Selling should
be a choice.

Something changed in the trades over the last ten years, and most people are describing it wrong.

The usual version is that private equity is buying up roofing and HVAC and plumbing, and that this is a money story about outsiders showing up with checkbooks. That version is easy to tell and it misses what actually happened.

Here is what actually happened. Somebody worked out that thirty contracting companies can share one back office.

That's it. That's the whole trick.

Go look at what these platforms do after they close. Apex Service Partners runs seventy-five local brands. Guild Garage runs twenty-eight. Wrench Group runs sixteen. Sila runs more than thirty. They keep the local name on the truck, they keep the local phone number, and in most cases they keep the operator. What they change is the office — purchasing, payroll, data, recruiting, marketing, and the phones.

They kept the local brand because the local brand was never the problem.

And that shared office is worth an enormous amount of money. A roofing company doing two million in earnings sells for around four times those earnings. Assemble a group of them with clean data, standard processes, real reporting and management that doesn't depend on any one person, and the assembled thing trades at twelve to seventeen. Same roofs. Same crews. Same customers. Six to ten extra turns, for infrastructure.

So let's be honest about what that means.

The infrastructure is worth more than the work. And right now, the only way an independent contractor can buy it is to sell control of the company he built to get it.

That's not a conspiracy. Nobody is hiding it. It's a distribution problem, and it's the reason so many owners who never wanted to sell end up selling anyway — not because someone made them an offer they loved, but because a competitor two towns over got equipped and they didn't.

We want to say the next part clearly, because it's where most people in our position start lying.

Private equity is not the villain here. Some of these operators are very good. The best research on buyouts of privately held companies finds employment goes up, not down. Plenty of owners who sold are happier, richer and less tired than they were, and a few of them are our friends. If you sold, we're not talking about you and we're not talking down to you.

What we're against is narrower, and we think it's much harder to argue with: nobody should sell their company because they're exhausted and outgunned. Selling should be something you choose from strength, on your terms, at a number that reflects what you built — or something you never do at all, because you'd rather hand it to your kid, or your foreman, or nobody.

Seven out of ten owners say they'd rather transition the business internally. Fewer than two in ten actually want to sell it to an outsider. The gap between those two numbers is a market failure, and it's the one we're trying to close.

We're not asking you to join anything or believe anything. We built the office we needed, and we're selling it to people who need the same one.

Take the scorecard. Find out where you actually stand. Then decide what you want to do about it.

Build it. Own it. Become it.

— The founder
Contractor AI Office · Seattle, WA