Joseph Pamic, who spearheaded a series of M&A deals that helped Stittsville-based Power-Tek Group more than triple its revenues since 2020, announced this week he has launched a venture with Toronto-based business partner Robert Curran aimed at acquiring companies in the precision manufacturing, industrial and consumer packaging industries.
An Ottawa entrepreneur whose knack for timely acquisitions fuelled a major growth spurt at a well-known local construction firm is branching out into the industrial sector.
Joseph Pamic, who spearheaded a series of M&A deals that helped Stittsville-based Power-Tek Group more than triple its revenues since 2020, announced this week he has launched a venture with Toronto-based business partner Robert Curran aimed at acquiring companies in the precision manufacturing, industrial and consumer packaging industries.
Now doing business as Lioncrest Industries, the organization was incorporated last summer as King West Partners Holding Ltd., a nod to the Toronto neighbourhood where its co-founders first met more than a decade ago.
Over the past 18 months, Pamic and Curran have quietly completed a series of acquisitions that brought five companies with a total of more than 100 employees in eastern Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area under the King West umbrella. Freshly rebranded as Lioncrest, the company had its coming-out party this week in posts on the founders’ LinkedIn pages.
In an interview with OBJ on Tuesday, Pamic said he and Curran – a former investment banker who recently left his role as managing partner at Toronto-based Socium Capital to devote himself full-time to Lioncrest – have “always talked about doing something together.”
An opportunity presented itself as Pamic started coming across attractive M&A targets that “were not a fit for Power-Tek.” Last year, he and Curran zeroed in on a plan to start “buying and running” companies that serve customers in burgeoning industries such as defence and robotics.
“Eventually, the timing was right,” Pamic says. “We’re just aligned on everything. Two heads are better than one. We can bounce ideas off each other, deal with difficult situations together, kind of strategize together. There are two of us, so we’re twice as dangerous. We can do twice as much work.”
'Growing into something real'
Their first buy, in April 2024, was Ottawa-based Dynamic Precision, which manufactures metal components for equipment such as drones, defence vehicles and medical devices.
Four more acquisitions have followed since, all backed by bank financing. They include York Fluid Controls, a Brampton-based distributor of pumps, valves and specialty systems to customers in the chemical, food and beverage, power generation and mining sectors; Scarborough-based Olympic Plastic Bags Ltd., whose clients include major supermarkets and Home Depot; Ottawa’s Kard Precision, which does contract manufacturing in the defence and industrial spaces; and Kingston-based industrial manufacturer Danton Machine & Welding Ltd.
“As we started building up this portfolio, we realized, ‘Hey, this is really growing into something real,’” says Pamic, who recently left his executive role at Power-Tek but remains an adviser to the company. “Our goal was to build a large, diversified industrial business.”
While manufacturers in many industries are bearing the brunt of the global trade war that’s seen the U.S. and Canada slap tariffs and counter-tariffs on products such as steel and aluminum, Pamic says Lioncrest is strategically targeting companies in sectors it believes will withstand the current economic storm, such as defence.
He and Curran have already seen “well over a thousand” potential deals cross their desks, he notes, but have pulled the trigger on just a handful.
“We’ve been very selective in the companies that we’ve acquired,” Pamic explains. “We’re selling to a lot of industries that, regardless of tariffs and outside political decisions, will continue to be around.”
Lioncrest’s meticulous approach to M&A shouldn’t come as a surprise given Pamic’s pedigree.
The firm’s co-CEO – he shares the job with Curran – graduated from the University of Ottawa with a bachelor’s degree in commerce before cutting his teeth in mergers and acquisitions with Toronto’s Lynx Equity Ltd. He then spent two years as director of investment management at Sussex Capital, the private investment firm of legendary entrepreneur Michael Potter.
Pamic told OBJ in 2021 that working alongside the likes of Potter – who grew Kanata software firm Cognos into one of the city’s leading tech companies in the 1980s and ’90s – taught him the importance of thinking strategically when it comes to growing a business.
“He came at it with a very scientific viewpoint,” he said of Potter.
In January 2020, Pamic joined Power-Tek, a contracting business co-founded by his father Walter in 1996, with the goal of jumpstarting growth by buying up companies that would diversify Power-Tek’s customer base and expand it into new verticals.
His efforts paid off. Targeting businesses of aging owners with no succession plan, Power-Tek made a string of deals over the next five years that brought the firm a slew of new customers and additional expertise in areas such as refrigeration and air conditioning. The company's revenues have grown from $10 million in fiscal 2020 to more than $30 million today.
Pamic, who also earned an MBA from Queen’s University, hopes to replicate that successful template at Lioncrest.
He says many entrepreneurs who run machine shops and other industrial businesses are nearing retirement age and looking for a path to exit. In many cases, he adds, second-generation family members aren’t an option – and that’s where Lioncrest comes in.
“We’ve got older owners who may not have a succession plan, and we’ve got a very strong foundation and base that we’ve built here,” Pamic says. “We can (give) a lot of these sellers a great next home for the business that they’ve built.
“Our goal is to continue to evaluate opportunities, and if it makes sense for both parties, to do an acquisition. It all just depends on what’s out there and what makes sense at the time.” 
