Agbede now vice chair of new entity
Robert Agbede says any budding minority-owned company should strive to build its business to the point where its skills, services and expertise are in such demand that a larger firm seeks to buy them to enhance its capabilities.
That’s what he has done, with a slight detour. After founding his Advanced Technology Systems environmental engineering firm in 1987, he built it to the point where he acquired another firm, Chester Engineers in 2003.
But he is not finished.
On March 31, Agbede announced that Chester Engineers has merged with Canadian-based Hatch, a global leader in mining, energy and infrastructure engineering, creating Hatch Chester. The new entity will be based in Hatch’s offices on West Carson Street on the West End and serve as the company’s U.S. headquarters. Agbede is the new firm’s vice chair.“I’ve been here 42 years. I got my first contract at ATS from U.S. Steel,” Agbede said. “We grew, merged with Chester, and today, we are growing beyond our region with a company involved in aviation, transportation, smart cities and steel mills, doing business in 150 countries.
“I am proud to announce this merger as we transition from a small minority firm, to Chester, to a global company that can do more for our region and beyond,” he said. “It allows us to touch, in a deeper way, all that we have always been involved in. It shows that, given access to opportunity, the sky’s the limit.”
He then introduced Ted Lyon, who will serve as Hatch Chester’s Chair, and who, despite being in the Middle East the week before, and in China in February, has strong Pittsburgh links. He and his sons all attended Pitt, and his uncle, Fred Way, was a noted riverboat captain who lived in Sewickley. Lyon’s cousin is opera singer and WQED announcer and music programmer Anna Singer.
“We expect to bring global experience to opportunities right here,” Lyon said. “We have 9,000 employees in 150 countries, and are a preeminent provider of infrastructure and design services, and we expect to become a major player in the United States.”
Agbede said Hatch is an employee-owned firm that shares his entrepreneurial spirit, and that he and all his Chester employees are now vested in the new firm’s growth. And to those who say that Hatch’s acquisition of Chester means the demise of a major Black-owned company, Agbede said that’s not the case.
“Frankly, we’ve grown beyond disadvantaged status for some time now—maybe by definition, but not by substance,” he said. “People don’t hire us because of our minority status, they hire us for our technical competence. Hatch didn’t seek us out for our MBE (Minority-owned Business Enterprise) status. We have an alignment of values.”
Asked whether the merger puts Hatch Chester in a better position to win some of the billions in contract dollars ALCOSAN (Allegheny County Sanitary Authority) will be awarding to refurbish its rainwater and sewer systems, Agbede said he hopes so.
“We can only do so much, but with Hatch, this is a case where one plus one equals at least three,” he said. “They have design infrastructure and tunneling expertise, for example—and of course with our environmental expertise, we are asking them to take a look at our capabilities.”
Like us at https://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Pittsburgh-Courier/143866755628836?ref=hl
Follow @NewPghCourier on Twitter https://twitter.com/NewPghCourier
About Post Author
