Introduction
Chris Hoffman, CEO of HP Solutions Group, shares his remarkable journey of scaling a family HVAC business from $9 million to over $200 million without any outside capital. Through strategic acquisitions, organic growth, and a relentless focus on process improvement, Hoffman has built one of the most successful privately held residential service businesses in the country. In this QnA, he reveals the key strategies, mindset shifts, and business decisions that fueled this extraordinary growth trajectory.
Founder Success Story QnA
What were the first big mindset or structural changes you made when you stepped into your father’s $9 million business in 2015?
When we joined our business, we concurrently made the decision to join an industry best practice association. So I would say it wasn’t us coming up with all these great ideas. It was more a story about how do we execute.
How does this industry best practice association work?
Yes, you pay yearly dues and that just gets you in the door, right? But then you get assigned coaches, business coaches, and they’re by function. You have your business coach, you have your inventory coach, your software coach. So with those annual dues, you get a suite of coaches that are trainers and advisers to you, but then they sell to their members, they’ll sell access to all of these coaching and trainings, live and in-person training.
Without this community or mastermind, would it be the same for you like it is today?
Short answer is no. The biggest mistake I almost made was letting my ego, my hubris allow me to say, I don’t need this organization. I can go do it on my own. The lesson for any entrepreneur is go learn from others because a lot of people have paved these roads in front of you and learned a lot of the hard lessons that you’re going to learn if you don’t go and engage with them.
Tell me about maintaining a five-year commitment to reinvest every dollar of profit that the business made back into growing the business.
When we transitioned the business from our dad, he gave us seller financing. We had a note to pay him, right? So there was that outflow of cash to support that debt service. And then the reality is if you’re growing a business, growth is expensive. For us, growth means we’re buying new trucks, which today are crazy expensive, right? They’re $50,000, $60,000 for service vans that used to be 35 in 2019. So you’re buying these trucks for whatever it is, $50-$60,000. You’re putting another $10,000 of shelving packages and letters and wraps on them. And then you’re putting another 10 or 15 or $20,000 of inventory in them. You have onboarding costs with the new hire with uniforms and employees and technology. So all suddenly hiring one new person is $100,000. So if you’re going to grow quickly and I’m going to hire 20 new service professionals, like that’s $2 million. And then I’ve got debt service on the seller note. So the reality is like any money that would come out of the business at those early stages was coming at the expense of my ability to meet those other commitments.
How quickly did you make changes to create an advisory board, and how did you approach them?
Most of the people that you want on your advisory board are not doing it because of the money. They’re doing it because they believe in you, they believe in your mission, they’re excited about what you’re building, they love the energy, they love the other people that are coming on the board. We don’t say, “Oh, that person’s super successful. Let me go get them on my board.” We start with a different approach and we say where is our business today? What expertise and knowledge and resources and competencies do we have? Then we look at where we aspire to go, what is our strategy, what initiatives are we executing on. Then I look at what’s that gap in between, like what knowledge and expertise and resources do I lack that’ll prevent me from executing on that strategy and getting to where we want to go.
What were you and your brother lacking skill-wise, knowledge-wise when you started?
In our business, we recognize that our product is our people, the quality of service, the service wrapper that we’re putting around the essential services that we provide. We’re not selling capacitors or fan motors or contactors or circuit boards. We’re selling a service that accompanies the delivery of those products. So to that end, I need to attract the very best talent and I need to engage them in a really impactful way. So for me, this learning and development function inside of a business, how we’re investing in people, how we’re thinking about performance management, how we’re thinking about training, that became a really critical thing that we needed to figure out.
What are the pros and cons of doing business with your brother and with your father?
Family business when it goes well can be one of the coolest things ever. But when family business goes poorly, it can be the worst environment ever. We’ve been really intentional around having the tough conversations upfront and early. It started back when Joe and I were contemplating coming into the business and working with our dad. We sat down together and we wanted to ensure that we all put all of our cards on the table before we started walking down this path together. So it was like, hey, what is the ownership transition going to look like? What’s the leadership transition look like? What’s the price going to be? How what if we disagree? How are we going to solve that?
Where does the drive come from for you and your brother to grow the business so quickly?
The people that have come to growth and ambition and success and change and new markets and new acquisition, it’s become part of the culture, right? And it’s what has attracted people to the business. It’s why we’ve got a really high performing team. It’s why a lot of our leaders have incentives around our ability to execute on those growth value creation levers. So it’s just not an option to say, “Well, I want to downshift now because we’ve made enough.” That’s just not compatible with the business that we’ve created. If I ever got to the point where I felt like I didn’t want to engage, I didn’t have the ambition or desire to be engaged the way I am now, then it probably just means I need to get someone in the seat who can be because I’m not going to change the entire business to conform to my needs.
Can you share your thought process on hiring a president and separating the CEO and president roles?
