A 9-Deal Rollup Without Losing 1 Customer

Alan Baca and Dana Robinson explain how Verde Equity Partners is buy-and-building a scaled commercial landscaping platform using an operator-led playbook. Drawing from prior home services roll-ups, Verde warehoused their early deals and operates by moving fast on M&A and slow on integration. In 2.5 years, the team has completed 9 acquisitions while retaining 100% of customers and employees.

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Execution topples rollups to a much bigger extent than leverage, capital markets, or valuations ever do. Buying companies is easy, but integrating, preserving, and improving people, processes, and revenue is hard. One bad integration decision can swiftly wipe out 10-20% of EBITDA. Your pro forma assumes stability & synergies, but reality usually delivers churn, fear, and distraction within the first 90 days.

Verde's first 2 acquisitions were roughly $5m each. Instead of waiting for institutional capital, Alan, Dana and their two partners "warehoused" these deals for ~24 months. That is, they "bootstrapped" by doing the two acquisitions deal-by-deal, investing their own capital and proving the concept before attracting institutional capital to scale. This early period created sweat equity. When LPs later entered, they were underwriting results instead of projections.

Over 2.5 years, Verde has closed 9 acquisitions. They have retained 100% of customers and 100% of employees. Key success factors included 30-year experience from hired operators, mandatory ERP implementation (however painful!), and respect for culture (across different satellites). Their goal line is $100m revenue, and then to replicate the same concept in other verticals. They have assembled a team of 4 partners who are senior executives in their respective careers.

Alan and Dana bluntly state that you never keep 100% of the EBITDA that you buy. Execution always leaks value. The job of the sponsor is to minimize that leakage. That requires high contact involvement across sourcing, integration, and strategy for 3-5 years. Financial engineering does not save bad execution.