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

You kind of got to pursue something like this. And so far it's worked out well.

Let's do hear how you approach things but because I feel like there's business buyer fit here. You were a mechanical engineer by education and then proceeded to have technical and sort of producty jobs and startup kind of dabbling in startups that does seem to pair nicely with commercial. Commercial H vac. So were you looking for something that paired nicely with your mechanical engineering…

And it by being in person. That kind of constrained me to Northeast Ohio because that's kind of where I was starting the next chapter of my life. I just had recently been married and we were going to plan our routes in the Northeast Ohio area.

So that was a big. Geography was a big part of it. And then I just started kind of talking to as many potential business owners as possible. So to get those conversations, I talked to people in like the local chambers of commerce, commercial real estate agents that potentially knew businesses that were moving out of their lease because maybe the owner was retiring at the same time, my buddies…

So I knew that the trades were kind of more or less like a hotbed for acquisitions. I was kind of all over the place and it just kind of was by happenstance that a trades business fell in my lap. So I was talking to commercial printing businesses, painting businesses, signs businesses.

I did like the trades a lot because especially the commercial H VAC and refrigeration side, as I got to know more and more of it because I came from the like the B2B SaaS world where you had that stability and that reoccurring revenue. And also working with a more of like a business client was really interesting to me rather than working with an individual or homeowner.

So I guess like I started compiling the criteria of my search as I was doing it. And by the way, I was like working my full time job as this was happening. So like there was a little bit of an element will, like if this didn't work out, it's still going to be okay because I still had the financial stability of my W2 at the time.

But the thing I really loved about the business I ended up buying was it's B2B, which I was very used to in the B2B SaaS world. It had the element of the reoccurring revenue, which SaaS did as well, and also the demand. As a product manager, I'm always thinking about product market fit.

The product market fit is like perfect in the trades. It's like the demand completely outweighs the supply. And I was like, if that is true, then I could really optimize a business in that kind of realm and take it to the next level.

So I kept using the term like product market fit in the trade because working in some of the technology companies I was at, product market fit was super hard to get to. And so it's like, okay, this is Something that has product market fit. We just have to optimize it, grow it, you know, add to it and we should be able to build a really solid company here.

Well, you, you just encapsulated very well. One of the, one of the big appeals of ETA is that you. Not just that the business already has revenue in some stability and a lot of infrastructure and you're sort of starting on first or second base.