About the Client
Our client is a growing platform of commercial field services businesses. Founders who join the platform keep a real stake in what they built, and the platform brings the capital, systems, and operating support to help each business grow.
This role leads one of those businesses: a long-established, founder-built commercial services company in the St. Louis region serving facility and industrial customers, with its own service, installation, sales, and office teams.
Client name disclosed upon mutual interest.
About the Role
The business is bringing on its first General Manager. The founder stays on to lead the brand and keeps doing what he is best at: solving problems in the field, carrying key customer relationships, and anchoring the culture he built. The GM owns the operating system of the business. The full team reports to the GM, and the GM reports to the platform.
The job comes in two phases.
First, performance:
put targets and a weekly cadence behind the sales team, get pricing right, tighten service delivery and the back office, and make sure the right people are in the right seats.
Then, growth:
new territories and tuck-in acquisitions in a regional market that is not well served today, with the GM leading integration.
This seat is built for an operator who knows how to work alongside a founder. The founder has the relationships with the team and the customers; the GM's leverage comes from earning his trust and bringing him along on the big decisions while owning the day-to-day.
If you want a blank slate with no one to consult, this isn't it. If you want to take a strong founder-built business to its next stage, it is.
Responsibilities
- P&L Ownership.
- Own revenue, gross margin, and EBITDA. Build the annual budget, run the monthly reporting package with the platform, and make the pricing and cost decisions behind it.
- Sales Leadership.
- Set targets for the sales team, run a weekly pipeline and quoting cadence, and hold each seller accountable to it. Build a sales motion that does not depend on any one person's relationships.
- Operations.
- Run dispatch, service delivery, installs, procurement, and receivables to clear standards. Drive adoption of the platform's shared systems.
- People.
- Assess the team, develop the leaders already in it, recruit where there are gaps, and make people decisions with judgment and follow-through.
- Founder Partnership.
- Work side by side with the founder as a true partner. Bring him the reasoning and the data behind key decisions, and turn his field instincts into repeatable process.
- Growth.
- Once the base business is performing, build the case for new markets, lead the integration of acquired businesses, and develop new service lines.
Requirements
- Must-Haves
- Full P&L ownership as a General Manager or equivalent in a trade or blue-collar services business of comparable size or larger: HVAC, electrical, mechanical, fire and life safety, security integration, industrial equipment service, specialty contracting, or similar.
- An operating seat as your current or most recent role. Consulting or banking in your background is fine; it should not be your last job.
- A track record of building accountability in a sales team: targets, cadence, pipeline discipline, and results you can point to.
- Experience raising the bar on an established team without breaking its culture.
- Strong financial command: you read the P&L without help, model the levers, and defend the number.
- Willingness to be on-site in the St. Louis area every day.
- Nice-to-Haves
- Experience inside a PE-backed or multi-brand services platform: monthly reporting, system conversions, and add-on integrations from the operator's side.
- Experience working alongside a founder or owner after an acquisition.
- Commercial B2B service experience: service agreements, quoted project backlogs, and facility customers.
- Familiarity with a modern field service management system.
- Ties to Missouri or the St. Louis region.
