Home Services Owners: The Builders Behind Marcus Sheridan, Ken Goodrich, Mary Jean Anderson and Mike Agugliaro

Josh Skolnick

Founder, Monster Tree Service; Founder & Chairman, HorsePower Brands — Doylestown, PA

Official links: Website

Josh Skolnick started in middle school, push-mowing neighborhood lawns until he had to hire help. By the time he graduated from Upper Dublin High School in 2002, he had 80 residential accounts — and a deal with the school that let him leave at 10 a.m. to run the business.

An Eagle Scout who had been Senior Patrol Leader of his troop, he credits scouting with teaching him the leadership and management skills he would use for the rest of his career. He acquired other landscape companies, built close to 400 full-service accounts, then sold the landscape business in 2007 to concentrate on his mulch company.

His old customers kept calling anyway, asking who they should hire — and a lot of them were asking about tree care. In June 2008 he hired a tree climber to take down a dead tree for one customer. That afternoon, he walked up and down the neighboring streets and sold $20,000 worth of tree care.

Skolnick had never cut down a tree himself. He founded Monster Tree Service that year, built it into the nation's first national tree-service franchise, grew it to more than 200 territories, and sold it to Authority Brands in 2020.

"I turned an opportunity to help out a few neighbors into a multimillion-dollar franchise business,"

Monster was only the first act. In 2018 Skolnick took over redbox+, a portable toilet and dumpster rental service, and turned it into a nationally recognized brand with over 240 territories.

Then he joined fellow franchising leaders to build HorsePower Brands, a platform of home-service franchise brands built to create new owner-operators in the trades, with shared support — marketing, recruiting, bookkeeping, training — so first-time owners do not have to figure everything out alone.

The platform has expanded to nine home-service brands and more than 1,300 franchise units in four years.

Franchising.com — “Monster Tree Service's Founder Featured by Success Magazine”
The Chestnut Hill Local — “Local entrepreneur has never cut down a tree - Monster Trees branch out, grow to millions of dollars”
Indy Franchise Law — “Identifying Key Partnerships with Josh Skolnick and Zachery Beutler of Horse Power Brands”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Josette Rovira Smalling  ·  Ken Goodrich

Ken Goodrich

Board Chair, Goettl Air Conditioning & Plumbing — Phoenix, AZ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Ken Goodrich was 10 years old when his father handed him a flashlight on a night repair job. Holding the light steady in a dim attic, he saw the name on the unit: Goettl — the “iron horse” his dad, an independent repairman, told him was built to last forever.

By 16, the day he got his driver's license, he had three service calls waiting. After his father died, Goodrich took over the family business and grew it from $200,000 a year to a million-dollar company before he was 30 — then the IRS showed up over unpaid payroll taxes.

He lost his trucks and his bank accounts, and all but two of his technicians quit. With $3,000 in emergency cash, he rebuilt one job at a time, read The E-Myth until its systems thinking sank in, and became a buyer and fixer of struggling HVAC companies.

In 2013, the chance came full circle: Goettl, the brand of that first flashlight job, was losing more than $3 million a year. He bought it — and grew it more than 400 percent.

"The first air conditioner I ever shined a light on was a 'Goettl,'"

Goodrich, Goettl's board chair and former CEO, expanded the company from Phoenix into Tucson, Austin, San Antonio, Las Vegas and Reno, and Goettl was named the 2018 Mechanical Trade Contractor of the Year by the Mechanical Trade Contractors of Arizona.

He co-authored The E-Myth HVAC Contractor with Michael Gerber, turning his hardest lesson — that being a great technician is not the same as knowing how to run a business — into a playbook other trades owners can follow. His father's rule still runs the company: do things the right way, not the easy way.

AZ Big Media — “Goettl named contractor of the year in Arizona”
Goettl — “Learn the Story Behind Goettl”
To The Point Podcast — “How To Get From $200k To $100M & Survive A Recession”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Josh Skolnick  ·  Kit Whittington

Kit Whittington

Founder, Seniors Home Care — St. Louis, MO

Official links: Website

Kit Whittington was a registered nurse, a single mother, and the only family available when her grandmother — diagnosed with cancer — needed care. In-home help barely existed then, so Kit resigned from her corporate position and cared for her grandmother herself.

Working full time as a caregiver grew physically and emotionally unsustainable, so she hired an independent caregiver to help. Then came the day she checked on her grandmother and found the caregiver had simply never shown up: her grandmother had missed her doctor's appointment and her meal, and both women ended up in tears.

Kit decided the agency that should have existed would have to be built by her.

In 1987 she founded Seniors Home Care in St. Louis — one of the first companies of its kind in the area, at a time when professional home care was practically unheard of — with one goal: to give seniors and their families the same careful, tailored care she had given her own grandmother.

