We Merged Our Home Service Companies—Now We’re Building to $100M

John and Jack are now partnered in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. So—

This is fucking awesome.

I'm now employee number 300 and something of John's. He's enjoying this very much.

Just to like give everyone what Jack and I are trying to build here. What we're looking to do is create a super regional platform. Can we connect the west side of Pennsylvania to Chicago and Michigan to Nashville?

We're really excited.

So what do you wanna do now?

I wanna go buy some, some more businesses.

If you are in Nashville, we'd love to talk to you. Welcome back to Owned and Operated, a top 200 business and entrepreneurship podcast. I'm your host, John Wilson. During the day, I'm the CEO of Wilson, and we are a $40 million plumbing, HVAC, and electric platform across 3 states in the Midwest. And for fun, I run this podcast where I talk to my friends about how to build their home service business. Today, I am joined by my good friend, partner, and co-host, Jack Carr, the CEO and leader of Rapid Response in Nashville, Tennessee. Welcome back. Welcome back.

Whoa, John, that intro changed a little bit. It went to 3 states.

It did. It recently changed a little bit. It's so weird. Yeah, we put this out on Twitter, or well, Jack put this out on Twitter, so maybe you should be the you should be the one to say it.

Well, how's business going? Business is going great. I heard you just added like six or seven million dollars to your top line.

Business is going great. We recently partnered with this incredible entrepreneur down in Nashville, Tennessee.

Oh, competitor! Wow.

Yeah, that's kind of rough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gonna be pretty tough.

No, everyone everyone who's not catching in between the lines here, John and Jack are now. Partnered in multiple businesses, including HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. So we merged here this week, actually a couple days ago, and we are now— I'm now employee number 300-something.

358. Yeah, you're number 358.

I now have my first W-2 in 7 years, and it's for John. So he, he's enjoying this very much.

I am enjoying it a little bit. I am enjoying it a little bit. Yeah. No, I think it's— I mean, this is fucking awesome. I think I was talking to Bridget about this and my 20s felt very isolated in entrepreneurship. Yes. And a theme of my 30s, and I'm turning 35, so midlife crisis, the theme of my 30s are, hey, for the past 5 years, I've really connected with the nation through this show, through the newsletter, through X, through whatever, and built this incredible group of friends and peers and people that I admire and want to work with one day. And so my 20s was building alone and it worked. And my 30s has been industry friends and being able to work closer with industry friends. So that's been a lot of fun. So We partnered with Jack in Nashville. Um, but, but this year especially is kind of funny because we've done 3— we've done, uh, 3 new, like, add-ons this year.

Yeah.

And every single one of them was a friend. Like, they were all, like, people that I have just known for years through the show. They went through the Breaking 5 workshops. Like, Jack knew them.

Groomer. That's what I'm calling it. Business groomer.

Jesus Christ. It's like that.

That's what this all is.

It's just all a big I met you years ago and I eventually acquired you.

Yeah, exactly. Um, no, man, I'm super excited.

This is—

I mean, we've been working on it for months. We've been hinting at—

yeah, if you, if you've been listening, we started working on this almost a year ago.

Yeah, you've probably heard some hints towards it. Um, and now it all makes sense. But yeah, we've been working on this for a while.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, we're really excited. I think that this is a good, uh, partnership that I'm, I'm super excited about because we're able to really put some gasoline onto our already, uh, raging fire. And yeah, I think for both of us, uh, the next couple years are gonna be crazy. Crazy, really. I was gonna say intense, intense, crazy.

It's gonna be crazy.

Um, but it's gonna be fun. Like, yeah, building with friends is— building this podcast has been fun. Yeah, building our other projects have been fun. And so it's, it's already been fun working with you and your team You too, man. To get through due diligence and to get into the stages we are now.

