- Trueline was supposed to bring more competition to the fiber broadband infrastructure market
- But the company laid off most of its employees last week
- Trueline is owned by the deep-pocketed private equity firm Grain Management
The broadband construction firm Trueline Infrastructure Solutions was supposed to bring competition to the market, but instead the company has gone out of business. Last Friday Trueline sent an email to its approximately 300 employees, terminating their employment immediately.
The email said, “As many of you are aware, Trueline has been facing unprecedented changes in the market, compounded by increasing competitive pressures. After carefully evaluating and pursuing all potential options to strengthen Trueline’s financial position, we have made the difficult decision to initiate a wind-down of our business.”
The company said a small group of employees will remain for a few weeks to shut everything down.
Darren Muljo, Trueline’s former environment, health and safety manager, told Fierce Network that the company’s CEO Rob Hughart resigned last week before the mass layoff, and the company’s CFO Karla Lunan had resigned in January.
There were other ominous signs that the company was in trouble. For instance, one of Trueline’s major service provider clients, Aspire/Highline, based in upper Michigan, recently dropped Trueline’s contract. And a few weeks ago, Trueline told its employees to temporarily shut down operations in some states, claiming the directive was “weather related.”
Rob Bridges, who formerly performed program management work for Trueline, suspected that the company was in trouble several months ago. He said, “I sat with a warehouse, material and staff and no work.” Ultimately, Bridges left Trueline and got another job last summer.
Grain brought together three companies
The private equity company Grain Management, a well-known telecom investor, brought together three services companies to form Trueline in 2023. The three companies were Atlantic Engineering Group, Fiber Optic Services and Young’s Communications. As a single entity, Grain planned for Trueline to focus on fiber-to-the-home builds as well as middle-mile construction and fiber connectivity to data centers. According to its website, Grain manages $9 billion of assets. Grain also owns several service providers, including Ritter Communications, Great Plains Communications, Summit Broadband, Hunter Communications and 123Net.
Fierce Network reached out to Grain for this story, but the company declined to comment.
Muljo said it’s a shame that Grain purchased these “fully functioning” family-owned businesses only to now shut everything down and leave people unemployed.
“I don’t understand how the board of directors would have not done their homework and understood the difficult nature of construction,” said Muljo. “How can a PE company with the pockets they have get away with this and leave 300 families?”
He said at least three employees had surgeries scheduled and were left unsure whether they still had health insurance.
Muljo added that the rush to lay off everybody has left a lot of incomplete construction in Florida and other states. He said there are trench boxes with steel plates covering open holes, conduit stubbed up out of the ground, and streets left with asphalt cuts.
According to Muljo, a group of employees plan to file a class action lawsuit against Grain Management for failure to provide a 60 day notice of layoffs pursuant to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.
