In this episode of JackQuisitions, Jack sits down with Collin Trimble of Alarm Masters and Entry & Exit to dig into what it really looks like to roll up commercial fire and security companies—and why recurring monthly revenue (RMR) can be a cheat code for ETA operators. Collin walks through his jump from petrochem finance to security sales, then into Salesforce and revenue consulting, and finally into buying his own alarm company with longtime friend and partner, Steven.
Collin breaks down why so many owner-operated alarm businesses stall out at $2–3M, how lifestyle creep and fear of reinvestment cap their growth, and why he and Steven saw a huge opportunity to professionalize sales, marketing, and process in an industry full of technician-founders. He shares how they think about project work, service, and RMR as three distinct revenue engines—and why they designed Alarm Masters to blend high-touch, “Chick-fil-A-level” service with scalable systems instead of giving that up as they grow.
You’ll hear Collin’s earlier entrepreneurial experiments (dumpster rentals and a CrossFit gym), how those reps prepared him to buy and scale a real platform, and why his roll-up strategy leans heavily on buying accounts, doing “coffee drops,” and cross-selling multiple scopes of work to commercial customers. They also dig into sourcing deals through brokers and vendors, what makes an ideal tuck-in vs platform, and Collin’s advice for first-time ETA operators who are grinding toward their first acquisition.
🔍 What You’ll Learn
- Why many security and alarm businesses stall out at $2–3M in revenue—and how Collin and Steven break through that ceiling.
- How Collin went from petrochem analyst → security sales → Salesforce → revenue consultant → alarm company owner.
- The three revenue streams in security: projects, service/inspections, and recurring monthly revenue (RMR)—and how they design around all three.
- Why they prioritize commercial fire and security over pure residential and how that changes ticket sizes, cross-sell, and churn.
💼 Special Thanks to First Internet Bank!
Looking to buy or expand a business? First Internet Bank is a National Preferred SBA lender specializing in acquisitions for the skilled trades. Their SBA loan program offers up to 90% financing for business acquisitions, partner buyouts, and commercial real estate—plus optional lines of credit to fuel future growth. Unlike traditional lenders, they take a “how can we” approach, making deals happen for both first-time buyers and experienced operators.
👉 Special Offer: Mention Owned and Operated for a reduced good faith deposit and a complimentary deal review + buyside prequalification.
Connect with Alan Peterson from First Internet Bank here
🔗 Connect
Jack Carr — https://www.x.com/thehvacjack
Collin Trimble — https://www.linkedin.com/in/collin-trimble-642a305a/
Entry & Exit — https://entryandexit
Jackquisitions Newsletter — Your favorite source for how to buy small businesses. Real insights, smart strategies, zero gurus.
🖊️ Sign up HERE for more insights
📢 Enjoyed the episode?
✅ Like, Comment & Subscribe for weekly insights on business acquisitions, deal flow, marketing, and growth strategies!
📌 Disclaimer: Some links may include UTM parameters or affiliate relationships, meaning we may earn a commission if you make a purchase. Episodes may feature sponsors, but all opinions expressed are our own.
