Home Services Owners: The Builders Behind Joe Strada, Dave Menz, Hal Denbar and Jerod Pierce

Dave Menz

Owner, Queen City Laundry; Author, Laundromat Millionaire — Cincinnati, OH

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Dave Menz introduces himself the same way every time: just a regular guy from Flint, Michigan, who grew up really poor. His family moved to Cincinnati when he was in sixth grade, and he was never a school kid — he hated it and came out without a degree.

He built a corporate career instead, working in a call-center world for Cincinnati Bell, and by the NoDegree Podcast's account he was fully committed to that career until he lost his pension. That was the lesson: the corporate world held all the power, and he held none.

So he finally chased the dream that had been in him since the lemonade-stand days. He found a local, dumpy laundromat for sale — a struggling, money-losing, outdated store he bought off Craigslist — and overhauled it into a vital community asset.

Banks had laughed at lending on a distressed store in a rough neighborhood, and the early years meant broken machines, late nights fixing equipment and learning operations in the trenches while still working full-time. He refused to quit.

That one store became Queen City Laundry: he told Voyage Ohio the chain now runs four locations with a team of about 45, and he described building a multi-million-dollar business — $2.3 million in 2025, in his words to the magazine.

"I didn’t grow up with money, connections, or a blueprint for entrepreneurship."

Menz wrote the book on the route he took — literally. His debut, Laundromat Millionaire — The Grit to Elevate an Industry, turned his story into a platform: a podcast, consulting, courses, live events and speaking, all aimed at everyday people who want to own an overlooked, unglamorous business and run it with excellence.

His message to readers, employees and his own children, as his book biography puts it, is simple: “If I can, you can. It simply takes grit.” The kid Flint counted as having limited options now spends his success teaching other ordinary people to bet on themselves.

Voyage Ohio — “Exploring Life & Business with Dave “Laundromat Millionaire” Menz of Queen City Laundry”
NoDegree Podcast — “Ex-Call Center Employee Built a Million-Dollar Laundromat Business–Dave Menz | EP178”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Darian Houssain  ·  Dustin Mitchell

Christy Hampton

Founder, Clean Cuts Trees — Fruit Heights, UT

Official links: Website

We’re inspired because Christy Hampton is not just an owner but the industry reformer regulators are hearing from. She started as the little guy in one of America’s deadliest trades and now leads the campaign to make sure the person in your backyard knows how to come home safe — and how to keep your family safe too.

“Most people have no idea that the crew they hire to take down a 60-foot tree over their house may have zero formal training.”

Hampton founded Clean Cuts Trees in 2012 and grew it from “the little guy” into an award-winning Northern Utah operator with residential, commercial and municipal service lines.

Tree care killed 243 workers in four recent years, yet the trade is completely unlicensed in Utah — anyone can hang a shingle — so Hampton is petitioning regulators and lawmakers to require training before a crew takes down a 60-foot tree over a house.

Her company won the Real Salt Lake / America First Credit Union Small Business Showcase, a program for Utah companies under 50 employees, and supports local nonprofits, educational workshops and community emergency assistance.

EIN Presswire — “One of America’s Deadliest Jobs Has No License in Utah”
CentralCharts / Newsfile — “Clean Cuts Trees Wins 2024 Small Business Showcase Award”
Clean Cuts Trees — Founders

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Dustin Mitchell  ·  Hal Denbar

Javier Payan

Founder, Payan Pool Service — San Diego, CA

Official links: Website

Javier Payan started cleaning pools as a teenager, and his ambitions were honestly modest: learn to surf, service a pool route, and avoid hiring employees. None of that worked out — his words, and he laughs about it. He never learned to surf.

Instead, in 1987 he purchased a $23,000 pool route and built Payan Pool Service into one of San Diego County's most respected pool companies, hiring hundreds of employees over nearly four decades.

This was a craftsman who deliberately kept growth to about 3 to 5 percent a year and would stop accepting work in the busy season rather than overload his people or let quality slip. The industry noticed the standard he kept.

The Pool & Hot Tub Alliance named Payan its Service Professional of the Year, noting more than 35 years of experience, a company named one of the top 50 pool service providers in the United States every year since 2019, and a single year of work that included 3,200 repairs and upgrades and 21,000 cleanings.