Yeah. No, this has been awesome. I think, yeah, I remember, well, when I was talking with Bridget, so we talked about like, hey, 20s we're alone and 30s I just want to do business with people I like. But I remember that you and I started talking about this It was almost a year and a half ago was when it first came up as like something. I feel, I feel like I remember it was like December of '24. And we had, I don't remember. I remember the podcast and I remember like where I was sitting when we did it, but I don't remember what started the conversation. Like maybe somebody got bought or somebody offered to buy me or something. And it was just starting to think through what's the benefit and what's the point, which is kind of interesting because I think as someone that's built, like both of us, as someone that's built privately without private equity funding, we've just built our businesses, it's hard to imagine a partnership. It's hard to imagine how it works and why would I Why would I do it? But I remember like a year and a half ago, we were talking about like, oh, hey, hold on. Goodman pricing is like 40, 50% freaking less. Like, yeah, I always get really annoyed when I hear people service tighten pricing. Like I heard someone's yesterday, it was like $160 a user. And I was like, that's cute. That's a cute thing that you've got there. And like, it's like there's these economies of scale that you get to benefit from by being a part of something bigger. Most marketing agencies will show you clicks, impressions, and maybe even traffic, but none of that really matters if the phone's not ringing. And that's why we partner with ServiceScalers. They are built specifically for home service companies and they focus on one thing, which is driving real high-quality calls and book jobs. This is a no-brainer. They're offering a 60-day money-back guarantee on LSA management. Google Business Profile optimization, and website builds. If you don't get more visibility, more calls, and better leads, then you don't pay. If you want more booked jobs without the marketing headache, click the link below and book a free strategy call with Service Scalers.

Yeah, I mean, across the board. And, and I think that was probably the conversation that spurred it is we were talking about Wrench Group or one of these other large groups that have came together. And then it, or it was We were looking at somebody's crazy pricing and going, how is this group— I think maybe like Kool-Aid or something— how are they getting these, this nuts pricing? And it's just this, these economies of scale that you're not able to touch, but you can see other companies utilize. And it hurts because you have to sell at the same market rate as them or within a reasonable percentage.

Yeah.

But their margin is like a 65% you know, gross margin on something at the same price that yours is a 45. So they're able to rip 20 more percent out of material than you are on each job. Like, it's just nuts.

Yeah, it is. I think that's something that is not well disclosed inside the industry. And I think wholesalers kind of get— I don't think they're totally— they're not in control of what I'm about to say. So I'm not like digging on any wholesalers here. Because factories, like wholesalers, like have a point that they can go to, and then at that point it's factory. So if your wholesaler's telling you you're getting a good price, like you very well might be, and it like who knows if it goes beyond that point, they have to go talk to the factory. I think it's really hard for the average contractor to understand the price difference of materials, of software, of services, of anything. When you haven't seen it with your own eyeballs. I remember back in 2024, we were working on this HVAC negotiation that we've talked a lot about. And one of the most formative moments of that is I was down in DFW and I visited with Baker Brothers.

Mm-hmm.

And Jimmy and I were reviewing what they were paying for equipment. And it was just like literally 50% less, like 5-0% less than what we were paying. And they were doing it through Lennox and Lennox is headquartered there. And I'm sure there's some stuff going on there, but it really opened my eyes to like, holy shit, this is what scale brings you is exactly that. Like it allows you to compete in a totally different world.

But the cool part, and I don't want to jump subjects here, but like that's one portion as well. Right. So again, the distance between Akron and Nashville doesn't allow for this. But once you start to— yet once you start to close the gap, hint hint, anybody in Kentucky, if anyone's in Kentucky and they would like to partner, Kentucky, I have a problem I need to solve. Roughly Bowling Green, Kentucky would be Bowling Green, Lexington, Lewisburg, all in the same area.

Just anywhere in there. Just spitball it.

If you would like to let like On a map, take Akron or Columbus and just—

I need a, I need a, I need a path.

But like, that's the next huge area of leverage, which you get with your current businesses up in, in Ohio. But we don't see just yet is like the people leverage is having the ability to pull up—

Share capacity.

Yeah, share capacity, share installer capacity when one person is oversold. Like, we just had it this month where we sold $180,000 more than we were able to install.

That's crazy.

And we were purely handicapped by the fact that we were doing, you know, 3 HVAC installs with 2 teams a day. Like, if we had somebody close that had extra capacity on the install side, yeah, right, we could have knocked out an additional $20,000, $30,000 easy, easy, easy. Probably like $50,000 or $60,000.

