The Building of Comprehensive Home Services Offerings to Meet Customer Needs

The desire to support a customer with an ever-expanding set of services and solutions is a long-standing driver for growing organizations. Highly visible examples could be car dealerships with service departments, phone companies providing cable tv and internet service, or oil and gas companies adding solar and other alternative energy solutions to their offering. Each of these industry examples illustrates a desire to increase a company’s ability to serve its customers in new and expanded ways.

Buy and Build

To accelerate an organization’s product and service offering, many will employ a “Buy and Build” strategy in which existing firms look to acquire complementary businesses that can add immediate value to the broader organization. Typical characteristics of an acquisition target could be its unique product, service area, or in today’s current market, its human capital (workforce).

Today, we are seeing a significant shift take place within the Building Products and Home Services space, both in the residential and commercial end markets. Particular sectors such as HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Roofing, Siding, Windows, and Doors, among others, comprise a group of sought-after complementary assets. The thesis of grouping these products and services together is to expand the opportunity to better serve the customer with shared resources, while growing the company’s wallet share within a client base or project.

One-Stop-Shop

An example of a “Buy and Build” strategy could be an Exteriors focused Private-Equity-backed “platform” company consisting of Roofing, Siding, Fascia, Gutters, Windows, and Doors that would address the entire exterior needs of a building or residence. This “One-Stop-Shop” organization through its shared resources would be able to deliver its services more efficiently while helping to save time and money with less individual service providers for customers to manage. This transformation, driven by consumers is being followed by institutional investors (i.e., Private Equity) who are now pouring into the space to construct multidisciplined, yet complementary organizations to support this growing ecosystem.

Bright Futures

At a business owner level, the opportunity to sell one’s business and merge into a larger organization with broader services can provide a bright future for both the owners and its most important asset, its people.

If you are considering selling a portion of your business, let’s have a chat about your options in today’s economic climate.

By Tim Hughes