Every morning, a five-minute briefing for owners of HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, and the rest of the trades. Acquisitions, technology shifts, operational tactics, and the regulatory weather — written by people who think the home services industry is the most interesting business story in America right now.
Join owners running shops from one truck to one hundred. No fluff, no founder-bro filler, no recycled LinkedIn takes.
Who got bought, by whom, at what multiple. Funds with new capital. Platforms looking for tuck-ins. The map of consolidation as it actually unfolds.
Pricing strategies that work. Hiring playbooks from shops growing fast. The exact KPI dashboards top operators run their week against.
Field service software, AI dispatchers, call centers, lead-gen tools. What's worth paying for, what's a money-pit, what's coming.
Labor rules, OSHA changes, insurance markets, financing conditions. The regulatory and economic context shaping every shop's quarter.
Apax has been quietly building a Sun Belt HVAC platform out of a 1980s family business. The deal closed Friday. Here's the playbook — and what it means for every shop in their footprint.
Lone Star Mechanical wasn't supposed to be a story. A Houston-based HVAC company started by a refrigeration tech in 1987, it grew to about $80M in revenue across four metros by 2019 — solid, regional, the kind of business you'd find in any Sun Belt city. Then Apax Partners showed up.
What Apax bought last Friday was no longer Lone Star Mechanical. Over the past 36 months, the company had quietly absorbed eleven smaller shops across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, growing to roughly $210M in revenue at a reported 18% adjusted EBITDA margin. The acquisition price — $340M enterprise value — pencils to a 9x multiple on $38M of EBITDA. That's an aggressive number for trades, and it tells you what Apax thinks they can do with it.
Here's what's notable. The selling sponsor, a regional family office, executed the rollup using a playbook that's become standard in the industry but is still poorly understood by independent operators: anchor on a strong technical brand, install a CEO who's run a $100M+ shop before, centralize call-center and dispatch, leave the local brand names alone for two to three years, and quietly migrate everyone to one tech stack. By the time customers notice...
The Roll-Up is for owners and operators with skin in the game. People who sign the payroll, who know what a real margin looks like, who get a call when a tech doesn't show up.
If you run a home service business of any size, in any trade, somewhere in North America — this is for you. If you're a private equity associate sourcing deals, a vendor selling into the trades, or a banker covering the space — fine, you can read too.
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