She recruited like-minded nurses and caregivers to build her team, and the reputation spread the old-fashioned way — through satisfied clients telling their neighbors.

"At the end of the day, I checked on my grandmother and to my disbelief, I discovered the caregiver had simply not shown up."

The company Kit built on showing up was recognized with the St. Louis Better Business Bureau's Torch Award in 2009 and named one of St. Louis's fastest-growing companies in 2012 and again in 2013; at its 25-year mark it employed an around-the-clock nursing staff and more than 160 caregivers.

It stayed a family business — her son Ryan rose to CEO, and in 2022 Ryan and Gretchen Whittington purchased Seniors Home Care after Kit's 35 years of ownership, carrying the legacy she built into its next chapter.

Seniors Home Care — “History”
Seniors Home Care — “Seniors Home Care is proud to celebrate its 25th year!”
Seniors Home Care — “Our Founder”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ken Goodrich  ·  Kristen Denzer

Kristen Denzer

Founder & CEO, Tierra Encantada — Minneapolis, MN

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook

Kristen Denzer learned business at her grandfather's side. He was an entrepreneur who owned a gas station, real estate ventures and a recreational vehicle business, and one of her earliest memories is emptying quarters from the vending machines at his gas station.

She started on a conventional career path — with a bachelor's degree, a master's in advocacy and leadership, and doctoral coursework behind her — until a supervisor took credit for work she had done. From that moment she was determined to run her own operation and reap what she sowed.

She launched venture after venture — event rentals, a dog daycare, commercial real estate — until she was running four businesses at once. Then motherhood pointed her at the business that mattered most. Searching for childcare for her own children, she hit long waitlists and programs that did not have everything she was looking for.

Rather than compromise, she built what she could not find: Tierra Encantada, founded in 2013, a Spanish-immersion early education program blending play-based learning, fresh scratch-made meals and holistic development — which grew to 17 locations across six states and began franchising.

"It made me understand what it means to build something of your own,"

Denzer serves on the board of directors of Women Venture, championing other women building companies, and she went back to school herself — completing a Wharton executive MBA while running a company of more than 300 employees, because, as she puts it, founding something does not automatically make you the best person to lead it at every stage.

Tierra Encantada's expansion has since carried it into eleven states, with more centers under construction and in development — a mother's answer to a waitlist, grown into a national franchise.

Wharton Executive MBA — “How Wharton Is Helping This Founder Scale and Lead a Childcare Brand”
International Franchise Association — “Tierra Encantada Accelerates Nationwide Growth as Demand for Spanish Immersion Childcare Surges”
Intentional Greatness Podcast — “Life as a Serial Entrepreneur, with Kristen Denzer”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Kit Whittington  ·  Marcus Sheridan

Marcus Sheridan

Partner, River Pools; Author, They Ask, You Answer — Warsaw, VA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

In the 2008 market crash, Marcus Sheridan's swimming pool company, River Pools, lost a quarter of a million dollars within 48 hours after five clients pulled their deposits. By January 2009, three consultants had suggested filing for bankruptcy — a move that would have cost Sheridan and his partners their homes and his 16 employees their jobs.

He had no money to market his way out. So he taught himself inbound and content marketing from the internet, and landed on a simple, radical idea: answer every question customers ask — including the ones businesses never want to touch, like cost, problems and comparisons — honestly and transparently, right on the company website.

In March 2009 he told his two partners the company would live by a new philosophy: “They Ask. You Answer.” He brainstormed every question he had ever been asked, and found the major ones were exactly the ones businesses least like to answer online.

He started writing. One article, explaining what a fiberglass pool costs without ever giving a simple price, generated more than $3.5 million in revenue on its own — and the approach saved the business, the homes and the jobs.

Sheridan turned the rescue into a method the whole business world now studies. His book They Ask, You Answer was rated the number-one marketing book to read in 2017 by Mashable and listed by Forbes among “11 Marketing Books Every CMO Should Read,” and the New York Times dubbed him a “Web Marketing Guru.”

As a partner at IMPACT, he teaches his transparent approach — updated in his book Endless Customers — to manufacturers and service companies everywhere, proof that the most powerful marketing a struggling company can afford is simply telling the truth.

Social Media Examiner — “Content Marketing Success: Why Answering Questions Sells”
IMPACT — “Request an IMPACT Speaker”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Kristen Denzer  ·  Mark Anderegg

Mark Anderegg

Co-founder, Newbury Franklin; Former CEO, Little Sprouts — Boston, MA

Official links: Website

Mark Anderegg had the career finance is supposed to lead to: investment banking with Goldman Sachs in New York and Chicago, then private equity investing with Chicago Growth Partners, after a Kellogg MBA in 2010. Then he walked away from advising on deals to do one himself — the hard way.

