It’s been easy to get overwhelmed by economic upheavals in recent years. Amid all that turmoil, can investors find a steady growth story? Preferably a company with a relatively small stock market capitalization of less than $1 billion or so?
Facilities management and remote work force accommodations may not sound as sexy as, say, artificial intelligence, but the future for Dexterra’s two basic businesses appears solid. And the Mississauga-based company has a strategic plan that looks very promising indeed.
Dexterra went through a major transition in 2020, when Toronto-based property and casualty insurance giant Fairfax Financial Holdings, founded by renowned value investor Prem Watsa, put together Dexterra (which traces its roots back as far as 1945) and Horizon North Logistics (which dates back to 1981). Fairfax retains a 51% holding.
For Dexterra CEO Mark Becker, 58, who joined Horizon North in 2018 and was promoted to the top job at Dexterra in 2023, the merger was almost literally a dream come true. An engineer by training, he had extensive experience with chemical giant Dow and in the Alberta oil patch with Suncor. Unfailingly modest, he describes Dexterra as “8,999 employees, plus me.”
Integrated facilities management for corporate and government clients means taking care of office buildings, light industrial and commercial facilities, military bases and more—including janitorial services, looking after grounds, heating and cooling systems, and so on. “The broader and more technically driven services we can do for clients, the more value we can add for them,” Becker says.
As for remote work force accommodations, three big sectors for that are mining (which Dexterra supports Canada-wide), oil and gas development in Western Canada and infrastructure such as high-voltage power lines. There’s also the prospect of new nation-building projects
The 2020 deal and subsequent growth and acquisitions have allowed Dexterra to expand into the United States, which now accounts for about 10% of revenue and more in future. Much of the facilities management sector there is fragmented, Becker says, and two acquisitions—CMI Management LLC in 2024 and 40% of Pleasant Valley Corp. last year—have given Dexterra a strong platform.
Even so, Becker is proud of Dexterra’s financial discipline. Its ratio of debt to EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) is still less than two, even though revenue more than doubled from 2020 to 2024.
“We want to focus on onboarding and capturing full value from recent acquisitions,” he says.