Preserving what works: Paul Adams and Columbia Home Services
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Mention private equity to a group of contractors, and you’ll get a mixed reaction. Paul Adams understands why.
“I think some of that skepticism is justified,” he said. “There have been good outcomes in our industry, and there have been bad ones.”
In 2023, Adams founded Columbia Home Services, a Dallas-based platform that partners with HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. What he’s betting on is that the two things contractors assume are a package deal — outside capital and the loss of what made the company work — can be pulled apart. “We’re trying to demonstrate that you can bring outside capital and professional resources into a business without destroying the entrepreneurial culture that created its value,” he said.
The bet starts with what CHS doesn’t do. “The first thing we try not to do is walk in and immediately tell people everything they have been doing is wrong.”
The idea grew out of a squeeze on good contractors. Owners of strong HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses, many built over decades, were facing questions about succession. At the same time, running a shop kept getting more complicated. “Technology, recruiting, marketing, financing, purchasing, training, and regulatory requirements all require resources that can be difficult for an independent contractor to build on its own,” Adams said.
CHS steps into that gap. It partners with residential and light commercial contractors in growing markets around the country and takes over the back-office load, accounting, marketing, HR, recruiting, purchasing, and technology, so local crews can keep doing the work that built their name.
“We saw an opportunity to create a platform where great local businesses could retain what made them successful while gaining capabilities they couldn’t necessarily justify individually,” Adams said.
The goal was never to collect companies, he said. “It was to partner with good operators, preserve strong local brands and build infrastructure around them that allows them to compete and grow for another generation.”
Listen before you change anything
The early months are mostly listening. A company that has run well for 20 or 30 years has institutional knowledge Adams doesn’t intend to override, so his teams learn the culture, the customers, the pricing, and the numbers before they touch anything.
“The objective in the first six months isn’t to make the company look like Columbia,” Adams said. “It’s to give the local leadership team better tools, better information and greater resources to run their business.”
The discipline is the hard part. Fast growth tempts you to centralize everything, and some things belong at the center: financial controls, safety, HR practices, technology. But the customer relationships and local reputation that made a company worth buying don’t come from a corporate playbook. “The challenge is creating institutional discipline without creating institutional bureaucracy,” he said. He calls it knowing what to standardize and what not to standardize.
Legacy, to Adams, runs deeper than signage. “Legacy is much more than keeping a name on a truck,” he said. It means looking after the employees who built the company, serving customers the way they expect, staying visible in the community, and leaving room for the next generation to move up. When CHS buys a strong local brand, it would rather keep that name than paint over it. “To me, that’s the best combination: local identity with institutional support.”
Answering the skeptics
His advice to a wary seller is blunt: run as much diligence on the buyer as the buyer runs on you. Find out what happened to the employees at past acquisitions. Find out if the brands survived. Call owners who sold two or three years ago, not someone who closed last month.
He doesn’t ask to be taken at his word. “Ultimately, owners shouldn’t judge us by what we say,” he said. “They should judge us by what we’ve done.”
CHS puts retention across the organization above 85%, with an 84% engagement rate. Adams treats the percentage as a symptom rather than a goal. “The objective is understanding why good people stay and why good people leave,” he said. Pay and benefits count, but so do leadership, communication, and how much people feel the company backs them.
You can’t recruit your way out of it
Size buys one thing a small shop can’t always offer: somewhere to go. A technician can climb to field supervisor, then service manager, then general manager, and maybe run a new market. “If we want our companies to grow, our people have to see an opportunity to grow with them,” he said.
That ladder matters more with the workforce shortage bearing down. There aren’t enough experienced technicians for every contractor to hire their way out. “We have to create technicians,” he said, through apprenticeships, in-house training, and partnerships with trade schools and colleges. Part of the fix is changing how young people and their parents see the work. HVAC, plumbing, and electrical careers can pay well without piling up significant college debt.
“The workforce shortage is bigger than CHS. It’s an industry problem, and it requires an industry solution.”
Not built in isolation
Shared problems need shared effort. So Adams keeps CHS close to ACCA instead of apart from it. He is an ACCA Gold Member, serves as Membership Growth Co-Chair, and was recently elected to the Board of Directors. He also works with ACCA-PAC and the Membership Committee Task Force, and he encourages his partner companies to join.
“I don’t think we should build CHS in isolation from the industry,” he said. Through ACCA, his operating companies tap into education, technical standards, training, advocacy, and a national network of contractors facing the same challenges. He wants his local leaders in the room with other strong operators, trading notes. “A healthier contractor community ultimately creates a healthier industry.”
For contractors still on the fence, he keeps it short. “My pitch is simple: don’t operate on an island.” The pressures on contractors, from the labor shortage to refrigerant transitions to regulation, are too tangled to handle solo. And membership isn’t only about what a contractor gets back. “It’s also about having enough contractors participating that the industry has a meaningful collective voice,” he said. “The stronger the membership becomes, the stronger that voice becomes.”
Size doesn’t make CHS a competitor to other contractors, Adams says. “I don’t view another quality contractor as the enemy.” The real threats, in his view, are poor workmanship, the labor shortage, bad actors, and anything that erodes consumer trust in professional contractors. A big platform, he argues, can pour resources into training, advocacy, workforce development, and groups like ACCA. “Independent contractors and larger platforms are going to coexist. We should be working together on the issues where our interests are aligned.”
What comes next
Adams expects the residential market to keep getting sharper. Technology will shape more of the dispatching, pricing, and customer experience, and the technician shortage will keep separating the shops that invest in people from the ones that don’t. Consolidation will roll on, he thinks, without wiping out the independents. “Great local operators will continue to thrive,” he said.
For CHS, the scoreboard isn’t the number of deals. “We want to build a collection of high-performing local businesses supported by a strong operating platform,” Adams said. “Five years from now, I’d rather be known for the quality of our companies and our people than simply the number of acquisitions we’ve completed.”
His parting advice to a fellow owner circles back to where he started. “Stay entrepreneurial, invest in your people, know your numbers, and participate in your industry. Scale can be an advantage, but great operators will always matter.”
Posted In: Business Development
