oday's guest came to commercial HVAC with a product manager's eye.

Pat Beal spent years in B2B SaaS thinking about product-market fit: does demand exist, is the product solving it, are there competitors crowding the space?

So when he pivoted to buying a small commercial HVAC and refrigeration business in Northeast Ohio, Pat ran the same analysis.

‍His conclusion: the product-market fit was endless.Pat closed in May 2024.

The business was doing just under a million dollars in revenue. He financed it almost entirely with a seller note — 90% of the $370k purchase price — which meant no bank, no SBA, no personal guarantee from the seller.

That structure had a practical upside as well: the previous owner could stay on and lend his license while Pat worked toward getting his own.In less than two years since close, Pat doubled the business to $2.5m in revenue.

And he's on pace to close this year with $3.5-3.6m — a quadrupling of his baseline in two and a half years, with just two additional technicians.

This is a happy case of pent-up demand because the previous owner wasn't chasing business. Pat has chased it and has been rewarded handsomely for doing so.

Here he is, Pat Beal, owner of Temperature Control Maintenance.