Welcome back to Jack Acquisitions. Today we have Colin, Colin is with Entry and Exit. And Colin, if you've listened to one of the last episodes, is partners with Steven. Um, we're really excited to have him. We're really excited to have him, if I can get these words out correctly. How's it going, Colin? It's going great.Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Excited to catch up for a few minutes. So for everybody that heard Steven's episode, talk to me a little bit more about like, what's, how'd you two meet? Why did you start this podcast and, and get into the alarm industry? Yeah, I guess those are huge questions. Yeah.Big question. Ready to answer it. Um, how did we meet? We've been friends for over 15 years. We met in college. We were in a bible study together and just stayed really connected and, and great friends and, uh, both kind of went our own separate ways. After college, he moved up to Dallas and went into consulting and I moved down into Houston and jumped into petrochem just like everyone else that lives in Houston.And, um, over time we kind of crossed paths back again. Uh, we stayed in contact, but um. Really crossed paths back again. Um, as I was looking to make, you know, kind of an entrepreneurial, uh, jump, uh, away from W2. And he and I have owned, bought and sold businesses together, uh, over the years. And, uh, my background is actually in the security industry, so I've got a little over a decade, uh, in the security industry, but more on the, um.More on the, the vendor side. So I was a, a supplier, a software vendor into the security industry, and, um, met with a whole bunch of owners and always wanted to get in and, and do that and actually be an owner of a security company. And, um, one day I got on a whiteboard with Steven and spent 15 minutes and said, look dude, I think we need to, uh, I think we really need to go find a business and, and purchase this.And I've got kind of this thesis on the market. Um, and I, what I loved about it is there's. Kind of three types of revenue. There's project revenue, service and inspections, and then there's, uh, recurring monthly revenue through subscriptions. Um, and it took about 15 minutes and Steven was on board. And, uh, I ended up calling a friend that was a broker to say, Hey, um.You know, do you know of any businesses in Houston and like, there's all these searcher stories of people that have like been looking for, you know, a plumbing company or whatever. Years. Years, yeah. Years. Made one phone call. She, and she was like, Hey, you actually know this guy. He was one of your customers.That's cool. And. Uh, turns out it was a guy that I had told years ago, like, Hey, even a decade before that I said, Hey man, if you ever wanna sell, I'd be, I'd love to consider buying your business. So it just was kind of a secure circuitous path, but we ended up getting connected again and, uh, we had a lot of rapport.And so that kind of kicked things off, uh, really easy. And then Steven and I went and went through a round of due diligence and then closed on the business a little over three years ago. Um, and the rest is history. Okay, so outside of this idea that there's kind of three sources of revenue, which is great, don't get me wrong, but why, why the security industry?And I would assume that that somehow goes back into why you got into the security industry to begin with. 'cause petrochem and security sales is, uh, yeah, it's a big, it's a big, uh, difference. Yeah. Uh, I was in the petrochem industry as a financial analyst, and I had, I was doing my MBA in finance and, um, my bosses were like, Hey man, um, you spend a lot more time walking around talking to people than you do sitting in front of spreadsheets.Uh, I think you need to be in sales. So they moved me into sales and petrochem and, and that was cool. I enjoyed it, but it was really long sales cycles, like three, four year sales cycles, and it was more like account management. Um, and I had a contact that worked in the security industry and was basically like, Hey, you're gonna have to start your career over, uh, in, in inside sales, but, uh, it's a great industry.You should jump in. So I did. I worked my way up into management. I was there almost five years, um, and then left and actually went to salesforce.com as an enterprise account rep. But always thought a lot about the security industry. And so what ended up kind of happening, which is kind of funny, is I was at Salesforce and a lot of my, um, customers when I was in security were calling me saying, Hey, I wanna hire you as our VP of sales.And I said, look, I don't, I don't think that that's the, the right fit, but let me consult with you. So I started a kind of a revenue consulting company and we ended up getting about a hundred million dollars in, uh, revenue, um, under our, under our book. And we were, uh, consulting with a bunch of different companies about six or seven at a time.And part of that was Steve and I were helping these companies grow, and I said, man, uh, we need to do this ourself. And, and the main reason behind that was a lot of these, there's sort of two types of security companies that exist out there. Mm-hmm. There's these large kind of national integrators that you, you know, you'd probably be familiar with.If you see, if you look on the, you know, on the road you see a DT or JCI or Stanley or something like that. And then there's this other, what I'm gonna say is like 80% of the market, which are classic alarm or security businesses that are really the bread and butter of the industry that are run by um, guys that used to be technicians.And