It’s been a personal journey for me of figuring out how I evolve my role to best serve the needs of the business. What a business at 9 million needs from its most senior leader is different than what a business at 200 million needs from its most senior leader. Over these last 10 years, it’s really been about how does my role evolve as this business evolves. Today, a lot of my work and focus coalesces around a few things. One of them is capital allocation. Where are we placing our bets? What are we buying? What markets are we investing in? The other is building a team. When I look at the folks immediately beneath me, I view it as my job to make sure I’m putting the very best team possible on the court. And thirdly, there’s responsibility around culture and the work we do there.
Can you give us an overview of the growth and some of the acquisitions?
The business today is about 165-170 million. We have our parent which is HP Solutions Group, the name of our holding company. Beneath that parent, we have our brands that we operate. So we have Hoffman Brothers which is the core brand we started with in St. Louis. That brand has also launched a greenfield effort in Nashville, Tennessee. Starting in 2023, we bought our third generation roofing business, roofing exteriors business. And then 2024 we bought a fourth generation plumbing HVAC electrical brand in Denver, Colorado.
What was the thought process behind acquiring companies, and how long did it take?
We’ve got to access new households and new markets to be able to sustain the high growth rate that we’ve been able to sustain. Specifically, I want to access new markets that have a lot of tailwinds, that are high growth, that are easy to do business, where there’s a lot of trades talent. The other reality is as we started dialing in our St. Louis operation, there just became less low-hanging fruit. Initially when we started introducing that process playbook, it was really easy to grow 30 plus% every year because there were so many value creation levers to pull. As that business scaled, as we pulled all those levers, it just became harder.
How has it been competing with private equity when it comes to deals?
If an owner today comes to me and says, “Chris, I’m just looking for the biggest price I can get today at closing and I want to walk away and be done,” that’s probably not a good partner for us. What’s worked to our favor really well is that the performance of private equity has varied significantly. If you go back to 2021, 2022, every private equity was growing and going up and to the right. 2023, 2024, 2025, we’re getting back to the normal steady state where these businesses are actually hard. There’s a biodal distribution where there’s a group of private equity over here that’s regressing, destroying value, shrinking, failing. And then you have a group over here that’s still performing really well.
Can you share the secrets behind how you grew Ferguson Roofing from $12 million to nearly $30 million in just two years?
There is no magic bullet in these. It’s about doing a lot of small things well. When we during due diligence, we kind of jokingly call due diligence “operation head start.” We’re learning, we’re building our playbook, we’re understanding where we need to lean in and what levers we want to pull to deliver the greatest value. For Ferguson, they weren’t spending any money on marketing, like sub 1% of their gross revenues. So we said, okay, huge opportunity from a lead generation perspective. Their abandoned call rates were like one out of every two customers that calls in ends up hanging up before we answer the phone. And then we had bottlenecks around production constraints, how many jobs we could set up at once, how many crews we had out in the field.
How important is financing in growing your business?
We’ve had a lot of success with our financing partners. At Ferguson Roofing, we use almost exclusively Green Sky Home Improvement as a financing partner. Here’s why it’s necessary: most people don’t have $500 available to write a check for a repair, let alone $10,000 or $15,000 to write a check for a new roof or a new HVAC system. People make these buying decisions based often on monthly payments, on their credit. And these are need-to-have things. It’s not an option to have a roof that works over your head or if you live in Dallas, Texas, it’s not an option to not have air conditioning.
How have you been able to grow your residential service plan memberships to 20,000 plus?
In the HVAC residential HVAC space, maintenance plans are a normal part of the business. Everybody has them. Everyone offers them. We were able to bundle together the benefits of having all these different services into a single home protection plan. When people join our plan, you get priority service, which is incredibly valuable because imagine it’s July and all suddenly it’s 110° and you along with everybody else have your air conditioner break on the same day. If I get 2,000 calls in a day and I can only run 500, guess which 500 I’m running? The people that are part of our program. You also get discounts on services, and if you’re part of our signature plan, we’re shipping your filters to you, we’re shipping your humidifier pads.
What have been the biggest financial disciplines or decisions that enabled you to scale without outside capital?
We’re blessed to be in an industry that is over 50% gross margins that has negative working capital, which means when you buy an HVAC system from us, we get a deposit in advance and we get cash upon completion. So our working capital dynamic is really favorable together with really great margins. We’re relatively asset light. Our biggest expense from an equipment perspective is trucks, is vehicles. So we’re blessed to be in a business where the cash production is high. That allows us to fund that high organic growth. And then when we started layering in inorganic growth, we went to a bank and got some acquisition financing in place.
For entrepreneurs stuck in a 5 to 30 million plateau with their business, what mental shift do they need to make to unlock real scale?
I happen to be in an industry that has worked out well, and luck plays such an outsized role in every successful entrepreneur’s life. That being said, I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, they become the limiting factor and they don’t realize it. To have your business reach its full potential, you need to be willing to recognize when you need to move on some functions, when you need to hire people who are better at executing certain things that are in your span of care and let them do that and let them own it and get out of their way. As I said, local brands rise and fall on the quality of their leaders, so does every company rise and fall on the quality of its leader.
