Perfect match: Trimac acquires Service Transport Company

The freight market is still painfully slowly for many fleets, but Trimac Transportation isn’t slowing down in its pursuit of growth.

The family-owned tank truck company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, this week acquired Service Transport Company in a deal with Tres Energy that unites two safety award-winning for-hire carriers, expands Trimac’s presence in liquid bulk chemicals, and gives Service Transport’s customers and employees access to new capabilities and opportunities.

“We want to grow,” Bill Marchbank, Trimac SVP of mergers and acquisitions integrations, told Bulk Transporter. “We’ve been in growth mode. This marks our 19th transaction since 2019, including companies we either acquired or sold. So we’ve been very active. We believe we can grow organically, too—and we have an initiative to do that—but we also know that growth through acquisition is something we’re going to have to do, and that we want to do.

“And opportunities to be able to acquire a company like Service Transport don’t come along that often.”

The transaction comes less than eight months after Tres Energy acquired Adams Resources & Energy, the parent company of Service Transport, for $138 million in a deal that took Service Transport from a publicly traded company to a privately held operation. The two parties signed the deal Sept. 15 after months of discussion, Harrison said. It closed Oct. 1. The transaction does not include Service Transport’s former sister operations, Firebird Bulk Carriers or GulfMark Energy, allowing Tres to now focus on its energy business.

See also: Service Transport goes private in $138M deal

“It's definitely an accelerated growth path for us, especially in a market like this,” Wade Harrison, Service Transport president, told Bulk Transporter. “In talking to the legacy Trimac folks, they’re in a similar position freight-wise, at least on the chemical side, as we’re in. It’s not a great market right now, and growing in a market like this is difficult. But as we create synergies, we can identify new opportunities within our own network; and the growth may not necessarily be top-line growth, but the top line doesn’t matter. It’s all about the bottom line.

“That’s really where putting these two companies together will pay off.”

Chemical-hauling expertise

Service Transport, founded in 1965 and based in Houston—where Trimac keeps its U.S. headquarters—is a provider of chemical-hauling services with 16 locations and four tank-cleaning facilities in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The carrier serves a range of top chemical producers, including shippers of hydrogen peroxide, acrylic acid, solvents, surfactants, and other specialty products.

Trimac’s acquisition includes about 300 drivers, 300 trucks, and 750 trailers.

“Service Transport Company has built a reputation for safety, reliability, and customer service, and we are thrilled to welcome them into the Trimac family,” Matt Faure, Trimac president and CEO, said in a news release. “Their expertise in chemical hauling aligns perfectly with our long-term growth strategy, and together we will strengthen our ability to deliver safe, reliable, and efficient transportation solutions.” 

Service Transport’s mix of commodities complements Trimac’s service offering, the companies said, reinforcing the strategic fit and enabling both to deliver enhanced value to customers across North America. Their respective top-10 customer lists each include two new customers, representing a 40% increase in their combined customer base, a development Harrison deemed “great.”

“It’ll take a bit to put everything together,” he said. “But when you lay their chemical assets on a map, and you lay our chemical assets on a map, it’s a great match. They’ve got dots where we don’t have dots, and we’ve got dots where they don’t have dots. Obviously, there’s some commonality, along the biggest chemical corridors, of course, but it’s a great new footprint, and path forward, in areas where we can both develop and service new customers.”

Marchbank agreed, saying he’s particularly excited about their combioned potential when the market finally turns.

“In a market like this, we’ve just diversified and de-risked our portfolio of customers significantly, because we’re adding a lot of new customers we didn’t have, and Service will be privy to customers they didn’t have.”

Award-winning services

The addition of Service Transport immediately increases the size of Trimac’s chemical business, but full integration is only just beginning. “The biggest thing now is really diving into the Service organization,” Marchbank said. “I’m going to work with Wade to figure out all those unique things about Service we weren’t able to digest as part of due diligence. So, over the next 90 days, it’ll probably be business as usual, for the most part. And then, after the first of the year, we will begin getting them onto our IT systems and things of that nature.”

Will Service Transport keep its name? That, they said, remains undecided. But rebranding is expensive—and not a priority.

“We haven’t come to the bottom of that just yet,” Marchbank shared. “We’ve got a lot of locations around here, where we were co-mingled, so really and truly, the name probably is not going to be on the top of our to-do list. We want to gain efficiencies, and be able to have Trimac drivers start using Service trucks, and Service drivers start using Trimac trucks where we need them, and things like that. So, we’re primarily going to focus on getting operations to where we can become efficient, and then we’ll worry about the name down the road.”

See also: Service Transport celebrates Heil trophy

Regardless of the branding, customers and employees will benefit from additional resources, and improved stability in uncertain times, Harrison maintained. And their combination reinforces their mutual safety mission. Service Transport claimed its first championship in National Tank Truck Carriers’ North American safety contest in 2022, and Trimac is a reigning and four-time Heil trophy winner.

“We’ve got a lot of the same core values,” Harrison said. “And the fact that we’re going to another trucking company is huge, because it’s the same business. Obviously, their scale is significantly different than we’re used to. But having access to the technology they have, the capital they have, and their knowledge is going to benefit our employees and our customers all the way around.

“It’s nothing but positives—so we couldn’t have found a better spot to land.”