I bought my first business at 27 years old. I had no money. Literally none. I made a deal with the seller to pay him back monthly — essentially buying the business on a note. I just made payments to him every month while I tried to figure out how to run a company. That business...

Tom Howard walked into Las Vegas and immediately did math that most of his competitors had never attempted. He calculated the total addressable market for residential HVAC in that city, identified the theoretical maximum market share a single company could realistically capture, and...

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...

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 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...

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...