Quantum Murray has used acquisitions and its experienced management team to build a full service decommissioning company serving Canada from coast to coast
Written and produced by James Buchanan & Michael Townsend
Founded in 2001 with Ontario as its sole base of operations, Quantum Murray LP has quickly evolved into a full service decommissioning company servicing all of Canada.
But now that the baby has matured and grown, the next test is integrating the company’s acquisitions to form a unified whole.
“Murray Demolition - which is now called Quantum Murray - started six years ago as a demolition company serving the industrial and commercial sectors primarily in Ontario,” says Shawn Murray, president of Quantum Murray.
“About five years ago we acquired another Canadian demolition company, and we held those assets and retained its employees. At the time, in our first year, we had sales of $18 million, but with this acquisition we expanded our company across Canada into Quebec and Alberta, and grew to be a $65 million company. All of that growth was done internally,” Murray says.
The company made its next growth spurt about a year ago, he explains, when Murray Demolition merged with Quantum Environmental Group to form Quantum Murray LP.
The two companies had a number of complimentary capabilities, which includes Quantum’s enhance environmental abatement services as well as its geographical reach.
Combined, the companies comprised two-thirds of what one would consider a full service decommissioning outfit with a national reach.
“Then about two months ago we acquired Thomson Metals, which means that we have now grown into a more than $200 million company with 900 employees,” says Murray.
He goes on to add that in order to facilitate both the Quantum and Thomson transactions the company brought in a financial partner.
“In order to financially undertake these acquisitions we brought in Newport Partners Income Fund, which has helped fund these acquisitions as a partner,” says Murray.
In six years the company has gone from its single mission – demolition – to be a full service decommissioning company with its base in Toronto and facilities in Burlington, Ontario; Hamilton, Ontario; Calgary, Alberta; Edmonton, Alberta; and a regional sales office in Ottawa, Ontario. The largest locations for its fleet of equipment and vehicles are in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.
“We can break our equipment down at any facility and ship them via train to any location in Canada,” says Murray. “This is a critical component of our capabilities because we have about 50 contracts going at any one time.”
Asked what has helped facilitate such rapid growth, Murray points to his years of experience and the relationships with other professionals he has been able to build.
“I have been in the business for about 23 years, and over the last 16 years I have largely worked with the same people,” he says. “Having these people as management has helped a lot in getting the company together. It made team building fairly easy because the team was already there.
“I suppose you could say I am fairly weathered in the demolition business,” he notes.
Services offered by the company include commercial and industrial demolition, asbestos and mold abatement, site remediation, and ferris and non-ferris recycling.
Demolition includes structural and interior demolition to buildings, bridges, emission stacks, incinerators, etc.
Environmental remediation services handled by the Quantum leg of the triad includes transport of hazardous and non-hazardous soil, construction debris, PCB waste, liquid and industrial waste, storage tank removal and restoration, groundwater treatment, vacuum truck services, onsite screening of soil and Brownfield remediation.
Recycling — of which investment recovery is a component — includes removal and recycling or resale of plumbing fixtures, safety equipment, shipping equipment, lighting fixtures, switches, transformers, mechanical equipment, office furniture and all scrap metals. Very few if any materials from a Quantum Murray jobsite will go to a landfill.
According to the company’s website, Quantum Murray has worked on projects where the value of equipment recovered exceeded the cost to decommission the site.
With so much physical and financial growth having taken place in such a short period of time, Murray says the company is looking to consolidate on that.
“We’ve grown the company to a comfortable space, so we are looking at growth internally,” he says. “We believe that the turtle wins the race, so we are going to take our time doing the integration of our companies right. There are a lot of companies that move too quickly on integrating their acquisitions and they don’t get it right; the cultures don’t match, the resources don’t fit together properly, and that sort of thing. So we want to take our time and make sure it all fits together well.”
Murray goes on to add that fully integrating the three companies means taking the financial systems, human resources, health and safety systems, and purchasing of three formerly independent companies and combining them under one banner.
“We are working to leverage the synergies of combining these companies,” he says. “For example, we have to outsource far less than we did before. We used to subcontract trucking and other logistics services, but now those are handled in-house through Thomson Metals. We also used to outsource soil management services, but Quantum is handling that now.”
Finding and exploiting these synergies, Murray says, has so far worked relatively well, as the companies fit well together.
“This is all working out very well for us because the cultures of all three companies are very similar and the people and systems are well disposed toward each other, so it’s been a really good fit. Everybody compliments everybody else.”
One of the key benefits of acquiring these companies, says Murray, is the combination of capabilities and size.
“We have the capacity of taking on any large scale commercial or industrial contract at any time throughout Canada,” he says. “One of the primary reasons we are able to do this is due to the huge fleet of equipment and trucks we keep mobile all across Canada. Our competitors — which are primarily regional players — don’t have the scale of resources that we have or the ability to get them on the job as fast as we can.”
Another unique feature of the company is also a result of the synergies created through its acquisitions.
“We have better relationships than most with the scrap metal recycling mills,” says Murray. “It used to be that we had to work through a broker with the scrap metals we reclaim from a particular site because the volume of metals we produced weren’t enough to justify a direct relationship with these recyclers.
“However, through Thomson Metals we have strategic business relationships with the two largest scrap metal recyclers in Canada, which means we are considered a Tier 1 reclaimer, and no longer have to work through a broker,” Murray explains.
Normally, Murray says the company would leave a fee behind for a broker, which is a percentage of the total sale.
Breadth of services means that Quantum Murray is a one-stop-shop for its customers seeking decommissioning services.
“We can do demolition contracting, environmental abatement contracting, soil remediation; we can sell and broker scrap-metal; clients can basically come to us and they have full service with one contractor,” says Murray.
Integration across the three companies also involves bringing some consistency to the equipment used by them.
“Our fleet is probably about 85 percent John Deere equipment and we have national servicing contracts with John Deere, which means we have significant purchasing power with John Deere,” says Murray. “We probably have the most John Deere equipment of any contractor in Canada.”
The company also uses universal fittings for attachments so that equipment is interchangeable, no matter the machine or its location.
“The appropriate attachment will fit any of our machines, and the operators know that when they get to a jobsite they will be working on John Deere equipment,” says Murray.
While the phrase ‘demolition company’ may conjure images of large building implosions and falling smokestacks, Murray says implosions are only a small part of what they do.
“When we do an implosion we will work with a specialist that will set the dynamite, and we will do the preliminary work and the engineering,” he says. “But there are a lot of other techniques now that are used for demolition, such as engineered dismantling. We have equipment that can reach 130 feet in the air and cut 16 inch steel beams.”
The company has also developed a number of new techniques and technologies that are unique to the industry, and in some cases have been mimicked by competitors making them industry standards.
“When taking down a multi-story building in a congested city center, we will wrap a building with an electric-powered scaffolding,” says Murray. “It’s basically a mobile, powered scaffolding that carries work platforms to where the work has to be done — which means it doesn’t have to be taken down and moved to work on different areas of a building. It just keeps crawling with the workers.
“The advantage is that workers don’t have to climb 12 stories to get to work or to go on breaks, and we can contain and control the debris and work activities on the inside of the building rather than the outside, which is safer and more efficient. Not all of our competitors do this the same way, but that’s okay because we get a number of advantages from using this system.”