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

Thanks so much Will. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pat, you bought a very small commercial H Vac business, less than a million dollars in revenue, but you have more than doubled it in the two years that you've owned it. We're going to hear how you've done that, what the trajectory is that you're on, but let's start, as always, with some background on you first, please. Pat sure.

So I've always been interested in entrepreneurship and after that, jumped over, you know, graduated from Ohio State, jumped over to to General Motors where I was working on some really cool concepts with a really young group of guys.

But, but the thing that kind of like the thing that I wasn't really getting my, you know, wasn't scratching my itch, if you, if you will, was a lot of the projects we were working on were like, hey, this will be great, but it's going to be out in production like 15, 20 years. So my patience wasn't really there. Ended up joining something that was a lot more fast paced.

So I joined some technology startups in Columbus where I switched from being a mechanical engineer into product management. It was working with engineering managers and engineering teams and had a lot of fun doing that. But then Covid hit and basically shut everything down in the Columbus area.

I was working from home in my one bedroom apartment by myself. I didn't really feel super fulfilled. So I moved back up north to Northeast Ohio, where my family's from.

And I did realize that when I made that move back to Northeast Ohio, there wasn't those same opportunities to basically work in the office and be a part of a technology company really in. In this area. And so I started kind of thinking, you know, how can I get out from behind the zoom calls every day and be a part of growing something bigger? And that's when I really started to consider buying a…

So it's been a long journey. But I wanted, I do want to say that the thing that really got me into potentially purchasing a business was growing up. You know, we'd eat dinner together as a family, and my dad was in the insurance business, and every night he would be like, yo, guys, just wait until you hear about this small business owner.

He's doing this, this, or this. And I just thought that was super fascinating and probably put a bug in my ear at an early age that this was something that people do and it was something that I could potentially do given the skill set that I had developed over my short career so far. So it was accumulation to kind of where I've gotten to today.

But long story short, started in mechanical engineering, software, product management, turned H vac refrigeration Business owner.

Pat, that story about your dad, I often wonder this with myself about my own interest in entrepreneurship. Was it that you were interested in all of those people or that you saw your dad's admiration for them? And so, yeah, that's.