Bradley Roofner & Logan Brown: Turning a Project-Based Landscaper Into an 8-Figure Exit
Two operators under 30 bought an Austin landscaping company and sold to BrightView in 3.5 years by rebuilding it around recurring revenue.
The Setup Bradley Roofner and Logan Brown were both under 30 when they bought WLE, a landscaping company based in Austin, Texas. In 2017 neither of them had heard of the search fund playbook. They went in as operators, not financiers, and picked a business most searchers would flag as ugly: landscaping is labor-heavy, weather-exposed, and structurally project-based, which means chronic cash-flow whiplash. That ugliness was the opportunity. Most landscaping shops live job to job. Revenue is lumpy, crews are over-staffed one week and under-utilized the next, and margins get eaten by the friction of constantly re-selling the same customers. The founders bet that if they could flip the revenue model, everything downstream (hiring, routing, margin, enterprise value) would reprice. The Deal Acquisition happened around 2016-2017. Entry price and financing structure were not disclosed on the record. What is knowable is the exit: in 2019 the business was doing $23.5M in revenue, and roughly 3.5 years after buying it, they sold to BrightView, the publicly traded landscaping roll-up. Using industry EBITDA margins in the low 20s and BrightView's typical 5-7x multiple range, the calculated exit lands around $28M. For two operators in their late twenties with no institutional backing, that is an 8-figure outcome built almost entirely on mix shift, not on buying something already pretty. Operating Moves - Rebuilt the revenue base around contracts. Instead of bidding one-off installs and hardscape projects, they stacked recurring maintenance contracts as the load-bearing revenue. - Installed a predictable sales function. Sales stopped being founder-led hustle and became a repeatable motion, which is what let the contract book compound instead of just replace churn. - Used the recurring base to smooth crew utilization. Predictable route density across a maintenance book made labor planning tractable, which is the real unlock in any trades business. - Kept project work, but subordinated it. Projects became a margin kicker on top of a contracted base, not the thing keeping the lights on. Operating Lessons - Revenue mix is a valuation lever, not just an operational one. The same EBITDA dollar out of a contracted book trades at a higher multiple than one out of project work, because the acquirer is underwriting retention, not backlog. - If the business you are buying has chronic cash-flow pain, diagnose the revenue model before you touch cost. Cost cuts in a project-based business compound the fragility; mix shift removes the fragility entirely. - A 'predictable sales function' is the cheapest moat in home services. Most competitors are founder-led selling. A repeatable sales motion in a fragmented trade is a structural edge. - Age and pedigree matter less than pattern recognition on model. Two operators under 30, no search-fund training, still executed a textbook value-creation path because they understood the unit economics. - Strategic acquirers pay for what they cannot easily build. BrightView can roll up shops all day. What they pay up for is a shop that is already shaped like them: contracted, routed, systematized.
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