In 2012, through a search fund, he led the acquisition of Little Sprouts, a Massachusetts early education provider with 16 locations in the Boston area, and stepped in to run it personally as CEO. Not as an absentee owner: as the operator, responsible for teachers, families and toddlers every single day.

Over his six-year tenure as CEO, Little Sprouts grew to become the largest private preschool company in New England, and it now operates several brands across four states. The schools in his care served families reflecting 56 cultures and speaking 23 languages — early education as a genuinely community-wide responsibility.

Anderegg credits the educators, not the spreadsheet — the man who traded Wall Street for preschool still insists the education team makes all the difference.

"We have the best team in early education."

Anderegg co-founded Newbury Franklin, a holding company that acquires and builds recurring-revenue businesses with an extremely long-term orientation — the opposite of the quick flip.

He is an active investor and board member across the search-fund ecosystem and serves as a senior adviser in the Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, where he also teaches as an adjunct professor — mentoring the next generation of buyers who, like him, want to run something real.

Tuck School of Business — “Mark Anderegg”
PRWeb — “Little Sprouts Named the World's Greatest in Early Education”
Tuck Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital — “People”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Marcus Sheridan  ·  Mark Coelho

Matt Shoup

Founder, M&E Painting — Loveland, CO

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

In March 2005, Matt Shoup was let go from the corporate mortgage banking job he hated — in his own telling, the bank president told him to put his things in a box and go do that painting thing he had done in college. He had $100 to his name and $170,000 in debt.

What he did have was a trade: he had learned painting interning with a college painting company while at Colorado State University. So he started M&E Painting in Loveland, Colorado, and decided he would never work for a boss again.

The company grew from a one-man operation into a multi-million-dollar-a-year business within a few short years, passing $2 million in revenue by the end of 2009, and it has produced more than $30 million in revenue since 2005. The growth was not painless.

Shoup admits his early leadership cost him key team members — he had to learn to invest in himself before he could invest in other people. And his most famous lesson came from his worst day: a paint sprayer mishap that splattered a customer's nine-month-old baby with paint. The baby was fine.

Shoup hid the story for years, ashamed of it — until a major prospect demanded to hear about a time he had screwed up, and telling it honestly won him the biggest contract of his career to that date.

"Painting a picture of perfection prevents true connection between humans."

That disaster became a book, Painted Baby, and a philosophy he now teaches: brave, vulnerable storytelling builds the trust that polished brochures never can.

Shoup has founded six companies, all grown from the ground up and run day to day by other people, and he writes and speaks on leadership — work recognized by ColoradoBiz, which named him one of its Top Five Most Influential Young Professionals, and the Northern Colorado Business Report's 40 Under 40.

M&E still gives back the way it started: its annual free paint makeover donates paint and labor to families who cannot afford it, a tradition born when a widowed customer could not pay for her house to be painted.

PPC Magazine — “Pouring into People: Emphasis on People over Profits Has Been Key to the Revitalization of M&E Painting”
My Favorite Mistake / Mark Graban — “Learning from Sales Mistakes: Matt Shoup and the Painted Baby Story”
ColoradoBiz — “Gen XYZ: Matt Shoup, 29, M&E Painting”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Mary Jean Anderson  ·  Mike Agugliaro

Mike Agugliaro

Co-founder, Gold Medal Service & CEO Warrior — East Brunswick, NJ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook

Mike Agugliaro was living on his own at fifteen, learning, as he puts it, how to grind it out and survive. He took up martial arts the same year — a discipline he has practiced for more than three decades — and trained as an electrician.

In the mid-1990s he and his partner Rob Zadotti started the electrical company that became Gold Medal Service in East Brunswick, New Jersey. The first years were brutal: long hours, weekend work, burnout, and a business that nearly had to shut down. The turning point was admitting what they did not know.

The two partners invested in their own education, studied what the best companies were doing, and rebuilt the business on marketing, sales and systems.

A company that had begun with two vans and a few helpers grew to 65 trucks and 200 employees, doing more than $32 million a year across plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical work — and in 2017 it was acquired by a private equity firm.

Twice over, Agugliaro built the thing that nearly broke him into the thing that set him free.

"Mastery is being better tomorrow than you are today."

Agugliaro and Zadotti founded CEO Warrior to teach other home-service owners the strategies that had saved Gold Medal, running intensive trainings from a 10,000-square-foot headquarters in East Brunswick for companies across the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

He later brought a private equity firm aboard CEO Warrior as well, staying on as a board member, and through the FuDog Group — founded with his wife, Jennifer — he now works on the mindset side of ownership: helping trades entrepreneurs build wealth without sacrificing their health, families or lives.

