Kelso Industries, the Draper, Utah-based mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractor, has added three companies to its platform: Gaddy Electric & Plumbing Company of Demopolis, Alabama; All Electric, LLC of Gillette, Wyoming; and Clearwater Construction & Management, LLC of Spokane, Washington. None of the three was accompanied by a formal announcement, and terms were not disclosed.
The three additions.
Gaddy Electric & Plumbing was founded in 1958 by B.L. Gaddy Sr. and has operated since as a family business in Demopolis, in Marengo County, west Alabama. It is unusually diversified for its size, carrying electrical, plumbing, HVAC, wastewater, generator installation, and portable sanitation work across residential, commercial, and industrial customers on a fleet of 32 service trucks. The company holds Alabama electrical, plumbing and gas fitting, and heating and refrigeration licenses alongside a general contractor license, and is licensed in Louisiana as well. Leadership has run through Sharon Gaddy and Elizabeth Gaddy-Rice.
All Electric is a different animal entirely. Based in Gillette, at the center of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, it is an industrial electrical contractor built around energy infrastructure: oil well tank battery electrical installation, gas compressors, amine plants, flare and combustor installations, water injection and water transfer facilities, methane construction, and pump, drive, and control panel fabrication, alongside high and low voltage distribution work. Its compliance posture reads accordingly — ISNetworld, Veriforce, and NCMS registration, with field staff carrying OSHA and H2S certifications.
Clearwater Construction & Management sits furthest from the platform’s traditional center of gravity. Founded in the fall of 2006 and based in Spokane, it is a heavy civil contractor organized around water — treatment facilities, reservoirs, combined sewer overflows, cut-and-cover tunnels, fish hatcheries and weirs, dams, and bridges. It works as a prime general contractor, a design-build partner, and a structural concrete subcontractor to larger generals, self-performing most of its scope: structural concrete, site and mechanical piping, and equipment installation and startup. The company reports more than 60 completed projects across the Pacific Northwest, with municipal owners among its recent clients.
None of the three sits in a major metro, and none is the kind of market a density strategy would target. What all three carry is licensed labor, self-perform capability, and industrial or municipal customers.
The platform.
Kelso was founded in May 2021 by chief executive Steve Carroll and a childhood friend; the name comes from the elementary school where the two met in fourth grade. Peterson Partners, a Salt Lake City firm, backed the company early, and Paceline Equity Partners of Dallas invested in 2023. Oxbow Equity Partners is also an investor. PitchBook records more than $600 million raised across the platform.
The growth curve is the story. Kelso disclosed 31 completed acquisitions in October 2025, when it announced it had crossed $1 billion in annual revenue with operations across more than 30 states — five years from a standing start. By that autumn the company described roughly $1.2 billion in annualized revenue and about 3,500 employees. Its brand roster has kept expanding since, and with these three the count is approaching 40, spanning mechanical, sheet metal, refrigeration, plumbing, controls, electrical, heavy civil, and industrial service.
The acquisition structure is a partnership rather than a clean exit: sellers typically retain a meaningful minority stake and keep running the business, with the operating brand preserved rather than absorbed. It is a model built for established contractors carrying management depth beneath the owner, not for books that need an operator installed on day one.
The end-market mix explains all three. Carroll has described the business in three roughly balanced segments: industrial, at a third to 40 percent and including data centers and manufacturing; institutional, covering hospitals, schools, and government work; and commercial for the balance. Industrial is the fastest-growing of the three, and data center work went from essentially nothing two years prior to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, with billions priced in mechanical scope alone.
Read against that mix, none of the three looks random. Kelso already holds an energy-services electrical position, having acquired an electrical contractor and an automation and instrumentation business in North Dakota’s oil and gas country in early 2025; All Electric extends that capability into a second basin. Gaddy brings multi-trade industrial capability, and the licenses to deliver it, in a part of Alabama where contractor supply is thin. Clearwater adds something different again — municipal water and wastewater infrastructure, a category funded by utility rates and public capital budgets rather than the commercial construction cycle, and one where the process piping and equipment startup scope sits close to work the platform already performs.
The consolidation backdrop.
The commercial and industrial MEP market is being worked as hard as any corner of the trades. Private equity has acquired nearly 800 MEP companies since 2022, according to PitchBook data cited by the Wall Street Journal. Construction services M&A reached 562 transactions in 2025, an 18.2 percent increase year over year and a third consecutive year of volume growth, with subcontractor deals up 38.6 percent and accounting for roughly 65 percent of all transactions.
The demand driver is not subtle. Data centers have become the single most important variable in commercial mechanical and electrical work, and platforms across the segment are positioning around that exposure deliberately — adding fabrication capacity, chasing hyperscaler programs, and buying the licensed labor required to deliver on compressed schedules. The scale involved shows up most clearly in the public comparables. Comfort Systems USA, the name cited most often in this segment, reported a data center backlog of $11.94 billion against $5.99 billion a year earlier. A book of business that roughly doubles in twelve months is not a cyclical uptick, and buyers are underwriting acquisitions accordingly.
What it means.
Three deals in three states, none in a target metro, says the platform is buying capability and end-market access rather than geographic fill-in. The thread running through Gillette, Demopolis, and Spokane is process and infrastructure work — energy, industrial, and municipal water — rather than commercial building services. That widens what an MEP platform is willing to own, and it reads as a hedge: while the segment races toward data center exposure, these three additions pull toward end markets funded by energy capital spending, industrial maintenance, and public utility budgets — work that runs on a different cycle than the commercial construction beside it.
Kelso is now large enough that the open question is not whether it can keep buying but how its shareholders eventually get paid. Carroll has been direct about the destination, saying publicly that “we’ll have to be a public company” to realize the platform’s full value.
That is the logical end state at this scale. Public strategics in commercial mechanical and electrical services have re-rated substantially over the past two years, and a platform carrying $1 billion-plus of revenue, national coverage, real prefabrication capacity, and genuine data center exposure has a credible listing case. A public offering would also be the liquidity event for founders, sponsors, and the many selling owners holding rollover equity across the brand roster — which is a meaningful share of the people who have sold into this platform over the past five years.
For owners of commercial and industrial MEP businesses, the practical read is that scale is being assembled quickly and buyers are underwriting capability rather than postcode. The assets clearing at the top of the range carry documented backlog, disciplined percentage-of-completion accounting, a service and maintenance base that survives the construction cycle, and management depth beneath the founder. Geography is negotiable. Capability is not.
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