14 Sep Acquiring Minds: $340k to $1.3m of Earnings in 14 Months
The conventional wisdom is that you don’t change anything in your first 90 days as a new owner. Just observe. Do ride-alongs. Earn trust. Then act. Rob Brooks had zero intention of following that advice. By week three he’d pulled the phones off the desks and thrown ten filing cabinets — 30,000 customer files — into the dumpster, over the objections of his GM and office staff. But 14 months later the small Sarasota HVAC business he bought has gone from $1.9m of revenue to a run rate north of $5m, and from $340k of SDE to $1.3m of EBITDA. The thread to pull here is Rob learning the trade. In the 100 days between LOI and close he taught himself HVAC, much of it talking to ChatGPT for hours at a time on long drives. Then he spent his first year in attics at 10 at night, and helping his technicians solve the calls they were stuck on. This is the opposite of what many searchers aspire to do — work on the business, not in it — and I push Rob on the point. His answer is that the two are sequenced, not opposed. He calls that first year “tuition.” You can’t recruit a great technician if you can’t speak the language, or coach a service manager toward running a $20m company if you don’t know what he does all day. The tuition is now paid. Rob is under LOI on a business that adds plumbing as a second trade, and he’s now aiming to build a $30–50m home services platform on Florida’s west coast. Here is Rob Brooks, owner of Gary Air.
