A daily punchlist for owners of HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping, and the rest of the trades. Operations, technology, the M&A wave reshaping the industry, and the regulatory weather. Written for people who think the home services industry is the most interesting business story in America right now.
Join owners running shops from one truck to one hundred. No fluff, no founder-bro filler, no recycled LinkedIn takes.
There's plenty of content about the trades — trade magazines that read like brochures, software vendor blogs trying to sell you their product, LinkedIn posts about "the trades opportunity" from people who have never actually run a shop.
What there isn't: a daily briefing written for the operator sitting at their kitchen table at 5:45 AM, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, trying to figure out what actually matters before the techs show up.
Punchlist Brief is that briefing. Five items. Five minutes. Every weekday. The deals that close, the tools worth knowing about, the operational tactics that actually work, the regulatory weather coming for your quarter — written with the assumption that you're smart, busy, and tired of being talked down to.
That's the whole pitch. If it doesn't deliver, the unsubscribe button is one click. If it does, forward it to one operator you respect.
One story worth the whole five minutes. A deal, a tactic, a market shift. The piece you'll forward.
Who got bought, by whom, at what multiple. New funds, fresh capital, platforms hunting tuck-ins.
Field service software, AI dispatchers, lead-gen tools. What's worth paying for. What just shipped.
Labor rules, OSHA changes, insurance markets, fuel, financing. The macro context hitting your quarter.
One statistic, one chart, one benchmark worth knowing. The kind you'll quote at your next leadership meeting.
One email. Every weekday morning at 6 AM ET. Recognizable subject lines. Five items, written tight enough to read between the first call and the second.
If a subject line ever feels like clickbait, you have permission to unsubscribe and tell us why.
A Sun Belt private equity sponsor has been quietly building an HVAC platform out of a 1980s family business. The deal closed Friday. Here's the playbook — and what it means for every shop in their footprint.
The platform wasn't supposed to be a story. A Houston-based HVAC company started by a refrigeration tech in 1987, it grew to about $80M in revenue across four metros by 2019 — solid, regional, the kind of business you'd find in any Sun Belt city. Then the sponsor showed up.
What the buyer acquired last Friday was no longer a single regional shop. Over the past 36 months, the company had quietly absorbed eleven smaller operators across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, growing to roughly $210M in revenue at a reported 18% adjusted EBITDA margin. The acquisition price — $340M enterprise value — pencils to a 9x multiple on $38M of EBITDA. That's an aggressive number for trades, and it tells you what the buyer thinks they can do with it.
Here's what's notable. The selling sponsor executed the rollup using a playbook that's become standard in the industry but is still poorly understood by independent operators: anchor on a strong technical brand, install a CEO who's run a $100M+ shop before, centralize call-center and dispatch, leave the local brand names alone for two to three years, and quietly migrate everyone to one tech stack. By the time customers notice...
Punchlist Brief is for owners and operators with skin in the game. People who sign the payroll, who know what a real margin looks like, who get a call when a tech doesn't show up.
If you run a home service business of any size, in any trade, somewhere in North America — this is for you. If you're a private equity associate sourcing deals, a vendor selling into the trades, or a banker covering the space — fine, you can read too.
Free, forever. No paywall. No premium tier we're trying to upgrade you to. The newsletter pays for itself through a small number of sponsorships — clearly marked, written separately from editorial, never more than two per issue.
If we ever launch paid offerings, they'll be additive (deal databases, in-depth reports, events). The daily newsletter stays free.
One email, Monday through Friday, at 6 AM ET. No marketing emails, no "we noticed you opened this" follow-ups, no sales drips. Five emails per week, that's it.
No. Ever. We don't sell, rent, lease, or share the subscriber list. Sponsors get aggregate performance data on their placements — no personal information, no email addresses, no names.
You can unsubscribe with one click from any issue. Unsubscribing means we delete your email from active mailings within 24 hours.
Punchlist Brief is an independent publication. The full editorial team is listed at the bottom of every issue. We disclose any business relationships that could create a conflict — investors, advisors, prior employers — and we don't write about companies our founder has a financial position in.
Mistakes happen. When we get something wrong, we correct it in the next issue, clearly labeled.
Email sponsors@punchlistbrief.com with a one-line summary of your offer and the audience segment you're trying to reach. We respond within one business day. We turn down roughly half of inbound requests — fit matters more than budget.
Reply to any issue with your story, your operator hot take, or a tip about something happening in your market. We read every reply. Most of our best stories start as a one-paragraph email from a subscriber.
Free, forever. Drop your email. Show up tomorrow. Decide for yourself.