The Memo
The $1T+ local services industry is ripe for disruption. Despite its massive size, many verticals within the market remain fragmented, inefficient, and reliant on manual processes.
The people who run these businesses are often old and slow to adopt new technologies. It’s difficult to sell software to them. However, we believe we have found a different way monetize new technologies like AI and ML in this industry; by outcompeting these companies rather than selling to them.
We are building a technology platform to enable the creation and rapid scaling of new local service brands.
Our ultimate goal is to achieve monopoly-level market share across multiple service verticals.
Our Vision
We envision a future where a wide range of local services, from commercial door repair to landscaping to HVAC maintenance, can be delivered at a fraction of today's cost through an end-to-end autonomous platform. By leveraging new technologies and rapidly converting them into market value more quickly than any regional competitors.
Our Strategy
Our strategy in a nutshell has three parts:
Part I: If you can rapidly integrate modern technology into service businesses you can easily outcompete local competitors.
Part II: Build proprietary technology in-house to enable rapid cross-geography expansion and consolidation.
Part III: Progressively automate the end-to-end process, ultimately creating a nearly autonomous global services conglomerate.
Our Technology
At the core of our platform is a suite of technologies that power the entire lifecycle of a service business:
- [In progress] Autonomous Branding & SEO Engine: Our AI-powered content generation system can produce high-quality, geographically-targeted, SEO optimized content at scale.
- Intelligent Quoting & Bidding: Our quoting system will leverage ML to accurately price jobs based on a variety of inputs, allowing us to win business profitably without human intervention. We will sync data cross region, from our inventory systems, human capital systems, and finance systems, to get a realtime total cost estimate of any job.
- Automated Customer Lifecycle Management: Our platform will handle customer communications, lead nurturing, follow ups, etc. via LLM + voice models (when they are ready). This will cut our service costs down significantly while allowing us to provide a better service. The people running these human businesses today are busy, often technologically illiterate, prone to scheduling errors and conflicts. Our system will not be.
- Optimized Routing & Dispatch: Our intelligent routing algorithms will enable the efficient allocation of technician resources, reducing wasted time and improving asset utilization. This will be further enhanced by our predictive maintenance and autonomous scheduling capabilities, which will proactively identify and schedule service opportunities.
By combining these technologies, and new ones as they are developed, we will be able to provide a high level of service at a highly competitive internal price point.
Our Approach
We are initially proving out our model in the $50B commercial door services market. By partnering with existing service providers, and referring leads to them, we can quickly monetize our SEO engine while we build out the other tech and eventually our in-house fulfillment capabilities.
As we refine our playbook, we will rapidly expand into new geographies and verticals. The modular nature of our technology platform enables us to spin up new brands in new markets with the click of a button, allowing us to scale at an unprecedented pace.
Over time, we will progressively in-source more of the operational functions, from quoting to service delivery. Our AI-powered tools will allow us to execute these functions more efficiently than any local competitor, giving us a powerful competitive advantage.
Traction to Date
In just two months, we have made significant strides in validating our approach:
- Launched our first brand, Elite Door Care, which is already ranking in the top 10 Google results for 15+ high-intent local keywords
- Partnered with an existing commercial door services company in Denver CO to send leads to
- Generated 6 qualified leads, including a $14K job that we referred to our partner. We keep 23% of the total job value.
- Developed a working version of our autonomous SEO engine that can generate and optimize content at scale, currently being used only on elitedoorcare.com
We are confident that we can build on this early traction to create a massive monopoly-scale conglomerate in at least one service vertical.
What’s next
- We will continue to improve our content & SEO engine, decoupling it from the existing Elite Door Care brand, to enable us to rapidly scale to other industries and regions
- We will identify the top 50 commercial door services markets and spin up targeted brands in each
- We will deploy our lead generation engine on other fragmented regional service verticals like Tree Arborists, Roofing and gutter services, etc.
- Hire a services team in strategic regions, and start fulfilling simpler high margin jobs in house, while continuing to sell the rest of the leads to service partners.
The Opportunity
There are hundreds of local services industries with TAM’s in the $10b to $100b range.
We plan to monopolize and dominate at least one.
Commercial doors is projected to be a $50b global market in 2027 (source)
DH Pace, the largest commercial door services company in the US, did $1b in revenue in 2022 (source)
If we monopolize this industry, and many more like it, we can be one of the largest companies to ever exist.
Who we are
Right now it’s just me, Alex Wallish. I’m ready to quit my job at Rippling and go in on this full time.
- Engineer @ Rippling for two years - built our automated compliance product (Vanta / Drata competitor) from day zero.
- Founding Engineer @ Limited - VC backed startup ($800k). Built marketplace software. Failed.
Funding
I’ve been funding operational costs out of my own pocket up to this point. Email me alexander@elitedoorcare.com if you want to participate.
I’d like to build a team to improve our technology and scale to new geographies and industries quicker.
Appendix
Risks
- Risk: Having to hire and scale large ops teams in many regions.
- Mitigation: We will hire ops teams and bring them in house one region at a time. We will scale them slowly and continue to sell excess leads for more complex jobs to our partners until we have predictable streams of leads. We will maintain revenue generation throughout the entire process and will only scale up our in-house ops team where it makes more financial sense than continuing to refer. We will rely on technology and attempt to keep very lean ops teams at all times.
- Risk: PE competitors with similar playbook rolling up regional competitors faster.
- Mitigation: We believe that by taking a more tech-driven approach and building the key tech in house, and by creating brands rather than purchasing them, we will be able to achieve a terminal state in particular verticals and therefore significant competitive advantage over even these players.
- Regulator risk: Licensing, insurance, etc.
- The first part of the playbook (referring to service partners) should not require any of this other than entity formation. We can automate entity formation using an entity formation API like Firstbase
- We will insure risk is isolated with a holding company (Delaware C corp) which develops the technology, and then local service entities throughout the region
- We will acquire licensing and insurance when we begin to bring leads in house. We will begin in more business friendly jurisdictions where these can be attained faster.
- We will only service “like-for-like” jobs in house at first, as this type of job does not require any sort of licensing or permitting in most jurisdictions.
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