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- By Brian Edwards
- Real Estate
Gun Lake Investments, the economic development arm of the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, completed its first bolt-on acquisition for a platform company it started to provide commercial cleaning services.
GLI said its CSM Services Inc. subsidiary acquired the assets of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Custodial Housekeeping Staffing Inc. (CHS), a provider of janitorial and sanitation services. Terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition strengthens GLI’s capabilities in the commercial cleaning industry, which it entered with the 2017 acquisition of CSM, which is also based in Grand Rapids. CSM provides custodial, cleaning and disinfection services across a variety of industries, including banking, education, entertainment, manufacturing, and tribal facilities.
CHS, led by Tony Zapata, offers a comprehensive suite of cleaning solutions for educational institutions and corporate facilities. Zapata co-founded CHS with Derrick Hayes, who passed away in 2019. The company employs about 15 employees, according to Monica King, CEO of Gun Lake Investments.
Strategically, CHS provides some specialty services such as floor care and carpet cleaning, and they also have a background in cleaning food-processing facilities that require USDA inspections, Kind said. There’s also overlap between the two companies with some current industries such as public schools, King said.
The timing of the acquisition follows work over the past two years to prepare CSM for growth as a platform company, King told Tribal Business News. That work involved beefing up its business infrastructure and a leadership change with the appointment of Rebecca Carbin as president last fall.
With CSM solidified and the CHS acquisition completed, the company is poised for growth, King said. The expanded commercial cleaning platform might offer a good fit for federal contracting opportunities, King said. CSM might also expand the range of services like property management, landscaping, snow removal and other services that GLI and the tribe can use within its own portfolio, she said.
