Alex Buehler

Alex Buehler is not the kind of guest who comes on the show with a single clever molecule or a membrane he invented in a lab. Buehler is a buyer. He is the rare water executive whose whole craft is taking businesses that already work, putting them together, and making the sum worth far more than the parts, and when I had him on in 2023 he was doing exactly that as President and CEO of Integrated Water Services, an Austin-based design-build outfit serving water and wastewater across the United States.

Alex Buehler arrived at that seat the long way around. He trained as a civil engineer at West Point, spent five years as a head civil engineer with the US Army Corps of Engineers in Germany, then went to Wharton for an MBA in finance, and from there built a career as the person you call when an industrial company needs to grow fast or be turned around (he has run businesses up to a billion dollars in revenue, by his own account). That mix of an engineer who can read a treatment process and a finance operator who can read a balance sheet is the whole reason his water playbook works.

Alex Buehler's bet at Integrated Water Services was on a part of the water map that almost nobody fights over. He calls it the middle market: the suburban and ex-urban communities that are too big for the small-system specialists and too small for the Veolias and Xylems of the world, and that is, in his words, "largely overlooked and uncontested." His way in was a product called the Blue Box, a forty-foot shipping container fitted out as a membrane bioreactor (an MBR, which is basically a compact biological treatment plant that uses membranes instead of a sprawling concrete works), that you truck to a site, drop in place and plug in.

Alex Buehler then bolted a disciplined acquisition engine onto that product. He builds a proprietary pipeline of a hundred to two hundred targets, most of them off-market companies run by founders who, as he puts it, have "never thought about selling their business," and he runs every one through a hundred-point scorecard that weighs market size, regulation, competition and how well the company's products bolt onto his own. It is the same buy-side discipline I spent twenty-three years of water-industry deals digging into for my own Leviathan database, which is exactly why his episode runs as a companion to my deep dive on how to buy a water company and turn in a profit.

Alex Buehler's stated ambition on the show was blunt: take a roughly $70 million business and make it ten times bigger inside four years, two-thirds of that growth bought rather than built, to end up with "the quintessential water and wastewater treatment and water reuse platform" with national coverage. He has since moved on from Integrated Water Services, and as of 2026 he is back in a seat he knows well, stepping in as interim President and CEO of Energy Recovery, the Nasdaq-listed maker of pressure-exchange devices for desalination, where he was chief financial officer years ago and has sat on the board since 2015.

“It's like a cargo container, a 40-foot container. Put it on the back of a truck, deliver it to the site, drop it in place, plug it in, influent, effluent, power, and you're in the treatment business.”

Buehler is, in short, the consolidator the water sector keeps waiting for: an operator who treats a fragmented, unglamorous market as exactly the kind of gap that money is supposed to fill, and who has the engineering credibility to do the diligence himself.