Houlihan Lokey Advises Whitney, Bradley & Brown

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Whitney, Bradley & Brown, Inc. (WBB), a portfolio company of H.I.G. Capital, has been acquired by Serco, Inc., for $295 million. The transaction closed on April 26, 2021.

WBB is a leading provider of advisory, engineering, and technical services to the U.S. military. Its highly specialized and experienced workforce modernizes, transforms, and sustains major mission-centric platforms, programs, and organizations that are critical to driving defense and national security superiority. WBB, founded in 1981, has approximately 1,000 employees, including more than 200 subject-matter experts across multiple defense departments and domains, many of whom are former senior military officers. The company has strong relationships with difficult-to-penetrate customers, including the Air Force, Missile Defense Agency, Space and Missile Defense Command, U.S. Space Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and other security agencies. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, WBB is an ISO 9001 registered company with employees operating at 15 strategically located facilities across the country.

H.I.G. Capital is a leading global private equity and alternative assets investment firm with $43 billion of equity capital under management. It specializes in providing both debt and equity capital to small and mid-sized companies, utilizing a flexible and operationally focused/value-added approach. Since its founding in 1993, H.I.G. Capital has invested in and managed more than 300 companies worldwide. The firm’s current portfolio includes more than 100 companies with combined sales in excess of $30 billion.

Serco is a leading provider of professional, technology, and management services. It advises, designs, integrates, and delivers solutions that transform how clients achieve their missions. Headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, Serco has approximately 8,000 employees and annual revenue of $1.4 billion. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Serco Group plc, a $5 billion international business that helps transform government and public services around the world.

This acquisition will expand Serco’s position within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), strengthen its capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data analytics, and cyber consulting, and offer new expertise in wargaming and modeling and simulation, as well as provide new strategic locations. Key strategic drivers include:

• Growth in the highly strategic U.S. defense market.
• Substantial breadth across the DoD, including access to highly strategic and difficult-to-penetrate customers such as Space Force and MDA.
• Meaningful expansion of capabilities across the cyber, AI/ML, data analytics, and advanced engineering and consulting domains.

Houlihan Lokey served as the financial advisor to WBB and assisted in marketing, structuring, and negotiating the transaction on behalf of the company. This deal further demonstrates Houlihan Lokey’s leading position in advising companies with high-end engineering, technical services, and national security mission support capabilities.

Houlihan Lokey’s Aerospace, Defense & Government (ADG) practice within the global Industrials Group is a leading M&A advisor to aerospace, defense, and government services companies. Since the beginning of 2020, the team has closed more than 25 transactions worth nearly $5.6 billion in enterprise value. With a staff of approximately 30 investment bankers in Washington, D.C., London, and Los Angeles, Houlihan Lokey’s ADG practice is among the largest dedicated industry banking groups worldwide. In 2020, the Industrials Group was once again ranked as the No. 1 M&A advisor for all U.S. industrial transactions, according to Refinitiv (formerly known as Thomson Reuters).