Home Services Owners: The Builders Behind Bryan Clayton, Carrie Kelsch, Bryan Park and Adeline Thomas

Aizik Zimerman

Owner & CEO, J. Blanton Plumbing — Chicago, IL

Official links: Website

Aizik Zimerman is the first in his family to finish high school and attend college — and he comes by entrepreneurship honestly. His father, a Holocaust survivor with a fifth-grade education, immigrated to the United States, worked as a bricklayer and in a restaurant, bought into that restaurant, and went on to own and operate nursing facilities in Cleveland.

Zimerman's parents both died while he was in high school. He studied finance and accounting at Miami University in Ohio, worked in investment banking and private equity, and ran a sales team and a general manager role at Uber Eats before enrolling at the University of Chicago's Booth School knowing he wanted to buy a business.

There, he shadowed plumbing and HVAC owners, built a database of targets, and blitzed owners with handwritten letters and gifts of Garrett's popcorn.

Within three months of starting his search he had signed a letter of intent; in October 2022 he closed on J. Blanton Plumbing, a three-generation family business with 40 employees, from its retiring owner — the first Booth student to complete an acquisition while still enrolled.

Acquiring Minds tells the next chapter in its headline: $6 million to a $25 million run rate in three years.

"I hate the ‘exit’ philosophy, I think it is so backwards,"

Zimerman talks about J. Blanton as his life's work, not a flip. He wants to build a very large home services company over decades, and he treats plumbing as a consumer sales and marketing business that happens to install plumbing.

He also wants to glorify the trades themselves — building training programs to create a workforce pipeline and reminding people that plumbers arrive in the middle of emergencies. The boy whose father's buying a business transformed his family's story is now writing the next generation of that story in Chicago.

Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Chicago — “Forget the Exit. This Booth ETA Student Plans to Hold Onto his Newly Acquired Plumbing Company for the Long Haul.”
Acquiring Minds — “Founder Mode for ETA: $6m to $25m in 3 Years”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Adeline Thomas  ·  Alek Ivanov

Adeline Thomas

Founder & Owner, Elderly Savior Homecare — Orange, NJ

Official links: Website

Adeline Thomas was the aide before she was the owner. Before home care, she worked her way through retail, grocery, banking and library jobs while pursuing her education in healthcare administration. Then she became a home health aide herself — and found the work she was meant to do, learning firsthand what patients, families and caregivers actually need.

In 2016 she founded Elderly Savior Homecare with limited resources, personally funding the business and reinvesting its early earnings instead of taking them out. In the early years she paid herself nothing at all, choosing payroll for her nurses and home health aides over her own compensation, every single time.

The agency began in one room of her home, as a one-person team: she handled the door-to-door marketing, the physician outreach and the relationship building herself. That is servant-leadership in its purest form — the woman at the top had done every job underneath her, and she protected her people's paychecks before she ever took one of her own.

She leads, she says, by family, faith, hard work and integrity, stays active in her church as a youth leader, and still holds herself accountable to a coach who challenges her own growth.

"When you lead with love, you create an effect that goes far beyond business,"

The one-room operation is now an established agency serving communities throughout New Jersey, holding government contracts that include Medicaid, veterans programs and the Division of Developmental Disabilities, with plans for a larger corporate office in Verona.

Thomas also founded the Elderly Savior Academy, coaching aspiring entrepreneurs who want to build home care businesses of their own, and the Elderly Savior Workforce & Care Foundation, supporting underserved seniors, caregiver training and workforce development — a mission her foundation traces to her grandmother's battle with diabetes.

She even returned to school for a second bachelor's degree in nursing, the better to lead the clinicians she hires.

EIN Presswire — “Adeline Thomas, Recognized By Influential Women, Builds Elderly Savior Homecare Through Compassionate Care”
Elderly Savior Foundation — “Elderly Savior Foundation | Care, Education & Community Impact”
EIN Presswire — “Adeline Thomas Joins Women in Power TV to Share Her Vision for Heart-Led Leadership”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Victor Rancour  ·  Aizik Zimerman

Alek Ivanov

Founder & President, Synergy3 — Philadelphia, PA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

At twenty-two, Alek Ivanov faced a choice, as ACHR News tells it: work as a loader in a Russian food store, or go into HVAC. He was living in New Jersey, did not know anybody and did not even have a car.

