The Trades Are Already Big Business

For decades, people talked about the trades like they were small businesses. Build a good local company. Make a good living. Take care of your customers. Maybe pass it down to your kids. Maybe sell it someday.

That was never a bad outcome. It just is not the ceiling anymore.

Reuters is reporting that KKR has agreed to acquire A1 Garage Door Service for around $2 billion. Tommy Mello started the company in 2007.

That should make every HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, garage door, and home-service owner look at their own company a little differently. Not because their business should be worth $2 billion. Because the idea that a trades company is inherently a “small business” deserves to be retired.

The trades are not becoming big business. They already are.

A1 is not the only signal. Reuters described the deal as part of a broader wave of home-services M&A, and the pattern holds up beyond one company. Oak Hill Capital agreed earlier this year to acquire Guild Garage Group for more than $800 million. Reuters also reported that American Residential Services, an HVAC and plumbing provider, was exploring a sale that could value it above $3.5 billion. The significance of the A1 deal is not that one exceptional company reached a remarkable valuation. It is that institutional capital increasingly sees the trades as a category capable of producing companies at this scale.

What kind of company are you actually building?

There is a difference between building a company that produces income and building one that becomes an asset. Both can make money. Both can employ a lot of people. Both can serve thousands of customers. But they are not necessarily the same business.

Jennifer Bagley put the distinction simply when the A1 deal was reported: revenue creates income, infrastructure creates enterprise value. That line is worth remembering, but it is worth being precise about too. Strong revenue and healthy margins still matter. What infrastructure actually does is determine how repeatable, scalable, and transferable that income becomes, whether it survives the founder stepping back, a new market opening, or a buyer looking at the business from the outside.

Revenue tells you what the company sold. It does not tell you whether the company can grow without the founder, whether another leadership team could operate it, whether customer acquisition is predictable, whether the brand carries weight beyond one person, whether the data is usable, or whether the systems still work when the company expands into location number two, five, or twenty.

Those things are harder to see on a revenue report. They are also what changes the kind of company being built.

What creates value beyond the founder?

Tommy Mello has spent years building a public platform around exactly this, a podcast, two books, and a company known industry-wide for how openly he shares his playbook on recruiting, training, call centers, marketing, leadership, and scale. That's worth paying attention to, not because every contractor should copy A1's strategy, but because the conversation itself is different.

It is not only, how do we sell more garage doors? It is:

• How do we build the organization capable of handling more demand?
• How do we recruit and develop the people?
• How do we create systems that work across markets?
• How do we make customer acquisition repeatable?
• How do we build something that does not require the founder to personally hold every important piece together?

Those are the questions that turn a local service company into something larger: a brand, a leadership team, repeatable systems, technology, data, marketing infrastructure, operational discipline, predictable customer acquisition, strong margins, multiple locations, and eventually, a company that can operate and grow beyond the person who started it.

A buyer, or a future version of the owner, is not underwriting today's revenue alone. They are underwriting the likelihood that the machine keeps producing it and growing it. Predictable customer acquisition lowers the uncertainty around future growth. A real leadership bench reduces the risk of the business stalling if one person is out. Standardized operations make it possible to open a new location without rebuilding the company from scratch every time. Clean data lets leadership actually see what is working, by branch, by technician, by channel, instead of relying on instinct. A recognized brand means the next market does not start at zero. Repeatable recruiting and training help address one of the biggest constraints on growth in the trades: finding, developing, and keeping good people.

There is no single formula that turns a trades company into a billion-dollar enterprise. But there is a clear distinction between growth that depends on one person and infrastructure that can support the company beyond that person.

Why can revenue grow faster than the business underneath it?

This is where owners can get fooled by their own success. Revenue goes up. Headcount goes up. Truck count goes up. Maybe another location opens. From the outside, the company looks bigger.

But underneath it, the founder may still be approving everything, solving every problem, carrying the relationships, knowing all the numbers, making the biggest decisions, and stepping in every time the system fails. That is growth. It is not necessarily enterprise value.

The real test is what happens when the founder stops being the operating system. Does the business keep moving? That is a different standard, one explored further in Founder Risk vs Founder Strength. It is also why founder dependence matters long before a sale is ever on the table. A company can be profitable and still depend too heavily on one person. Building beyond that dependence is what changes the business.

Do you have to want private equity to build this way?

A conversation about enterprise value can quickly become a conversation about exits, multiples, and private equity. That is not the point.

An owner may never sell. They may want their children to run the company. They may want to own it for the next 30 years. They may simply want to stop being the person every decision eventually lands on.

The same things that can make a company more valuable to a buyer can also make it a better company to own. A stronger leadership team. Better systems. Cleaner data. More predictable demand. Less dependence on one person. A brand that means something in the market. Infrastructure that lets the business grow without making the owner's life smaller every year.

That is worth building even if nobody ever writes a check for the company. And if you're curious what a buyer, or a future version of you, would actually see in yours today, that's the specific question Deal Diligence & Valuation work answers.

How do you know whether the business can grow beyond you?

You do not need to be building toward a billion-dollar exit to think this way. The more useful question is whether the company can keep growing without depending on you to hold every important piece together.

A few questions can reveal where the business stands:

• If you disappeared for 90 days, what would stop moving?
• Can leadership see where growth and profit actually come from without asking you?
• Can you open another location without recreating the company from scratch?
• Is customer acquisition a repeatable system, or mostly the product of your relationships and instincts?

The answers tell you a lot about whether the business is simply producing income today or building value that can last beyond the founder.

The trades are not becoming big business.

They already are.