When I worked at Whitey's Pool Service, it was owner-based. And he made a pretty penny, but it was all around the owner. Nobody knew what was going on but the owner.
Acquiring Minds
One Year, 3x Revenue, and a Clear Path to $15M
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What Mike used to be, actually, Mike's company in 2009, before the Great Recession, was 26 employees. The recession hit. He went down to four employees. Then he grew to 20. Then the pandemic, he went down about 14.
And then recently he was down to 10 because guys just left for other jobs. And, you know, time catches up to you and you're not going to grow up to, you know, back to 25 people when you're, you know, mid sixties. So, but it shows me this is, this is a resilient company that survived many, you know, historical events.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that was one plus that I saw in the company. It's been around through a few things. The project-based business, when you get to a certain size, when you have professional managers, it's a more stable company.
When you depend on one project and also the commercial projects, they last from a few months to a couple of years. So you can plan. You can plan, if you have multiple projects, you can fit the manpower around and you can project a year or two out how much manpower you need. I can project out my growth.
And to me, a service-based business with a good backlog has what, four weeks? you know, six weeks. Like, I don't know how you, I couldn't, I probably wouldn't go be able to go to bed at night too often if I dropped below three weeks, but you're always have to, you know, you have a certain gross margin that's limited.
And then you have to have a big sales funnel and you're paying for leads to keep getting all this residential work and whatever service businesses do. I don't have that issue. I pre-qualify in the, the larger I get, the more I pre-qualify for larger jobs that the smaller guys can't get.
Yeah. I am not competing with Chuck in the truck. I'm not changing old ladies' fans in their basements. I do switch gear replacements.
I design, build, you know, service upgrades, heavy electrical work that uses. And then me being an engineer and hiring my project manager as an engineer, I have a very good value proposition where I'm giving you better quality work at the same price as other electrical contracts. But back to the project-based business.
So if you have multiple projects, you fit the manpower. It's called it's operations management. You're just like a call center where if you have one person answering the phones, the phone calls could go from from one minute to 10 hours because only you have is one person.
The more people you have, the more likely your average call time hits a certain number and you can plan around that. When you have multiple projects at the same time of differing sizes and different schedules, you can plan around that. You can fit your manpower, your crews in between these jobs as the projects progress and phases and level of construction.
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