How Jordan Dubin & Co Built One of the Largest Garage Door Companies in America — Then Sold It for $800 Million

In late 2024, Jordan Dubin and his partners at Guild Garage Group were just months into their first acquisition…

And yet, they were already on track to hit $200M in revenue before the year ended.

By March 2026, Oak Hill Capital had agreed to acquire Guild Garage Group for more than $800 million.

Here's the story (and the lessons):

Jordan Dubin grew up in New York City, played college football in Boston, and spent a summer as the first-ever intern for Matt Perelman and Alex Sloane — 2 Harvard Business School graduates quietly building a portfolio of Burger King franchises out of one of their father's townhouses.

That firm, Garnett Station Partners, has since become one of the premier lower middle market private equity firms in the country.

But it wasn't their financial engineering that hooked Dubin...

It was the relationships — the nicknames, the inside jokes, and the ritual of knowing exactly which restaurants to visit in each city.

He left that summer wanting to become like those guys — "I just so much appreciated and loved how they formed these real relationships and bonds with all these different families and owner operators across the US," Dubin said.

Then, he followed the “prescribed” path in finance: 2 years at Goldman Sachs in investment banking before joining L Catterton — one of the most respected consumer-focused private equity firms in the world.

It was there, on his first day, that he met his future co-founders: Joe Delaney and Sean Slazyk.

At L Catterton, the 3 men underwrote & ran deals. Joe and Sean worked inside live rollup platforms: Alliance Animal Health (veterinary clinics) and L the Plumber (HVAC and plumbing).

Every day was a live training ground for exactly what they would eventually build themselves.

When Dubin, Delaney, and Slazyk finally decided to stop talking and burn the ships, they knew their target had to be a residential services category. HVAC was already picked over. The question was: what's next?

They settled on 2 finalists: garage door repair and tree servicing.

Tree servicing had one PE firm executing a rollup at the time. Today, there are 10 or 11. Garage doors had something better — a single, towering precedent.

That precedent was A1 Garage Door, founded by Tommy Mello around 2008.

Mello organically built A1 to roughly $100M in revenue and $20M in EBITDA before selling to The Cortech Group in November 2022. He did it by importing best practices from HVAC and plumbing — Service Titan software, truck branding, digital marketing — into an industry that had been, in Dubin's words, "in the Stone Age."

Dubin gives Mello enormous credit and isn't shy about it. Guild's playbook is modeled, in no small part, after what A1 built. The difference is approach: where A1 was purely organic, Guild is an acquisition-first machine.

The garage door category by the numbers at the time Guild launched:

That last point is what made the opportunity both terrifying and thrilling:

The real target universe wasn't 15,000 businesses — it was 10 to 15. Guild's goal became simple: get as many of those “off the board “ as fast as possible before anyone else showed up.

With no platform, no track record, and 3 guys in their late twenties, Guild's outreach strategy had to be different.

Dubin's guiding question: what would every private equity firm do? Then do the opposite.

PE firms buy a $15,000 data subscription and send emails that go to spam...

Guild sent handwritten letters — 700 to 800 of them — in kraft paper envelopes. The brown, textured envelopes were deliberate: white or yellow envelopes look like IRS notices, but Kraft envelopes look like something your niece sent from preschool.

Owners opened them — the response rate was a whopping 10 to 15%. Three of Guild's first 5 deals came directly from those letters.

When an owner picked up the phone, Dubin didn't schedule a Zoom for 2 weeks out. He invented an excuse to be in that city the next day — and booked the first flight.

His reasoning: one dinner over beers is worth six to eight Zoom calls, both for information gathering and for trust-building.

His opening pitch was deliberately disarming: "I'm Jordan Dubin. I'm from New York City. And if you think a Jew from New York City can come in and run your garage door business in Georgia, you're crazy. If I took over your business and fired you, it would go to zero."

That radical transparency — almost reckless in its honesty — became Guild's most powerful closing tool…

Owners didn’t get a polished pitch…

Instead, they were being “recruited” as the co-founders of something big. It wasn’t saying "we want to buy your business,” instead, it was more like "rather than selling, what if you ‘bought into’ this vision of growth."

Guild acquires a majority stake — typically 70 to 80% — in each platform partner at a mid-single-digit EBITDA multiple.

The owner retains 20 to 30% equity, continues drawing a W-2 salary, and receives quarterly distributions proportional to their ownership stake.

The real payoff is what Dubin called the "second bite."

When Guild eventually sold, the owner's remaining equity would be priced on a dramatically higher EBITDA multiple. A1 Garage Door sold at 21x EBITDA. A standalone garage door company, even a great one at $5–7M in EBITDA, would likely not command that high a valuation… but as part of the Guild platform, it could.

With the Oak Hill deal, those predictions proved out:

Guild was generating more than $300M in annual revenue and close to $50M in EBITDA at the time of the sale — much more than the $20M EBITDA target the founders had penciled in as a 5-year goal. Every owner who rolled equity into Guild rather than taking a full cash-out at the start was sitting on a dramatically more valuable stake by the time Oak Hill came knocking.

That explains why Guild consistently won deals over competing PE firms offering 2X to 3X more upfront. The owners who joined Guild were taking chips off the table, but also choosing which growth platform they wanted to co-own.

The second bite turned out to be considerably larger than even Dubin had promised.

Guild's integration philosophy drew a hard line between what must be uniform and what must stay local.

On the back office — financial reporting, payroll, CRM — there was no flexibility. Every company ran on Service Titan, Sage, and ADP. That uniformity is what allowed a 20-person executive team to monitor and support a rapidly growing number of platform partners simultaneously.

On the consumer-facing side — brand name, truck wraps, technician culture, pricing approach — Guild left the owners alone. The brands that joined Guild were best-in-class because of how they operated. Changing that would mean destroying the very asset they had just acquired.

The growth strategy was 2-phase. Phase one ("Land"): partner with 15 to 20 of the most sophisticated, scaled operators across the country. Phase two ("Expand"): help each of those brands grow organically and through “tuck-in” acquisitions in their local markets.

Those tuck-ins are where things got creative:

Guild would buy a 1- or 2-person garage door company — sometimes for as little as $50,000 — for the customer list and sticker base. Plugged into a beach head partner with sophisticated systems, that acquisition could immediately generate 20% margins on $400,000 in annual revenue with zero additional marketing spend.

In late 2024, after Jordan Dubin set a goal of reaching $20M in EBITDA in 5 years, they hit $30M in the first year.

By early 2026, Guild had completed close to 30 acquisitions in roughly 2 years and was generating more than $300M in annual revenue and close to $50M in EBITDA.

Then, Oak Hill Capital reportedly agreed to acquire the platform in a deal worth over $800 million — making it one of the most striking exits in the short history of the ETA rollup model.

Dubin had always credited 50% of Guild's success to luck — specifically the timing, and the good fortune that no one else acted on a similar thesis a few months sooner. The other 50%, he said, belonged entirely to his partners and the owners themselves, who became Guild’s engine.

If there was ever any doubt that a 27-year-old with a stack of kraft envelopes and a willingness to book last-minute flights could build something of genuine institutional scale… it’s now gone.

Jordan Dubin is active on LinkedIn and welcomes outreach from entrepreneurs interested in the home services space. The original interview aired on the Acquiring Minds podcast with Will Smith in late 2024. The Oak Hill Capital acquisition was reported by Reuters in March 2026.

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