He was promised $8 an hour if he could get a car to drive a senior installer who had lost his license. That was his humble beginning — an immigrant starting at the bottom of a trade he had never heard of. Sixteen years on, he had built Synergy3 from the ground up.

The climb was not smooth. On the Entrepreneur Intel podcast, Ivanov describes losing over $500,000 along the way and the internal shifts it took to break through a $3 million bottleneck in his business — lessons he now shares openly with other owners.

The podcast reports the company he rebuilt has grown to more than 30 team members and more than $8 million in revenue.

It also describes how he learned to turn his most hurtful moments into fuel — the same drive that now takes him biking solo across Iceland and competing in Ironman races while his team runs the business he built.

"I had no idea what HVAC was,"

Synergy3 now serves the Greater Philadelphia area and New Jersey from three locations — Philadelphia, South Plainfield and Marlton — across HVAC, plumbing, electrical and insulation, and the company received the Bryant Medal of Excellence for the second year in a row, ACHR News reported.

Ivanov, named to the magazine's Top 40 Under 40, says his goal is to leave a legacy in the trade and to look out for installation teams, having been an installer himself. The company motto says it plainly: “I am here to make your day better.”

ACHR News — “2023 Top 40 Under 40: Alek Ivanov”
Entrepreneur Intel via ListenNotes — “I Had to Stop Working IN My Business to Save It - Alek Ivanov's $3M Breakthrough - Episode #47”
Synergy3 — “HVAC Contractor in Philadelphia & NJ | Synergy3”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Aizik Zimerman  ·  Antonio Sustiel

Antonio Sustiel

Founder & CEO, Flooring King — Miami, FL

Official links: Website · Instagram

Antonio Sustiel's discipline was forged early: he has said he quit school at ten to work for his father in Israel, starting days at four in the morning, and later served in the Israeli military. In 1987 he immigrated to the United States with $400 in his pocket, not yet speaking the language.

He worked flea markets, saved, and built his first real business selling perfume — then sold it for $3.5 million and retired in his thirties. What followed is the part most people never recover from: he spent and lost the fortune.

A friend introduced him to flooring, and Sustiel rebuilt from there, learning the market the hard way, overbuying inventory customers did not want before he mastered what actually sells. The company he built, Flooring King, grew to nine locations, and a video interview tracing the comeback is billed “From $400 to $150M.”

CNBC came calling too: its series Blue Collar Millionaires opened its second season with an episode called “The Flooring Kings.” Twice built, once lost, built again bigger — that is a fortune with a sequel.

"Winners never quit and quitters never win."

Sustiel runs Flooring King on customer service and buying power, offering deep discounts against the big-box stores across tile, hardwood, laminate and vinyl. Giving back is part of the model: his giving includes contributions to Habitat for Humanity and support for first responders, and he has partnered on flooring for families who cannot afford it.

He also coaches younger entrepreneurs, preaching the creed his father taught him — start early, work hard, and never give up — to anyone trying to climb the same ladder he did.

Pop-Culturalist — “Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Antonio Sustiel”
Gistly — “From $400 to $150M: The Flooring King's Journey to Success”
Bold Journey — “Meet Antonio Sustiel”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Alek Ivanov  ·  Brad Bacon

Brad Bacon

Founder & CEO, Bacon Plumbing, Heating, Air & Electric — Fort Worth, TX

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook

Brad Bacon started out as a plumber in 1992 simply to make a living. He was not in love with the work, but he kept pushing to pay the bills and provide for his family, building relationships with builders in residential new construction and earning a promotion to manager, where he began learning the business side.

Along the way he helped a few other people start businesses of their own. He left his employer during the 2008/09 recession, and in late 2010 decided to shoot his shot. Bacon Plumbing began as one man with one truck in his garage, taking any work he could get.

He shifted the company from commercial and new-construction work into service work to escape its cash-flow problems, joined the Nexstar best-practice network to learn how to run a business, and added heating, air and electrical alongside plumbing.

The To The Point Home Services Podcast reported the company on pace to hit $30 million a year — a long way from one truck in a garage.

Bacon is the first to say he is just a plumber learning how to be a business guy, and the podcast credits that hunger to keep learning, more than any single move, as the real secret of the growth.

Today Bacon Plumbing, Heating, Air & Electric is a family-owned company serving Greater Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, with locations that include Fort Worth, Plano, Rockwall and Spring, and the whole Bacon family has joined the business Brad founded in 2011. He has also started a roofing and garage-door company.

