Service Depot Holdings · Investor overview

The next owner for founder-built facilities companies.

Service Depot buys one solid commercial cleaning company — healthcare first — and grows it through add-ons. Crews, customers and the local name stay. We’ll run scheduling, billing and compliance on agentic AI workflows, so overhead gets leaner with every company we add.

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Starting with one solid base company, then add‑ons — 3–5 companies in total, one at a time.

01 · The trade

Buy one solid company. Add on, one at a time. Sell it larger and integrated.

Founder-led facilities companies — many founded in the 1960s–90s, now facing succession — sell for a fraction of what larger, integrated operators trade for. The spread between those two prices is the return. Everything else in this plan exists to make sure the spread is earned rather than assumed.

EntryWhat we pay per company
~3.7× EBITDA
private
Exit benchmarkWhere the public comp trades
~9× EBITDA
public

The exit is deliberately benchmarked to the listed industry leader — the pure-play facilities services comparable, five-year median ≈9× EV/EBITDA. Any premium the company earns over the sector leader is upside; the underwriting does not depend on it.

How the spread is earnedClose
STEP 01

Buy a solid base company

Owners in their sixties and seventies with no internal successor, in a category private equity has largely walked past. Entry prices reflect a thin buyer pool, not a weak business. The first company has to stand on its own.

STEP 02

Add on, keep the crews

Each add-on joins the base company’s back office, one at a time. The direct labor that actually services the building stays local, and stays employed.

STEP 03

Sell an integrated company

Scale, audited protocol standardization and national account coverage are what move a business from private multiples to public ones. A group of unintegrated companies re-trades at the price it was bought for.

02 · Why niche, credential-gated facilities

These buyers choose on risk before price.

Commodity office cleaning is re-bid on price every cycle, so efficiency gains there get handed straight to the customer. Hospitals and medical office buildings, data centers, cleanrooms, manufacturing plants, large retail portfolios, airports and Class-AA corporate campuses behave differently, and that difference is the moat.

GATE 01

Failure is expensive

A failed inspection, a contamination event, a security lapse — in these environments it's a clinical, operational or compliance risk, not a line item. The incumbent who has never failed holds pricing power no commodity contractor gets.

GATE 02

Credentials gate entry

Audited protocols, documented training, background-checked, badged or cleared staff. Qualification takes months, and locks in whoever already passed — in whichever niche they hold it.

GATE 03

Owners are national

Health systems, data center operators, national retailers, manufacturers and airport authorities procure city-by-city from fragmented local vendors. One vendor, one SLA, one audited standard across their portfolio is a product nobody local can offer.

Why these verticals, and why nowClose
The category

Fragmented, recurring, and largely uncontested

Venture capital has crowded into legal, accounting and contact-center roll-ups, where the work being automated is the work being sold. Facilities services stayed fragmented: thousands of owner-operated companies, contracted revenue that renews on multi-year cycles, and in credentialed niches like healthcare, structural protection from the price erosion that undoes cost-synergy stories.

The screen

What we will and won't buy

  • A credentialed specialty — healthcare, data centers, cleanrooms, manufacturing, corporate HQ, large retail or airports — that the platform can then extend across every existing opco.
  • Contracted revenue — recurring janitorial agreements rather than one-off construction cleanup.
  • Owner-operated — a founder whose judgment is documented in the P&L and who is motivated to stay through the handover.
  • Commodity-only books are passed, or priced as ballast rather than as platform.
03 · The platform

Each company keeps its crews. Everything else consolidates.

No AI cleans an exam room, and we don't underwrite as if one will. Direct labor stays local, led by a GM in each market. What consolidates is the 15–20% of revenue that is overhead, and the bidding decisions where contractors quietly win or lose their margin.

What the operating layer actually doesClose
Cost side — one back office

Shared services + AI operating layer

  • Finance, payroll, AP/AR — invoice processing, reconciliation and consolidated reporting across every opco; one finance team instead of a bookkeeper at every company.
  • HR & credentialing — recruiting, badging, background checks and training records tracked centrally, with turnover prediction so a retention conversation happens before a crew walks, not after.
  • Scheduling & labor fill — callouts, unfilled shifts and overtime are where janitorial margin dies; software absorbs the supervisor hours spent fighting them.
  • Supply & procurement — standardized SKUs and consolidated purchasing leverage across every site; per-site consumption tracking flags waste before it compounds.
  • Compliance reporting — inspection records, training logs, certification upkeep, generated once and audited centrally.
Revenue side — the part cost-cutters skip

Win rate, price, and national accounts

  • Bid accuracy — productivity data per square foot, by building type and compliance scope, pooled across every building the group cleans. Underbidding is the industry's silent killer; this is the antidote.
  • National account capture — a multi-metro footprint, built add-on by add-on, can bid REIT, health-system and enterprise portfolios no single-market operator can touch.
  • Specialty transfer — each acquisition adds a credentialed niche — hospital protocols, cleanroom certification, data center clearance, manufacturing safety, airport badging — to a shared library every opco can then bid against. One company's qualification becomes the whole portfolio's market access.
  • Protocol standardization — the audited, portfolio-wide standard national owners actually want to buy.
Who it's for

The automation is pointed at the office, so the crews get better jobs

Every hour a supervisor spends rebuilding a schedule after a callout, or re-keying an inspection log, is an hour not spent on the floor with a crew. Janitorial turnover runs punishingly high across the industry, and turnover is expensive twice over: rehiring cost, and the service failures that cost contracts.

