Chen Moore expands into electrical engineering with Fred Wilson acquisition

Dive Temporary:

• Two prominent Florida-based mostly engineering firms with focuses on civil operate have joined forces. Chen Moore and Associates, a civil engineering consulting agency based mostly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has acquired Fred Wilson & Associates (FWA), a Jacksonville, Florida-based mostly engineering firm. 
• The integration will increase electrical engineering to Chen Moore’s assistance presenting, broaden its access into the Jacksonville sector and provide the Florida DOT into its freeway engineering task portfolio. 
• With the acquisition, three of FWA’s 4 handling principals, all associates of the Wilson family members, have exited the enterprise, Chen Moore CEO Peter Moore informed Building Dive. The remaining FWA executives will keep on to operate FWA’s transportation and electrical engineering groups.

Dive Insight:

The acquisition, which brings Chen Moore’s worker rely to about 105, implies the firm is “poised and ready for development,” Moore explained.

“Fred Wilson definitely had a whole lot of the critical measures that we ended up searching to do,” he stated. “We ended up now in south Florida and central Florida, and our purpose actually was to broaden all the way into north Florida. And then from a company line standpoint, the actuality that they did key perform for the Section of Transportation and electrical engineering, these ended up all talent sets that we didn’t necessarily have in house.”

The initial electrical engineer in Chen Moore’s Fort Lauderdale office started off work in early November. The corporation intends to grow electrical engineering providers across all offices in the around long run, and conversely to lengthen its civil engineering, environmental engineering and landscape architecture techniques into the Jacksonville space.

Chen Moore was most a short while ago concerned in the completion of a 7-mile-prolonged, 48” redundant sewer force principal in the City of Fort Lauderdale, created following a collection of pressure key failures in late 2019. Its current transportation engineering assignments consist of the statewide enlargement of the Brightline (pictured previously mentioned), a passenger rail procedure involving main towns in Florida. The recently obtained Jacksonville workforce is performing on roadway rehabilitation on Principal Road in downtown Jacksonville.

“Our target is to be an Engineering Information-Record 500 business by the year 2025,” mentioned Moore. “I feel we’re probably going to hit it in the up coming two many years…But we’re not escalating for growth’s sake, we are truly escalating to supply occupation paths and chances for our staff members.”

In accordance to Moore, the agency operates on an 80/20 split of general public sector and personal sector assignments, with a lot of of the latter as general public/private partnerships. The current passage of the federal infrastructure invoice will generate substantial options for public sector investment decision in Florida — projects that would be a boon to Chen Moore’s business, Moore stated. Nonetheless, availability of labor could impact the skill for providers like Chen Moore to execute on the get the job done obtainable to them, specifically more than the five-yr period outlined in the monthly bill.

“You can find just not that numerous persons that are eager to do some thing which is, honestly, it can be a quite risky work, [whether you’re] setting up highways, you might be making bridges or you’re setting up huge drinking water or sewer methods,” said Moore. “I definitely see that remaining the largest disadvantage to attempting to complete almost everything in five several years.”