William Blair acted as the lead financial advisor to The Evans Network of Companies (Evans), a portfolio company of Calera Capital (Calera), in connection with its recapitalization with Court Square Capital Partners (Court Square).
Transaction Highlights
- Deep sector expertise: Calera and Evans were attracted to William Blair’s extensive knowledge and experience within the transportation and logistics industry.
- Process and execution excellence: The William Blair team worked closely with Evans management and Calera during an accelerated, high-touch process with a focused group of financial investors.
- Strong relationship and trusted guidance: William Blair and the transaction leadership team have a strong relationship with Evans and Calera having advised on the prior sale to Calera and an add-on completed during Calera’s ownership.
About the Company
Founded in 1939 and based in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, Evans is a leading non-asset based logistics platform providing critical services at scale to a large and growing agent network of intermodal drayage, truckload, and freight brokerage agents. The Company operates as an outsourced provider of non-core but essential services to its agents, including a variety of back office functions (e.g., billing / collections, compliance, insurance and risk management, and IT) that enable agents to focus on their core activities of selling and dispatching freight. Providing these critical, centralized services at scale to vast, highly fragmented freight markets, Evans has driven robust growth through a combination of organic initiatives and a successful track record of highly accretive strategic acquisitions.
Founded in 1991, Calera Capital is a leading middle market private equity firm which has invested over $3.7 billion. With offices in Boston and San Francisco, Calera focuses on partnering with founders and management teams to drive significant value creation in their businesses, primarily in two industry sectors: Business Services and Specialty Industrials. Calera Capital makes substantial equity investments in middle-market businesses and works closely in support of management to build long-term sustainable value through the implementation of strategic and operating initiatives.
Court Square is a middle market private equity firm with one of the most experienced investment teams in the industry. Since 1979, Court Square has completed over 235 platform investments, helping managers, families and founder-owners to develop their companies into leaders in their respective markets. Court Square invests in companies that have compelling growth potential in the business services, industrial, healthcare, and tech and telecom sectors. Court Square has $7.6 billion of assets under management and is based in New York, N.Y.