Bradley Roofner & Logan Brown: Turning a Project-Based Landscaper Into an 8-Figure Exit

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.