they worked their way up and then they started their own business and they kind of scraped it along and now they're at retirement age and. What I had found is a lot of these security businesses kind of hit a cap. They hit a kind of a, um, a cap of about two to $3 million in total revenue, and they just really don't grow past that.And that's, that's because they are not multiplying themselves. And uh, what I found was Steven and I are excellent at that. We're excellent at scaling businesses and putting in mm-hmm. Sales and marketing and process and, and this industry was sort of ripe for that improvement. Yeah. So let me ask you a question there.So, with. With, and, and Steven mentioned this, so we got into a whole conversation about tier two, tier three cities, and he said, that's where you guys are pushing into, which is amazing. We see the same cap in any home service, hvac, plumbing, electrical garage, you know, in these tier two, tier three cities.Like there's just not enough. People or there's not enough, uh, essentially a need. There's only so much, um, market share. And so is the cap from those $2 million companies you're seeing, was that mostly based on those tier three cities or was that just, there's just opportunity because they're all, all technicians.Yeah, it was, it was mostly in Greater Houston. A lot of these, you see that sort of a cap is, uh, is, is in the city of Houston. And the, and the problem was it wasn't that they didn't have enough ability to grow or have market share. The issue was that the owner was doing everything themselves. Mm-hmm. And they didn't really wanna reinvest.So what happens is, is these owners, like they, they get this escape velocity at like seven 50 to a million dollars of revenue and they start paying themselves and then they get to about that two 3 million mark. And between salary and. You know, and distributions, they're making two 50 to 300. So the thought about like reinvesting dollars back into the business to hire that next sales guy or to invest in digital marketing or into, you know, into technology is sort of gut wrenching.And so they sort of limit their selves in terms of growth and, but what, what they do exceptionally well is they deliver personalized experiences to customers. So they, you know, they, a lot of their customers have their personal phone number. Mm-hmm. And so customers, they have, you know, a lot of our work, we've been around 40 years.Our business has been around 40 years, and we still have, majority of our customers have been with us for 40 years. Uh, and that's just because we deliver that experience. And my thesis on the market is, hey, you can scale and grow and also deliver those high touch customer experiences. It's doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.And so that's, that's really what our mission is, uh, at Alarm Masters. So walk me through a little bit of that. What, what are you guys doing? Because I mean that's a indus or not that's industry agnostic, right? Anybody? Yeah. Would love to drive that amazing customer experience. Customer forward facing.Mm-hmm. You know, hey, we love this team. This is a cult. Cult following behind you guys. 'cause you guys are so good. At, at driving that experiments? What? I mean, 'cause I would assume and, and hear me out here that you're not giving out your personal number to all the companies and everybody who wor works for each of those companies because that just at a scale that becomes a nightmare.So what's, what's the, where are you finding the secret sauce in this? Yeah. You're gonna laugh. I do. So I actually put my personal phone number on our website. Um, and you can hit me up and you'd be surprised. Um, most of our customers, I do go watch the video on our website. I do 5,000 customers have my personal phone number.And, um, that's the point is, is that I have levels of, of management and so you'd be surprised I really don't get hit up, um, that much from customers coming directly to me. And, and that is because before I did that, we. Over communicated, hyper communicated to our customers. Here are all the levels between you, my technician, the service manager, the installation manager, the director of operations, the customer experience manager between you and your work and me.And so a lot of them know before it even gets to me, we're trying to nip a lot of those things in the bud. Occasionally we'll get something where a customer fell through the cracks or whatever and they'll come back and say, Hey, I, I need to get ahold of somebody. And so that, that phone number, um, is my.My work phone number, my work cell, and it actually is monitored also by my team. So if I get a phone call and I can take it, I'll take it like I really value talking to customers and I want to scale that as much as I can. But man, I'll tell you, I probably only get a dozen or so ca uh, calls from.Customers on that, uh, on that line per week. Uh, it's not, it's really not too dramatic. And, and that's because we've, we've done the reps at getting all of these levels in between and communicating with our customers so they know, Hey man, there's so many ways that you're gonna be able to get ahold of us.We're gonna communicate to them so much that they're gonna feel annoyed by the level of communication. Do you feel then that, I mean, it makes sense that the communication aspect is one of the ways that you are really driving that, that heightened customer experience. Yeah, yeah, it is. We, we wanna deliver, right?Yeah. We wanna deliver that Chick-fil-A of the security world experience, right? Mm-hmm. So we want to be every little