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Family-owned chemical and equipment manufacturer Betco Corporation announced that they are actively seeking opportunities to diversify and acquire culturally aligned businesses. As a part of their growth strategy, this core objective will help them expand their existing products and capabilities, as well as integrate best practices from all companies to support continuous process improvement.

In pursuit of entities with potential sale aspirations, Betco has enlisted the help of Pursant, an Illinois-based investment banking firm that provides buy-side and sell-side advisory, certified business valuation, business optimization, and talent support services to manufacturing and other sectors. Pursant has started proactively exploring the interest of companies that could supplement Betco’s existing business and benefit from the economies of scale that the corporation’s wide reach would provide.

Betco has applied over 70 years of industry experience into creating the most comprehensive line of cleaning and maintenance products and programs ever supplied by one manufacturer. Their expansion into various new product categories has been achieved through a combination of research and development and acquisition—the latter of which began with the purchase of Toledo Chemical in the mid-1960s and resultant addition of disinfectants to Betco’s offering.

Other acquisitions include two powered equipment companies, PowerBuff and NuSource, in the 1990s that ultimately led to their first entirely in-house machine. More recently, the purchase of wood floor coatings industry leader Basic Coatings in 2005 served to augment Betco’s existing floor care expertise, and a long-held commitment to sustainability drove the 2015 acquisition of Bio-Systems International—since renamed EnviroZyme — provider of live bacterial cultures for a wide variety of janitorial, wastewater, and other bioaugmentation applications.

That last acquisition has culminated in the construction of a dedicated plant—one of the most advanced in the world—for the fermentation and blending of microbes. The EnviroZyme building shares a campus with the state-of-the-art, 500,000-square-foot manufacturing and distribution complex that Betco built in 2016. In addition to leading-edge production capabilities for excellence in quality and consistency of products, both facilities also meet the most stringent regulatory and compliance needs.

Having configured their operations with room for growth far in advance of the outbreak of COVID-19, Betco leveraged some excess capacity to ramp up production while necessary to fuel virus relief efforts. They are now, however, looking beyond the pandemic and further investing in the future. 

“COVID-19 sparked heightened and abiding awareness worldwide of disinfection, cleanliness, and hand hygiene. Having dynamically improved our capabilities in response to the pandemic, we are entering a new era of growth and building on our most formidable assets: our brands, our high-performing solutions, and our dedicated team members,” says Brad Betz, President of Betco Corporation. “We are now on a strategic journey to leverage these strengths through acquisition.”