Payan also served as president of the PHTA's San Diego chapter — a route operator who became a leader of his whole local trade.

"If I was to write down what it would take for me to sell this business, it was all right there."

Selling was never Payan's plan, and buyers had been calling for years. He finally sold to California Pool Partners because, he told PoolPro, their plan checked every box he had for the company, its employees and its customers — the local brand kept, the team kept, the culture protected.

He completed his agreed six-month retention, took a two-week trip to Italy during what used to be his busiest season without a single panic call, and moved on to consulting and other pool industry ventures. PoolPro reported the company grew approximately 30 percent after the sale.

And with time finally his own, Payan says he may return to that old unfinished goal: learning how to surf.

PoolPro Magazine — “Payan Pools Under New Ownership”
PoolPro Magazine / PHTA — “PHTA Announces 2023 Award Recipients”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  James Bearden  ·  Jerod Pierce

Jerod Pierce

Founder & Managing Partner, Olympic Holdings Investments — Seattle, WA

Official links: Website

Jerod Pierce was born in Seattle to a single mother addicted to heroin who was frequently in and out of jail. He grew up in and out of foster homes, first in Seattle and then in Missoula, Montana — at times sleeping on the street, sleeping in a car and dumpster diving for food behind grocery stores.

Around age ten he landed in a permanent foster home, and later, living with his best friend's family in a Missoula trailer park, he found the stability that let him start to excel.

He worked his way through Seattle University into investment banking at DA Davidson, then private equity at GenX360 in New York, where colleagues pushed him to apply to Harvard Business School. He got in.

At Harvard he discovered entrepreneurship through acquisition, sold the Seattle townhome he had house-hacked with friends — bought for about $293,000, sold for $595,000 — and used the proceeds with an SBA loan to buy Mercurio's, an HVAC company doing $3.5 million in revenue and about $500,000 in earnings, for $1.75 million. He knew nothing about furnaces.

He learned the trade, mastered marketing and sales, and showed up seven to seven, many Saturdays too. Five years later the company had $35 million in revenue, more than $6 million in EBITDA and 125 employees, and he sold it for an upper eight-figure price — after turning down a $95 million offer because he doubted that buyer could close.

"I didn't ever ask anybody there to do something that I wasn't willing to do either."

Pierce now runs Olympic Holdings Investments, the family office he founded, with offices in Seattle and Houston. Through it he keeps buying established businesses in essential industries — among them Integra Clear, the Washington maker of Vita-D-Chlor water-treatment products — taking a patient approach, with permanent family capital and no private-equity clock.

When he sold Mercurio's, he shared the win: key team members received bonuses of a million dollars or more out of the deal, his thank-you to the people whose hard work, he told them, had made it possible. The foster-care kid who once dumpster-dived for food now builds companies meant to thrive for decades.

Acquiring Minds — “From SBA Loan to High 8-Figure Exit”
EIN Presswire — “Olympic Holdings Investments Acquires Integra Clear, Maker of Vita-D-Chlor® Water Treatment Solutions”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Javier Payan  ·  Chad Louk

Joe Strada

Founder, Strada Services — Sanford, FL

Official links: Website

Joe Strada started working at 14. In high school he was the handyman at a bowling alley, fixing whatever broke.

At 19 he took his first job with an air-conditioning company, and when his friend Robert Dello Russo, founder of Del-Air, offered him a sales position, Strada rode along with experienced technicians in his free time — unpaid — to learn installation and repair, and wired houses on Saturdays.

Over two decades he earned state certifications in electrical, plumbing, air conditioning, residential building and general contracting. In 2003 he and Dello Russo launched an independent electrical company that became Strada Services. In 2016 Strada bought out his partner and took full control.

When his HVAC noncompete expired in 2021, homebuilding giant Lennar offered him air-conditioning work on roughly 3,000 homes — even though he had no HVAC employees at the time. Within 12 to 18 months, the new operation had generated roughly $120 million in air-conditioning work, by his account.

That same year, Trilantic North America took a 55 percent stake in the business. Strada Services now reports about $534 million in annual revenue and some 4,000 employees across 13 states, and Forbes has estimated Strada's net worth at around $800 million.

"How about that? Just the kid, a handyman in a bowling alley, fixing things that break…and now I'm blessed to have a business that's in 13 states, thousands of people that work for me. It's been a blessing and, I'm able to live the American dream."