Yeah. Well, that so that's what we've done so far. So the just to like give everyone the what we're trying to build together, like what Jack and I are trying to build here. So in our headquarters is essentially Cleveland, Ohio. We're just south of Cleveland, Ohio, and really big market, like three and a half total million people in like that MSA. It's Akron, Canton, and Cleveland. A lot of people. We we bought a business about thirty minutes west of us in January first. It's been an awesome addition to what we're doing, and we get to do exactly what you're talking about. Where you know I've seen it with A1, I've seen it with Peterman, I've seen it with Call Dad. Like these companies are doing this incredible job of sharing capacity, so there's no there's basically no such thing as a slow day anymore because if you're slow here, they're busy as hell over here. And it's a totally different way of looking at scale. So we brought on that business and then a month later in February, we brought on one in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And we're actually about to, I'm hoping we're gonna bring on a second one in Fort Wayne here in the next like month or two. We have one that we're about to get under LOI. And so we've got that and now we've been sharing capacity there too. And that's a 2.5-hour drive. But like we've still been sharing capacity. So like, hey, we sold out the week, let's send an extra crew for a week and just get an Airbnb. It's not ideal, it's not as profitable as it could be. Uh, so like our plan is to connect them. So we have Toledo and we have kind of Dayton that are like directionally where we wanna go.

Yeah.

Indianapolis, uh, Ann Arbor maybe. Like there's a lot of different ways that we can skin that, but like we want to be able to connect it. And then now we have Nashville, and what we're looking to do is create a super regional platform. Hey, can we connect the west side of Pennsylvania to Chicago and Michigan to Nashville? And like, can we connect all of that and build ourselves a path through all of it? So like, that's what we're trying to build. That's why the next 2 years are going to be kind of intense and crazy because like, That's what we're on the path for.

Which, I mean, I love acquisitions. I started a whole YouTube channel about acquisitions, so that's super fun for me. Yeah, and definitely intense, but a lot of fun. And then the interesting part too. So, I mean, you have material, you have physical personnel leverage there, and then you have centralization, which is an interesting one that you and I have gone back over like 6 different—

Centralization has been crazy. That's been crazy. And I'll say it for the world, you were right on a lot of this stuff.

Yeah. But I think the point is a very good point to bring up is how do you think about centralization without hitting an over-centralization point? Because you can over-centralize and it can cause additional issues on top of it.

Well, let's just explain what the concept is. So the idea, and this video might as well be like, How to do a roll-up, like how to self-fund a roll-up. So the idea is, as you go to bring on businesses, you can run one of two models. You can run centralized or you can run decentralized. Centralized means that you're going to centralize as much disciplines into one office as you can. So call center, dispatch, potentially install coordination, accounting, recruitment, HR. marketing, purchasing. Those are, those are probably the big ones. Yeah. And, um, and then like what you, the whole goal of it is to leave at the branch the branch tasks, sales, go sell, go install, do, do the job. And, um, so that's centralization. Decentralization, decentralization is the exact opposite. You buy a bunch of businesses and you let them run on their own.

Go solo.

Run solo. Yeah, no resources. And obviously that's a spectrum of very centralized to not at all. And there's a lot of different ways it could look. The success that we've had so far this year has been heavy centralization. So we've bought 2 and we centralized absolutely everything as fast as we possibly could. And what it meant for us is that branch-level EBITDA or branch-level profit percentage went from 10% or 15% for the seller to 30% to 40% for us. Now, obviously there's some allocated costs. If I put a fraction of my accounting cost or call center or whatever back into that branch, maybe it's like— 25% or something, but it's still extremely helpful.

Yeah. But the downside, right, is if you overdo that, which I know— I don't know if you're going full centralization or not, but there is a point where if you do too much of that, it can cause issues, right?

Yeah.

And that specifically is, hey, There are things that happen at the local level where it's much easier and there's efficiencies to having someone local doing those said tasks.

Yeah.

Where those are is the area of hot debate. So one of the initial conversations John and I had was regarding marketing.

Yeah.

It's for, it's for example, you know, different markets require different marketing to some extent, but how much of a difference does it actually make? And so having marketing move to one central location, pushing out to every individual location.

Yeah.

And then filling capacity at every individual location based on capacity planning is the idea. And the original conversation that we had was, hey, we should probably centralize marketing because that's generally what smaller companies have the most issues with. they don't have time. The owner is the one who's doing the marketing, turning it on and off. It's an office person who's also in charge of dispatch, who's also in charge of CSRs, who is doing that. And so that's one of the ones that makes sense to market or to centralize.

Yeah, but these parts of it.

Yeah, at least parts of it. But there's, there's other parts like if we have a local company called Dairy Berry here who does a lot of local like boots on the ground marketing, not necessarily canvassing, but like sponsorship of teams and Things in that nature where it's a very community-oriented thing, which would be very, very difficult to centralize, especially if you overdid it, said all your marketing budget is going centralized, we're going to kill the local budget. Yeah, obviously you've just absolutely destroyed a good marketing system.