But ask what the growth is for and the podcast's answer is legacy: with two sons and a daughter in the business, setting his family up for success matters more to him than any revenue number. Everyone, as the trucks say, loves Bacon — and he built it that way on purpose.

To The Point Home Services Podcast via Ryno Strategic Solutions — “From a Plumber to $30 Million a Year”
Bacon Plumbing Heating Air Electric — “Dallas Plumbing, HVAC & Electrical | Bacon Plumbing Heating Air Electric”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Antonio Sustiel  ·  Brent Agee

Brent Agee

CEO, AXN Growth Partners & ACTION Termite & Pest Control — Phoenix, AZ

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram

Brent Agee did not arrive in pest control from a conference room. His father ran a pest control company before him, and Agee started in the field as a technician, moved into sales, and started a pest business of his own.

Then he merged his company into his parents' operation, ACTION Termite & Pest Control — a family company founded in 1969 — so his parents could step down, and he became its CEO.

When private equity firms first came calling, his answer was the one most operators give: no. What changed his mind was a light-bulb moment about wealth creation — the chance to roll equity at the same share price as the investment firm — which led to a partnership with Shore Capital and to building a platform of his own instead of selling out.

That platform, AXN Growth Partners, completed 11 acquisitions in just over two years in Arizona, with FieldRoutes reporting annual revenue increases of 15 to 20 percent or more in the year after close across its partners.

His leadership team is built the same way he was: the people making the day-to-day decisions have serviced a route as technicians or built a pest business from the ground up.

"I told them to kick rocks, like most pest control operators do,"

AXN's pitch to founders is that operators, not bankers, run the platform: most sellers have stayed on in some operating capacity, leading their own brands with AXN's support behind them. The platform has since expanded beyond Arizona — Pest Management Professional reported AXN entering the Houston market through a partnership with GreenForce Pest Solutions.

Agee says the benefit of growth he is proudest of is not size but people: team members stepping into new leadership roles and building meaningful careers inside a business that started, for him, on a pest route.

FieldRoutes — “From Pest Technician to Private Equity-Backed CEO”
Pest Management Professional — “AXN enters Houston market”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Brad Bacon  ·  Brian Lamkin

Brian Lamkin

Owner, Flooring Solutions, Inc. — Austin, TX

Official links: Website

Some owners build loud. Brian Lamkin built quiet. In 2002 he started Flooring Solutions, Inc. at the dining-room table of his apartment in Austin, Texas, in a market full of uncertainty, because he believed that if there was ever a time to start a business, it was then.

For almost three years, he did not give himself a paycheck from the company. Read that again: nearly three years of building a business while paying himself nothing, betting that the work would come and the company would hold. It did.

Flooring Solutions grew into a $34 million commercial flooring company with more than 35 employees. Getting there meant swallowing some pride about how growth gets financed.

Lamkin had started the company his own way and was hesitant about the Small Business Administration program, but working with First Commonwealth Bank's SBA team gave him the confidence to move forward — and with that access to capital, the company grew from $25 million to $34 million. His is not a story of one big break.

It is a story of patience, partnerships chosen carefully, and an owner who put his own paycheck last for years so the business could come first.

"The SBA team was very knowledgeable and understanding of where the business had been and where we were at the time"

First Commonwealth Bank tells Lamkin's story as a customer story for a reason: it is the kind other owners recognise. He credits straightforward dealing and access to capital he did not have before for the pace of growth that followed. The boy-from-nowhere version of this story would end with the money.

Lamkin's ends with a company still standing on the same idea it started with at that dining-room table — do the work, keep your word to your partners, and let the growth take care of itself.

First Commonwealth Bank — “Flooring Solutions”
WSOP.com — “The Kid is Back: Negreanu wins Tunica Grand's WSOP Circuit Championship”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Brent Agee  ·  Bryan Clayton

Bryan Clayton

Co-founder & CEO, GreenPal — Nashville, TN

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

Bryan Clayton's first push came from his father, who kicked him out of the house for playing too many video games. Clayton started mowing lawns, and he kept mowing.

Over the years that followed he built the small lawn-mowing business into Peachtree, one of the largest landscaping companies in Tennessee, with over 150 employees and $10 million in revenue a year. In 2013 he sold the business — and then did the thing nobody expected.

