The Aquatrols Company story

Erick Koskinen and Greg Sinner lurked in the back of a crammed Glendale, Arizona, Hampton Inn conference room on Jan. 30, 2024, and cautiously watched as competitors-suddenly-turned-co-workers conducted a team meeting on the eve of the 2024 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show.

The duo studied body language. They listened intently to the dialogue. New impressions were formed, because it’s human nature to view teammates differently than business foes.

The end of the meeting, which came less than a month after Lamberti SpA announced its intention to merge Aquatrols and the turf division of Precision Laboratories to form The Aquatrols Company, marked the beginning of a new business journey for the 30 people in the room. The Aquatrols and Precision Laboratories teams were no longer selling against each other; they were working with each other.

Nearly a year later, Koskinen and Sinner describe the meeting on a Thursday morning Microsoft Teams conversation. A Precision Laboratories stalwart for 14 years following a stint as a golf course superintendent, Koskinen is now the general manager of The Aquatrols Company. Sinner, who joined Aquatrols in 2020, is the company’s director of sports turf. They have assumed leadership roles in bringing the companies together.

“The great thing about it was that our sales teams were always respectful competitors in the marketplace prior to this merger,” Koskinen says. “It’s not like we were tearing each other down.”

Now in their first full calendar year of a new chapter, Koskinen and Sinner realize the professionalism displayed in Arizona will forever remain a key part of the company’s business story. Open-mindedness supplanted awkwardness as the meeting progressed.

“When we got in there, everybody was sizing each other up and feeling each other out,” Sinner says. “But the irony was how similar everybody was with our approaches, our products and our positioning. We realized, ‘OK, this isn’t going to be as much of an obstacle as the lead and integration team thought it was going to be.’ We came out of there thinking we can capitalize on the positivity and excitement.”

The business opportunities, according to Koskinen, Sinner and other Aquatrols officials, stem from operating as a turf-focused company.

Based in Gallarate, Italy, Lamberti is a 125-year-old multinational company responsible for manufacturing specialty chemicals for myriad industries. Lamberti formed an agriculture-focused joint venture with Precision Laboratories in 2013. Founded in 1964, Precision Laboratories offered a portfolio of tank mix adjuvants, colorants, additives and surfactants to the turf industry.

Lamberti expanded its turfgrass industry presence by acquiring Aquatrols from a Chicago-based venture capital firm in January 2023. Established in 1954 and based in Paulsboro, New Jersey, Aquatrols methodically developed a strong presence in North American and European golf markets by refining surfactants designed to optimize water usage. The acquisition resulted in Lamberti consolidating the Precision Laboratories turf business into The Aquatrols Company.

The company’s business segments and research efforts are based in Paulsboro, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Kenosha, Wisconsin, serves as the manufacturing hub.

“In a very short amount of time, we have taken two separate companies and put them together from a management and personnel standpoint, and combined our manufacturing into one,” says Wes Hamm, the company’s director of North American golf sales. “From all accounts on the organizational side, it has been very positive.”

North American golf represents the combined company’s biggest business segment. Hamm oversees a sales team consisting of 10 territory managers and a strategic account manager responsible for serving distributors and superintendents.

Coincidentally, the companies merged during a dry year. Late into fall 2024, large swaths of the country were classified as “abnormally dry,” or in “moderate” or “severe” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

By integrating Precision Laboratories products into its portfolio, Aquatrols is positioned to bring holistic management programs to help superintendents with water quantity, quality and maximization challenges. The ability to offer diverse water management solutions to superintendents represents one of the biggest changes since Hamm joined the company as a territory manager in 2017. “We were a little bit of a spot-buy company then,” Hamm says. “We were not as program-oriented as we are now.”

Through efforts such as its Aquatrols Approach EOP, which extends to March 31, and marketing, the company will use 2025 to aggressively tell the story of its hydration, nutrition and enhancement capabilities, a contrast to the company’s early days when it exclusively focused on hydration.

“It’s creating awareness for not just how water performs in soil, but it’s creating awareness for water quality and how it impacts everything in your spray tank,” Koskinen says. “Every tank, every time, we should be impacting the performance and efficacy of water, because it has an effect on the performance and efficacy of everything that goes along with it.”

Koskinen adds that the company’s research pipeline, which includes access to Lamberti chemistries, will yield future golf water management innovation. Dr. Matt Fleetwood, who earned his doctorate from the University of Missouri before joining Precision Laboratories in 2022, is the company’s research and development/technical services manager. Aquatrols also recently hired superintendent Troy Noble as golf technical services manager/research and development. Noble will help the company bring product trials to golf course situations.

“The turfgrass industry should look for new things coming from us on a regular basis,” Hamm says. “New products, new ideas, new markets … status quo is not going to be where we sit for very long. We have a very healthy line of products in the pipeline.”

In addition to North America, the company also is increasing its golf presence in Europe, where course managers are coping with a wet 2024, inputs are heavily regulated compared to the United States and industry dynamics vary by country. The backing of Lamberti, according to Aquatrols director of European business Graham O’Connor, has already helped move products through the Fertilising Products Regulation, which governs manufacturing, importing and labeling of products in the European Union.

“I honestly feel we have set ourselves for growth,” says O’Connor, who joined Aquatrols in 2012. “Lamberti’s pipeline is crucial to it. They really do have an exciting pipeline. Combine that with Precision’s and Aquatrols’ market-facing presence, and their innovation and their global reach, and we’re in a really exciting place as we head into 2025.”

The formal entry into the North American and European sports turf markets represents another source of post-merger optimism. The company announced the launch of its sports turf plans in early November.

“We had to figure out how do we take our brand and expertise in golf and leverage that into adjacent spaces such as sports turf,” says Sinner, who will oversee the efforts. “It was a very easy transition as far as product-wise. The challenge was how do we build a brand? How do we understand the market? How do we gain traction in a market that we are currently playing in but never put in resources and financial backing and headcount into that? This integration (with Precision Laboratories) created that opportunity because our portfolio is so broad.”

Aquatrols will support the sports turf market with targeted research guided by Dr. Christian Baldwin, product development, and sales and marketing efforts, although Sinner adds that the company “will leverage the horsepower that we have,” to grow the business. Adding sports turf to its business aligns with the company’s “Turf at Heart” ethos.

“The exciting part — which gets us jazzed up — is that we are a company that’s 100 percent focused on the turfgrass industry … and that’s empowering,” Koskinen says.