Yeah, I think that's a good— I think that's a good example. I'm going to take it a little bit outside of marketing of like what I was—

No, I think it's a great idea. Yeah.

Is sales. So a lot of companies, us included, are running a remote sales process, like inside sales, they're doing live close or over-the-phone CAs or whatever you want to call that. There's call-by-call. And to me, that's a good example of, I think there's some— we're doing it with caution because I think there's some real risk I— the way to, like, the way to think about it is what am I— what problems am I taking on and what am I taking accountability for? So if I'm centralizing a branch's sale, like we get something in Kentucky and I centralize their sales process to Akron's inside sales team, what I'm saying is I'm accountable for your sales now and I've centralized it. So if you miss sales, the first response is going to be, well, sales guys are in your office, go talk to them. Like, that's your problem. Like, my problem is Y instead of X. And I think that that's where some of these companies over the past couple years have gotten really tripped up, is you can take too much. And once you take too much, it's hard to put it back in because the muscle is gone. And then all that turns into, like, I have friends that for a few years they had branches all over the US and they were just flying from branch to branch to firefight because they had stripped so much autonomy out of that team that they were no longer a self-sufficient team. And I think that's my big concern. I think you are right on marketing. There's too much like, knowledge of what works. There's too much measurement that has to happen. But before we even started recording, you and I were talking about recruitment, which is a perfect example, I think. If we took over your recruitment, what could happen is if we're recruiting for 3 other branches, then what if we do a terrible job?

What if we don't scale up? Why did you fail this month? Well, we've only had 3 people.

Well, we didn't have the 3 techs we needed. Well, and you're so much closer to the problem. And then I don't want to be choosing your team for you. I don't want to be choosing Kevin's team for Kevin. So it turns into, am I allowing people to lead or am I babysitting? Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's a hard decision.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot of layers.

Agreed. Agreed. And so that's, The problem is kind of fun though. I mean, it is really a big puzzle to solve. And it's like, how far do you go? And that's where the conversations come in, where you and I have had lots of extensive conversations on like why and what to centralize and brought in, you know, people from private equity companies to talk about why they centralize, what they centralize. And so it's been an absolutely fascinating process to understand kind of behind the reasoning of why certain country companies are centralizing and why some aren't.

Um, I think target size is a really big part of the equation where, um, like if we go and take over, I mean, just in, just in our year this year, like, you know, we took over a plumbing company that had 6 employees. Well, if you go take over, like we have a potential partner in Dayton, that is obviously more complicated because it's an $11 million company.

Right?

Like, if I centralize too much, I actually might just totally break that company and remove all— like, that's a company, that's a real business, and they were doing great without me walking in the door. $1.5 million was not doing great without me walking in the door. It's time again for our Breaking 5 workshop. This is the 5th time we've done it, and we've had over 130 contractors go through this cohort. If you're hovering between $1 and $5 million of revenue and you're feeling stuck, then you're not alone. I know the hesitation. Can I really step away from my business for 3 days? Is the workshop actually going to be worth it? Is it too HVAC-specific? Well, here's the truth. Breaking Five isn't a big conference. It's 25 to 30 operators in a small room. It's highly tactical. There's no rah-rah nonsense. You'll be alongside myself and Jack Carr at my home service business in Akron, seeing the actual systems behind accounting, call center, dispatch, service, install, The real bottlenecks. You're going to work alongside other operators at your exact stage to build a plan that you implement the second you get home. The networking alone is worth it, and the clarity is game-changing. 3 days, limited to 30 seats. If you're serious about breaking through the $5 million wall, grab your ticket for $500 off at ownedandoperated.com with code BREAKINGEARLYBIRD, or click the link below.

Which actually is a great point to show the other juxtaposition of the other model of thinking here, right? Is the other framework is I'm going to go buy a bunch of businesses that are extremely self-sufficient. I will centralize a very teeny bit like that purchasing component. Like, hey, how do we get better pricing on things? And then that's it. You run yourselves. You guys have been a good company. You guys have been profitable for the last 10 years.

Yeah.

Like, go continue. We're not going to try to optimize anything. We're going to let you run the way you run as the other end of the extreme spectrum, which some, some private equity groups have done absolutely fantastic with that. Right. They've been able to just—

If you can buy big things. Yeah.

