Andrew Harbin Bought a Seasonal Awning Shop, Then Bought a Fence Franchise to Fill the Gaps

The Setup Awnings are a spring-and-fall business. Homeowners and commercial buyers install them before summer heat and after winter damage, then demand collapses in the peak of summer and the dead of winter. For the operator, that cycle is brutal. You spend months recruiting, vetting, and training blue-collar crews, then watch them drift to other employers when work slows. Every rehire is a tax on the P&L and on institutional knowledge. Andrew Harbin walked into Venango Awning, a small manufacturer and installer outside Pittsburgh, knowing this was the structural problem he had to solve. The business itself was a classic small-town blue-collar shop: tribal knowledge, a legacy customer base, and an owner ready to transition. The Deal Harbin acquired Venango Awning as a self-funded searcher. Specific purchase price, multiple, and financing stack were not disclosed publicly, but the profile fits the small end of the SMB search market (sub-$2M enterprise value, owner-operator scale). What makes the deal interesting is not the entry. It is what Harbin did after closing. Operating Moves Rather than try to smooth awning demand through marketing gymnastics or diversification inside the same product line, Harbin went looking for a second business with inverse seasonality. He landed on a fencing franchise. Fencing peaks in summer and holds through warm months, the exact window when the awning shop goes quiet. The logic is mechanical: - Awning peaks: spring, fall - Fencing peaks: summer - Combined: crews stay busy roughly 10-11 months a year - Winter slowdown still exists, but it is a manageable trough rather than a quarterly layoff event This is a workforce strategy dressed up as an M&A strategy. The acquisition of the second business was the cheapest way to buy crew retention. Every dollar of fencing gross margin is also a dollar that prevents a trained installer from leaving for a competitor. Operating Lessons - In seasonal trades, your scarcest asset is not customers, it is the crew that already knows your install standards. Protect it first. - Pair businesses by labor calendar, not by product category. An awning shop and a fence franchise share almost nothing operationally, but they share the same crew skill profile (measure, fabricate or stage, install on a residential or commercial site). - A bolt-on does not have to be accretive on day one to be the right move. If the second deal eliminates seasonal churn, the return shows up as lower recruiting spend, higher crew productivity, and fewer callbacks from rookies. - Franchise bolt-ons are an underrated path for searchers who want a second revenue stream without sourcing, diligencing, and integrating a second independent business from scratch. - Nine out of ten trades operators name people as the hardest part of the job. Design the portfolio around that constraint. Where They Are Now Harbin set a public target of $1M in EBITDA within five years of the initial acquisition, pursued through organic growth at Venango plus the fencing operation. At the time of the episode (October 2022), the combined...