Scott Wilson says he still suffers from sleepless nights as chief executive of Regenesis, a privately held maker of environmental decontamination products in San Clemente.
There’s some progress in his restlessness, though.
Wilson first went through bouts of sleep deprivation when the company’s business went flat after the onset of the Great Recession in 2008.
These days, he says, Regenesis is growing and garnering lots of attention from environmental engineering companies with international clients, as well as would-be investors in China.
“We don’t really need cash,” Wilson said.
That means he’s been able to gently turn away foreign investors and corporations interested in acquiring the producer of products that safely eliminate soil and groundwater contamination. He declined to provide sales information but said Regenesis specializes in a market valued at about $250 billion.
The Business Journal estimates it has annual revenue of around $25 million—which leaves plenty of room to grow.
“In the last year we wrote about 1,800 designs for sites around the globe,” Wilson said, adding that the company needs to grow 15% annually for “several years” to respond to the growing demand.
Regenesis’ current customer base emphasizes the potential. The company’s products have been used by Fortune 500 companies, as well as federal and local governments, to decontaminate more than 20,000 military bases, municipal properties, manufacturing plants, gasoline stations, dry cleaning sites and commercial real estate developments since the company was formed in 1994.
It also boasts an impressive pedigree in the person of founder Gavin S. Herbert, who’s better known for building Allergan Inc. into a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical firm from its campus in Irvine.
Herbert brings plenty of financial backing and has attracted a board of directors that favors the long-term development of the company, Wilson said. Current directors include Lou Rosso, chairman emeritus of Brea-based laboratory instruments maker Beckman Coulter Inc. and a former vice president with Philadelphia-based drugmaker SmithKline Beckman Corporation.
“We’re fortunate that we have a very patient and supportive board,” Wilson said. “They want us to build a global brand.”
Regenesis has 100 employees, 40 of whom are employed in Orange County, and currently focus on producing the compounds to decontaminate the environment. The other 60 employees are salespeople working throughout the U.S. and overseas.
The board’s directive for global brand-building raises the stakes when it comes to making quality hires and deploying talent to meet new demands, he said.
First up will be three more researchers who will increase the company’s research and design staff to eight.
The challenge of finding the right talent becomes more complicated outside of the laboratory.
“I have to find qualified decontamination specialists, devise methods to evaluate them, purchase the proper field equipment, identify parts suppliers and repair shops,” Wilson said.
He also has to consider the “typical” projects, the size of the teams deployed to sites, the number of possible sites in a region, and the most cost-effective location for new offices in the U.S. and overseas.
Environmental engineering companies such as Englewood, Colo.-based CH2M Hill Cos., which Wilson said is a client, will accept an environmental contract, then subcontract with a third company to devise a cleanup plan that will use Regenesis’ products to eliminate the oil, chemical, or other type of contamination.
Those companies have begun to cut out the subcontractor, Wilson said. Regenesis has been asked to design cleanup projects because subcontractors missed deadlines or have been unable to completely solve the problem.
That’s a big change for a company that started more than 20 years ago and now offers 10 products that can eliminate 84 contaminants.
Traditional methods to remove oil, for example, from contaminated land—such as digging up the soil or washing it away solely with water—can take several years, Wilson said.
Regenesis’ compounds can eliminate 95% of the contamination within three months, and the company will guarantee that the contaminant will be undetectable within a year, he said.
The company’s latest compound, called PlumeStop, is a combination of finely ground-up charcoal, a degradable organic polymer, and naturally occurring microbes that is placed into a contaminated site.
It’s essentially injecting bacteria into the ground or water, allowing it to eat the contaminant and convert it into an inert product, Wilson said. The liquid polymer prevents clumping and helps the compound seep through the ground; the charcoal collects the contaminants; and the microbes eat them.
Wilson said the polymer breaks down as the bacteria eliminate the contaminant, and the bacteria die over time after they have depleted their food source. The bacteria do not transmit diseases and pose no medical risk to humans, he said.
The site needs to be well defined, and specialists need to know and stop all the sources of contamination, he said. When a design fails, it’s usually because the compound was placed in the wrong location or because the site was not thoroughly examined, Wilson said.
He attributes part of Regenesis’ growth to new demands from real estate developers, oil and gas producers and other businesses that want environmentally safe sites. “Fear was the original motivating force for cleaning sites,” he said. “Now it’s a part of the entire business process.”
A real estate developer, Wilson said, had to decontaminate a site in downtown Chicago that was saturated in chlorine solvents. The land was occupied with auto shops and industrial businesses that used the solvents for decades to remove gasoline and oil from tools and surfaces. They permeated the soil and forced the developer to remove the contaminants prior to breaking ground for a high-rise hotel and sports arena.
Regenesis designed a plan, received city approval, and decontaminated the site in 70 days, Wilson said.
The increased number of projects also increased the workload on Regenesis’ five-person R&D team. The team has to examine a site, then determine soil penetration rates and the appropriate method of cleaning the site. R&D manager Kristen Thoreson said her staff also responds to sales questions, develops uses for existing products, and researches other types of contaminants found at client sites.
The increased workload caused Chief Executive Wilson to triple the square footage for the R&D department to about 6,000 square feet. He took some space from the company’s attached warehouse to minimize costs.
He’ll take the growing pains over the dark days of the Great Recession.
“I’d rather deal with these problems,” he said. “It’s a lot more interesting dealing with these problems.”