touch. So after every service call, uh, we're communicating. Prior to this, we have whole SOPs that are hundreds of steps. For every single service call from the second that the phone call comes in to when it gets handed off to scheduling, to when the technician goes out there, to close it, to invoice it, to follow up on that, to make sure they're good.Like there are hundreds of steps and stops along the way where customer communication is required to the point where we've had customers say, Hey. I don't need this many emails. It's like, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna continue to email you 'cause we wanna make sure you know what's going on and what the next step is.And you know, there's no surprises along the way. So yeah, we've got really tight processes around that. And so as a result we don't have a lot of angry customers calling in saying, I can't get ahold of anybody. It's pretty tight. The whole process is pretty tight. Yeah, that's great. 'cause I, I do find that that's.For us as well. That's a big portion of where complaints come in is yeah, in lack or misses in communication where the cus the customer has to reach out to you about a problem. That's when there's a miss, especially if there is a problem, then they're already upset. Um, so take a step back with me. Um, you said you went from your W2 into the entrepreneurial field, you said it sounded like you dabbled in a few businesses before.Um. Have you always been entrepreneurial or was this, is this, uh, like is this a, was this a newer thing or was this your biggest venture? Like, just walk me around a little bit about this. 'cause you, you have kind of a, a speckled background between the Yeah. The few areas. Yeah, I do. Um, I did, I don't know that I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.I didn't really know. I just knew that I. Liked building things, and I kind of got into this place where I'd get into a role and I would kind of conquer it and get to the top of the game. And I would be like, man, I want a new challenge. Like I want something new. And so I was always like elevating and trying to get to that next goal.And. Um, what I really found is that I love the consulting side of helping customers scale. Um, I'm a huge sales person. I love digital marketing. I love technology and process, and I think that I'm not innately great at any of them, but I'm pretty gr pretty good at all of them. And so as a result, I. I see things a little differently and I'm able to help coach my customers on growth strategy and go to market strategy and how to invest dollars.Ultimately, I think as an entrepreneur, you're placing chips, right? Like where's your highest return and best chance of getting that back. Um, and so when I left the W2 world, I really started as just a consultant and consulting with a bunch of different clients. And, and while I was doing that, I was buying and selling really small businesses, like I had a dumpster rental business that I started.Yeah, walk, walk me through some of those ones. Those sound fun. Yeah, I, I, I started a dumpster rental business. Um, I literally, I, I live in a, uh, a suburb in North Houston and they have really tight HOA guidelines and so, uh, people are always like trying to clean out their garages and like, you know, do yard projects or whatever, and it's just kind of a pain to, to dispose of stuff.And so I saw these dumpster trailers. Um, that people were using for roofs. And I thought, man, if you could make those really nicely painted and put a really clean logo on it, and you could park that, I wonder if the HOA would approve it. So I called the HOA and they're like, yes, we would love that because we don't want trashy.We don't, they didn't allow roll off dumpsters. So there's this vacuum. So I. So we bought, I ended up driving to ca at the time it was COVID, so there was like none of these available. So I had to drive 20 hours a round trip from Houston to Kansas City to pick up, um, me and my business partner to pick up two dumpsters, drove them back.We ended up scaling to seven dumpsters in about three months and we were ripping on that. And it was really fun. I really liked it. We ended up getting an operator. But there wasn't really like a, a super great end goal in sight for me. It was like they continued to scale more dumpsters and the unit economics were pretty tight.Um, so I ended up selling to a guy that was doing waste removal and junk removal and a bunch of other services, kind of an easy tuck in for him and didn't really make a ton of money on it. Uh, it was really just a great experience for me to kind of see how to build something from the ground up. Um, so I did that.And then the only other one that's really not sexy is. Um, I started, or I, I ran a CrossFit gym, so, um, got, kind of, got into fitness that was more of like a passion project for me. But, um, had a lot of employees. We had like 15 employees for the size of the gym we were. Mm-hmm. So I got experience like how to deal with employees and um, kind of.Growing that side of the business, ended up selling that years ago. But, um, the thing that I spent the most amount of my time, like my day job was my consulting business, and that's where I was spending time with CEOs of businesses from 20 to $50 million. Um, so not huge businesses really in that SMB core market and helping them grow their business.And that's, that's where I kind of fell in love with this idea of going to build something that could scale. And then ultimately, if I want to exit it down the road, I'd have that option. Yeah. And then at what point did you guys decide that