Optimum Energy Acquires Fourth-Generation Hussung Mechanical Contractors

What happened

Optimum Energy Co., an energy infrastructure company owned by Bernhard Capital Partners, announced on August 12, 2026, that it had acquired Hussung Mechanical Contractors and its service arm, HMC Service Company. The business is based in Louisville, Kentucky, and will keep operating under its own name as HMC within the Optimum Energy group. Calfee, Halter & Griswold served as legal counsel to Hussung, and Fishman Haygood represented Optimum Energy and Bernhard. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The seller

Brothers George and Henry Hussung founded the company in 1966 to serve the construction community in Kentucky and Southern Indiana, and George's son David joined a year later. David Clark Hussung, the third generation, is chief executive, and William and Cole Hussung represent the fourth. "My grandfather and his brother started this company with a straightforward promise: do quality work, act with integrity, and take care of the customer," David C. Hussung said in the announcement.

HMC designs, installs, and services HVAC, plumbing, medical gas, and process piping systems. Its construction side runs an in-house engineering and design-build team and a pipe fabrication shop, and has piped specialty gas, chemical, and distillery facilities; the service company handles maintenance, building automation, and emergency calls from offices in Louisville, Lexington, Calvert City, and Auxier. Its customers have included Norton Healthcare, Baptist Health, Owensboro Medical Health Systems, the University of Louisville, Fort Knox, and Louisville Metro Government.

Corey Cousino, president of Hussung Mechanical Contractors, said joining Optimum "gives us the resources and reach to take on more complex work and create more opportunity for our team, while staying true to the core values we have always held."

The buyer

Since 2005, Seattle-based Optimum Energy's patented software and engineering have helped customers cut the energy their heating and cooling systems use. When Bernhard agreed to acquire it in June 2023, the firm called it "a global leader in HVAC optimization solutions." It now describes itself as a holistic infrastructure company for healthcare, higher education, and advanced manufacturing facilities, covering engineering, construction, central utility plants, operations and maintenance, and performance optimization, and it offers an Energy-as-a-Service model with off-balance-sheet financing. Its service lines now include mechanical contracting and field services through HMC.

Optimum said adding HMC's mechanical contracting and field service work "expands Optimum Energy's in-house execution capability and strengthens its ability to self-perform across every phase of the infrastructure lifecycle." Chief executive Lisa Roy said, "Hussung has built exactly the kind of organization we want to grow alongside." Bernhard, a Baton Rouge investment firm with more than $6 billion in assets under management, framed it as platform building: "We identify and bring together market-leading businesses whose expertise, customer relationships, and technical capabilities create end-to-end offerings with greater scale and reach," said managing director Jonathan de Lauréal.

What this means for mechanical contracting owners

The buyer here is not another mechanical contractor. Optimum sells energy performance, central plant work, and financing to hospitals, universities, and manufacturers, the same kinds of facilities on HMC's customer list, and it has now paired that with a contractor that self-performs the mechanical work. For an owner with similar services in their portfolio, the buyer set reaches past contractor platforms to energy and infrastructure companies adding field capability of their own, as Optimum did here. Our guide to selling an HVAC or mechanical business to private equity covers how sponsor-backed buyers approach these deals. What connected a Seattle energy company to a Louisville contractor was a shared kind of customer, and an owner whose customers look like HMC's has reason to count companies like Optimum among the possible buyers.

OffDeal is an advisory firm that helps lower-middle-market business owners sell with confidence. Reach out to learn more about our expertise with mechanical contracting businesses in Kentucky.

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Source: Optimum Energy - https://optimumenergyco.com/optimum-energy-announces-acquisition-of-hussung-mechanical-contractors-and-hmc-service-company/