Two names on the door: the spouses, parents and partners behind the businesses

At least 13 of the 33 owner entries in this database involve a second person. Eight carry two names on the entry itself: couples, a father and son, school friends, business partners. Five more describe a husband, a wife or a group of partners who did part of the work. Read together, those pages show what the second person tended to bring, and it was usually something the first could not have bought.

The person who already knew the work

Cristobal Mondragon's business was his wife's idea. In 2015 Sandra was cleaning homes for someone else's Seattle-area company, watching the owner keep the margin on her labor, and she told him they could do it themselves. He was skeptical. They started with about $5,000, and the company, now called Bumble Bee, reports $120,000 to $140,000 a month and more than $5 million of cumulative revenue. She had the trade knowledge on day one; he has spent the years since publicly taking back his doubts.

Dan Spracklin came from corporate work with no septic experience. His wife had worked the back office of Gray Brothers in high school, and the seller was her father. The couple took over the 1929 company in 2013 at about $1 million a year and 10 to 15 percent margins, and within two years it was near $3 million with margins above 30 percent. Our piece on buying versus building covers why a family sale is often the cleanest route into a trade like this one.

The person who found the first customer

Haley Gallagher's husband was working security at a bar where nobody liked the cleaners. They asked for the contract, and the manager gave them his second bar across the street as well. Moonlight Commercial Cleaning booked $100,000 of work in nine months and turned over $170,000 in its first full year, with both founders keeping their day jobs.

EJ McCoy and Josh Cahill were running a lawn company when they spotted the job their own customers would pay to avoid. They launched Scoop Soldiers in McKinney, Texas in 2010. By 2023 it reported about $1.25 million a month systemwide across 96 franchised territories. In both cases the opening came from a job one of the partners was already doing.

The salary that kept the cash in the business

Dave and Carla Menz bought their first laundromat for $85,000 in 2010, after 25 banks turned Dave down. For roughly five years the couple reinvested nearly every dollar while he kept his phone company job, and he left only after the third store. Queen City Laundry now runs four Cincinnati stores reporting over $2 million a year.

Christian Sanya did the same thing from the other side. On a $76,000 lab salary she earned $46,000 from laundry gigs in 2022, and she and her husband used that income to open The Laundry Room, a 40-machine store bringing in about $24,000 a month. She still fulfills about twelve hours of laundry a day, with her husband and staff covering around her shifts. A household with one steady paycheck can leave the business's money in the business, and the startup cost ladder shows how little most of these owners started with.

Parents and children

Joel Davis left corporate telecom to open an America's Swimming Pool Company franchise in Frisco, Texas in June 2019 with his son Hunter. UpFlip's feature put it at $851,000 a year in revenue. His entry calls the father-and-son structure the succession plan most trades in this database never build. Our piece on the key employee problem covers what can happen to a trades business without one.

John D'Eri bought a failing Parkland, Florida car wash in 2013 for roughly $3 million so that his son Andrew, who has autism, would have a job. His other son, Tom, had just finished business school and is the second name on the entry. The wash did 35,000 cars a year at purchase. Rising Tide now washes close to half a million across three locations and reports nearly $6 million a year at margins above 20 percent.

Partners, and the partnerships that sold

Johnny Robinson and Sergio Silesky have been friends since seventh grade. At 19 they spent $150 on window cleaning gear, reached $65,000 to $70,000 months about four and a half years later, and sold Orange Window Cleaning. Nick Huber and Dan Hagberg started Storage Squad at Cornell in 2011 and sold it to 1-800-PACK-RAT in January 2021, at a price reported between $1.65 and $1.7 million, then put their attention into Bolt Storage, now 68 facilities. Both exits are on the exit ledger.

Frank Rolfe had already sold his billboard company and bought his first mobile home park when he met Dave Reynolds at an industry conference in 2006. Together they bought parks at roughly two dozen a year, and in 2013 their parks did $30 million of revenue with more than half of it profit. Nathan Lenahan bought Bart's Heating & Air with partners for $400,000, financed with an SBA loan and a $100,000 working capital line, and each partner put in another $70,000 afterward. Luke and Heather Menear have been striping parking lots in Rochester together since 1999 and approach $739,000 a year.

What to take from it

The second person in these entries mostly brought one of four things: knowledge of the trade, a first customer, a relationship with the seller, or a salary that let the business keep its cash. Money from partners shows up too, in Lenahan's deal and the D'Eri family's $3 million, but in fewer of the entries.

What the entries do not document is how any of these partnerships split ownership, or what was agreed about one partner leaving. For a couple or two friends starting with $150, that conversation is cheap to have early and expensive later, and it is the first question we would ask any pair starting out. Every owner above is in the database, the margin ledger shows what each trade keeps, and Start here sorts the models by capital and hours. This site is one of SideRoad's weekly builds.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Buy it or build it
• When the owners quit their day jobs
• Eleven categories, ranked by how many owners we have documented