Buy well. Measure what the seller never could. Run the business off what it shows.

1. Executive summary

Bayman Capital Partners acquires and operates founder-owned home services and trades businesses: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and the essential trades around them. We buy businesses doing $2M to $20M in revenue, at entry multiples of 4 to 7 times EBITDA, from owners who built something real and are now facing the question of what happens to it next.

Two things separate us from the funds already active in this space. First, we rebuild a business's true job-level margin before we price it, using its own field service and accounting data, rather than underwriting off trailing financials and hoping the operating improvement shows up later. Second, we are not sitting on a blind pool with a clock on it. We pursue deals independently and deal-by-deal alongside committed-capital conversations, specifically so we are never forced to buy at the wrong price to put money to work.

The opportunity is a demographic one, and it is timed. Millions of trades businesses are approaching an ownership transfer their owners have not planned for, in an industry where demand is non-discretionary and the work cannot be sent offshore or automated away. Large sponsors have already proven the platform model works at scale. What none of them offer a ten million dollar revenue owner is someone who understands, job by job and crew by crew, how his specific business actually makes money. That is the gap Bayman was built to fill.

2. Investment thesis

Home services businesses generate steady, essential, recurring cash flow, and they change hands at prices that do not reflect that quality, because the owner-operators who built them are retiring faster than the market has capitalized on. A furnace that fails in January is not a discretionary purchase. A commercial building's chiller is maintained on contract regardless of the economy. The demand is durable, local, and repeat.

Yet the typical seller runs the business on instinct and a bank balance, without job-level visibility into where the margin actually comes from. That is not a flaw to hold against them. It is the source of the return. A business earning fifteen percent margins on gut-set pricing, an underpriced maintenance base, and a booking rate no one measures is a business with real, mechanical upside that has nothing to do with paying more or waiting for the multiple to move.

Our thesis is that disciplined acquisition at a fair entry price, followed by the installation of job-level financial visibility and the operating decisions that visibility makes possible, compounds cash flow at a rate that does not depend on multiple expansion to produce a strong return. We buy well, we measure what the seller never could, and we run the business off what the measurement shows.

3. Why now: the ownership-transfer window

The seller side of this market is opening on a demographic schedule. This is not a standing condition a buyer can wait out. It is a window, it is open now, and it closes as this generation of owners finishes retiring.

An estimated six million U.S. small and midsize businesses are projected to change hands by 2035, roughly one million of them sold outright, cumulatively worth on the order of $5 trillion (McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility; Forbes reporting, 2026). Baby boomers own an estimated 32 to 41 percent of U.S. small businesses, roughly 12 million companies employing more than 25 million people, and construction and the specialty trades sit among the highest-concentration sectors for boomer ownership and exit pressure.

The businesses are not ready to sell. Seventy-two percent of boomer business owners have no formal written succession plan, and only 15 to 20 percent have ever obtained a professional valuation. The average owner's retirement age has drifted from 65 to 71 over the last decade, which tells you owners are holding on past the point they intended, often because there is no obvious buyer and no plan. That is the exact condition in which a credible, respectful, numbers-literate buyer is worth more to a seller than a marginally higher headline offer from someone who will not close cleanly or will not understand what they are buying.

4. Market backdrop and platform validation

The roll-up of home services is not an untested idea we are hoping works. It has been validated repeatedly, at scale, by some of the largest and most sophisticated capital in the market. Our edge is not the model. It is the size of business we operate at and the way we underwrite it.

The read-through is direct. The largest sponsors in the market are paying 17 to 18-plus times EBITDA for platforms at scale. We acquire the businesses that feed those platforms at 4 to 7 times. The spread between what a $1M-EBITDA founder-owned business sells for and what a $140M-EBITDA platform sells for is not a market inefficiency that will be arbitraged away tomorrow. It is a structural feature of how these businesses are valued by size, and it is the entire economic reason the platform model exists.

5. Market sizing

The universe is large and fragmented, which is what makes a density-first buy-and-build strategy viable rather than a bidding war.

• The U.S. HVAC contractor industry alone spans 118,000-plus establishments as of 2025 and exceeds $158B in annual revenue (IBISWorld).
• Roughly 24,000-plus roofing contractor employer firms operate nationally (2022 U.S. Economic Census).
• Across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and adjacent trades, there are roughly 648,000 specialty trade contractor establishments nationally (2017 U.S. Economic Census).

Valuation scales sharply with size, which is the arbitrage we are underwriting. CT Acquisitions' 2026 tiered HVAC analysis puts sub-$1M-EBITDA businesses at roughly 3.0 to 4.5 times, $1M to $3M at 5.0 to 7.5 times, $3M to $10M at 7.0 to 10.0 times, $10M to $25M at 9.0 to 13.0 times, and $25M-plus premium platforms at 13.0 to 20.0 times (the top tier is press-derived). We buy at the bottom of that ladder and build businesses that belong further up it.

6. Investment criteria

We are narrow on purpose. The criteria are a filter, not a wish list.

We want businesses that have never been financially engineered, because that is where the operational upside is intact.

7. Sourcing and underwriting edge

Sourcing is relationship-driven, not auction-driven. Jack Ward leads seller relationships and channel partnerships, working the brokers, accountants, trade suppliers, and local networks that see founder-owned businesses before they hit a banked process, if they ever do. The businesses we want are frequently not for sale in any formal sense until an owner decides that the right buyer has shown up.

