Before buying a plumbing business I spent my career in Tech - cutting my teeth in sales then moving over to management, leading different revenue-related teams. From boiler room cold calling to Enterprise sales, from leading SDR teams to scaling a RevOps org, then owning overall sales pipeline strategy, health, and growth. My experience was 100% corporate; 0% in the trades. My search for the right business to buy took around 9 months; 6 months to find it and 3 months to close. I read all of the books (‘Buy Then Build,’ ‘HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business,’ and ‘Here’s the Deal’), did all of the research, and realized I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I felt it was possible to climb this proverbial mountain on my own but, given everything I had on the line, thought it would be best to hire a sherpa - after researching all options I joined the Acquisition Lab and so, began the journey.
I hear from a lot of people in similar positions - corporate backgrounds, no trades experience - who assume that disqualifies them from buying and running a business like this. I disagree. Almost 2.5 years in, with the full crew still intact and margins improved significantly, I can say that the fundamentals that made me effective in a corporate environment translated almost directly.
What didn't translate was the operational knowledge I didn't know I was missing. That's what this piece is about.
The assumption about trades businesses that most corporate buyers get wrong
People from corporate environments sometimes treat trades businesses like they require a different kind of leadership - tougher, more technical, more hands-on in a way they don't know how to be. In my experience, that's not what the people in these businesses actually want from an owner.
The crew wants to be treated right. Paid fairly. Respected. Communicated with honestly. Those are not complicated things, and they're not things that require a trades background to deliver - being a good leader is being a good leader.
Before the sale closed, I made sure to meet every member of the crew. The previous owners introduced me, so the employees knew the transition was coming. I talked to each of them directly, got them involved in decisions like where the new shop would be located (no real estate was included in the purchase), and made clear from the beginning that I was there to build something they'd want to be part of and that I wanted them to be a part of.
On my first day as owner, I gave everyone a small raise.
Every member of the crew is still with me almost two-and-a-half years later. If employees don't stay through a transition, you've bought an empty shell. The business you paid for walks out with them.
The pricing mistake that almost cost me everything
When I took over, I inherited the previous owners' pricing model and rates. I didn't change it right away - I had enough to figure out, and I assumed the rates were at least in the right range. It’s also best practice to wait ~6 months to make any changes to the business after acquisition unless critical.
After the first quarter did a quarterly review of our financials just as I was accustomed to doing in my past life in corporate. I discovered we had lost money on almost every single job. Quite a shock to the system.
The old pricing hadn't been updated in a long time. It didn't reflect current material costs, and it definitely didn't reflect my overhead, which was higher than the previous owners’ had been. I had a new shop lease to cover. I had real insurance - not minimal coverage. I had debt service. The rates that had worked for them, in their cost structure, didn't work in mine - and I had inherited them without thinking to verify they still made sense.
In month four I threw everything out of the door and rebuilt the pricing model from scratch - labor hours per job, materials, travel time, overhead, the whole nine. I went to my recurring commercial clients, explained what had changed, and asked them directly: what margin do you think is fair for me to earn? Then I showed them the math - my actual costs, my actual overhead - and walked them through why the rates had to increase. There was pushback, as you'd expect, especially since many of these conversations about price changes were the same meetings where I was meeting them for the first time. Think about that: ‘Hey I’m Robert the new owner…by the way, have to raise our rates.’ Some of the smaller accounts didn't stay. The major ones did, because I was extremely transparent and they could see the numbers were real.
That pricing rebuild was the foundation for what came next. Over the following two years, through improved pricing, tighter operations, and ongoing efficiency work across the business, I improved SDE margin by roughly 165%. If you're not familiar with SDE, I wrote a full explainer on how to calculate what your business is actually worth that covers the math in detail.
I asked them: what margin do you think is fair for me to earn? Then I showed them the math. The increase felt like a shared conclusion, not a demand.
What you have to track once you're running it
Two things need regular attention that most new owners don't think about until something goes wrong.
Material costs. The price of materials - metals, fixtures, components - moves. Tariffs, supply chain shifts, gas prices, and market conditions all affect what you're paying, sometimes significantly. If your pricing was built on a cost assumption from a year ago and that assumption is now wrong, you're losing margin - and maybe money - on every job without knowing it. We review material costs regularly and adjust pricing when the numbers move enough to matter. Experienced commercial clients understand this but proactive communication is critical so they have time to adjust on their end.
Labor units. This is what I'd call time-per-task from my past life in the data labeling and Machine Learning / AI world - how long each piece of the job actually takes. You build pricing assumptions around these numbers, and those assumptions need to be tested against real jobs. I track how long different tasks take on actual work, then compare that to what I assumed when I priced the job. When the two don't match, something needs to change - either the estimate or the execution.
Neither of these is complicated. Both require discipline to do consistently, and both will cost you if you ignore them.
What I'd tell someone thinking about buying a trades business
The operational fundamentals of a trades business are learnable. What you bring from wherever you've been - how you treat people, how you think about systems, how you handle relationships under pressure - matters more than most buyers expect.
What catches people off guard is the stuff that isn't in the listing: pricing that hasn't been updated, overhead that's different from what the previous owner carried, compliance rhythms that nobody told you about. These aren't reasons not to buy. They're reasons to go in with your eyes open and your first ninety days structured around finding out what you don't know yet.
The business I bought had a 20+ year history. We took the bones, made improvements, and ended up changing its name to start building our own reputation with it. Two years in, the crew is intact, the margins are up, and the clients who stayed through the rate increase are still clients - we’ve added more. The things I wish someone told me upfront would have made the first few months less expensive, but they wouldn't have changed the outcome.
If you're thinking about buying or selling a business: I offer a straightforward first conversation where we look at what you're working with and what comes next. No pitch, no pressure - here to help anyone on a similar path.