How to Scale a Business from $10M to $1 BILLION (ft. Adam Coffey)

Getting to revenue milestones is rare — only about 7% of entrepreneurs reach $1M and only 4% of those reach $10M — so there's a repeatable mathematical formula for climbing each level.

Private equity is 'hit or miss' mostly because of alignment: when everyone rolls over as an investor in the same company, you harness a group of entrepreneurs pulling in the same direction to build operating leverage.

Winning acquisitions start with a written profile of your perfect target — a specific revenue size, EBITDA size, and margin — so you buy on criteria instead of emotion.

As a company scales, functions like purchasing and training have to move in-house to capture the discounts and consistency that size is supposed to deliver.

Bigger PE funds have fewer large companies to buy, so they often pay more; understanding that scarcity dynamic tells you where the money is willing to go.

The wealth-building engine is the roll-up: buy at roughly 8x, build EBITDA, and sell the larger platform at a higher multiple — locking in profit like a savings account across many deals.

The magic that got you to a certain size eventually runs out of bandwidth; scaling further requires shifting entrepreneurial gears and, ideally, giving technicians and installers a path to equity and running their own business under your wing.