Andrew Hitchings·March 6, 2023

How to Grow a Small Business Acquisition into a HOLDCO Platform | Andrew Hitchings Interview

Andrew Hitchings, along with his wife Marcella (ex-McKinsey/GSB, former cidery founder) and partner Max Williams (chemical engineer, ex-McKinsey), acquired Colorado Home Cooling in April 2020 — right at the start of COVID — for a 2.6x multiple on roughly $250k SDE. The business installed whole house fans and attic ventilation in the Denver metro and had been flat for a decade due to the owner-operator's inability to retain seasonal labor. In under three years, the trio tripled SDE to approximately $750k by solving the seasonality problem through off-season B2B business development, expanding into fully licensed electrical contracting (EV chargers, solar, new construction), implementing live operational dashboards, hiring a full-time marketing director who drove SEO dominance, and replacing Andrew in the field with a GM hired from the fitness industry. The episode captures Andrew and team at the inflection point from single-acquisition operators to a nascent holdco (branded Olive Ridge Partners), with Marcella and Max running active deal search while Andrew manages operations — a model they describe as self-funded, long-term-hold, equity-retained, and built around complementary operator expertise rather than investor capital.

Deal facts

multiple: 2.6x SDE
sde ebitda: SDE ~$250k
financing structure: self-funded
notes: Bought April 2020 (closing during early COVID). Business was Colorado Home Cooling, 18-year-old whole house fan / attic ventilation installer in Denver metro. SDE had been steady at ~$250k for 10 years. At time of interview SDE had grown to ~$750k. Retention bonus carved out for key employee from purchase price as part of deal structure.

Why this business

They saw a profitable, 18-year-old business with a genuine seller, transparent diligence, and clear growth upside. The whole house fan product was a green alternative to air conditioning with strong demand tailwinds (COVID fresh-air narrative, California mandates), no sophisticated competitor landscape, and a clear operational problem — seasonality and inability to retain staff — that they believed they could solve. The small size and the fact that it hadn't grown in 10 years was not a red flag but a signal of an owner who was a technician, not a growth operator.

What's working

Tripled SDE from ~$250k to ~$750k in under three years through a combination of seasonality fixes, hiring licensed electricians, and business development in the off-season
Becoming a licensed electrical contractor opened up a much larger addressable market: solar companies, general contractors, municipalities, and new home builds
Hiring a full-time marketing director who drove strong SEO results, particularly dominating organic search for the niche whole house fan product
Daily operational debrief ('gray today') sessions that tie technician performance to compensation, creating a culture of continuous improvement
Max Williams built a sales-training app in Google Sheets that lets new seasonal sales reps get up to speed within a week
Google Looker dashboards give live visibility into sales rep and operator performance and commissions
Q1 (winter, snow on the ground) now generates more revenue than the prior owner did in an entire year, by pivoting off-season sales staff to business development targeting commercial decision-makers
Hiring a GM from the fitness industry (managed 19 gyms) — character and operational ownership over industry experience — freed Andrew to focus on strategy and HoldCo search
Complementary three-person partnership: Andrew (operator/leader), Marcella (finance, accounting, customer experience), Max (data, platforms, search)

What's hard

Bought what was essentially a job — one employee beyond the seller, extreme key-man risk — and had to build a team from scratch
Seasonality was severe: the prior owner could not retain employees through winter and had to re-hire and re-train every spring
Andrew spent the first 18 months in the field doing installations himself, which was necessary but eventually had to consciously pull back to focus on strategy
Reinventing the wheel: spent too much time building custom tools in Google Sheets before realizing off-the-shelf SaaS platforms with 80% solutions were better
Finding and affording a master electrician (very expensive first hire) was a major threshold that had to be crossed before the electrical services expansion could happen
Hiring a licensed electrician from a lending/acquisition perspective is a deal risk — if the license holder leaves the business cannot operate, which also makes electrical businesses harder to acquire
Business has been financially lean — founders paid themselves little, reinvesting heavily; two McKinsey salaries replaced by ~$100k combined lifestyle for years
Running a business with a spouse can be all-consuming — business talk bleeds into home life, required deliberate effort to establish lanes and take real family vacations

Notable quotes

We were buying a job. Yeah. But we looked at the industry, we looked at the product — it's a green solution that is an alternative for air conditioning. We saw this as something that would help with the climate change movement and all of these things. There wasn't a huge sophisticated competitor landscape and it was something we could do, we could wrap our minds around pretty quickly.

Our Q1 while snow is on the ground is going to turn more revenue than the previous owner had in a year, and that is from standing up a business development capability.

When you purchase a business of this size that has been profitable for a long period of time, the bones are there — you just got to put meat on the bones. I don't think it's that hard. You can make small changes that have a big impact: you implement a new CRM, you tweak the SEO, you rebuild the incentive structure, you can change some vendors.

We learned to hire for character not experience. Hiring someone is less about do they have phone sales experience or do they know what our product is — it's more about is this person thorough, is this person reliable, do they have a power of persuasion.