the, 'cause you would call yourself a, a rollup company, right? Yeah.Like you guys are rolling up h or, uh, fire alarm companies. Yep. Um, or excuse me. Fire. It's fire and, um, security. Security, yep. Thank you. Uh, so at what point did you guys decide like that was the method versus just buying one and scaling that singular option? Yeah, so I think there's some magic here that exists in the way that the industry happens.And so the way that industry trades is, um, there are almost every business at a minimum has a burglar alarm. An intrusion alarm. That's your standard. You come into your office, it's the type in the code, turns it off, and that's just one of five scopes of work that we can sell to a customer. So we can sell the intrusion, video surveillance, access control, intercom services, pa, fire alarm, all that.Um, and so the way that this industry works is you acquire a business or they're just their accounts on a multiple of the RMR. So if, if, for example, you've got an account that pays you 10 bucks a month, you'd buy that account for 30 times that RMR, so you know you're buying it for $300. What's, then you end up, up.Yeah, we call RMR. So our, uh, recurring monthly revenue. Okay. Not, not a RR or a MRR. Not a r, or not MRR, which is another one. And it's so funny 'cause RMR is like only specific to the security industry. Got it. And in the, uh, in the software world, it was MRR. Yeah. Um, monthly recurring revenue, and now it's recurring monthly revenue.Um, but that's how it trades, right? So if you have a, if you have a client mm-hmm. Like, I have clients, and if one of those clients is paying me $10 a month of recurring revenue, $10 of RMR, uh, I would trade that. I could sell that account for, you know, 30 to 40 times. But then that, that client is just paying me for.For, you know, for intrusion alarm. But they also have service that they need usually once or twice a year. They usually have other projects, like they want to, they need video cameras, they need access control, they need fire alarm. And so the idea is combining the inorganic growth strategy with the growth, the organic growth strategy is sort of the magic of what we're trying to do.Mm-hmm. So we're buying accounts, businesses that are smaller than us, uh, and buying their. RMR recurring monthly revenue, their accounts, and then we're going and marketing to them for service, for projects. And what we do is we do something called coffee drops. And I think you talked to Steven about this, where we basically, we go out, we buy a block of accounts, we just closed on 500 accounts last month.And I have a full sales team. I have five salespeople, and they go out and they just knock on the door of the customer and they just say, Hey, we're your new alarm company. We're excited to work with you. If you have any issues, let me know. And by the way, I see that your cameras are hanging off the wall.There are those functional, and what ends up happening is two out of every 10 coffee drops we do converts to a sale. And so that's ultimately scalable, right? It's like I can go and buy accounts. Send salespeople on those accounts. And then all I'm trying to do is increase my conversion, increase my average ticket value, and, and I'm buying more accounts to feed my salespeople.And then our payback period on that investment is usually a year and a half to two years. Um, and so we get at a minimum, we're getting the recurring revenue each month, which is highly profitable, but then we're also able to get and extrapolate more service work and project work. So two outta 10 conversions on.Purchased accounts. Do the inside salespeople also run kind of Absolutely. Just cold accounts where they're just hitting up businesses. So we do, we talked about this a a lot with John actually, and he was kind of shocked by this. He was like, yeah, but eventually you're gonna have to go and call on cold accounts.And it's like, well, if I'm buying two to 3000 accounts per year. I, I won't have an, I, there's too many, I'm, there's too many coffee drops today and my sales team can't keep up. So the answer is yes, we do. Um, new logos is what we would call customers that we're not currently contracted with. Mm-hmm. And that's typically through digital marketing efforts.So we run really robust. Robust local, SEO, programmatic SEO. We do Google AdWords and all the other things from a digital marketing perspective. And that does come in bound. We've got a whole process for, for those leads. We're not going outbound on new logo, and that's just simply because the conversions are just not nearly as good as my existing account base.And I'm adding accounts faster than my guys can go visit them. Yeah, and let me actually dig into that a little bit. So. HVAC recently has been historically terrible for any kind of marketing efforts, right? You PPC is $600 a click. It's mm, it's rampant in the industry, but then you get into things like appliance repair, garage doors in some places, and you see that cost per click being significantly lower.What is the current competition like from an advertising perspective in your industry? