@T’Boo Ted Marshall sorry to hear about your issues. Never a dull moment, I suppose.
Do you think you need to stabilize the balance sheet and produce some consistent profitability before pulling the trigger on the PE decision? I'm curious if you think a year or two of solid results is A) achievable and B) can put you in a spot of added leverage when that time comes.
Update on our end. We're six months in to the HVAC side and just over a year into the MEP endeavor as a whole. Definitely slower to achieve consistent profitability than I had hoped and costing WAY more on the front end than I had budgeted. Part of that is a byproduct of rapid growth (26 field guys now) and part is the fact that we're investing heavily in the infrastructure (full call center and three managers) to make it more scalable. We were optimistic that we could cash flow the expansion with our legacy business units, but that hasn't been the case. We signed a five year lease on a 15,000 SF space, so we should see some operational efficiency increases. Migrated to Service Titan for service dispatch. Just kicked off a big marketing / advertising initiative. But, all that being said, we're starting to achieve critical mass on the labor side and starting to achieve consistent margins that have put the MEP operation in the black the last two months. The trend is definitely in the right direction.
As such, we're close to pushing out a mezzanine debt raise. After some pretty exhaustive conversations, it fits the bill the best for our business at this stage. More flexibility than institutional debt without sacrificing equity. We don't need a ton of cash, so this seems to be the logical next step.
Then the question becomes the long-term goals. I have two silent partners, and my end game is dramatically different than theirs. So, that's a whole different conversation that keeps becoming more integral in the overall strategy.