Kelly Mesaris on Taking a Roofing Company From $3M to a $36M Exit in 16 Months

Featuring Kelly Mesaris, COO of LB Capital and president of the Winner's Circle coaching group.

Munz Roofing closed 2023 at $3 million in revenue. Sixteen months later it was under LOI, and it sold for $36 million. The gap between those two numbers is not luck or a hot market, it is a written blueprint that LB Capital has now run ten times.

Kelly Mesaris is the COO of LB Capital, Lance Bachmann's home services holding company, and the president of Winner's Circle, the coaching group that sits under the Build It To Sell It movement. Ten roofing companies sit on the platform today, pacing roughly $160 million in combined revenue. Six companies have already sold. I wanted her on the podcast because she is not writing about this from a conference stage. She sets the budgets, builds the tech stacks, and sits with the partners two days a quarter in their own offices.

Partner where the business is stuck, not where it is already winning

LB Capital does not chase the winners. It goes looking for owners sitting in the revenue band where most home services companies stall out.

"Right now on the platform, we're usually partnering with companies that are kind of stuck in that swamp revenue area, like four to 6 million. Each level has different problems and issues."

The blueprint exists because those problems repeat. Every company at $4 million hits the same wall, and the wall looks different at $10 million and different again at $20 million. Kelly has worked through all of them enough times that the fix is documented rather than discovered.

"We usually take our companies from that $4 million mark, and then with our blueprint and our leadership team, we are growing those companies to 20 to 25 million. Usually within 16 to 18 months, we're able to accomplish that goal."

The model is 100% residential retail. No insurance work. LB Capital does not buy companies outright either. It takes 50% and full operational control, and Kelly frames that control narrowly. They are not there to win an argument about which CRM is better. They already know what the playbook runs on, and they want to execute it without relitigating the tech stack.

Judge the operator before you judge the P&L

Every LB Capital partner comes through Winner's Circle first. That is deliberate. The coaching group is a filter, and what it filters for is whether the owner will actually do the hard parts.

Most owners arrive on cash basis accounting and have to be rebuilt on accrual. Most have to raise prices. All of them have to commit to ServiceTitan as the CRM. Kelly is direct that none of this is pleasant, and that is the point. The pain is the signal.

Then comes the part that surprised me. The C-suite assembles the data on market saturation, customer acquisition cost, and local competition, and Lance mostly goes with his gut on the person.

"He believes, are you a family person? Because you have to be working towards something, some kind of mission. So usually likes people that are married, have kids, because that's their why."

Three years in, six exits, one failed market. The gut is working.

Build the budget backwards from the win-the-day number

This was the most useful ten minutes of the conversation. LB Capital sets budgets in October and November for the following year, and the number is not a wish. It is reverse-engineered from the math.

Marketing gets 10% of revenue. From that spend they know the lead volume. From the booking rate they know the booked calls. A sales rep runs two calls a day and closes roughly one of them. Stack those numbers and the headcount, the marketing spend, and the recruiting budget all fall out of the target.

They also forecast the bad months honestly. January and February on the East Coast produce decent sales because snow and thaw cycles find every leak in a roof, and produce weak revenue because nobody installs on a snow-covered roof.

The budget then breaks down to a daily number for every organization.

"You can't wait until the end of the month and be like, okay, well, we didn't hit budget. We're looking at those numbers every day, so we can call a 911 if there's an issue."

The sales team meets with the chief revenue officer twice a day. Lose the morning and they rebuild the afternoon around the gap, because the missed revenue gets added to tomorrow's number. A monthly review process cannot catch a problem that fast. Our operational reporting cadence guide covers a lighter version of the same idea.

Stop apologizing for lead aggregators and fix your speed to lead

Lead aggregators carry a bad reputation in the trades. LB Capital runs on them, and Angi Ads, Angi Leads, Networx, eLocal, and Fixr are top revenue generators in every one of their markets.

Kelly's response to the criticism is not a defense of the channel. It is a diagnosis of the buyer.

"My feedback to anyone that will come to me and state that is that probably your speed to lead process is not dialed in, and that's why you feel that they're insufficient."

Their process: a live CSR makes three calls back to back to back, plus a text and an email. Hatch runs ringless voicemail, text, and email on top of that. SameDay AI runs outbound calling until the homeowner either books or says no thank you. CSRs carry a KPI of 250 calls a day and are managed like inside sales reps.

The results justify the aggression. Angi's stated benchmark is a 20% booking rate on the leads they send. LB Capital books 30 to 33%.

"We're getting anywhere from a nine to a 16X return on ad spend. For every dollar I give Angie, they're giving me $16 back. I'm gonna do that all day long."

I brought up a painter we hired off Thumbtack. The companies that called immediately had websites and reviews that made it obvious they ran a real operation. The ones that called three days later were burning their own money, because by then we had already hired someone. That is the whole argument in one anecdote. Kelly hears the model called too aggressive, and her answer is that a competitor is already running it.

