We are looking to buy a single company in Central MA or MetroWest to operate for the long-term as our family’s business.
I’m Jason Paquette. My wife, Lindsay, and I are looking for a B2B or home services company that is stable and proven, which could benefit from enhanced systems or additional sales focus to unlock growth, generating $400,000-$700,000 in SDE.
Your life’s work
becomes our life’s work…
We bring a long-term mindset focused on building a durable, enduring company.
Long-Term Mindset: We plan to own this indefinitely.
We’re not looking to flip the business to the next buyer in a few years.
We’re buying this with our own savings. We do not plan on using outside investors, so there’s no fund-life demanding return of investor capital on a schedule, and we won’t depend on the exit proceeds of a sale in 5-7 years to make investor’s ROI math work.
That changes ordinary decisions: We can look at the long-term benefits of decisions, instead of making decisions based on what will or won’t pay off before a planned near-term sale.
I can’t tell you that we’ll never sell… We’re 46 and someday there will be another owner, but there's nothing structural forcing it to be sooner than later. If things go the way we intend, we’ll still own it into our sixties.
Owner-Operator,
not Capital Allocator
We’re here to run it as our family business.
Some buyers want to buy a company, run it for a few years, sell it, and use the operating experience to raise a fund to build a portfolio. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that… it just isn’t our goal.
I’d much rather spend my time working with the team and engaging with customers than deciding where to redeploy capital.
We’re devoting ourselves to this, not just paying our dues.
We are not the kind of buyer who comes in and cleans house.
The team is what makes a small business worth buying.
We are not buying “synergies” to merge into an existing business (which often means layoffs).
We’re looking for a business that stands on its own merits.
We’re looking for a great team delivering great products & services to happy customers… then preserving and amplifying what’s working well.
What I bring to the table:
Over the last two decades…
I’ve run locations,
I’ve led people,
I’ve carried a sales quota,
I’ve owned both customer & vendor relationships,
I’ve built processes from scrappy to scalable.
I've run locations and been measured on their numbers.
I came up through Enterprise Rent-a-Car, where I ran branches. That meant, customer service, sales (both B2C & B2B), fleet management, collecting receivables, and P&L metrics I was accountable for.
My branches ranked at or near the top of a thirty-branch region on operating profit per car, income per car, and customer service scores.
I won the company's branch performance award twice.
It’s a big name company, but it’s like a bootcamp for running a small business.
I've led people —
different size teams, and different kinds of work
I’ve defined new roles and job descriptions, interviewed, hired, developed, promotion & succession planning, performance management, and terminations.
I’ve managed teams both in-person and remotely from half a world away, building high-performing teams regardless of physical proximity or location.
I’ve managed varied roles, from customer-facing (sales, customer service/support) to internal support functions (systems administrators, data analysts, help desk, training/enablement).
I’ve held both front-line & second-line leadership roles. I’ve led teams as small as 2-3 where I couldn’t just delegate everything and still had to roll my sleeves up and contribute. I’ve been a 2nd-line leader of a department of more than 70 people across two functions and seven locations. I’ve grown teams from 0 to 15 that supported a sales org which grew from 100 to 650 people, through an IPO, while my team was building the systems underneath it.
Leadership extends beyond formal reporting relationships in an org chart. I’ve successfully led projects with other functions including Marketing, Customer Service, Software Development, IT, and Finance. From designing hand-offs, aligning priorities, or implementing shared systems, I know how to collaborate with and meet the needs of different functions.
“At the time he became Operations Manager, SCS was a nearly dysfunctional organization... Jason has worked tirelessly to help make SCS a cohesive and synergistic organization...
Of the five other Operations Managers I have worked with as Director, none have built a stronger, more synergistic team than Jason.”
George Ball, Director, WSU IT - Student Computing Services
Excerpt from letter of recommendation (available on request)
Sales: I’ve carried a number.
Eight straight quarters at or above target sales performance, conducting a B2B value-based, consultative sale of a premium-priced product to technical buyers. We succeeded by making a business case against lower-priced competitors.
Before that, at Enterprise, most of our revenue came from relationships with local body shops, dealerships & service shops, and hotels where we had to position our higher quality service over owning a loaner fleet or using cheaper competitors.
I've owned customer & vendor relationships, end to end.
As a rep, I wasn’t just a closer. I also owned post-close customer relationships to drive adoption, upsell, and retention. Later, as a manager, I created the first dedicated Account Management/Customer Success team to manage customer relationships.
Three separate times at Enterprise I took over a branch where customer satisfaction scores were at or near the bottom of the 30-branch region, then improved them within 1-3 months to at or near the top of the region, and kept them there.
This ability to foster positive relationships also carried over to managing vendor relationships where I was regularly asked by vendors to participate in customer advisory boards, serve as a reference, and speak on panels or in conference sessions.
I can take things from Scrappy to Scalable.
It starts with learning how things actually work from the people doing it. I start with small changes and quick-wins, and always based on input from the people it impacts.
I balance what’s possible with what’s practical. Not every change is worth the cost or disruption.
Where data is available, we’ll use it to inform decisions; and where it isn’t, we’ll look at what data we can start to capture, without being onerous for the team.
When it comes to doing the work of building out processes & systems, I’ve directly contributed to it myself, and I have also managed employees and vendors on design and implementation.
Demonstrated pattern of quickly mastering how things work.
I could just say that I learn things quickly, but my story shows how
I’ve gone from newbie to expert many times:
With no prior sales experience, I ramped in half the typical time and became a consistently top-performing rep. I eventually trained new teams of reps, then rolled out the company’s first global standardized sales processes across 100 reps.
Without formal training or a traditional IT background, just hands-on experience, I went from being just an end-user of Salesforce.com to Systems Administrator. I earned multiple technical certifications, and was acknowledged as an expert in the top 1% of the global Salesforce community by earning the coveted Salesforce MVP status five years running before earning lifetime MVP Hall of Fame status. I’ve been a speaker at multiple Dreamforce and other industry conferences on enabling processes with technology to improve sales performance.
At Enterprise, most new Assistant Managers go to work at larger branches to continue learning from experienced Branch Managers. Upon completing the Management Training Program, I skipped that step and went directly to running satellite branches as a de facto branch manager. Three different times I stepped into an underperforming branch and turned it around within weeks, earning multiple performance awards in the process.
After we had our home’s HVAC system replaced, the owner of the HVAC company wrote a letter of recommendation (available upon request). It reads, in part:
“While most homeowners have a difficult time fully understanding the inner workings of heat pump equipment and sizing, Jason quickly became an expert… We discussed highly technical details…
Jason may not have direct experience with his business’s subject matter yet, but he will quickly become an industry expert.”
I'll make the most of the transition period to get up to speed quickly.