Sealing The Deal

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With the merger of leak sealers, industrial specialty services is raising the bar for service and safety in one of the industry’s toughest and most critical sectors.

When the largest players in the refining, petrochemical, pipeline, gas, power and o‑shore and subsea markets need safe, smart, and reliable integrated mechanical services and solutions, they call on Industrial Specialty Services (ISS). The Deer Park, Texas-based enterprise leverages a safety-first culture and the industry’s best craftspeople to handle the most demanding and complex jobs on time, on budget, and with the ultimate safety practices.

In 2021, ISS merged with Leak Sealers to create the leading on-stream technical engineered service provider in America. The world’s major energy firms turn to ISS for their outstanding safety record, engineering expertise, and fabrication capacity to handle their most complex engineered technical solution needs.

Despite employing some of the best technical experts in the industry, ISS lacked the manufacturing capabilities they felt were necessary to differentiate themselves from the competition. The Leak Sealers merger added those capabilities; the blended organization has both robust engineering and manufacturing potential and a 400-person strong employee base to deliver on-stream solutions for leak sealing, hot tapping, line isolation, and composite wrap services as well as bolting, field machining, pipe cutting, valve repair, and heat treatment services.

“We have a strong culture of safety and execution,” Gary Gardner added. “Our people are empowered to make any decisions necessary in the field to protect themselves and our customers.”

The strength of ISS is rooted in continuous innovation. “We’ve found better, more innovative designs that have solved problems that some of our competitors have walked away from,” Gardner revealed. On the hot tapping line stop side of the business, they have taken over several extremely technical and complex projects, leveraging their extensive in-house expertise and complete commitment to safety to do what much of their competition can’t. In addition to those service lines, they take on complex, high-end field machining work. Their fabrication shop runs 24/7 and they are known for having the fastest turnaround time in the industry.

Their current geographic footprint is throughout the Gulf Coast, the Northeast, Midwest, and Ontario, Canada. The firm plans to grow throughout Canada, as well as into other strategic geographic regions. “In some cases we will greenfield these e‑ orts, and where it makes sense pursue acquisitions that give us greater market share in desired region,” he noted.

Today’s ISS entered the market in 2020 - carved out as an independent firm from Brand/Safeway. Gary Gardner, the company’s CEO, immediately faced a challenge that often comes with acquisitions: missing back-office technology. The accounting, HSE, and HR systems were proprietary and stayed with Brand, so Gardner called in cloud ERP specialists Acumatica to help. “We chose Acumatica because of its outstanding business intelligence capabilities and received their 2021 award for Implementation of the Year,” he said.

The company’s engineering group is led by industry veteran Chris Larsen P.E., who brings his 25 years of experience to bear in his collaborations with customers. As Gardner put it, “He chose to come to our much smaller organization to be more actively involved with our customers. Our philosophy is very much about collaboration, and working with our customers to find solutions to their most difficult problems.”

ISS is remaining true to its foundation, focusing on services that require a greater level of expertise than most companies provide. They include: engineering, designing, manufacturing, and installing custom leak sealing clamps and enclosures; drilling into pipes carrying materials under pressure, known as hot tapping; line stopping and freezing; and ASME-PCC-1 torquing of flanged connections to ensure leak-free joints.

They also provide field machining, heat treatment, and valve repair, and employ their specialized Studbuster tools to make stud, bolt, and pin removal more efficient and cost-effective. ISS/Leak Sealers also partners with Dragon Industrial Wrap to install their carbon fiber wraps; They reinforce piping and vessels for preventative care or when an upset happens. DIW newest wrap technology can handle heats up to 700 degrees.

ISS’s manufacturing facilities are located in Silsbee, Texas, and are outfitted with state-of-the-art CNC mills, CNC lathes and CNC burn tables, coupled with hand-operated lathes, mills, and vertical Bullards to take care of the most di cult engineering designs and solutions.

ISO Certification, which they expect to be granted by Q4 of this year, will boost their already strong customer confidence, demonstrating the company’s ability to consistently deliver quality products. Given that a key differentiator for Leak Sealers is the speed of delivery, the company remained hyper-focused on that commitment as they pursued ISO certification, as well as their promise to provide the fastest turnaround time on leak-sealing clamps in the industry.

“Everything we do is about finding unique and innovative solutions for our customers. We are problem solvers,” Gardner exhorted. Experts in risk mitigation, ISS employs standard safe operating procedures (SSOPs) to ensure that rigorous jobs can be done safely and effectively. This is why we are hyper-focused on people,” he explained. “Only with the right people working in a positive culture can you safely accomplish the types of jobs we perform.”