MARS Energy Group Acquires Citadel Roofing & Solar in Its 11th Deal

What happened

MARS Energy Group, a holding company based in Rocklin, California, announced on August 27, 2026 that it had acquired Citadel Roofing & Solar, a residential roofing and solar contractor based in Vacaville, California. MARS called Citadel its 11th acquisition and said the deal adds more than 1,000 employees to its platform. Citadel will continue to operate under Dieter Folk, Helmut Gehle, Eric Owen, Wendi Zubillaga, Stephanie Crichton, Jeff Maxfield, and the rest of its existing management team. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The seller

Industry veterans founded Citadel in 2015. Its core business is roofing and solar on residential new construction in Northern California, alongside reroofing and retrofit solar for homeowners. It installs with its own crews rather than subcontractors and runs offices in Vacaville, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, Fresno, Santa Clarita, and Corona.

On the builder side, Citadel has relationships with more than 80 homebuilders and residential developers, among them national builders D.R. Horton, Shea Homes, Taylor Morrison, and Toll Brothers, and regional builders including Elliott Homes, ESI Builders, and Tim Lewis Communities.

Dieter Folk, Citadel's president and owner, started in roofing at 16 with a summer job at his father's roofing company and has since founded and run two roofing companies. All three of his children work at Citadel. "Joining the platform gives us additional resources, operational support, and room to keep growing, while preserving the values and relationships that have made Citadel successful," Folk said in the announcement.

The buyer

MARS Energy Group builds and scales energy infrastructure businesses, with solar, storage, roofing, and electrification work for residential and commercial customers and developers. On the commercial side it designs, builds, and maintains solar, energy storage, and EV charging projects, and in November 2025 it bought Nelnet Renewable Energy, a commercial and utility-scale solar EPC business. On new homes it works with builders through Solara Home Energy, a MARS company, and its new-construction businesses, including Solara, CalState, and Ready Home, install solar for builders.

Manvendra Saxena is MARS's founder, chairman, and CEO. He formed MARS as a holding company within Mars Equity Partners, a lower-middle-market private equity firm in Northern California that he helped create, and the firm lists NewGen Energy, Ready Home Energy, K12 Solar, and CalState Solar, all MARS businesses, among its current holdings.

"This partnership is not about changing what has made Citadel successful," Saxena said. "It is about investing in it."

How MARS has been buying California's builder roofers

In November 2025, Solara acquired California Premier Roofscapes, Custom Roofscapes, and CWD Loma, together known as CalPrem Roofing and CalPrem Solar, which supply roofing and solar to California homebuilders. Those were MARS's sixth and seventh acquisitions, and President Wes Mayer and CFO Danny Mayer stayed on to run the business. In May 2026 MARS bought Solar Savings Direct, which does business as Solar and Roof Direct, and Sequoia Roofing & Construction, its ninth and tenth. Those companies do what Citadel does: new construction installs for production builders, plus reroofing and retrofit solar for homeowners. MARS said that business would keep its branding in the near term before moving to the MARS Home Solutions name.

All three deals paired a roofing business with a solar business. California's Title 24 building code requires solar on new residential construction, so on a new home the roofer and the solar installer work the same roof. Because MARS was formed within a private equity firm, an owner talking to it is talking to a private equity-backed buyer, and our guide on selling a roofing business to private equity covers what that involves.

What this means for roofing owners

For roofers whose work runs through production builders, the buyer set now includes energy companies with builder solar businesses of their own. A new-construction roofer with solar capability and a builder roster of its own is the profile this buyer has now paid for three times. Each of those announcements kept the seller's leadership running the business, so an owner in talks with MARS or a buyer like it can start from that term rather than ask for it.

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

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Source: MARS Energy Group via Newswire.com - https://www.newswire.com/news/mars-energy-group-acquires-citadel-roofing-solar-strengthening-its-position-as