Private Equity Roll-ups and Buying Power in HVAC

The speakers discuss how private equity platforms achieve margin expansion through economies of scale in equipment purchasing, and express concern about their impact on small contractors. They propose a co-op model to band small businesses together to gain similar buying power and compete against PE-backed roll-ups.

“one of the things that bothers me about these private equity platforms is people think they're so sophisticated in the way that they create value and basically improve the margins of the business. I mean, I have friends that work at these roll -ups as they call them. The number one way that they create that margin expansion is through savings on equipment. They go to a distributor, like a Watsco or a Ferguson, they say, instead of buying a million dollars worth of equipment, we're buying a hundred million dollars worth of equipment across all the companies we own. And they therefore have that economy of scale and pricing power to demand discounts.”

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