Blackstone Paid 18.5x EBITDA For Champions Group. Apollo Bought Into Apex At $10B. Apex Closed 60 Acquisitions In 2025. If You Own A $1M-$5M Trades Shop, Did You Build A Business Or A Job?
Blackstone paid roughly $2.5 billion for Champions Group in February on approximately $140 million of LTM EBITDA. That is about 18.5 times. Alpine Investors sold a minority stake in Apex Service Partners to Apollo in May at a reported ~$10 billion valuation. Apex closed roughly 60 add-on acquisitions in 2025 alone across HVAC, plumbing, and […]
SBA Just Doubled The Acquisition Cap To $10 Million On July 4. Seven PE-Backed Platforms Closed HVAC, Plumbing, And Electrical Deals The Same Week. Blackstone Paid $2.5 Billion For Champions At 18.5x. Your Shop Now Has Two Bidder Pools Instead Of One.
Two things happened last week that most trade owners did not connect. On July 4 the SBA quietly doubled how much an individual buyer can stack behind a single acquisition. Then between July 6 and July 8, seven different PE-backed platforms closed HVAC, plumbing, and electrical deals in the United States. One buyer pool just […]
Forbes Just Named The AI-Proof Business: Yours. Millennials Are Buying HVAC, Plumbing, And Electrical Companies At Record Pace. SBA Backed 6,915 Acquisitions Worth $8.17 Billion In 2025. PE Is Paying 7-9x EBITDA. Your Exit Just Got Real.
Forbes just wrote the sentence you need to print out and put on your wall. Millennials with MBAs are buying HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies faster than the SBA can process the loans. They are not doing it because they love HVAC. They are doing it because your business is the one AI cannot eat. […]
Private Equity Just Mapped 288 Trade Roll-Up Platforms. ServiceTitan Just Mapped 74% AI Adoption. Your Exit Multiple Now Has An AI Coefficient.
Two reports landed inside seven days. Together they redrew the exit math for every independent trade shop in America. CT Acquisitions counted 288 active private equity platforms rolling up the U.S. trades across 32 sectors. Home services alone — HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, pest control — hosts more than 30 active platforms competing for your […]
Blackstone Just Paid $2.5 Billion For A Home Services Platform. The Independent Shop Still Owns The One Signal They Cannot Buy.
Blackstone just bought Champions Group for roughly $2.5 billion at 18.5x EBITDA. Meta committed $115 million to skilled-trades training the same week. Apollo dropped $2 billion into a Texas home-services platform. If you run a five-truck HVAC or plumbing shop, you are now competing with permanent capital. Here is the news you may have missed […]
Cycle 11 In One Frame: AI Search Hit 1B MAUs, EPA Pivoted Twice, Hurricane Season Went Quiet, And 340,000 Electricians Left Residential. The Trade Economy Just Forked. Pick Your Side By June 30.
Eight days. Seven trades. One thesis. Cycle 11 of the Marketing Code rotation closes today. Look at the seven prior posts in one frame and the structural shift becomes unmissable. The trade economy just forked. One branch books the work. The other branch fights for scraps. The split runs along a single axis — AI […]
Google Just Announced That For Home Repair, Beauty, and Pet Care, AI Will Call Businesses On Your Behalf This Summer. The Phone Call Between You And The Customer Is About To Get An Agent Standing In The Middle.
Last Tuesday at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai announced Google is redesigning the search box for the first time in 25 years. The bigger announcement, the one that should pin every contractor reading this to their chair, was buried four paragraphs down. Quote, directly from the Google blog: “For select categories like home repair, beauty or […]
Cars Are the New Search Bar. Chat Is the New Quote Pad. The Industry Shift Hit This Week.
Gemini just landed in millions of cars. Google Assistant is gone. The same week, Gemini learned to build downloadable Word docs, Excel sheets, and PDFs straight out of chat. Two product moves. One quiet message: the customer who used to call you from a stoplight is now talking to a model. The customer who used […]
OpenAI Just Killed Custom GPTs and Launched Workspace Agents. This Is the Industry Shift Contractors Cannot Sleep On.
OpenAI quietly killed Custom GPTs last week. Almost nobody noticed. The thing that replaced them is going to decide whether your shop exists in five years. April 22, 2026: OpenAI launched ChatGPT Workspace Agents. They run continuously in the cloud. They plug into Slack, Salesforce, Gmail, calendars, payment systems, scheduling tools. They execute tasks autonomously. […]
The House Is the Customer Now. Smart Homes Are About to Book Their Own Contractors.
For as long as the home services industry has existed, the process has been the same. Something breaks. The homeowner notices. The homeowner picks up the phone or opens a browser. They search. They compare. They call. They book. That chain is breaking. In 2026, smart home systems are detecting HVAC faults weeks before failure, […]