What is going to be the focus for the next 3 to 5 years?
One of the things that’s just a superpower is focus and discipline and doing the same thing for a long period of time. It’s easy to get distracted with new ideas, new industries, new investments. To keep your head down and be in the same business doing the same thing focused on the same value creation strategy for 10 years is becoming less and less common. But ultimately you start to experience the effects of not only compounding capital but you’re experiencing the effects of compounding relationships, compounding team dynamics, compounding culture, compounding community impact. So what are we going to do over the next three years? We’re going to do the exact same we’ve done over the last three years, right? And we’re going to do it better and we’re going to do it faster and we’re going to grow and we’re going to reach that goal of becoming the largest independent home service company in the country.
What is your favorite book?
I’m not going to give you a specific book, but I’ll give you a genre that I love. I have so many half-read business books on my shelf. I think that form of media now sucks. I don’t want to read 400 pages of a business concept. I want to read the cliffnotes. But sci-fi, fantasy, those type of books, I tear through. I’ll tear through one of those a week and they can be 800 pages. A one that I liked a lot recently, I like the Dune series. I’ve read all those books twice.
What’s the best investment advice you’ve ever heard?
I have a saying, I refuse to be “dumb money” in a cap table. If my only value in an investment is the money that I bring, then it’s not an investment that I want to make. When I come into a cap table or if I directly invest, I want to be bringing operating expertise. I want to be bringing ideas. I want to be bringing energy. I want to be bringing something other than money to the table there. If you’re an investor, how are you leveraging the other things you can bring into that investment to accelerate its growth and to increase the likelihood of success over just writing a check.
Chris Hoffman Business Stats
Under Chris Hoffman’s leadership, HP Solutions Group has experienced tremendous growth, scaling from a $9 million family business to a $200 million holding company with multiple brands across the United States. The company now employs over 600 people and operates in multiple high-growth markets.
- Grew business from $9M to $200M in 10 years without outside capital
- Acquired 2 companies: Ferguson Roofing (2023) and Blue Sky Plumbing/HVAC/Electrical (2024)
- Expanded from St. Louis to Nashville and Denver markets
- Built residential service plan membership base to 20,000+ customers
- Maintains over 50% gross margins in the HVAC industry
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Current Yearly Revenue | $200,000,000 |
| Starting Yearly Revenue (2015) | $9,000,000 |
| Number of Employees | 600+ |
| Number of Acquisitions | 2 |
| Gross Margin | 50%+ |
Chris Hoffman Method
Chris Hoffman’s approach to building a massive HVAC business without outside capital centers on strategic reinvestment, process optimization, and disciplined growth. His method combines learning from industry best practices with aggressive execution and a long-term vision.
- Joined industry best practice association to access proven process playbook
- Reinvested all profits for first 5 years to fuel growth
- Built advisory board with expertise in key growth areas
- Separated CEO and president roles as business scaled
- Focused on high-growth markets with tailwinds
Chris Hoffman Tools
Hoffman leverages a suite of tools and technologies to streamline operations, improve customer service, and drive growth across his HVAC businesses. These tools enable efficient processes and data-driven decision making.
- Service Titan – CRM platform with integrated financing options
- Green Sky Home Improvement – Financing partner for customer purchases
- Industry best practice association for process playbooks
- Business coaches and trainers for continuous improvement
- Advisory board for strategic guidance and expertise
Key Notes
Building a $200 million HVAC business without outside capital requires a combination of strategic vision, disciplined execution, and the ability to learn from others. Chris Hoffman’s journey offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses.
- Growth is expensive – hiring one new service professional costs approximately $100,000
- Industry associations provide access to proven processes that accelerate growth
- Family business success requires clear communication and defined roles
- Acquisitions create value when you bring operating expertise to underperforming businesses
- Financing options are critical for customers making large home service purchases
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
Entrepreneurs looking to replicate Chris Hoffman’s success can follow these five key steps to build their own growing business without outside capital. This approach focuses on strategic reinvestment and continuous improvement.
- Join industry associations or masterminds to access proven playbooks and best practices
- Commit to reinvesting profits in the business for at least 5 years to fuel growth
- Build an advisory board with expertise in areas where you lack knowledge
- Establish clear processes and systems that can scale with your business
- Focus on markets with growth tailwinds rather than fighting headwinds
Conclusion
Chris Hoffman’s journey from taking over his father’s $9 million HVAC business to building a $200 million holding company demonstrates the power of strategic reinvestment, process optimization, and disciplined growth. By focusing on continuous improvement, learning from industry best practices, and making smart acquisitions, Hoffman has created one of the most successful privately held residential service businesses in the country without relying on outside capital. His story offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses while maintaining ownership and control.