Peter Brooks Is Building a Water Company With No Exit Clock

Peter Brooks found water in a place where its absence was impossible to romanticize. As a Marine infantry officer in Iraq, he worked around failed municipal projects and abandoned infrastructure. The pipes were not an asset class or a climate thesis. They were the difference between a city functioning and a city improvising. He became curious about the rivers behind the immediate problem too - the Tigris and Euphrates, and the tensions created by upstream neighbors. A career had announced itself, though not yet in a language that belonged on a résumé.

Brooks had joined the military after September 11. At Harvard he began in Navy ROTC, then moved to the Marines because, as he later put it, he wanted to be “closer to the ground.” Four years of active duty included two deployments from 2007 to 2009, first as an infantry platoon commander and later in company-level and operations roles. The experience gave him an appetite for teams under pressure. It also produced a gentler discovery: between missions, Brooks ran an SAT course for his Marines, with study sessions and quizzes. Several went on to school. “I learned that I like teaching,” he said.

The education of a water operator

After leaving active duty in 2010, Brooks took a Fulbright grant to India to study water policy. Rajasthan’s desert villages and the Himalayan foothills turned an infrastructure interest into something more elemental. Clean water, he observed, belonged to human dignity. Policy could be abstract; carrying water was not. He began thinking about technology and diplomacy together, and about how the United States might engage water-scarce regions through something more constructive than a security lens.

Harvard supplied the institutional grammar. Brooks earned an undergraduate degree in government with high honors, then completed a joint MBA and Master in Public Policy in 2014. He taught water policy and received a Derek Bok Teaching Award. He was also a Tillman Scholar, part of a community that treated education as continued service. The sequence can look almost implausibly tidy in retrospect: soldier sees broken water systems, scholar studies water, teacher explains water. Real careers are messier. His next education took place inside companies.

At Xylem, Brooks worked in advanced water treatment and reuse. At NLine Energy, he helped utilities find electricity hiding inside their own distribution systems through in-conduit hydropower. At waterTALENT, he worked on the staffing and operating side of utilities. Each stop exposed another piece of the machine: technology, energy, labor, procurement, field judgment and the long patience of public customers. Water was not one industry so much as a federation of specialized trades that happened to meet inside a pipe.

An infinite holding period

Brooks and Michael Warady founded Sylmar Group in Los Angeles in 2019. Their target was not the glittering frontier of water technology. It was the durable middle: industrial treatment firms, groundwater-well specialists, pump shops and regional service businesses whose technicians know which valve has been temperamental since 1998. Many are family companies approaching a succession decision. Their assets are partly equipment and contracts, but largely memory.

Sylmar’s proposition to an owner is striking because it removes the usual second act. The company says it buys to hold indefinitely. It keeps legacy brands, invests in teams and connects regional expertise across a broader platform. There is no promised five-year resale and no theatrical renaming ceremony. The theory is that a permanent home can protect the local trust that makes a water business useful while adding recruiting, systems and capital that a smaller firm may struggle to assemble alone.

That sounds soothing. Operations rarely are. Buying a company creates a thousand decisions about what to standardize and what to leave alone. Brooks’s stated sequence is sensible: listen, prioritize, fix systems. The listening matters because a regional water operator may know more about a customer’s plant than any central office ever will. The systems matter because tribal knowledge, however charming, is a fragile database. The work is to convert memory into institutional capability without insulting the person who remembers.

Sylmar calls one of its values “Think in Decades.” Another, the “Virtuous Triangle,” asks leaders to invest in employees so employees can serve customers. These are useful slogans only if they survive a difficult quarter. By February 2026, the company had secured a $130 million senior credit facility to refinance prior debt, support a recent acquisition and fund more expansion. Permanent ownership still has a balance sheet. Patience must pay its interest on time.

The long pull

Brooks came to patience before he came to finance. He rowed at Harvard on two national-championship heavyweight teams and represented the United States at the 2001 junior world championships in Germany. Rowing runs through his family: his father competed at the 1968 Olympics, his brother rowed nationally and his sister won two NCAA championships. Brooks stopped early in his junior year to focus on ROTC. It is tempting to turn all this into a clean metaphor. Still, rowing does teach a particular contract with time: the stroke is repetitive, the pain is private and the boat moves only when the crew agrees.

The crew around Sylmar matters to Brooks. When he publicly shared his first podcast interview about the company, he used much of the announcement to credit Warady, board members, advisers, colleagues and the practitioners across its operating businesses. The self-effacement is consistent with how others in water describe him, but it is also strategically correct. A holding company cannot service a cooling tower, pull a failing pump or diagnose a well from a Los Angeles spreadsheet. The work belongs to people with tools in their hands.

That creates Sylmar’s most interesting challenge. Water needs younger talent at the same moment experienced technicians are retiring. Brooks wants to make the sector a magnet for ambitious people, not a place they discover accidentally. Artificial intelligence and data centers may generate a new class of water demand, but the glamorous customer does not make the underlying work glamorous. Someone still has to understand chemistry, machinery and a site manager’s midnight call.

A company of inherited names

Sylmar’s portfolio is a small museum of American business longevity. Its oldest well-service lineage has operated in Southern California for more than seven decades. Its oldest water-chemistry brand began during the Great Depression. That history gives the parent company credibility it could not manufacture in a campaign, but it also creates obligations. A name that has survived several generations carries the accumulated promises of everyone who answered its telephone. The sensible acquirer treats that goodwill as borrowed, not purchased.

Brooks’s utility-services post keeps him close to this reality. As chief executive of General Pump Company, he leads the part of Sylmar concerned with wells, pumps and the physical systems that bring groundwater to the surface. The work is geographically specific and mechanically unforgiving. Conditions underground vary. Municipal schedules do not care about corporate presentations. A rebuilt pump either returns to service or it does not. For a founder with policy training, this is a useful daily correction: the grand idea eventually has to fit inside a machine shop.

It also explains why Sylmar is organized around regional teams. Water treatment combines chemistry with familiarity. Cooling systems, boilers, industrial processes and groundwater wells each develop a local history. The technician who has watched that history unfold can hear trouble in a vibration or spot it in a test result before a dashboard begins shouting. A national platform can spread expertise and purchasing power. It cannot teleport judgment. Brooks’s model depends on letting scale travel while keeping attention near the customer.

What the clock reveals

There is a pleasing stubbornness to building around an infinite holding period. It refuses the most convenient measurement: the exit. Without a sale to settle the argument, success has to show up in customer retention, safer systems, stronger teams and businesses that remain worth owning. A permanent promise also accumulates moral interest. Every acquisition makes the next seller ask whether Sylmar treated the last one well.

Brooks’s path makes sense beside that promise. The Marine Corps taught him to depend on a team. Teaching revealed a taste for development. India gave water a human scale. Industry roles exposed its commercial seams. Sylmar joined the pieces into a company whose product is partly treatment and utility service, partly a home for local institutions. It is less a sudden invention than a career slowly admitting what it was about.

The private joke of infrastructure is that urgency rewards patience. Water systems must work now, so the companies responsible for them need to think far beyond now. Brooks has chosen a field where maintenance is a form of ambition and reliability earns no applause until it disappears. His bet is that enough good operators, given time and a reason to trust one another, can make an old industry compound. The clock is running. Happily, he does not seem eager to stop it.