Yeah. And it generally comes down to that, I think, is, is size of the acquisition target.

Target took over. Like, yeah, yeah. Well, how well were they doing before you walked in the door?

Yeah.

And did they have, maybe a better version is if somebody bought me tomorrow, what would they need to— they wouldn't need to add anything, right? I have a marketing team, I have an HR team, I have an accounting team, I have a purchasing team, I have an awesome senior leadership team. We're not missing a discipline, whereas a $2 million business is missing all of those disciplines. So I don't know. What I think is going to be really interesting—

I mean, though, Peterman, just super hypothetical, Peterman was to say, hey, John, I want I wanna buy you for a ton of money. Chad, you have my number. Yeah, yeah, right?

Feel free to text.

He is known to have a great call center. So even though you have a call center, like the idea though still is he would centralize into himself even though he's buying a $40 million platform.

There is some— Well, it's faster. There is something to do with centralizing. And see, this is how it— this dude, this is how this shit happens. So when we, when we in 2021, we bought these businesses, we've told the story a lot.

Yeah.

2021, we bought 3 businesses and we had to figure out multi-location management. And the way— this was John 5 years ago, give him some grace. He was young, he was 30, and he was an idiot. And the way that we solved problems was we took them over. We took the monkey. Isn't that the who put the monkey on my desk thing?

Yeah.

We took the monkey from them. So What that turned into was we had this management company, and this management company, we started staffing to take over branch-level issues. So some of them make sense, like, hey, we need accounting. Well, yeah, like, no shit. Um, but purchasing got really tricky because there's, there's a few layers to purchasing. Is it, is it contracts with vendors? Is it relationships with the vendors? Or is it parts that I need in an hour? We tried to centralize parts we needed in an hour, and it was a total, like, miserable experience. But like, vendor relationships is a very key part of like our ability to drive scale. So we have to centralize that part. So it— what my point is, this small company We had 100 team members total. We had like 11 people inside our shared services company, which like, what? And that wasn't even call center. That didn't even include call center or anything. I did a bad job, but it's because I centralized way too much shit and kept, instead of like helping to like grow leaders and like helping people solve their own shit, I just took it on personally and like started hiring people, and then they stopped, started dropping the ball because they're fighting fires in four branches.

Yeah, which makes sense. I mean, it makes sense. So it's a very, it's a very intricate issue, right?

So what do you want to do now?

So I mean, I want to go buy some, some more businesses. Me too. I mean, I'm really pumped.

If you are in Nashville, we would love to talk to you. We would genuinely love to.

If you are between Nashville and Akron, Cincinnati. Yeah, anywhere. Cincinnati, Clarksville, Bowling Green. Oh man, that'd be so—

Bowling Green would be nice. I looked it up. It's an hour and 15 from you. I was checking earlier.

It's a— it's one of the top growing markets in Kentucky as well. So not a big deal or anything.

Okay.

I don't think I've even met one of our contractors in any of our groups that are from there though. So we have some in Elizabethtown, which is nice, but outside of that, I know that's what I've already started, John. I've already started.

Okay.

Okay. Feelers are out. Feelers are out. But that would be fun. I'm excited for that. Yeah. As a good next step. And like, what's— I guess a good question is like, what's, what's the goal? What are we trying to— what are we trying to get to? $100 million?

A couple hundred million.

Yeah.

Like a couple hundred. Yeah, a couple hundred million.

Like, let's fucking do this. There's some, you know, it's, it's a bunch of young guys who have just giant egos because— and they're like solely on the fact that it's like a 9-figure number. I don't know about you. I'm talking for myself here. Is like the nine figure is such a driver for me.

Just because it looks like it's an extra number.

It's an extra zero. Yeah.

Yeah.

Like totally. But also, it's it's from from like a career standpoint and a growth standpoint, being at the forefront of a company that's growing from you know going from six seven six seven six seven million to you know forty million part of a forty million dollar organization and then helping grow that into a $100 million organization sounds like really exciting stuff to me. That sounds like a fun team to be a part of.

Yeah, I think it'll be fun. I'm looking— this year's been kind of fun so far because the last time we did M&A, first off, we did We did three in ninety days, which is a little chaotic.

It's crazy. And your team's got it down though now, dude.

I know. That's to me. That's the other part that's crazy is like it wasn't that big of a fucking deal.

