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Dudek Looks North To Grow Its Business

Environmental consulting firm Dudek has managed to maintain a delicate balancing act over the past three decades — growing bigger while keeping its focus on local clients in communities it now serves at nine offices throughout California.

It competes in an industry with several large players aiming to serve multistate and global customer rosters, but founder and President Frank Dudek says the Encinitas-based company has found a comfortable niche with no current shortage of work opportunities.

“There are a lot of environmental regulations in a place like California, and that is the kind of thing we focus on,” said Dudek. “We want to be the California expert, and that has worked for us, especially as some of these other companies go after federal and international work.”

Dudek recently acquired North Fork Associates, a five-person Northern California environmental and land use planning firm, in a move to expand its statewide presence beyond Southern California. Officials said Auburn-based North Fork, specializing in environmental planning, permitting and biological services for public and private clients, was a good fit with its own service strengths.

The two privately held companies did not divulge financial terms of the acquisition.

Protecting Natural Resources

Founded in 1980, Dudek now has a total of approximately 275 employees statewide, handling projects such as endangered species mitigation, habitat restoration, wildlife protection planning and other areas where development intersects with natural-resource matters.

The company recently provided construction management on the city of Carlsbad’s $16.5 million safety training center geared to emergency first-responders, and other projects in that city built adjacent to sensitive native habitat, including a municipal golf course, fire station and a major expansion of a cross-town arterial road.

Among other recent work, it consulted with the city of San Marcos on a planned 214-acre downtown development along that city’s creek district, and managed development of a community conservation plan for a six-county region in the Mojave and Colorado desert areas.

Frank Dudek said there are public and private projects throughout the state where developers and communities are grappling with complex environmental laws, and there likely will be more work as communities return farmland and former industrial sites to their original nature-based uses.

Helping Cash-Strapped Cities

In addition, city governments throughout California are in budget-cutting mode, and hiring private consulting firms on a project basis is often less expensive than maintaining full-time staffs geared to environmental planning, he said.

Based on current and upcoming work, Dudek projects his firm will finish 2012 with about $45 million in revenue, an increase of about 10 percent from last year.

Dudek’s company competes in a growing environmental-services field that includes large and small rivals with a California presence, such as AECOM, CH2M Hill Inc. and locally based Kleinfelder Inc.

The research firm IBISWorld Inc. notes that environmental consulting is now a $19.1 billion industry in the U.S., after growing revenue by 7 percent annually since 2008. The industry is expected to grow another 9.4 percent annually over the next four years, to $30 billion by 2016.

Dudek said his firm’s work is done by a staff that is now about two-thirds biologists and other environmental scientists, and about one-third engineers. He said employees are drawn to a work environment where they can concentrate more on their reason for getting into the business, and less on bureaucratic and paperwork issues common to larger consulting firms.

“If they are biologists, they want to focus on biology, not on filling out forms,” Dudek said.

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