M&A Market Remains on a Roll

Engineering Inc. magazine

The good times in the engineering industry keep on rolling, with 2024 on track to be another stellar year of revenue growth and profitability. Engineer­ing firms continue to prosper from unprecedented demand for their services, substantial public sector and institutional funding, and sustained interest from public equity. Fueled by robust backlogs and balance sheets, engineering firms are investing in both organic and acquisitive growth initiatives.

Since the start of 2021, the A/E and environmental industry has experienced a record level of consolidation—with more than a merger a day. And there’s no sign of a slowdown. Morrissey Goodale tracked 204 transactions of U.S. design and environ­mental firms through the end of May. If trends hold, this tally will be a new all-time deal-making record.

Based on Morrissey Goodale’s analysis of deals completed in the second quarter of 2024, the size of buyers and sellers con­tinues to increase. For as long as we have been keeping records, the median acquirer size has never exceeded $98 million in gross revenue, and the median seller size has consistently ranged between $2.5 million and $3.5 million. Over the first five months of 2024, however, the revenue of the median size acquirer ballooned to $147 million, while the median seller size jumped to $4.25 million.

The first change is easier to explain: Bigger buyers are getting more active. It’s harder to say, though, why the seller size has increased. One theory is that buyers are reallocating their limited M&A deal-making resources to execute relatively more, larger “needle-moving” deals. Another theory is that private equity firms, which make heavy use of debt, have been increasingly active and targeting larger sellers since those acquisitions are not heavily dependent on hard-earned equity to finance. Whatever the reason, it’s bad news for smaller firms that have been shut out of deal-making.

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