Consolidating the paperwork is what makes better pay, real training and reliable schedules affordable at 10% margins. Crew retention is the operating metric the model is most sensitive to, which is the rare case where the decent thing and the underwritten thing are the same thing.

What stays local

The market GM keeps the relationships

  • Crews, supervisors and their schedules stay with the operating company and its GM.
  • Customer relationships stay local; building managers keep the same phone number they've always called.
  • The brand can stay too. Fifty-year local reputations are worth keeping.
04 · Discipline

The downside case still returns capital.

The AI roll-up category is crowded with decks promising software margins on services revenue. This one is underwritten at margins the industry actually delivers, and structured so sellers stay invested in the handover.

Principle
Term
Seller-aligned acquisitionsCash at close, a fair seller note, and rollover equity in the holdco — founders keep skin in the integration
50 / 30 / 20
Margin underwritingGroup EBITDA margin at exit — peers underwrite 30–40%
10%
Exit multipleBenchmarked to the listed sector leader, not to SaaS
~9× EBITDA
Debt coverage at closeModeled cash available vs. all financing costs, base case
>1.6×
Acquisition screenPriority on a credentialed specialty — healthcare, data centers, cleanrooms, manufacturing, corporate HQ, large retail, airports — that extends across every existing opco; all-commodity books passed or priced as ballast
Specialty-led
SequencingOne at a time — each add-on integrated before the next; integration capacity governs pace, not deal flow
Serial
How the base case was builtClose
Underwriting posture

Conservative on purpose, in three places

  • Margin — 10% at exit, roughly where well-run janitorial businesses live today. No synergy stack is required to clear the debt.
  • Multiple — benchmarked to a listed operator's five-year median rather than to a peak print.
  • Pace — one close at a time, each integrated before the next. Integration capacity is the binding constraint, so the plan treats it as one.
Where it breaks

The risks we underwrite against

  • Customer attrition at handover — addressed in structure: seller notes and rollover equity that only pay if the book stays.
  • Integration outrunning the platform — addressed in pace, and in a shared back office built before the first add-on rather than after the last.
  • Multiple compression at exit — the reason entry discipline, not exit optimism, carries the return.

Every assumption above is a slider in the full model, including the downside cases. It's available to serious investors on request.

05 · The operator

Raised in the business he's now buying into.

The venture-backed consolidators in adjacent categories were created by funds who then hired operators. Service Depot inverts that order: it is led by an operator with decades in commercial facilities services, with the capital behind him. In a business whose classic failure is cutting the wrong supervisor and losing the crews, that ordering is the risk control.

Paul Mederos, founder and CEO of Service Depot
Paul Mederos
Founder & CEO · 35+ years in commercial facilities services

Paul's father arrived from Cuba and built a janitorial company cleaning hospitals in Northern Virginia. Paul grew up inside it — working in the business from childhood, running it by age 23, and growing it to roughly thirty commercial and medical-office properties, including Kaiser Permanente sites. Healthcare facilities aren't a market he researched; they're the family trade.

He spent the next two decades as a senior executive at a national facilities services contractor, most recently as Executive Vice President, running operations across Dulles and Reagan National airports, an NIH headquarters campus contract, 150+ healthcare facilities, Class-AA commercial buildings, data centers and manufacturing plants: over 300 sites nationally, 5,000+ employees and subcontractor crews, $100M+ budgets, made over three affiliated companies across the nation.

Experience35+ yrs
Sites operated300+
Healthcare facilities150+
People managed5,000+
Budgets$100M+
Why an operator has to lead this oneClose
The judgment calls

Every number in this model is somebody's opinion

Which add-backs are real. Which supervisors are load-bearing and which are fat. What a hospital contract actually costs to service once infection-control protocol is priced in. What a national account will demand in year two that it never mentioned in the RFP.

None of those are visible in a data room. They are pattern recognition built on the operating side of exactly those calls, in exactly the buildings this thesis concentrates in.

The rest of the toolkit

Transactions, turnarounds, and the shop floor

  • As General Partner of Mederossa LLC, scaled companies past $75M in revenue, reorganized distressed businesses, and structured M&A and joint ventures — the toolkit a buy-and-build runs on.
  • Negotiates in English, Spanish and Portuguese, which matters in an industry whose workforce and ownership are heavily Latino.
  • Has sat on both sides of the table an acquirer meets: the founder selling a family company, and the national contractor absorbing one.
06 · The conversation

Building relationships with founder-led contractors.

Service Depot is in conversation with founders of East Coast contractors serving Fortune 500 and institutional facilities, drawn from a pipeline of founder-led companies screened for credentialed specialties and succession.

The full interactive model — deal structure, debt coverage, AI synergy assumptions, exit scenarios and sensitivity tables — is available to serious investors on request. Every assumption is a slider; stress it yourself.

Service Depot Holdings
Founder-led · healthcare first · East Coast pipeline
Email now → Materials available under NDA: interactive model, target financials, term sheet, pipeline detail.