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So it's definitely not as competitive as, um, plumbing and HVAC and a lot of the home service businesses, and that's mostly because of the way the industry works. We're in B2B commercial, so we're not, um.We do some home service as well, but, um, a lot of the way that, but, but I, I actually have a firm belief that commercial still uses Google a lot. Buyers are getting more educated before they're reaching out. So, so typically, like at Salesforce, they used to push this narrative, and I think it's true, I believe it, which is something like 80% of all customers are spending a minimum of, of 30 minutes to one hour of education on a.Particular potential vendor before reaching out to them. And that's in B2B services. And that's because they're basically saying, Hey, I wanna go look at the website, I wanna look at their social media. I wanna look at their Google. I wanna look at Reddit. I wanna look at random places on the internet to see if this company has a good reputation before I go and click and try to engage with them.Um, and so there is a decent amount of competition for like really broad keywords like security near me. Mm-hmm. But if you do something really specific, like, um, and this is sort of our little hack around is like. Access control service near me. So that would be somebody that's like, Hey, I have an existing access control system, but it needs service, so I just need a service call.Well, if you need a service call and an access control system, you probably are gonna have to replace it almost entirely. There's probably something going wrong with it. And so that's how we would get entered into that lead pool in a more competitive way. Yeah. Really interesting. I, I mean, I definitely understand it.It also helps that you're doing B2B, so like words like access control Yeah. Are less hit by that residential function. That's right. Um, why did you guys choose was, yeah, why did you guys choose to go commercial B2B versus residential? Yeah. That, that is a great question. The reason is. That in commercial you have more scopes of work, so you can sell them fire alarm, you can sell them access control or keypad readers.You can sell them video surveillance, uh, intercom, pa, gate access, you know, structured cabling. In residential world, you basically only have kind of three scopes of work that you can sell them, which would be an alarm. Video surveillance and some type of home automation. There is a lot. We do about 20% of our business is residential, so we do have a lot of residential, mostly through acquisition.Mm-hmm. Uh, but we're not actively targeting that. Um, the idea there is. You have more ability to cross sell. So our kind of theory on this industry is most security businesses don't go cross sell to their existing base. Um, and so in commercial, and so we really love the idea of acquiring accounts and then cross-selling the other five scopes will work versus if you go buy a residential account.You can't really send a sales person to someone's home between the hours of eight and five to then sell them something that's really only gonna be one or two more things. And the average ticket volume is pretty low. And it's extremely competitive, right? So it's like, okay, maybe I can sell them, but my.You could, you could, you better. But I don't think, I don't think it'd be a winning strategy though. Yeah. And you know, people walk into our business all the time, but if someone showed up at my house was like, Hey buddy, you want, I know you have, uh, alarms. Do you want some security cameras? I'm gonna say get off my porch.Yeah, exactly Right. Um, and, and it's true. And it's also just the average ticket volumes low, right? Yeah. So like in, in, in our world, like the average ticket value on a, on a, just a video surveillance project as a whole is. $4,500. But for the same, for a video surveillance project in residential, it's like 1500 bucks, right?So, um, your, your ticket value is just bigger. With that, I mean, that, that doesn't change though, relative to industry, right? So like hvac, the units get bigger 'cause they're bigger buildings, so you would naturally see that. But with that being said, on. I, I would assume that a large portion and reasons you chose the business you chose, you got into the industry you did, and the decisions you make every day are revolving around valuation at some, some level, um, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in 10 years, but at some point right there, there's a valuation conversation.Um. Did you, do you take a hit when you do commercial? 'cause in other industries you take a lot of, you know, the, the multiples are less on commercial contracts than they are on residential contracts. So when looking at it from that aspect, did that influence your decision at all? Or you just said, Hey, this is the way this, there's, it's better here in the long run.Yeah. So in our industry, commercial is actually a premium over residential. Okay. But it hasn't always been that way. Mm-hmm. Um, 15 years ago, residential, uh, had a higher value than commercial. Uh, but that's shifted. A lot of those market dynamics have shifted. Commercial customers are really sticky. They're good payers.You have more ability to cross sell, uh, they usually have more locations, et cetera, et cetera. So, um, there is. Uh, we, I, I, here's what I would say. We were not thinking, I would love to say that we were super smart and we had the end in mind when we were planning that out. What we were really trying to figure out is, Hey, can we even freaking find a business to buy Yeah.In security, whether it's residential or commercial. The other thing is, is we really wanted a business that had fire alarm, because fire alarm is extremely sticky. That's about 50% of what we do, 50 to 60%. Mm-hmm. And so we really wanted a. Us that had commercial fire alarm. Um, and so those were sort of the, the things we were thinking about.We weren't really thinking about, um, Hey, what are we gonna do in 15 years from now when we want to exit? Yeah, no, that's a good point. You