Like it's kind of wild that the downside to this though, how good it was. It was like super anticlimactic. It was one of your team members like playing "It's closing time," and I'm sitting there like signing on a DocuSign by myself. Like nobody else is in the room besides I do have a video.

I need to put this on Twitter.

This is super— this is exactly not what I expected as closing on a business. And then everything just went back to normal minus operating better prices.

Well, now the service time is just a bigger number, which is kind of cool.

Yeah, exactly.

But no, it's really interesting. I think that— so a couple things for me happened this year, just as the listener, as you're thinking about what you wanna do with your business. There's a couple things that were interesting. One, I understand why the size that Wilson was at the end of last year is the investible platform size. To me, it makes total sense because we have every discipline. There's a strong controller, there's a great accounting team, there's a strong HR manager. She's got an awesome team of recruiters. Our inside operations is locked and dialed. Our sales team is locked and dialed. Our marketing is top-tier performance. Like, I get it. And it is like, we're just a couple of fucking cowboys and we were able to, in 90 days, bring on 3 partners. That's kind of fucking crazy. And it really, like, I remember 2021, it broke the business. It felt pretty casual. Like, yeah, it's not like it was like hard. It was not like it was easy, but it wasn't like I have not been stressed. Also, it's honestly just been fun.

Yeah, I was just saying, that's, that's the crazy, the, the interesting part of this as well, like due diligence process. I mean, you and I still going through any due diligence, going through any contractual agreements, going through anything like that as, uh, 2 people sitting on the opposite sides of the table, definitely— I don't even want to say it gets heated because it's not heat, it's just like there's definite conversations that happens that you have to nail down, and it is a You know, conversation. But what's hilarious is, you know, we didn't— you're not a private equity group either. So like, as we—

I'm just an idiot. I'm just like an idiot in Akron, Ohio.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that like, it's, it's just like the group that, that I'm working— so I know all the people at your business anyway, but like, there's There's— I feel like you need like 1 or 2 gray hairs in your business because all of us are like in our 30s.

Okay. Okay. I've got—

Just absolute, um, like Type A psychopaths. So, John, I learned the hard way that John's, um, GM up at— or president, COO, Brandon. Brandon drinks like 8 shots of espresso a day. I thought I was on a lot of caffeine.

Oh yeah, yeah. No, we're heavily caffeinated here. Yeah.

He puts them down.

Yeah.

Um, so anyway, point being is that, that, you know, there's no, there's no, there was not a single blazer. Oh yeah. There's not a single sports coat in all of this conversation.

Yeah. Megan playing Closing Time and Cass being bubbly and Patrick trying to get his eyes around the numbers. Yeah, totally.

It was fun.

Yeah, it is. That's hilarious. But I, I think, I think it's, um, you know, for, for like 3, 4 years we've had multi-location, like multi-location has been the thing that's been like on the brain of like, how do we do it? Because at scale, Businesses are multi-location businesses. Like the biggest businesses are multi-location businesses. There's two there's two examples of that not being the case, and that's Four Seasons and Parker. Like yeah, that's it. Everybody else is multi-location. So like if you want to scale, you got to go multi-location. So this has been this thing we've been studying and learning about because we didn't do it that great the first time, and we merged into one. So when we I think my point is I wouldn't have done anything different. Than what we did. We got almost to $30 million of revenue, strong EBITDA, strong gross margin, full built-out disciplines before we went multi-location. And then we went from 1 to 4 in 90 days, and it wasn't that intimidating because the team was built, the team is capable. I don't know, it's kind of wild. I always wondered why everybody sold at $30 million. Why is that such an attractive number to be a platform. And it's like, now it's like, oh, holy shit, we just did this on our own. Like, this is crazy. Just a couple cowboys.

It's a couple cowboys. And so next step's trying to get to $100 million, probably the next like big insight goal that we've talked about. Yeah. Um, a big portion of that obviously is going to be acquisitions, and I'm sure a big portion of that is, uh, organic growth.

Yeah, maybe we buy $20, $25 million of revenue over the next couple years and we That's what I was gonna say.

So what does that look like?

