Chris Jones Bought a $6M Foundation Repair Shop and Survived a Fetal First Year

The Setup Chris Jones acquired a foundation repair business in North Carolina doing roughly $6M in revenue. Foundation repair is a classic search-friendly trade: high ticket, insurance-adjacent, referral-driven, and dependent on a small bench of skilled crews plus a GM who actually knows how to price a job. That last piece matters for what happened next. The business had the markers buyers look for. Real cash flow, real crews, a known brand in its service radius, and a seller ready to exit. What Jones did not fully price in was how much of the operation lived inside one person's head, and how fragile the handoff would be if that person walked. The Deal Deal structure and purchase price are not disclosed. What is clear is that Jones took the reins as full operator rather than passive owner, which is the only way these transitions work in the trades. The revenue base was attractive enough that he closed, and the timeline puts the deal in 2022. First 100 Days The first address to the team went badly. Jones himself calls it a fetal-position period: hunker down, absorb hits, try not to bleed out. Inside the first months, three things went wrong at once. - The General Manager quiet-quit. Showed up, stopped caring, stopped producing. - That GM then left to start a directly competing foundation repair business in the same market. - Sales collapsed. Whether because the GM was rerouting leads, because crews followed him, or because the new owner had not yet earned pricing authority with customers, the top line buckled. On top of that, the seller was not available for the kind of post-close hand-holding most SPAs contemplate. Tribal knowledge walked out the door twice: once with the seller, once with the GM. Operating Moves Jones had to rebuild the spine of the company while blood was on the floor. The moves, read between the lines: - Stop the bleed on sales. Get in front of estimates personally, even as a non-technical owner, rather than wait for a replacement GM. - Win the remaining crews. When a GM defects, the next wave of departures is usually the crews who trusted that GM. Retention becomes job one. - Rebuild the bench. Hire, promote from within, or both, and accept that the new operating rhythm will not match the seller's. - Cut off the defector's oxygen. In a referral-driven trade, that means locking in the commercial channels (GCs, realtors, inspectors, insurance adjusters) that actually feed the pipeline. Operating Lessons - Assume your GM is a single point of failure until proven otherwise. Before close, map who owns pricing, who owns estimating, who owns the phone. If it is one person, budget for their exit. - Non-competes in trades are weak. Plan for the GM to open a competitor across the street and price your deal as if they will. - Seller availability post-close is a promise, not a guarantee. Get the knowledge transfer done in the first two weeks, on paper,...