know, some, some of us fall into. These certain situations. I mean, that's what happened to me. Like I didn't realize that commercial, it sounds silly to say as as HVAC jack as my moniker online, but I didn't realize like the massive differences that came along with valuation when I bought and found out, oh, like commercial and and residential are just massively different businesses.That being said, I mean, lucked into residential and now being, you know. Well, at least was last couple years, uh, the PE um, PEs excitement child. So yeah. That, that's really neat. And so moving forward, I mean, what, what's your guys' plan? Like, what do you foresee in the future? What, what are you looking for?What, what's the the end all goal if there is one? Yeah, so the goal is we really wanna be a really strong regional player in the state of Texas. So our goal is to acquire what I would say tuck-ins or add-ons in the Houston market. So we've done seven acquisitions in three years. Our goal is to find two platforms, one in central Texas and one in North Texas, near Dallas.Um, and then be able to add onto that. So the strategy is get the platform, do add-ons in that given market. Uh, layer in the organic growth side of it and then, you know, find another platform, do add-ons for that layer in the organic. And then what happens is you also get stronger organic drive, because a lot of the times companies have locations in Houston, Austin, Dallas, or Houston, San Antonio and Dallas, like that's.Those are, that's kind of the, they call it the golden triangle in Texas. Yeah. And so, um, that strengthens our value proposition. It's like one plus one equals three because mm-hmm. We now can go service clients that have, you know, major headquarters in each of those three locations. And so our goal is to continue with excellence, um, doing acquisitions and also continuing to layer in the organic side of it.So outbound sales, huge thing, huge part of my strategy and what I'm really excited about, and that's just gonna continue with all these acquisitions that we're doing. Very cool. Very cool. And so when you to, to help out people listening that maybe don't understand, so when you say platform, you're looking for a larger business where you're going to keep the name, keep the branding.Yeah. And then you're gonna find smaller businesses than that and kind of tuck them in. To the name, they'll, they'll take on the name. They're, you're essentially buying the accounts and some of the employees and a few other things here and there. The GMB, um, what are you looking for on those platforms and those tuck-ins?Like what, what is your, uh, prerequisites for those? Yeah. Yeah. We love tuck-ins. Tuck-ins are great. I love Tuck-in. Tuck-ins are the best. They're the best. And we are buying the, we're typically buying the accounts, uh, grabbing some technicians. Mm-hmm. Uh, some digital marketing assets as well. And then the rest we're, you know, we're kind of pushing, uh, we're gonna, we don't buy, we don't buy their rent, we don't take their technology stack, you know, et cetera.Yeah. Uh, and so we have a really tight buy box in terms of what we're looking at. But the big ones that we're, we're truly looking at is mostly commercial. A big emphasis on fire, um, geographically centered around a platform where we are. Um, they have what we would call healthy recurring monthly revenue.So they've got contracts, they've got, uh, then these contracts have the right type of language in them. Uh, we're also looking at receivables. And then the other thing we're looking at is. How much, um, service and or project revenue are you getting on top of that? So you don't get any extra credit from that.Like your valuation is maybe a little bit higher, but it's generally gonna stay the same. But if you've got a business that has, you know, $30,000 a month of revenue. But then you're also doing another 50 KA month in service work. That's highly valuable to us because that's predictable revenue. Uh, and so we're always looking at how do we find tuck-ins that have really long ownership?Like we just did an acquisition last year in the owner. Was second generation and had been in with his family for 50 years and man, they have clients that had been with them for 50 years. Oh yeah, yeah. So it's like, dang, that's great. Those are the most loyal customers. We take care of them. So we're looking for those longer terms.What we're not looking for is the guy who started business five years ago and is ready to sell it. So when, when you're saying, looking for them, how are you finding these acquisitions? 'cause you know, locating with a tight buy box in a. Geographic. I mean, don't get me wrong, Texas is absolutely huge. Yeah.But in, if you're going to, uh, limit yourself with the geo geography of Texas still, that does reduce the amount of potential buyers or sellers that there will ever be. What strategy are you using to find these people and then reach out to them? Yeah, that's a great question. And we just did an entire episode on entry and exit about that very topic was our last week's episode.Um, so the way we do it is we always like to say, Hey, if we can find you a magic bullet, like we always tell our listeners, if I can find you a magic bullet, like I would say a magic bullet. My industry is go do face-to-face meetings with your customers. So we have all this data about face-to-face meetings, that's a magic bullet to give you more sales in, in the, um, acquisition side, trying to find targets, the.The magic bullet, unfortunately is not gonna look the same. So there is no secret sauce. There is