30 Days. One New Company. Let’s See What Happens.

Hey oh, buyers and builders! Your weekly biz buying newsletter that hits your inbox every Friday morning like that first snow, highly anticipated, beautiful, but your quickly realize it’s time to get to shoveling (work).

I have only 30 days…

I launched a new company, and now I have 30 days to figure out if we can land our first customer.

But before I tell you what it is, here’s the origin story.

During due diligence for the shower door company we’re acquiring (think of it like a house inspection but way more intense), one of my goals was to understand the business’s biggest constraint: supply or demand.
Were they struggling to get enough customers? Or were they struggling to serve the customers they already had?

It didn’t take long to see the truth:
They’re supply constrained …not enough people.
But I also noticed something else…

They were throwing away tons of valuable leads because they only answer the phone 9am–4pm, Monday through Friday, and never on weekends.

So I picked up the phone and called a bunch of other shower door companies and general contractors. And what I found was shocking but consistent:
It was rare to get someone on the first ring.
I had to call multiple times to get a connect.
Most customers won’t do that, they just move on to the next business on their Google list.

Another insight hit me last summer when Meredith and I needed a parking lot repaved. We got three quotes (about $38k each) and not one contractor followed up.
We still hired one, but a single follow-up would have closed the deal instantly.

And here’s the kicker: after we signed, they required 50% upfront (~$18k)… but they never followed up to collect it. We’re busy, so we just paid the whole thing at the end.
If they’re doing this with every job, they’re paying expenses before getting money in (a recipe for cash-flow disaster).

What I realized is simple:
Home-service business owners are drowning in admin.
Answering the phone, following up on quotes, invoicing, recruiting….they don’t have time for any of it.
But those tasks are exactly what drive growth.
And ignoring them is exactly what kills businesses.

So this week, I launched an automation agency to remove these admin bottlenecks so home-service owners can grow, get paid faster, and focus on what they do best.

🚀 Introducing Rivet (www.rivetops.io)

Rivet helps Metro Detroit home-service companies identify their primary constraint, then automates the business processes that are holding them back.

• Missing leads?
  We built a 24/7 SMS + voice agent that captures and qualifies leads instantly.
  You can see a live demo here: www.rivetops.io/ai-voice-assistant.

• Need better employees?
  We automate recruiting so the owner only interviews highly qualified candidates.

• Dead quotes piling up?
  We automate follow-up so no one has to remember who to chase.

So, we are giving ourselves 30 days to find our first drowning business owner. To find our first customer, next week, I’m launching a simple SMS outreach campaign to home-service companies in Metro Detroit to validate demand and see if the market is ready.

Let’s keep building.

P.S. Regardless of how this shakes out, I’ll be using Rivet to automate away my shower door company’s constraints. Let’s go.