He decided to build the technology the lawn business had always needed, even though he had never written code in his life. Clayton and his two co-founders pooled their money to hire a development shop, and that first version failed.

So the three of them taught themselves to code, rebuilt the product from scratch, lived cheaply, and bootstrapped GreenPal with no outside capital — an entirely self-funded startup in an industry used to venture money. It took three years just to get the product ready to expand beyond Nashville.

The platform, often called the Uber for lawn care, went on to serve over 200,000 active users. The mower became a founder twice: once with his hands, once with a keyboard he had to teach himself to use.

"GreenPal is a 10-year overnight success."

GreenPal is now a nationwide platform that has celebrated over 5 million transactions, connecting homeowners with local lawn care pros while handling the scheduling, billing and marketing that wear small operators down.

Clayton still does an hour of customer support every single day, and he coaches the pros on his platform the way someone who has actually run their route coaches — because he has.

His message to other founders is the one he lived: celebrate the small wins, tie them to real progress, and keep going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

Handyman Startup — “How to Grow a $10 Million Landscaping Business with Bryan Clayton”
90 Percent Mental — “Intensity is the Strategy: Interview with GreenPal CEO, Bryan Clayton”
The brandiD — “Episode 071 | From Blue Collar Worker to Tech Founder with Bryan Clayton”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Brian Lamkin  ·  Bryan Park

Bryan Park

Founder & CEO, Footprints Floors — Littleton, CO

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Bryan Park had recently left the Air Force and was working as a flooring technician when the floor dropped out — literally and financially.

His employer was poorly managed and sinking in the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and Park worked a full six months without pay before his boss sat him down at an Arby's and told him the location had gone under. The company owed him like $35,000.

He was $30,000 or $40,000 in credit card debt, in an 800-square-foot house, with a two-year-old at home and his wife pregnant with their second daughter — unemployed in the worst recession since the Great Depression. That is where most stories end. Park started Footprints Floors there, on December 9, 2008, in winter, in a seasonal business.

For months he walked neighborhoods putting flyers on doors and hung out in the flooring aisle at Home Depot drumming up work, while his wife handled reception and the phones. The first project came in February 2009, and the company did almost $550,000 that first year.

Park built it as a faith-based, customer-first business — professionalism, courtesy and integrity — and began franchising the concept in 2013.

"Integrity, serving others and helping people succeed have always mattered more to me than growth for the sake of growth."

Footprints Floors has grown into one of the nation's largest flooring installation franchise networks, with more than 150 territories nationwide, and Park has been named one of the Denver Business Journal's Most Admired CEOs.

Giving is built into the model: through the First Fruits Fund, the company pledges a portion of corporate profits to nonprofit organizations and holds an annual service day for employees to volunteer.

Park and his wife also co-founded Joyful Light, a nonprofit Christian youth theatre, and as an Air Force veteran he offers qualified veterans a discount on the initial franchise fee — second chances, systematised.

Footprints Floors — “Bryan and Brian Share our Flooring Franchise Origin Story”
Franchise Press Releases — “Footprints Floors CEO Bryan Park Named Most Admired CEO by Denver Business Journal”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Bryan Clayton  ·  Carrie Kelsch

Carrie Kelsch

Founder & CEO, A+ Garage Doors — Salt Lake City, UT

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Carrie Kelsch's road to garage doors was not a straight line, and it was not an easy one. She married at sixteen and had a baby; her second child, Camron, died at just twelve days old. At nineteen she started her first company, Cuter Kids, making headbands and foot frills that earned placement in stores.

After ten years of marriage, a divorce left her a single mother of three. She worked at Home Depot, sold timeshares, saved enough to buy a house, and took a job working with a mortgage broker in 2003. Then came the idea that changed everything: open a garage door company, a place her kids could one day work.

In 2005, with a $75,000 investment and her partner Ryan Humphreys' knowledge of the industry, A+ Garage Doors opened out of her home in Herriman, Utah — and Kelsch had no experience in garage doors at all.

Growth came slow and steady, and for years, by her own cheerful admission, the company was a mess and nobody was really running it. The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program in 2013 changed that, teaching her to read her finances, hire intentionally and delegate.

Revenue began growing 30 percent a year, and by 2022 A+ was generating $35 million in revenue with 30 percent EBITDA margins, fielding offers of 10 to 11 times EBITDA.