no, um, awesome listing that we know about, or this direct mail strategy that uses these templates and this email, what it is, is we are really, really aggressive about meeting with people in our industry, our vendors.We tell all of our vendors we're looking to buy when we have. Hundreds of vendors. We're telling all of our software and service providers, our bookkeeper. Uh, we're telling lawyers and m and a and uh, our accountants and all that. Everybody we work with, we're trying to tell them. We're also networking extremely aggressively with the brokers in the industry.Most deals in this industry Trade with a broker. Yeah. Uh, especially anything of size is gonna have a broker. Um, but you're not just 'cause. They have a broker does not mean you're gonna get access to it. In fact, a lot of deals are pocket listings and so we're always trying to build relationships with the brokers, make their lives easier, uh, and show them that we're serious and have our ducks in a row and have a really tight buy box.If you go to a broker you never worked with and you just say, Hey, I want anything in Texas, you're never gonna get a lead. And if you do, it's gonna be a terrible acquisition. So we're very specific about what we want and they know we can close and we have references from other brokers and we have a track record.And so unfortunately the magic bullet of finding deals is relationship. You have to just get involved in the industry and be a good person and have high integrity and don't burn any bridges and you'll find deals. But trying to find some magic sauce of like direct mail, I get hit up. Three to five times a day by somebody trying to buy alarm masters.Yeah. And you know, everyone else is getting the same inbound. So the difficulty with that though, right? We talk about it on, on jack acquisitions a lot, is the difficulty is buying your first deal when that is the best strategy, right? So I talked with Nathan Lehman last week and we both, our first deal was our worst deal, and it was terrible and we were forced to grow out of that.And yeah, one of the ways we grew out of it was through acquisitions, but a lot of those opportunities never would've. Shown themself if we never got in in the first place. Yeah. So that being said, there's not really a question there. You just confirm my bias, so I appreciate that. Yeah. If people want to hear more about that and, and go and listen to that episode, where, where can they find you?Just one more time. Yeah, so if they are interested in learning more about Entry and Exit, you can find us on all of your favorite podcast channels. You can find us on YouTube. It's Entry and Exit. You can also go to entry and exit.co. Uh, you can email me specifically at info@entryandexit.co. And I'm, we get, we call it fan mail all the time from folks, and I'm always responding.I just talked to a guy in the Netherlands today. Last week I met with somebody in the UK who had questions. You can find me on LinkedIn at Colin Trimble or on Instagram at Colin Trimble. Uh, and I'd love to help people out. We, we are, the reason we started this podcast is because we were getting hit up from friends in the industry saying, Hey, what you're doing is cool.Can I learn more? And so I just said, Hey, Steven, let's share this with people. Like, this is great content and we wanna learn more too. So we're having guests on, and especially in areas where we're really weak. Uh, we're not doing industry news or product news, none of that. This is all about, Hey, I want to grow my business, buy a business, or sell my business for a lot of money.That's the aim of the podcast. Awesome, Colin. Well, I appreciate your time today. I could talk to you for like two more hours. Likewise. But with that being said, um, you've just told everyone where they could find you. Any last words for aspiring entrepreneurs? Somebody who maybe wants to get into the industry, found us randomly on YouTube and, you know, uh, wants a little advice.Any, any soapbox that you'll stand up on and scream from? Yeah, here's my soapbox. My soapbox is people that have high integrity and are gonna work hard, are gonna find good deals. And if you have a really high integrity and you're the right type of person and you're willing to work hard, you're gonna find a deal and you're gonna find a business and it's gonna be successful.But you gotta make sure you keep your head up because a lot of this can be kind of a grind, especially entrepreneurship. It all starts after you buy that business. Once you, once you close the, the fun is just getting started and you're gonna walk into all sorts of things that you never thought you'd run into.And so I would just say, Hey, have a great attitude about it. Enjoy the ride. And just know that like you have to lean on your network. So when people like me or Jack or anybody says, Hey, reach out to us. You've got questions. We mean it like, we'd love to chat, we'd love to share the knowledge. We're all about talking and networking.So let us know you're, you're kind of the sum part of all of the people in your network. So let me know if I can help in any way. Awesome. Colin, I appreciate you coming on today. Thank you all for listening. If you like what you heard, I know I've said this a hundred times and I know you're still listening, click the five star below.Even just a small quick blurb review. We're really trying to push Jack acquisitions above. I think it's 25. We want 25 reviews. Let let go. Sounds silly, but it's a start, man. Uh, please like, subscribe, follow, and then uh, click that five stars. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks.