The underwriting edge is the same capability as the operating approach, applied earlier in time. Logan Bardunias leads a job-cost rebuild during diligence that joins the target's field service management data (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, and the like) to its accounting file, producing true margin by service line, by crew, and by job type before we price the deal. That rebuild routinely reorders which parts of the business are actually the asset, and it lets us hold price on a business worth holding it for and walk from one that only looks good in the blend. We do not underwrite off trailing EBITDA and hope. We underwrite off the parts.

8. Value creation playbook

Value creation is sequenced, not hoped for. Before close, we rebuild job-level margin from the target's own field service and accounting data. In the first hundred days, we install measurement and stabilize the business without ripping out working software or unsettling the crews, and we correct the clearest pricing leaks the rebuild already found. From months four to twelve, we turn that measurement into margin: repricing to target margin by job type, coaching technician efficiency off a real scorecard, treating the maintenance base as the core asset it is, and lifting the call booking rate before spending another dollar on demand. From year one to two, we consolidate the back office into a shared spine and then bolt on density-adjacent businesses that plug into it. Exit-readiness is a byproduct of running the business this way, not a project at the end. Multiple expansion is not the plan. Compounding cash flow is.

9. Illustrative return case

The figures below are illustrative and exist to show the mechanics, not to promise an outcome. They deliberately assume no multiple expansion, because multiple expansion is not what we underwrite.

Assume a platform assembled from three founder-owned businesses over the first two years, blended entry EBITDA of roughly $3M at a blended 5 times, for an enterprise value near $15M, funded with conservative leverage. Over a five-year hold, the operating playbook lifts platform EBITDA toward $5M through pricing correction, technician utilization, a repriced and growing maintenance base, and overhead collapsed across the shared back office. Free cash flow through the hold pays down acquisition debt and partly self-funds the bolt-ons.

At exit, even holding the entry multiple flat at 5 times, the combination of EBITDA growth and deleveraging produces a strong multiple on invested equity. If the scaled, cleaner, better-run platform earns any premium at exit, and the tiered market data suggests businesses at $3M to $10M-plus EBITDA trade meaningfully above the 5 times we paid, that premium is upside we did not pay for. The return does not require it.

The point of the case is what drives it. The equity return is built from cash flow the business always could have produced and never measured, not from financial engineering and not from betting the exit market rerates.

10. Fund structure

We are structured to avoid the single most reliable way to lose money in this strategy: being forced to deploy committed capital on a clock, and buying badly late in a fund period to do it.

Bayman pursues acquisitions deal-by-deal and through independent sponsor structures in parallel with committed-fund conversations. There is no blind pool and no pressure to deploy. Each acquisition can stand on its own economics, and capital partners can evaluate real businesses rather than a promise to find them. As the platform and track record build, a committed vehicle may follow, but on terms and at a pace set by deal quality rather than by a fundraising calendar.

11. Team

Jack Ward, Co-Founder. Leads sourcing, seller relationships, and channel partnerships. Jack owns the front of the business: finding founder-owned companies before they run a formal process, building the broker and referral network that surfaces them, and earning the trust of owners for whom this sale is the largest financial decision of their lives.

Logan Bardunias, Co-Founder. Leads diligence infrastructure, job-cost underwriting, and post-close financial operations. Logan owns the machine that rebuilds true job-level margin during diligence and runs it forward as the operating dashboard after close.

We will state the firm plainly. Bayman is newly formed, and we are not going to dress a two-person firm up as something it is not. Our qualification is not a list of prior exits we have not yet had. It is operating fluency in how contractor businesses actually make money, at the level of the individual job, which is the specific thing the sellers we court and the capital we raise both need and rarely find in a buyer. We would rather be trusted for what is true than doubted for what is inflated.

12. Key risks and mitigants

Integration and execution risk of a new firm. We are early, and disciplined sequencing is how we manage it. No blind pool means no forced deployment, so our first deals can be chosen for fit rather than urgency. The playbook is designed to stabilize before it changes anything.

Technician and skilled-labor retention. The crews are the asset, and a bad transition can lose them. Our first-hundred-days approach is explicitly built to leave crews, software, and routines intact, and owner rollover keeps continuity at the top where it matters most.

Owner and key-person dependency at targets. Many of these businesses run on one person. The job-cost rebuild identifies exactly where that dependency sits, rollover equity keeps the owner engaged through transition, and back-office consolidation reduces reliance on any single person over time.

Cyclicality. Home services demand is more resilient than most, because repair and maintenance are non-discretionary, but replacement and new-construction work is more sensitive. We bias toward service, repair, and recurring maintenance revenue, which is the durable part of the demand.

Multiple compression at exit. We do not underwrite multiple expansion, so we are not exposed to its reversal. The return is built on cash flow and deleveraging, which hold up even if exit multiples soften.

Financing and rate environment. We use conservative leverage and buy at entry multiples that leave room, rather than stretching price on the assumption that cheap debt persists.

13. Sources

• IBISWorld, U.S. HVAC contractor industry data, 2025 (establishment count and industry revenue).
• U.S. Economic Census, 2022 (roofing contractor employer firms) and 2017 (specialty trade contractor establishments).
• McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility; Forbes reporting, 2026 (small-business ownership transfer projections).
• Small-business ownership and succession statistics (boomer ownership share, succession planning and valuation rates, retirement-age shift), 2026 reporting.
• CT Acquisitions, 2026 tiered HVAC valuation analysis (top tier press-derived).
• Platform transaction data in Section 4: Apex Service Partners, Wrench Group, Redwood Services (press-derived), Champions Group (press-derived), Service Logic. Items are flagged in-table as confirmed, reported, or press-derived.

Press-derived figures are drawn from trade and financial press reporting and have not been independently confirmed. They are presented as market context, not as verified transaction terms.

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