Aizik Zimerman's Founder Mode Run: $6M Chicago Plumber to $25M in 36 Months

The Setup Aizik Zimerman grew up in Cleveland watching his parents do acquisition entrepreneurship, so ETA was not a pivot, it was the family trade. Before the search he stacked eight years of reps across investment banking, private equity, and operating roles at UberEats and Beam Suntory. He ran the search while at the University of Chicago Booth, which kept him anchored in the city and narrowed geography to a market he actually wanted to live in. His self-assessment going in was honest. He was not going to invent a category. His edge was pattern-matching across operators he admired, then executing relentlessly in a fragmented, unsexy space where modern marketing and HR discipline were still rare. The Deal Target: J. Blanton, a Chicago plumbing company doing roughly $6M in revenue and $1M in EBITDA. Price: $5.5M, a 5.5x EBITDA multiple. Structure: 65% equity, 35% SBA debt. Most self-funded searchers lever 80-90%. Zimerman went the other direction on purpose. He wanted growth capital headroom and did not want debt service choking reinvestment during the rebuild. The tradeoff he accepted: lower personal ownership percentage at close in exchange for the ability to invest aggressively in marketing, people, and systems without begging the bank. Operating Moves He reframed the business on day one. J. Blanton is not a plumbing company that does marketing. It is a consumer marketing and sales organization that happens to dispatch plumbers. That reframe drove every subsequent decision. - Digital marketing and Google reviews became the top of funnel. Reputation volume is the moat in home services local search, and he treated it like a KPI, not a vanity metric. - He built an offshore team of roughly 47 employees handling auditing, process enforcement, back-office, and digital marketing support. That is a wildly high offshore-to-onshore ratio for a $25M plumbing shop and it is the unlock for his unit economics. - He rebuilt the physical office with lounge spaces, a bar, and pool tables. In a trade where young techs pick employers on vibe as much as pay, the office is a recruiting asset. - He refused to do roll-up M&A. His view: most home services roll-ups create zombie companies because buyers paper over operational chaos instead of fixing it. You earn the right to acquire by first perfecting the playbook in one location. Operating Lessons - Underlever on purpose when the thesis is growth, not extraction. A 65/35 cap stack cost Zimerman ownership but bought him three years of aggressive reinvestment without covenant pressure. - Treat home services as a marketing business, not a trades business. The plumbing is table stakes; the customer acquisition machine is the asset. - Offshore is not just cost arbitrage, it is process enforcement. Dedicated auditors watching every job, every invoice, and every review create an operating cadence an owner-operator cannot sustain alone. - Recruiting is a capex decision. Spending on the office, the culture, and the brand is what lets you hire the techs who will not leave in eighteen months. -...