Tom Howard built Fetch-a-Tech from zero to a $6 million EBITDA company in roughly 16 months. The exit produced well over $50 million for the shareholders. But the path from “let’s sell this” to “funds are in the bank” was a grueling process that nearly...

Jayne, the accounting lead at Fetch-a-Tech, was closing the company’s books by the 4th or 5th of each month. Tom Howard expected the 10th to 15th and considered that good. Jayne delivered in four to five days. That speed — that clarity — is what allowed Tom to drop over a...

Tom Howard spent $1,600 sending a letter to the recent customers of a plumbing company he had just acquired. That single mailing generated $170,000 in revenue. That is a 106x return on a marketing investment — and it happened because Tom followed a precise playbook for what he calls...

Tom Howard was lying on his back, sick with COVID, watching $9,000 a day drain from a company he had just signed over to himself, all because someone on his team could not resist talking about an acquisition. He lost a second deal months later for the same reason. Two costly,...

Lee’s Air did not add a single truck when they rebranded. But within months, customers were calling to say the company seemed to have tripled in size overnight. Trucks that used to blend into traffic were suddenly visible from a mile away. That is the power of a brand that...

Tom Howard sat alone in a hotel room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas — stuck because of high winds, COVID raging outside — with a laptop, a yellow notepad, and a mission: build a budget for a business that had almost no reliable historical data and a growth rate that would curve like a...

Tom Howard is the first to admit that he did not build Fetch-a-Tech alone. In fact, he gives direct credit to Gerry Finney, Dennis Thompson, and Brent Buckley — three individuals whose specific skills, combined, created something none of them could have built independently. The...

I didn’t expect to walk out of an autism therapy center with the clearest lesson I’d ever received about employee performance. But that’s exactly what happened. The founders of the California Autism Center, Will Forath and Amanda Nicholson, brought me in as an...

Most people walk past a disaster and see only the mess. Tom Howard walked into Fetch-a-Tech — a Las Vegas HVAC company hemorrhaging $9,000 a day — and saw a $50 million opportunity. That gap between perception and reality is where fortunes are made. But it takes a trained eye, a...

I want to push back on something I hear constantly in the trades: the idea that there simply aren’t enough good people out there. Ismael Valdez, who built a significant following in the home services space through his work in marketing and recruiting, had a line that stuck...