Lindley Home Services has completed 11 HVAC acquisitions and is at roughly $16m annual revenue in 2026.
Lindley is weighing an exit within 12 months and wants to repeat his 3x-to-10x HVAC roll-up at a $5m to $30m scale every three years.
He credits putting everyone on commission after his hourly staff quit with stabilizing the business.
How an HVAC Roll-Up Turned Eleven Small Shops Into $16m
Lindley Home Services is a residential HVAC roll-up built by buying small owner-operated shops and fixing what their owners never did. It pays technicians on commission so cost of goods tracks revenue, and it keeps advertising at zero by having CSRs call acquired customer lists. Lindley underwrites on call volume, and he thinks the buy-at-3x, sell-at-10x arbitrage tapers as a platform grows, so he plans to exit within a year and repeat.
Takeaways
Eleven deals built a $16m HVAC platform. Lindley bought a one-owner, one-technician HVAC company making about $250,000 a year, financed by an $850,000 SBA note. Two deals closed in 2020, then one a year for four years, then three or four, reaching eleven acquisitions and a $16m run rate.
Commission pay made costs predictable. Hourly technicians made cost of goods impossible to forecast, so he moved everyone onto commission. All his employees quit the same day. An Indeed applicant who chose commission over $28 an hour out-earned the rest, and charting expenses against revenue became the turning point.
He underwrites targets on call volume. Lindley values a business by the calls it runs. Ten calls a day sell on five or six at about $3,000 each, and a 2,000-call business billing $1m would have done $2.95m under his metrics. He compares it to Moneyball, buying at bats.
No ads, CSRs reactivate old customers. Four inbound and seven outbound CSRs work acquired lists with free tune-ups, keeping the board full about eleven months a year. Lindley calls waiting for the phone to ring terrible advice. If a company ran 2,000 calls but holds 5,000 customers, 3,000 did not call.
Owner-facing revenue is now a red flag. Contractor relationships the previous owner held supplied about 40% of his first company's revenue, and he could not carry them on. He now treats a customer-facing owner as a red flag and folds acquired phone numbers, lists and technicians into Done Right.
He plans to sell and repeat the model. Lindley is weighing an exit within twelve months, then a repeat. He buys mom-and-pop shops at 3x and sells at 10x, taking $5m of invested capital to a $30m exit. Past 10x the arbitrage tapers because each extra multiple needs more EBITDA.
The deals that did not work
A lawsuit over the wrong air conditioner installed at a customer's home.
His first acquisition now generates about $100 a year while he still pays $8,500 a month on the $850,000 SBA note, six years into a ten-year term.
Outbound calling into one acquired customer list has not worked nearly as well as other databases he bought.
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On this episode 2
Show 1
He says he tells the story because people in that position need to hear about the bloodshed, not just the successes.