Foundral, the Chicago-based, McNally Capital-backed platform assembling a family of union-backed mechanical contracting companies, has acquired A. Hattersley & Sons of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Hattersley joins Smith & Oby and DSO under the Foundral umbrella, pushing the platform's combined workforce to roughly 350.
The asset.
Hattersley traces back to 1856, making it the area's oldest mechanical contractor. It serves commercial, industrial, and institutional clients with design-build, engineering, project management, installation, and maintenance of piping and HVAC systems, and it operates a branch and second fabrication shop in Lafayette. President and CEO Jack Koehne continues to lead the business — the kind of continuity Foundral's model is built to preserve.
Why mechanical contractors are getting bought.
This is not residential service M&A. Institutional mechanical contracting is a different game, and the demand drivers are loud right now: healthcare, higher education, life sciences, government, and — increasingly — data centers, all of which need complex mechanical systems installed by crews that can actually staff the work. Foundral's platform points squarely at those end markets.
What Foundral is actually buying.
What a platform is really acquiring in a deal like this isn't revenue. It's the set of things capital can't manufacture quickly: decades-deep general-contractor relationships, a trained union labor force, and a regional name that took generations to earn. A 170-year-old contractor with those assets is close to impossible to replicate from scratch — which is exactly what makes it valuable to a buyer trying to scale capacity for larger, more complex projects.
The mechanism mirrors what we've watched in residential service: preserve the local identity, add capital and back-office muscle, and let the company chase bigger, more complex jobs than it could underwrite alone. The difference is the binding constraint. In commercial and institutional mechanical work, skilled labor — not customer demand — is the bottleneck, and Midwest roll-ups like Foundral are moving to lock up that labor wherever a respected name comes available.
Operating a mechanical or specialty trades business?
Commercial mechanical, MEP, and specialty contracting M&A runs on its own set of diligence questions. We work with owners and acquirers across the trades — no pitch, just an honest conversation about where you are.
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