Andrew Hitchings Tripled a $250K SDE HVAC Shop Into a Holdco Launchpad

The Setup Andrew Hitchings did not buy a trophy. He bought a tiny HVAC and home cooling shop in Colorado with roughly $250K of SDE, less than $1M in revenue, and exactly two people on the payroll: the seller and one employee. The thesis was unglamorous on purpose. A small first deal was cheap enough to self-fund, simple enough to learn on, and profitable enough to cover three partners while they figured out what the next chapter looked like. The ownership group was a trio. Andrew, his wife Marcela, and Max Williams split the work across field operations, back office, and growth. None of them came in as absentee buyers. For the first 2.5 years all three spent meaningful time in the field, on the phones, and in the truck bays. The Deal A sub-$1M-revenue home services business in a mountain state is the kind of listing most searchers scroll past. It was too small for SBA lenders to love, too small for a traditional search fund mandate, and too small to support a professional GM on day one. That is exactly why it was available and why it was mispriced relative to the operator alpha three motivated owners could inject. Concrete deal mechanics are not disclosed in the episode, but the shape is legible: a small self-funded acquisition of an owner-operator HVAC shop where the seller was effectively the business. Every transferred customer relationship, every tribal install note, and every vendor account was carried in one person's head. First 100 Days The partners did not show up with a McKinsey deck. They showed up to work the jobs. The first months were less about strategy and more about absorbing tribal knowledge before the seller walked: equipment brand preferences, how bids were priced, which supply houses gave terms, which neighborhoods converted, which technicians could be trusted on a call alone. They kept the existing employee, kept the existing customer base, and resisted the classic rookie mistake of repricing everything in month two. Trust transfer came first. Rate cards came later. Operating Moves Over 2.5 years the team tripled both revenue and earnings. The moves that drove it are the boring fundamentals that always drive home services growth: - Hiring and retaining technicians so the owners could stop being the capacity constraint. - Tightening dispatch and call conversion so existing lead flow was not leaking. - Expanding the service mix beyond the narrow cooling niche the seller had run. - Installing basic financial hygiene: weekly numbers, job-level margin visibility, real AR discipline. - Keeping all three owners close to the work long enough to know which improvements actually moved the P&L versus which looked good on a whiteboard. Tripling a home services shop in under three years is not a function of any single magic lever. It is a function of showing up every day and removing one constraint at a time. Where They Are Now The original thesis was never to operate one small HVAC shop forever. It was to...