Hampden firm Sargent & Sargent buys H.E. Sargent Family building companies united

HAMPDEN – In a family homecoming of sorts, a local construction firm has acquired a larger company with a similar name that was founded in Maine 79 years ago.

Sargent & Sargent, a company headed up by Herb R. Sargent and located on Main Road in Hampden, on Thursday bought H.E. Sargent Inc., an Old Town construction company founded in 1926 by Sargent’s grandfather Herbert E. Sargent.

“It really blends two extremely strong work forces together,” Herb R. Sargent said Friday of the sale. “If you take the family connection out of it, I’d feel the same way about it.”

For the past 10 years, H.E. Sargent has been a subsidiary of Fru-Con Construction Corp. of Missouri. Based in suburban St. Louis, Fru-Con was founded in 1872 and is owned by German construction conglomerate Bilfinger-Berger AG.

Sargent said H.E. Sargent was sold by his family in 1988 to the French construction company Razel and, after a series of international mergers and acquisitions, became part of Fru-Con in 1995.

Sargent & Sargent, which Herb R. Sargent founded in 1992, employs roughly 105 people and has annual sales of about $20 million, he said. H.E. Sargent has an office in Ashland, Va., and employs more than 300 people. It has done construction work in 17 eastern states and has annual sales between $80 million and $100 million, he said.

“It’s kind of like a small fish swallowing a bigger fish,” Sargent said of the sale. “It was like a hand in a glove, really.”

John Simpson, president of H.E. Sargent, said Friday that Fru-Con had been looking to get out of the civil construction business, which includes the kind of earthwork and site preparation jobs in which H.E. Sargent has specialized in recent years. He said Fru-Con put out feelers to see if anyone might want to buy the firm and that 12 companies expressed an interest.

“The Sargent family basically came up with the best offer,” he said. “I see it as a very positive thing.”

A confidentiality agreement prevented him from disclosing the purchase price, Simpson said.

Sargent said the acquisition makes strategic sense because both companies specialize in earthwork and site preparation and are fairly familiar with each other. Also, Sargent & Sargent’s business development had leveled off in recent years, he said.

“We had grown all we could,” Sargent said. “We had felt like an acquisition was the best way we could grow.”

The companies will continue to operate independently of one another through the end of 2005, according to Sargent. He said each company has a backlog of work that it should complete before they try to merge together.

Sargent, already the president of Sargent & Sargent, also will serve as president of H.E. Sargent. Sargent & Sargent will be the parent company but the executive offices of each company will be combined at the H.E. Sargent facility in the Old Town village of Stillwater, he said.

Simpson, president of H.E. Sargent since its sale to Razel in 1988, said he hopes to retire in the near future but that he plans to stay on with Fru-Con for at least another few months.

“I just finished my 40th year with [H.E. Sargent],” he said. “I’m not certain what I will do.”

Sargent said George Thomas, chief financial officer of the Hampden firm, will take on the added duty of serving in the same capacity for H.E. Sargent. Tim Folster, the operations manager for Sargent & Sargent, will become vice president of operations for the Old Town company.

Sargent emphasized that the goal of the acquisition is to focus on future growth rather than on the historic family connection between the two companies.

Nonetheless, he has at least one relative who is pleased that the ownership of H.E. Sargent is returning to Maine and to the family that created it before the Great Depression. That person is the same man who named the company after himself almost eight decades ago.

“He lives right next to the [H.E. Sargent] office,” Herb R. Sargent said of his grandfather. “He’s 99 years old [and] he’s terribly enthusiastic about it.”

Herbert E. Sargent, contacted Friday at his camp in West Enfield, said that seeing his family regain ownership of H.E. Sargent made him emotional.

“I think it’s a great thing,” he said. “I think a great deal of my grandson.”