Commissioning Giants’ revenue surges $100 million over last year

Commissioning Giants insights

• The 2023 Commissioning Giants includes six new companies, which may have affected overall revenue increases.
• Staffing challenges plagued this year’s Commissioning Giants, with nearly half citing hiring or quality as a major challenge.

The 2023 Commissioning Giants provides information on the top 25 firms based on self-reporting for this year’s rankings.

The average percentage of commissioning revenue earned by the 2023 Commissioning Giants was approximately 32.9%, a slight increase from the past reporting year at 30.5% of gross revenue. The top 25 firms earn a great deal of their revenue from commissioning, with four firms earning 100% of their revenue solely from commissioning: Bureau Veritas Primary Integration Inc., Iconicx Critical Solutions, FST-HEA LLC and Rubicon Technical Services.

See Table 1 for the complete ranking, including the six new or previously unranked companies.

Table 1: The top 25 firms earned $831.7 million in the past fiscal year. Nearly all firms (92%) reported having a commissioning engineer or coordinator on staff and 80% indicated they had a business development director, a drop from 92% last year. Courtesy: Consulting-Specifying Engineer

For the 2023 report, the top 25 companies made $831.7 million in commissioning revenue, a marked increase from the previous year’s $730 million. The majority (40%) of firms are consulting-engineering firms with a commissioning division; about a quarter (24%) are commissioning-focused firms. Firm ownership type fell into four categories: private (32%), public (24%), limited liability company (24%) and employee-owned (20%).

The average commissioning fee per project varied. About a third (32%) of companies earned $100,001 to $300,000, 28% earned $50,001 to $100,000 and 24% earned $25,001 to $50,000. Only 12% earned more than $300,000 per project.

This data reflects commissioning at all levels: new buildings (46%), whole building (13%), emergency power systems (6%), existing buildings (7%), retro-commissioning (6%), building enclosure (envelope, 5%), monitoring-based (3%), fire protection systems (3%), recommissioning (3%) and communications systems (2%). Each reporting firm completed, on average, 371 projects in the previous reporting year, up from 320 commissioning projects (at any level) in 2022.

Figure 1: Most firms are consulting-engineering firms with a division committed to commissioning at various levels. Courtesy: Consulting-Specifying Engineer

According to survey respondents, these firms were contracted to complete commissioning for a variety of reasons: resiliency (safety, flexibility, disaster resilience, health: 88%, no change), savings (energy efficiency, lower life cycle cost: 84%, no change), sustainability (long-term materials and performance efficiency: 88%, a slight uptick from 84%) and mandates (codes, standards, benchmarking: 76%, no change). Other reasons included and marketability of the property (48%, a decrease from 64%).

Commissioning challenges

The 2023 Commissioning Giants study asked about future challenges in commissioning. They are:

• Lack of knowledge about commissioning’s worth: 52%.

• Not enough commissioning authorities or agents (CxA) or commissioning professionals (CxP): 44%, a large drop from 64%.

• Lack of funding or buy-in (from owners, engineers, etc.) to conduct commissioning: 40%, a drop from 52%.

• Codes, standards changing: 20%, an uptick from 16%.

• Slow market acceptance: 20%, an uptick from 16%.

• Association leadership lacking or too slow: 16%, a doubling of 8%.

• Litigation concerns: 10%.

• Poor training opportunities: 10%.

• Other: 12%.

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