Birch Hill reportedly agrees to buy TruGreen from CD&R, putting North America's largest lawn care platform in Canadian mid-market hands

Birch Hill Equity Partners, the Canadian middle-market private equity firm, has agreed to acquire lawn care company TruGreen from Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), Bloomberg reported on November 6, citing people familiar with the matter. Terms were not disclosed, and CD&R declined to comment. No announcement from the companies was available at publish time, so this should be read as a reported agreement, not a closed transaction.

The asset.

TruGreen is the largest residential lawn care provider in the US, offering lawn, tree and shrub, and mosquito services. S&P describes the business as asset-light but highly seasonal, with about 65% of revenue earned in the spring and summer. Per Bloomberg's earlier reporting, second-quarter adjusted EBITDA rose 6% to about $133.8 million on revenue up about 4% to $578.5 million.

For the full year, S&P said TruGreen's 2025 revenue was flat as residential volumes stayed soft, but its S&P-adjusted EBITDA margin rose 70 basis points to 16.4%, from 15.7% in 2024, driven by commodity deflation, pricing, and more efficient sales and marketing. S&P credits about 200 basis points of margin improvement over four years.

The capital structure.

This is a levered asset heading into a maturity wall. S&P put adjusted leverage at 6.9x at the end of 2025, down from 7.8x, but forecast a temporary rise to the mid-7x range. In April 2026, Moody's affirmed TruGreen's Caa1 corporate family rating and moved the outlook to positive, citing expected improvement in leverage and free cash flow. Octus reported this spring that TruGreen had engaged a bank to explore a sale, with about $1.4 billion of term loans maturing in 2027 and 2028. BDC filings for June 30, 2026 show first- and second-lien TruGreen loans marked at about 95 cents on the dollar in aggregate.

CD&R's long hold.

CD&R's ownership of TruGreen began through its 2007 take-private of ServiceMaster. In January 2014, ServiceMaster spun TruGreen out to its stockholders as a private company, with ServiceMaster's board valuing the business at $399 million at a time when TruGreen had lost nearly a quarter of its customers since 2010. In April 2016, Scotts Miracle-Gro contributed Scotts LawnService to TruGreen in exchange for about 30% of the combined company, which had roughly $1.3 billion of revenue and 2.3 million customers; CD&R, its co-investors, and management held 70%. In March 2019, Scotts sold its stake back to TruGreen for about $234 million. A sale to Birch Hill would close out a roughly 12-year run as a standalone CD&R portfolio company.

A reference point on value.

No price or multiple has been reported for TruGreen. For reference, when Rentokil Initial agreed to acquire Terminix, TruGreen's former ServiceMaster sibling, in December 2021 for $6.7 billion, it said the deal valued Terminix at approximately 19.3x 2021E consensus EBITDA before synergies, and approximately 13.9x including $150 million of expected cost synergies.

What it means.

For owners of lawn care, landscape, and pest businesses, the largest residential lawn platform changing sponsors resets the buyer map. A new owner with a fresh capital structure typically revisits add-on acquisitions once refinancing is done, and a Canadian mid-market sponsor stepping up for a US national platform is a sign that capital for route-based outdoor services is still deep, even at elevated leverage.