He is the author of more than 17 books and still trains in the martial arts system he created — the kid on his own at fifteen, still proving the world wrong.

The Good Men Project — “Mike Agugliaro: Proving the World Wrong”
NJ New Jersey — “CEO Warrior Co-Founders Mike Agugliaro and Rob Zadotti Are New Jersey Success Story Themselves”
VitalStorm — “A Chat with Co-Founder of CEO Warrior, Mike Agugliaro — Webinar Recap”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Matt Shoup  ·  Mike Andes

Mark Coelho

Co-owner, La Pine Septic Service — La Pine, OR

Mark Coelho and his wife, Kris, started in the septic business in 1991, operating Big Jim's Honey Buckets in Central California. Within three years they had grown its gross revenue by 35 percent and added a second septic company. Then, in 2001, they caught an employee embezzling.

Kris traced the theft to a quarter of a million dollars before Mark told her to stop — he did not want to know the rest. His attorney and CPA advised bankruptcy. He refused: the vendors they owed were friends, and every debt would be paid.

No employee missed a paycheck, Mark took a second job, and when the company was sold, the Coelhos kept less than 20 percent of the price after paying everyone back.

They left the industry for a decade — Mark worked at a phosphate mine in Wyoming — before spotting La Pine Septic Service for sale on a road trip, reviewing its books in a Staples parking lot in Provo, Utah.

They closed in June 2013 and rebuilt the struggling Oregon company on clean trucks, word of mouth and hard work, growing it to more than three times the revenue it was doing when they bought it. Then Mark solved the problem that had nagged him since California: disposal.

After three years of homework with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, La Pine built its own land-spreading operation, which went online in June 2022 and handles about 1.3 million gallons a year — cutting his disposal cost from as much as 13 cents a gallon to about 4 cents.

"We ended up with not even 20% of what we sold the business for, but we paid all the debts back,"

La Pine Septic now runs four portable restroom trucks and three septic pumping trucks with nine employees from the couple's 16 acres, where the office and a 4,000-square-foot shop stand. Mark got himself DEQ-certified as a maintenance provider for the nitrate-reducing treatment systems Central Oregon requires, building 150 maintenance accounts in the process.

And he shares the lessons openly in the trade press — the embezzlement, the refusal to declare bankruptcy, the years of homework behind the disposal plant — urging other small operators not to be discouraged by red tape. The couple built the company as their retirement plan, and by Mark's own account, they are basically there.

Pumper — “Mark and Kris Coelho Move to Land-Spread Septage and Portable Sanitation Waste”
La Pine Septic Service — “La Pine Septic Service” (company site)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Mark Anderegg  ·  Mary Jean Anderson

Mary Jean Anderson

Owner & President, Anderson Plumbing, Heating & Air — San Diego, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

Mary Jean Anderson was working full time as a licensed practical nurse — giving injections, drawing blood, administering chemotherapy to oncology patients — when her then-husband Walter founded Walter Anderson Plumbing in the San Diego area in 1978.

Watching patients fight illnesses they had no control over, she later said, taught her how she wanted to live and run a business. She left nursing in 1984 to join the company, pushed it to expand its services and hire its first technician, and eventually bought the business from her ex-husband after their divorce. The hard years followed.

She added heating and air conditioning by acquiring an existing company that turned out to be, in her words, smoke and mirrors — and inherited an employee with a prior embezzlement conviction who took $200,000 from her. Then the Great Recession hit, and she found herself $500,000 in debt, propping up the struggling HVAC side with profits from plumbing.

She would not quit. She changed the marketing, rebranded the company — hot pink trucks and all — invested in training, learned to ask for help, and turned it around. ServiceTitan reports that in the 14 years of her ownership the company grew from $4.6 million in revenue to $33 million.

"I couldn't fail. I just kept going,"

Anderson's proudest project is opening the trades to people the industry overlooked.

After her daughter Kelly Jo joined the company and posted the highest revenues and closing percentage on the team, Mary Jean went on a mission to hire women — building a team that included 12 women technicians in a field where women were about 1 percent of HVAC workers.

She founded the Anderson Career Builder Institute, the company's own school, offering paid apprenticeship training at no cost to successful applicants; one early hire had been living in her car and went on to buy a second home.

She tells the whole story in her memoir, Here Comes Cannonball!, named for the neighbor who cheered her on as a girl racing her bicycle out of the garage.

ServiceTitan — “With 12 Women as HVAC Techs at San Diego Company, ‘I'm Watching Them Succeed’”
ACHR News — “Pretty in Pink: Successful Contractor Gives Back”
Anderson Plumbing, Heating & Air — “Here Comes Cannonball! Reflections on the 40th Anniversary of Anderson Plumbing, Heating & Air”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Mark Coelho  ·  Matt Shoup