Eddy Zakes Bought a Landscaping Brokerage in Green Bay and Doubled Revenue in 30 Months

The Setup Eddy Zakes came into search with an unusual resume. Before running his own acquisition, he ran the International Search Fund Center at IESE Business School in Barcelona, the academic nerve center for search funds across Europe. He watched hundreds of searchers pick industries, structure deals, and either thrive or stall. When he left academia to raise his own traditional search fund, he knew what he was hunting for: a recurring-revenue service business with an unusual structural edge. He found it in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Earth Development is a landscaping and snow removal company, but the model is not what most buyers expect when they hear those words. Earth Development is a brokerage. It holds commercial contracts with property managers, national retailers, and facility owners, then subcontracts the actual mowing, plowing, salting, and landscape work to a network of local crews. The company owns the customer relationship, the pricing, the routing logic, and the service-level accountability. It does not own trucks, plows, or crews. The Deal Eddy closed the acquisition through a traditional search fund structure around 2021. Specific purchase price and financing terms were not disclosed on the podcast. What matters more than the multiple is what he was buying: a book of commercial contracts in a market where weather creates forced demand, competitors are fragmented sole-proprietor operators, and customers would rather write one check than manage fifteen vendor relationships across their property portfolio. Operating Moves The brokerage model is the whole thesis. In a conventional landscaping rollup you are buying trucks, crews, route density, and a lot of working capital tied up in equipment. Seasonality kills you. Labor turnover kills you. Diesel prices kill you. Earth Development sidesteps all of it. The company's asset base is contracts, software, dispatch, and the people who manage the subcontractor network. That structure is what let Eddy scale headcount from roughly six employees to more than twenty in two and a half years without a proportionate jump in fixed costs. The hires were not crew leads and mechanics. They were account managers, operations coordinators, and sales roles that compound the value of each new contract. Operating Lessons - Asset-light services beat asset-heavy services for searchers who want to scale without raising another round of capital. No trucks means no fleet manager, no shop, no CapEx cycle. - Commercial snow is a forcing function for contracts. Property managers sign multi-year agreements because the downside of a parking lot lawsuit is worse than paying a premium. That contract book is the real asset you are buying. - Subcontractor networks are a moat only if you manage them like a supply chain. Pricing discipline, SLA tracking, and backup coverage on storm days are operational muscles most landscapers never build. - Scaling a brokerage means hiring sellers and coordinators, not field labor. The unit economics of every new hire should be visible within two quarters. - Geographic expansion in a brokerage model is cheaper than in an asset model, because you are recruiting subs, not...