From Bedroom to £50M Exit: Building a Facilities Empire in Your Pants with Andrew Holbert

So let's dig into that then.

I know you just gave us like a brief overview.

Yeah.

And I know there's tons in-

Oh, yeah.

So much

... that we can unpack.

Why do you think your EBITDA was so high-

So I-

... compared to your competitors?

Yeah.

So in facilities management, and, and actually many service sectors, it's very easy to start focusing on starting small.

So you have a man in a van-

Mm

... and he's going around and he's doing a few bits, and then maybe you get two men or three men, four men, whatever.

For me, I didn't want that.

I didn't wanna start small.

I wanted to go big from the very beginning.

So I was only targeting customers that had at least one permanent member of staff based on site.

So in facilities management, we were really focusing on engineering, so engineers, electrical, mechanical, air conditioning engineers based on sites, and then also management teams, so facilities managers or reception teams and all that sort of stuff.

We never self-delivered cleaning and security because that was too hard work and people were better than we were.

Now, why that's important is because in my model, let's just say I have 10 engineers and they're permanently based on 10 different sites for customers.

The customer pays 100% of their cost regardless of the output of that engineer.

Mm.

So now if I have a guy in a van and he's only utilized for 45% of the week, well, the other 55% I'm taking to overhead, whereas in my model, 100% utilization of every staff member every week always paid by the customer on a 1/12 basis throughout the year.