The other half of the problem is measurement. Kelly sees members show up with one generic phone number running across every campaign, then conclude that a channel does not work. You cannot fire a channel you never tracked.

Separate the roles so nobody carries three jobs

Every LB Capital division runs canvassing teams, a CSR function that behaves like inside sales, a sales leader who recruits and runs the sales team, project managers who handle subcontractors in the field, and an install coordinator who orders material and drop-ships it to the site. Turnover calls are required on every call.

The whole thing is organized around four kinds of speed: speed to lead, speed to sale, speed to install, speed to collections.

My friend Steve Adelman, who runs Red Rock Roofing here in Colorado, hit the same wall from the other direction. His early sales reps knocked doors, ran the sale, and then managed the project. Splitting those into three roles is what let him scale.

Roofing makes that separation easy because the crew on the roof barely touches the customer. HVAC does not, which is why Kelly says she would not go back to it. An HVAC tech needs technical skill and sales skill in the same person, and the perfect consultation runs two hours and four minutes.

"The technicians have the technical skills, but they don't have the sales skills. And most of them don't believe in selling. They just wanna fix things."

Her fix at Dilling, the Philadelphia HVAC company she came in to turn around, was not a training deck. She moved the techs from hourly to 100% commission, which is a hard sell, and then went on ride-alongs and did the job in front of them. On one maintenance call she built out options and converted a $9,000 ticket.

"Now, I didn't keep any of the money. I gave it all to them. It opened the door to say, this is how you do it and this is what's possible."

That is the difference between coaching and instruction. She was willing to go in the trenches and prove the number was real before asking anyone to chase it.

Point AI at the gaps you already have, not at the org chart

LB Capital is further into automation than almost anyone in the trades, and the reason is that they never started with the technology. They started with the gap.

"Here's a gap in my organization, how can I close that? A lot of times you'll find out it's not from another person, it's a technology that can help you close those gaps."

Hatch covers speed to lead, missed calls, unsold estimate follow-up, and review requests. SameDay AI handles inbound and outbound calling. DispatchPro inside ServiceTitan makes assignment decisions. AI builds the rotating seven-day sales schedules, the same way Walmart or CVS staffs a store, and drafts and brands the SOPs before rollout.

The next frontier she named is operations, and the reason matters to anyone planning an exit. Find the manual processes, automate them, and the company runs leaner without new headcount. That flows straight into EBITDA, and EBITDA is what the multiplier gets applied to.

Kelly is also clear about where automation stops.

"Sales skills and connecting with the customer, that's probably gonna be a slower automation. You need that person."

Her method for finding the gaps costs nothing. Call your competitors and walk their consumer journey. Then call your own company. See how long the phone rings, hang up, and find out whether anything follows you. She is not looking for original ideas, only ideas that already work somewhere.

I have made this same argument with Mike Potts, who helped build Fence 360 for Superior Fence & Rail, on a previous episode. Mid-market home services companies keep buying AI because they feel they should, then wonder why nothing improved. See our AI adoption in home services breakdown for the longer version.

Pick vendors on the phone call, not the feature list

LB Capital runs both Hatch and SameDay even though the two products now overlap. When they signed each one, they did not.

"It comes down to the person, how responsive they are, and the relationship, and how vested they are and how much they care about us."

Kelly can text Aaron, SameDay's founder, and get a reply. Kara and Nick at Hatch move fast when a bot breaks, and bots break. On a level playing field of features, response time is the product.

What home services owners should take from Kelly's playbook

Three things from this conversation transfer to any residential trade, at any size.

• Raise your prices 10% tomorrow. This was Kelly's first answer when I asked what a $7 million owner should change immediately. She is confident it will not move your conversion rate, and you need the margin to build the company properly.
• Reverse-engineer the budget, then break it into a daily number. An annual target nobody can act on is a wish. Marketing spend, booking rate, calls per rep, close rate, and a win-the-day figure turn it into a roadmap your team can follow.
• Audit your own consumer journey before you buy anything. Call your own company. Time the pickup, hang up, and see what follows you. The gaps you find are your automation roadmap, and most of them are cheaper to close with technology than with headcount.

Her closing answer reframes the whole industry, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

"We can talk about fencing, we can talk about HVAC, plumbing, roofing. They're all widgets. At the end of the day, you need to treat your company like a sales, marketing, recruiting, technology company. Because at the end of the day, that is what you are."

Watch the full conversation

Kelly covers the Munz model tenant, the Winner's Circle structure, and where LB Capital is pointing next in fencing. The full episode is on our podcast episode library . LB Capital runs free half-day shop tours the first Wednesday of every month, and they travel, so there may be one near you at builditsellit.com.

If you want to see what automating the gaps looks like inside your own operation, book a Nail demo .

Article by George Paladichuk, founder of Nail AI. Featuring Kelly Mesaris, COO of LB Capital.