Strada has made himself a national voice for the trades. When a labor shortage threatened his company's growth, he built his own answer: a 17-week paid training program that takes people who may not know which end of a screwdriver to hold, pays them from the first day and trains them into a career.

He now carries that message to trade schools and high schools across the country — that a four-year degree is not the only respected path to a good life, and that the trades offer success without $250,000 of student debt. He has since taken the same workforce message into a run for Congress in Florida.

ACHR News — “If Elected, Florida HVAC Contractor Could Be Richest Member of Congress”
Fox News — “From handyman to House history: HVAC mogul Joe Strada pushes trade schools, business mindset in Florida race”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Chad Louk  ·  John Versfelt

John Versfelt

Founder & Owner, Southernwind Pools — McKinney, TX

Official links: Website

John Versfelt was cleaning pools in the late 1970s, part-time, while still in school. He liked the work and the industry, and in 1983 he made his decision: he quit his other job, wrote himself a business check, deposited it in his personal account and told himself this was how he was going to live.

He started with apartment-complex cleaning and repair, knocking on complex offices where only one manager in twenty showed interest — until word got around and his schedule filled. Yellow Pages advertising brought renovation work, then chances to build pools, and Southernwind Pools was on its way.

Versfelt compares that 1983 leap to the Vikings burning their boats on arrival: no retreat, no alternatives. The decades since have tested plenty of pool builders — by his count, 80 to 90 percent of pool companies eventually fail, and most are gone within 10 to 20 years.

Southernwind has instead completed 5,000 pool projects, won dozens of industry design awards, and been ranked among the Top 50 builders in the country by Pool & Spa News and in the top five percent of pool builders overall. Asked why he outlasted the rest, Versfelt's answer is plain: he just never quit.

"It's kind of like the Vikings. When they invaded a country, they would burn their boats when they arrived to make sure they had no alternatives."

From its McKinney showroom, Southernwind designs and builds far more than pools: outdoor kitchens, fireplaces, fire pits, pergolas, cabanas, putting greens and sports courts — whole backyard environments where, as Versfelt puts it, families take their prom photos, graduation pictures and birthday-party snapshots. More than half of the company's pools come from referrals.

Versfelt served on the Pool and Hot Tub Alliance board, and he hires designers fresh to the industry — no experience required, he says, just artistry and motivation — preferring to train people his way rather than untrain the habits of veterans who say they have done it all.

Construction in Focus — “Reflecting Lives and Living”
Southernwind Pools — “North Dallas Pool Company | New Construction, Renovation, Maintenance & Repairs”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Joe Strada  ·  Jonathan Steward

Josette Rovira Smalling

Founder, Leading Home Care — Louisiana

Official links: Website

Josette Rovira Smalling started Leading Home Care in 1997 with two goals: follow her passion for helping people with special needs, and make enough money to raise her daughter. Success, she says, was never the goal. Building the company, though, took everything she had.

She did it all herself — opening the company, hiring people, training them — working, in her words, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, nonstop.

The work itself is intimate: one-on-one, in-home care built around an individual plan for each client, helping people take their medications on time, stay fed and hydrated, and — the part she cares about most — become part of the wider world around them, growing until some clients move out of the family home and into apartments of their own.

One solo operator became a statewide Louisiana company with satellite offices across the state, caring for countless individuals each day. Smalling describes the company as a family — workers and clients together — and her team, simply, as a mother to a lot of people.

"I simply wanted to follow my passion for helping those with special needs and make enough money to raise my daughter."

Giving back runs through the company Smalling built. Through the Randon Costello Scholarship — created in loving memory of Randon, her late daughter — Leading Home Care has awarded more than $100,000 to 33 students, all children of its Direct Support Workers, opening doors for the families of the people who do the caring.

The company distributes more than 1,000 supply-filled backpacks to staff families in its annual drive, provides back-to-school haircuts for employees' children through Cuts for Kids, and supports community partners across Louisiana. It has been named a Gold Winner in both Acadiana's Choice Awards and the Shreveport-Bossier Choice Awards.

