Spencer Satorie and Marc Chard didn’t start out as business partners. Marc built Apex Services Heating & Cooling from scratch in Omaha, working his way up from solo technician to running a company he could operate on five to ten hours a week. Spencer came from real estate and house flipping, buying Apex from Marc right as COVID hit and turning a banking nightmare into his first business purchase. What started as a mentorship between a seller and a buyer turned into a full partnership two years later, and from there the acquisitions didn’t stop.
In this conversation, Spencer and Marc walk through the systems that let them buy and fix nine HVAC and plumbing companies in under two years, growing from three million to fifteen million in revenue before selling to private equity in 2025. They talk pricing discipline, culture fit, why manuals only work if people actually follow them, and what it takes to walk into a broken business and double it in a year. They also get into what happens after the sale, and why they’re already back in acquisition mode.
– Why charging the right price matters more than any acquisition strategy
– How Apex’s training and onboarding process turned inexperienced hires into six figure technicians
– What changed operationally once they scaled past a handful of locations
– Why culture fit matters more than pay when it comes to keeping technicians
– The real reason they walked away from private equity’s day to day involvement
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