Johannes Hock 3x'd a $5M Turf Installer in Two Years by Moving Fast

The Setup Johannes Hock was a searcher with a tight acquisition thesis and a bias for action. He studied the usual recurring-revenue playbooks, then ignored the part where project-based businesses are supposed to be off-limits. Artificial turf in Dallas-Fort Worth had real tailwinds: drought, water restrictions, suburban expansion, homeowners tired of reseeding dead Bermuda every July. The category was growing faster than most installers could hire. DFW Turf Solutions was doing roughly $5M in revenue when Hock found it. Project-based, lumpy, dependent on a steady top-of-funnel. Exactly the kind of business searchers are trained to pass on. Hock went the other direction. The Deal Six weeks from first search to signed LOI. That is the headline number, and it is the lesson. Most searchers spend eighteen months building a pipeline, refining criteria, and second-guessing. Hock compressed the cycle by treating speed as the strategy. His framing: you increase the surface area of luck by taking more at-bats. Deal size was not publicly disclosed. Financing structure was not detailed. What is clear is that the seller wanted a clean transition and Hock was ready to move while other buyers were still building spreadsheets. Operating Moves Taking a $5M project-based installer to $15M+ in two years is not a marketing trick. It is operations. A few levers Hock worked: - Capacity scaling. Project businesses die when demand outruns crews. Hiring, training, and crew productivity had to move faster than the top of the funnel. - Lead engine. Artificial turf is a considered purchase with a long research window. Whatever Hock did on paid acquisition, SEO, and referral had to keep feeding a larger install machine without crushing margin. - Job mix. Residential backyards, commercial putting greens, sports fields, and pet facilities all carry different margins and cycle times. Shifting mix toward higher-margin or more repeatable work is where project businesses find operating leverage. - Pricing discipline. Input costs on turf, infill, and sub-base moved a lot in 2021-2022. Operators who repriced quarterly protected gross margin; those who didn't got squeezed. Operating Lessons - Project-based is not automatically bad. It is bad when you inherit it at low volume with no lead engine. It is good when the category has tailwinds and the seller has already built a repeatable sales process you can scale. - Speed compounds. Six weeks to LOI means you are negotiating against sellers' inertia, not against ten other buyers. Every week you delay, the information asymmetry flips the wrong way. - Tailwind beats thesis. The recurring-revenue thesis is a preference, not a law. A project business in a tailwind category will out-earn a flat recurring business most years. - Raise your action rate. Searchers who look at forty deals and pass on thirty-nine are running a worse process than searchers who look at eighty and move on three. - Scale the bottleneck, not the revenue. Crew capacity, not marketing spend, is almost always the cap on a home-services installer. Solve that first.