Leading Home Care — “25 Years as Part of Your Family: A Talk with Leading Home Care's Founder”
Leading Home Care — “Leading Home Care 2025 Wrapped: A Year of Growth”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jonathan Steward  ·  Josh Skolnick

Dustin Mitchell

Co-owner, Half Moon Plumbing — Owasso, OK

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Plumbing is in Dustin Mitchell's blood. He is a second-generation plumber who entered the trade before graduating high school and held his contractor and master plumbing licenses in Oklahoma and Arkansas by twenty-one. He watched his father climb from living in his car to success through plumbing, and he always knew he would lead his own company.

In 2007 he and his wife Tiffany started Half Moon Plumbing in Owasso, outside Tulsa. He was the company's sole plumber, working out of a 30-by-40 shop beside their home that he had built from scrap material, while Tiffany's nursing income helped carry the young family.

For years, growth was slow and the bottleneck was people: there simply were not enough licensed plumbers to hire. Mitchell's answer was to stop waiting and build his own. Half Moon created Half Moon University, a rigorous in-house training program every new technician must graduate before getting a truck of their own.

On the Marketing Domination podcast, Mitchell said the company did $3 million in 2022 and expected to finish a later year over $11 million — about 99 percent of it plumbing — with 45 or 46 employees. The jump, he and Tiffany explained, came only after they got intentional about building technicians instead of chasing them.

"Everything rises and falls on leadership, so the stakes are high."

Mitchell runs Half Moon on what the company calls its 3 M's — Manners, Methods and Materials — and on a stated responsibility to the nearly 40 families who depend on the business for their livelihood.

When he began hiring, he wrote down three leadership goals: to improve his employees in performance, personality and spiritual health, and he says those goals remain. Every Half Moon University graduation is celebrated by the whole team, and the graduate rolls out in one of the company's colorful trucks.

It is a training school built by a man who decided his company's growth would be measured in people built, not just jobs booked.

First Bank of Owasso — “Plumbing With Purpose”
Sean Garner / Marketing Domination Podcast — “How Half Moon Plumbing grew to $11M by getting intentional”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Dave Menz  ·  Christy Hampton

Hal Denbar

Founder, Patriot Pool & Spa; Former CEO, National Pool Partners — Austin, TX

Official links: Website

Hal Denbar started Patriot Pool and Spa in Austin, Texas, the week he graduated college — with one account, no employees and, by his own admission, no knowledge of pools or business. Think about that first year: one pool, one bucket, one young man figuring it out alone. He ran solo for five years before hiring his first employee.

What he had from day one was a philosophy that turned a cleaning route into a company: this was never really about pools.

He scaled Patriot into the largest residential pool service provider in Austin, and Skimmer's account of his rise says he later sold Patriot to National Pool Partners, where he climbed from running the Texas business to chief operating officer to CEO — leading hundreds of technicians across the country.

It is a rare arc in the trades: the one-man route operator who ends up running the national platform that bought his company. National Pool Partners was itself later acquired by Certus Pest, as PoolPro reported, as part of Certus's expansion into multi-vertical home services.

"We're a customer service company that happens to clean pools."

Denbar now serves as a board member and advisor to Skimmer, the operations platform for pool service businesses, where he helps guide product strategy for growing companies. PoolPro quoted Skimmer's CEO calling him a high-integrity operator who understands the business at every level — in the field and at scale.

In Skimmer's industry discussions he is just as direct about what breaks companies: the stretch between two and ten trucks, undisciplined pricing, and cultures built by accident instead of on purpose. The solo operator from Austin has become one of his industry's elder teachers.

Skimmer — “State of Pool Service 2026 Webinar Recap”
PoolPro Magazine — “Skimmer Adds Hal Denbar to Board”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Christy Hampton  ·  James Bearden

James Bearden

Co-owner, 24/7 Septic Solutions — Austin, TX

James Bearden did not leave car sales for the money. He left because of what the job was costing his family. Working in Florida car sales, he missed his newborn daughter's first words and first steps because he was always away from home — and he decided that was a price he would not keep paying.

His wife Brittany's family was in the septic business, and on his days off he went out and helped them. In 2019 the couple moved to Austin, Texas, and started 24/7 Septic Solutions with everything they had: their entire savings, $10,000, went into a well-worn 1998 Chevy 7500 pumper truck.

The driver's door did not open and the window did not roll down, so when Bearden pulled up to a customer's house, he climbed out the passenger side to greet them — laughing later that customers might have thought he had an invisible chauffeur.

