By MARK MUELLER
Three years ago, Ian Bress expected to be the chief executive of a different cleaning and janitorial services company.
Bress, the former chief financial officer of then Chicago-based real estate brokerage Grubb & Ellis Co., had been tapped to head up an East Coast commercial janitorial services company that was looking to go public.
The New York-based company's investors wanted to expand nationally. They asked Bress to scope out acquisitions on the West Coast.
That's where he came across Costa Mesa's Pacific Building Care Inc., a family business formed in 1969 that was doing about $18 million in yearly revenue—primarily in Orange County. The company was making about $2 million in annual profits.
"I ended up falling in love with Pacific Building Care, but not as much with the New York company," Bress said.
So he switched plans and moved to line up investors to buy the Costa Mesa company on his own. Scorpion Capital Partners LP, a New York-based private equity firm, helped fund the buyout, which closed in early 2006.
Bress took over as chief executive of Pacific Building.
The company's grown rapidly since then servicing office buildings, corporate campuses, government sites, medical facilities, schools and industrial properties.
The company has sales for the 12 months through June of $90 million, up 400% from two years earlier. Pacific Building is No. 6 on the Business Journal's list of fastgrowing private companies.
A deal to acquire another company is adding $10 million in yearly sales, Bress said.
Since Pacific Building's buyout, the space the company serves has grown from 55 million square feet to about 103 million square feet, with more than 1,700 customers.
Employees have grown from 800 to more than 3,000.
Bress estimates the company to be the 10th largest commercial janitorial company in the U.S.
He credits his time and experience at Grubb & Ellis (which now is based in Santa Ana) for helping him make Southern California-area contacts that have pushed growth.
"Grubb had 10 offices around Los Angeles when I was there," he said. "I spent a lot of time here."
Operations have expanded outside OC to Southern California. The company's also moved into central California, Phoenix and Denver.
OC remains the company's core market. Among local corporate campuses, Pacific Building Care does work for Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp. and Fullerton's Beckman Coulter Inc.
Along with its core janitorial services, it offers clean room services for medical device, drug and other specialty companies.
Among office buildings, the company does work for Irvine's Waterfield Tower, which was bought last year by Laguna Hills-based Muller Co.
Pacific Building is working with Muller to get the 237,659-square-foot building, previously known as Tower 17, certified as being environmentally friendly.
Working with building owners to promote green property management and janitorial services has proven to be a selling point to existing and prospective tenants and an edge for the company, Bress said.
Pacific Building offers property managers environmentally sensitive cleaning products, chemicals and others materials, more efficient vacuums and floor equipment and extensive training of its cleaning crews, among other services billed as green.
"The greening (of buildings) is becoming more common, but it's still just in its beginning state," Bress said.
The company wants to keep expanding, according to Bress.
"We went from being a local company to a regional company," he said. "Now we want to go from a regional company to a national company."
Bress said he hopes to grow the company to be among the top five nationally.
That level of growth likely will require new private equity funding. An initial public offering is possible, but not too likely considering the health of the market for public offerings these days, Bress said.
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