23 Jul Acquiring Minds: Product-Market Fit in the Trades: 4x in 2.5 Years
Today’s guest came to commercial HVAC with a product manager’s eye. Pat Beal spent years in B2B SaaS thinking about product-market fit: does demand exist, is the product solving it, are there competitors crowding the space? So when he pivoted to buying a small commercial HVAC and refrigeration business in Northeast Ohio, Pat ran the same analysis. His conclusion: the product-market fit was endless. Pat closed in May 2024. The business was doing just under a million dollars in revenue. He financed it almost entirely with a seller note — 90% of the $370k purchase price — which meant no bank, no SBA, no personal guarantee from the seller. That structure had a practical upside as well: the previous owner could stay on and lend his license while Pat worked toward getting his own. In less than two years since close, Pat doubled the business to $2.5m in revenue. And he’s on pace to close this year with $3.5-3.6m — a quadrupling of his baseline in two and a half years, with just two additional technicians. This is a happy case of pent-up demand because the previous owner wasn’t chasing business. Pat has chased it and has been rewarded handsomely for doing so. Here he is, Pat Beal, owner of Temperature Control Maintenance.