Then the pandemic hit, and a homebound city needed him: pumpouts jumped from two or three a day to seven or eight, seven days a week.

He hired a driver, bought a second truck in 2021, and during that year's Central Texas freeze, his trucks' heated valves made them among the only ones able to pump — bringing still more work.

"We used our whole savings to buy a 1998 Chevy 7500 with a 3,000-gallon tank on it."

Pumper reports the company now has 12 employees and multiple trucks, doing installs and pumpouts in Texas and Central Florida. To open the Florida operation, Brittany went back to get licensed while James stayed and worked in Texas; that location runs six employees and two install crews, largely friends and family.

A third location is planned in Denver, for grease pumping rather than septic. Bearden's own advice to his starting self is pure earned wisdom: buy newer trucks, and jump into installs faster. The father who refused to miss his daughter's childhood built a company in two states instead.

Pumper Magazine — “Septic Pumping From Scratch”
Florida Department of State (Sunbiz) — Corporation filing listing Brittany N. Bearden as President and James L. Bearden Jr. as Vice President

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Hal Denbar  ·  Javier Payan

Chad Louk

Founder, Prodigy Pest Solutions — Sarasota, FL

Official links: Website

We’re inspired because Chad Louk went back to the doors he once knocked as a salesman and rebuilt from almost nothing — debt-free, with customer churn at 14% against an industry norm near 25%. And he is building ownership for the team that helped him: public plans to share equity with the key employees who built it with him.

“I don’t have to babysit and worry about everything that is going on with Marketing Pro.”

When Louk’s first partnership ended, he restarted with $7,000 and a used truck. Prodigy Pest Solutions now runs three Florida offices — Sarasota, Boca Raton and Port St. Lucie — with a fourth planned, 54 trucks and a team of nearly 60: 38 technicians, 12 office staff and 5 sales reps, supported by 4 service managers.

The company crossed the $1 million mark and kept compounding at roughly 50% a year with no debt, holds about 3,500 reviews at 4.9 stars, and runs a training-led culture in an industry known for burning through people. His journey is the subject of a Boardroom Buzz podcast episode, “From Door to Door to Industry Leader.”

FieldRoutes — “Marketing Made Easy: Prodigy’s Winning Formula”
FieldRoutes — “Marketing Automation Delivers Revenue and More for Prodigy Pest Solutions”
Prodigy Pest Solutions — Meet the Team

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jerod Pierce  ·  Joe Strada

Jonathan Steward

Co-Owner & President, Rojo Mo (Mosquito Shield) and Fox Road (Mr. Handyman) — West Deptford, NJ

For 25 years, Jonathan Steward told other people how to own a business. Introduced to franchising in 1999, he spent the next quarter-century in director of operations roles at Dairy Queen, Great Clips and Planet Fitness, coaching franchisees on every aspect of their businesses.

He earned his Certified Franchise Executive designation, and when he pursued a master's degree, he wrote his capstone on how social exchange — peer groups, recognition, genuine community — drives franchise success; it was published in an academic journal. But the advice-giver had a gap on his own résumé, and he knew it.

His brother Jim had walked away from a corporate role looking for a new challenge, and the two teamed up to buy a Mr. Handyman franchise. Then, in 2024, they doubled down, acquiring an existing 13-territory Mosquito Shield franchise and adding four more territories.

Today the brothers run 17 Mosquito Shield territories as Rojo Mo and three Mr. Handyman territories as Fox Road in South Jersey. Underneath the business plan sits a family story: the brothers' father had dreamed of owning a business but never knew how to make it a reality. Through franchising, his sons achieved that dream for him.

"I felt my journey would be incomplete if I never took that advice myself."

Steward runs Mosquito Shield while Jim oversees Mr. Handyman day to day; the brothers share marketing, training and financials across both brands, and Steward meets regularly with a peer group of fellow Mosquito Shield owners to trade ideas and hold one another accountable — the community model his own research said wins.

His management creed is that he works for his team, not the other way around. The next goal is plain: pay off the acquisition debt so both businesses can support the next generation — whether his and Jim's adult children choose to join the family business or strike out on ventures of their own.

Franchising.com — “Better Together: Passion for Franchising Fuels Multi-Brand Home Services Operator”
Mosquito Shield of Southern NJ — “About Us”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  John Versfelt  ·  Josette Rovira Smalling