"My mom inspired me to keep going and to not let limitation win,"

Kelsch has spoken openly about imposter syndrome and about starting out as a clandestine business owner before leaning into her identity as a woman leader in a male-dominated trade.

ServiceTitan reports her team jumped from $36 million to $48 million in a single year, using ideas like a revenue bell that turns company goals into a game the whole office plays.

When she partnered with Guild Garage Group, she rolled 100 percent of her equity into the deal and held back shares to give to employees, so the people who built A+ with her share in what comes next. Her nearly 150 employees, based in Salt Lake City, call her Mama Carrie — and she has got their backs.

ServiceTitan — “A $48 Million Mission to Make the Garage Door Industry Sexy”
ServiceTitan — “Heartbreak, Healing, Helping: Carrie Kelsch's Journey as the A+ Garage Doors CEO”
Built to Sell Radio — “Home Services Home Run: How Carrie Kelsch Built and Sold a $35M Business”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Bryan Park  ·  Khadija J. Head

Khadija J. Head

CEO, Head’s Plumbing Sales and Service — Atlanta, GA

Official links: Website

We’re inspired because Khadija J. Head applies elite coaching discipline to a legacy trades business — and to showing up for her city.

Her company renovated the water-heating systems at Nicholas House, an Atlanta homeless shelter, installing three tankless heaters so mothers could sanitize baby bottles, and she partners with vocational schools on apprenticeships that mentor young people into the trades.

“It is easy to be an employee. But when you take on the burden of entrepreneurship, it is something that you carry morning, noon and night, and even throughout your dreams.”

Head leads Georgia’s oldest and most experienced Black-owned plumbing company, founded by her family in southwest Atlanta and still family-run. Head’s Plumbing survived Civil Rights-era blacklisting — and customers who turned her technicians away at the door — to become a metro-Atlanta institution serving 44 areas, residential and commercial, where technicians can earn over $100,000 a year.

Head herself arrived by an unlikely route: a 15-year career as an NCAA Division I women’s basketball coach, a PMP credential and a Tory Burch Foundation fellowship, before she came home to lead the company’s next generation.

ServiceTitan, Toolbox for the Trades — Head’s Plumbing interview
PM Magazine — “Khadija Head, Co-owner of Head’s Plumbing”
AfroTech — “Black Family-Owned Plumbing Business in Atlanta Helps Homeless Shelter”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Carrie Kelsch  ·  Darian Houssain

Darian Houssain

Owner, Pro Lawn Care & Landscaping — Richmond, IN

At eight years old, Darian Houssain was push-mowing lawns after school alongside his father. The side hustle that became Pro Lawn Care & Landscaping was born out of necessity: his father, Nizamul “Brent” Houssain, was a Guyanese immigrant who, when he was laid off from his factory job in the early 2000s, took the lawn business full-time.

The family, in Darian's words, grew up dirt poor, and his father played it safe, keeping the operation small and lean. Darian was not built to play it safe.

Against his father's wishes, he bought a $7,000 commercial mower and went after bigger commercial work — and, with no experience or reputation, won the bid for the Wayne County Jail in Richmond, Indiana, where the company is still headquartered.

When a city job needed sidewalks installed, he figured it could not be that hard, learned concrete from a laborer on his own crew, and built a concrete division that carried the company through the Great Recession.

Then he taught himself contract crushing by watching YouTube videos, spent $10,000 renting a crusher his dad told him he was nuts to rent, and kept going until a regional manager at a large Ohio aggregate producer gave him one shot at a quarry job. He backed it up.

"We grew up dirt poor,"

Today contract crushing makes up about 75 percent of Pro Lawn's business, with the rest in site prep and concrete — a $3 million to $5 million company employing nearly 20 people, with six crews working across Indiana, Ohio and northern Kentucky, and a finalist in Equipment World's Contractor of the Year program.

Darian still keeps the Pro Lawn name as an homage to his father and his humble roots. His rule for the people who work for him is simple — take care of your people and they will take care of you — and he has been known to buy vehicles for employees in times of need.

His father, he says, thinks what they have achieved is the coolest thing ever.

Equipment World — “Pro Lawn Care & Landscaping's Multi-Million-Dollar Business”
Pit & Quarry — “P&Q Profile: Pro Lawn's Darian Houssain”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Khadija J. Head  ·  Dave Menz