THUNDER BAY — TBT Engineering has added offices west and east of its home campus overlooking the Kaministiquia River.
The employee-owned multi-disciplinary engineering firm merged with LBE Group in Kenora in February, and opened a new branch office in Ottawa as well.
The benefits run both ways between Thunder Bay head office and the branch locations, TBTE president Scott Peterson said Monday at the 30-year-old Lakehead firm’s Yonge Street offices.
“We’ve got a lot of strengths that we developed over the last 30 years of work that now we can bring to those new markets and jurisdictions,” he told Newswatch, but TBTE is also richer in “resources and expertise through these acquisitions, mergers, and relationships.
“Now we can bring those technical skill sets back to our clients in our communities in northern Ontario where there’s been a bit of a void or they haven’t existed. So we’re very excited to be able to share that back as well.”
The merger with LBE Group brings 15 more professionals into the TBTE team of approximately 150, Peterson said.
The Thunder Bay firm’s “vision and drive has always been to highlight the expertise and innovation that exists within Ontario,” he said.
“These expansion initiatives will increase TBTE’s ability to deliver high-quality engineering solutions throughout Ontario at a time when Ontario-driven solutions will be more important than ever.”
TBTE now has offices in four Ontario locations outside Thunder Bay: Kenora, Ottawa, Collingwood and Fort Frances.
The new Kenora branch “ties in well with our vision, our mission and sort of our morals and ethics, what we see from northern Ontario,” Peterson said
“We have a strong relationship with leadership of (LBE Group),” he added. “Their services tie in very well with what we do here, so (the merger) just made sense.”
For the former staff of LBE Group, merging with TBTE “gives us access to a larger group of engineers and some people with additional expertise that we didn't have in Kenora,” senior engineer and branch manager Andrew Brookes told Newswatch.
The merger “allows us to offer some different services where TBT is very strong, specifically geotechnical and environmental engineering,” explained Brookes, who co-founded LBE Group about 12 years ago.
“We didn’t have any capacity in those two fields, so for us it’s very helpful that way.”
The Kenora branch office of TBT Engineering is at 815 Ottawa St. in Keewatin.
