Product-Market Fit in the Trades: 4x in 2.5 Years

That feels right. Like, that's. Feels like that's how you should do business.

That's great, Pat. Well, I want to learn more about commercial H Vac, so we're going to return to it. As I said, I jumped ahead. Back to the story. Tell us the. The happenstance of how you did find this business.

And I was also kind of in the middle of, like, flipping houses. I got really into that, and I'm still like, super into house projects and stuff like that. But a gentleman had moved across the street from us.

His name was Rich. And I was over his house one day, kind of helping him renovate, work on his house, renovate a couple things on his house, and just kind of out of the blue. I kind of felt a tug. And I was like, hey, this is a strange question, but any chance, you know, anyone trying to sell a business?

And he looked at me, he's like, yeah, actually I do, but it's H Vac. You probably don't care about that. And I was like, huh?

I really care about. I think that that would be really interesting to meet this individual. So Rich ended up connecting me with the former owner of Temperature Control.

His name's Steve. And Steve and I met up at a coffee shop at the time. Steve is probably around like late, like mid-60s, 65. He had run his business since 1985 and was just kind of looking towards like the next stage in his journey.

And he had four technicians, a dispatcher, and then his wife was helping with the books as well and got to talking with Steve over coffee. And long story short, you know, I come home and I'm like, hey, you know Alexis, my wife, I'm like, hey, I met this gentleman, his name's Steve. He owns this, this commercial H Vac business.

And she goes, really? Steve? And she's like, he's the guy that helped lead this missions trip that I went on to Costa Rica a couple years back. And he made me feel so comfortable when I was nervous going, you know, out of the country, I was like, no way.

Like, what's the chances of that kind of happening? And it was in that moment that she kind of looked at me. She's like, I feel like this is a meant to be kind of thing.

Like, you should really pursue this. So then over the course of the next many months, Steve and I would regularly meet for coffee and just kind of talk about the idea of me, you know, me buying the business from him. And yeah, it just, I couldn't have been more blessed with somebody to buy a business from because I feel like I've only had a data point of one, of buying one business so far.