Private equity firms will pay big bucks for “density” and most acquisition entrepreneurs try to create that by adding services.

Andy Rougeot tried that first, but it failed.

In 2017 he used an SBA-backed search to buy RG Maintenance, a Colorado company that repairs gates and access-control systems for self-storage facilities.

The seller handed him about $2.5 million in revenue, $725,000 in EBITDA, 12 employees, and a customer list that would make most lenders flinch: Public Storage was more than 50% of revenue.

He paid about 3.25× EBITDA.

Five years later he sold the same company, now in 5 states, $9 million in revenue, $1.7 million in EBITDA, 40-odd employees, to an LA private-equity firm running a roll-up.

Price: $9 million, all cash — about 5.3×.

He recently sat down with Will Smith on Acquiring Minds and walked through the process:

Andy is a former Army intelligence officer and Harvard MBA who lasted one McKinsey summer and left.

His line on that career path: veterans have a gut instinct that if they don’t know what to do, they should “find the dirtiest, sweatiest job and go do that.”

Gate repair for self-storage is that job:

Recurring maintenance... Ugly... High margins... About 95% share of the Colorado storage-gate work.

He mapped who bought: district managers, a construction manager, a capex manager — several check-writers inside one logo.

One logo (i.g. Public Storage) was not actually one relationship... If your “50% customer” is really 8 people in 8 districts, you are underwriting a different risk than the CIM implies.

The 3.25× entry price is what made the hair acceptable. Good price, recurring work, real margins. He said that combination offset the concentration.

The plan on day 1 was the plan most buyers write in the first 90 days: same trucks, adjacent verticals.

Industrial sites... Apartment gates... because “we’re already in gates.”

But the technical work was not the same.

Storage keypads, gate behavior, and what “good” looks like on-site are specific.

So he stopped adding services and started adding geography.

This is the piece worth stealing. Andy says it travels to other blue-collar service businesses.

1. Ask the concentrated customer where they are in pain. He went to Public Storage and asked for their worst vendor market in the country. The answer was Oregon. That is not a cold outbound campaign. That is a warm complaint from a customer who already pays you.

2. Hire a player-coach GM, preferably a veteran. He used a military recruiting firm. The Oregon lead was a former Marine crew chief. The job is not “regional vice president.” The job is technician who can later run a territory.

3. Train with left seat / right seat. Military handoff, not a slide deck. Experienced tech in the left seat, new GM in the right seat watching. Then the new GM drives while being watched. Then they run it solo with remote support. Oregon’s GM spent about six weeks in Colorado before launch.

4. Start the new state as two guys and a truck. Oregon opened at the beginning of 2018. First year: five people and about $300,000 of revenue. They invoiced generously while techs were on the learning curve (roughly four months to become useful). That is buying reputation in a market where the incumbent already failed the customer who invited you in.

5. Blob out from the first logo. Once Public Storage was a reference in the new state, Extra Space and CubeSmart were the next conversations. Same vertical. New zip codes. He repeated the pattern: Bay Area at the end of 2019 into 2020, Washington in 2021, Arizona in 2022.

Colorado → Oregon → California → Washington → Arizona. Five markets. No fantasy org chart.

Notice what he did not do. He did not install a CRM to “professionalize” his way to margin. On the investor side of the same interview he is blunt: “I almost never see margin improvement. Anytime I see a use case from a searcher that’s driven by saying hey, we’re going to drive down costs, that almost never happens.” Revenue went up. EBITDA went up. Underwrite growth and professionalization. Do not underwrite a margin miracle.

By early 2022 he wanted out for a non-business reason. He listed the company online, but nobody useful showed up.

A searcher contact introduced an LA PE firm that wanted a roll-up. That buyer closed in July 2022 at $9 million cash, about 5.3× on $1.7 million of EBITDA.

Entry 3.25×. Exit 5.3×.

The multiple moved because the company was no longer a one-state, one-logo shop with a founder-operator. It was a 5-state platform with GMs and a story a fund could put in a deck.

If you already own a service business with one national or multi-site customer:

If you are still buying:

Our written take on Will Smith’s December 2025 interview with Andy Rougeot. Read the original article here.

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