30, 40. Yeah. Well, this year, depending on growth, it's kind of hard to get ahold of total output when you're bringing on new brands. But I think we're gonna do 2 more deals this year. We have one we're looking at that's gonna strengthen an existing branch, and I really want to get one that would somewhat connect us to Nashville to make this more of a super regional connected platform. And also for vendor conversations, it'll be easier if we're connected. So probably 1 or 2 more deals this year. And I think we're just going to be in a cadence because it really, the team did good. It felt good. It felt normal. Our systems are good. We can do this. We can scale on the back of M&A somewhat rapidly. I think the biggest challenge is going to be leadership, but we are on our 3rd cohort of a leadership development. We've been preparing for this for 18 months. Yeah, feels awesome that we fucking knocked it out of the park. But so yeah, I think we have leaders to deploy. I mean, the biggest downside is going to be cash. We have to actually buy these things.

Yeah.

But yeah, I'm hoping for 1 or 2 more deals this year. And then I think M&A just becomes a much more consistent part of the business. We haven't bought anything for 2 years. And so I think it just has to become a much more consistent part of our business. And what's been really exciting is you go into these smaller companies and there's so much low-hanging fruit because they just haven't been, like, maybe they just didn't know how to do this marketing channel or they didn't know how to measure it.

Yeah.

Or they didn't have the right tech stack or like, hey, I can save 50% on your HVAC equipment. Like, there's just so much low-hanging fruit.

Yeah, I don't even take it as an insult. There is. And like, I think all of us, smaller business owners know that, but it's capacity of an owner, capacity of the leadership team. Yeah, it's like, hey, it's no punches to throw.

The guy's probably working 70 hours a week.

Like, how's he supposed to be grinding? How are you supposed to worry about like this one thing that's going to do 10% when there's like 10,000 fires? Yeah. So it's— that's, that's what I'm excited about is it's really cool to be able to work with your great team and frees me up to focus on exactly where I want to focus on.

Yeah.

Podcasting. Yeah, media. No, I mean, it's like we've talked about before on the podcast, like my main job is marketing here. Like that's my one sole responsibility is really focusing on that. But now that marketing is being centralized to some extent, like I can take another 10, 15, 20% off my workload to focus on growth initiatives and to focus on like these really big items that can move our company forward. So yeah, I'm really excited.

It's gonna be fucking awesome.

This is crazy, man. Crazy. For anyone listening, I know like we're talking about this nonchalantly, but it's, uh, it's, it's really cool. We're really excited. I'm, I'm pumped. Yeah. Um, I'm smiling a lot. Uh, it's, it's been a lot. The only thing I don't like is, uh, John going around. You have to, if you sell, ever sell to John, you realize he'll, he'll just go around saying, I bought Jack. I bought Jack. I bought this person.

I bought that person. Um, I have been using partnered and merged.

Um, Except with me. So this is just, this is just a me thing.

I think I've only said merged with you.

I don't know about that. I think I've heard things.

Nope.

Nope.

Not from me. I mean, the definition of what we did is a merger.

No, I know, but I think you just like to throw shade as much as you can.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

So it's already started. Uh-huh. It's already started. Um, well, if you want to work with us, like Shoot us a message. Hit up our DMs. Jack's super relatable.

See, like that. Like what was that?

Just like people DM you more than they DM me, and I'm like why? I think you're friendlier than I am, and my takes are too harsh. Jack's kind. He's kinder than I am.

I have kind eyes.

Yeah, if you have kind eyes. But if you do live in Indiana or Kentucky, I mean, if you live outside of Indiana or Kentucky though.

And maybe, maybe I still say have the conversation with me or John just for funsies.

Just for funsies.

Just for funsies.

Cool. Thanks everybody. I'm excited to work with you, Jack. If you like what you heard, if you like what you heard, go to ownedandoperated.com and there's a contact form. You can say, hey, I want to partner with you guys. But if you like what you heard, make sure you like and sub.

Also, I think we're supposed to say May May fifth to the seventh.

There's another breaking five. This is our fifth or sixth one. Yeah. It's filling up fast. Now do bear the risk of being acquired if you go. So fair.

You have to understand these are purely grooming events. Jobs are going to start paying you to go to these things.

These are real risks, guys. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to come. You're going to drink the Kool-Aid. You're going to walk away a partner. It's going to be fucking awesome.

Yeah, no, but on a serious note, like in terms of growth and everything, you can see it all over Twitter. You can see it from people who've gone in the past.

Like, dude, we're like 120 people in.

It's so much fun. Yeah, it's so awesome. You get to meet all of us and honestly, you walk away with— there was so much great information and a good cohort of other business owners in your field usually. So May 5th through the 7th, it's on the website, owneroperated.com, baby.

All right. Thanks, everyone.