full year on the new reporting. Twenty-three add-ons have followed nine platforms; none in the first twelve months.
Every platform since 2014,
including the one
we lost money on.
Companies are described by sector rather than named. Ironfield is a demonstration firm and every transaction on this page is invented.
Twenty-three add-ons in eleven years. Every one of them was already a customer, a competitor or a supplier of a business we owned.
If you back the deal, you see the same file we do.
Ironfield syndicates each transaction to family offices and independent-sponsor funds that have done this before. Nobody is asked to commit to a blind pool, and nobody is asked to decide in a week.
You get the full quality-of-earnings, the customer interviews and the capital plan, not a teaser. You get the model with our assumptions exposed rather than summarised. If we are wrong about something after close — and the 2018 platform is the standing example — you hear it from us in the quarter it happens, not in the annual letter.
- Check size
- $2M – $15M per transaction
- Structure
- Deal-by-deal SPV. No management fee on uncalled capital.
- Promote
- 20% over an 8% preferred, 50/50 catch-up
- Reporting
- Monthly operating pack, quarterly call, annual audit
- Co-invest
- Offered on every add-on at cost
The people on this list are the people who show up.
There is no associate layer between you and a decision. The partner who takes your first call is the partner who signs.
Two audiences,
two conversations.
Send the business, not a teaser deck.
Three years of financials and a customer list gets you a real answer in five business days — including a number, or a reason we are not the buyer. We sign your NDA. We do not call your customers before you say so, ever.
Send a businessdeals@ironfieldcp.exampleAsk for the last file we sent out.
The complete memorandum from the most recent closed transaction — model, quality-of-earnings, the customer calls and the post-close variance. Judge the underwriting before there is a deal on the table.
Request the filecapital@ironfieldcp.example