How Vesta Foundation Solutions Grew From Zero to About $15M a Year in Foundation Repair

How did Will Blake get into foundation repair?

Will Blake came to foundation repair by way of a rock band and a baby. He learned drums young, was signed at 17 with what he calls “a little emo alternative rock band,” and toured until he and his girlfriend Sydney, now his wife of 21 years, found out at 20 that they were having a child. His father was a general contractor and Will had grown up building houses with him in the mountains of North Carolina, so that is what he went back to.

He paid $800 cash for a Chevy Astro van, sold repair projects and did the work himself for three years. Then he merged with a man who was trying to retire, and together they grew the company from $300,000 a year to $9 million a year in seven years.

What went wrong at his first company?

Will lost it. He and his partner split when he was 28, and he puts the blame on himself: “I was just a poor leader and didn’t understand how to run a business.” Having something he built taken away because of his own actions was, he said, “the piece of humble pie I needed in my life.”

He and Sydney spent the next years helping other foundation and waterproofing companies. At a friend’s company in Virginia, where Will was VP of operations, revenue went from $33 million to about $77 million in three and a half years before the owners sold to private equity. The culture shifted after the sale, and the couple decided to run their own operation again. They looked for underserved markets, picked Oklahoma City, and started Vesta Foundation Solutions nine years ago.

Vesta now does about $15 million a year with 82 employees, fixing about 46 homes a week.

How did Vesta Foundation Solutions get its first leads?

By being, in Will’s words, “five mile famous.” Going from a $77 million company to zero was quiet. The website was still ramping up and the phones were not ringing, so he joined four referral groups and went every day for six weeks. That got Vesta to about 40 leads a month. Then Google kicked in and he hired two salespeople.

Today he treats marketing “like a diversified stock portfolio.” Vesta runs 46 different marketing products in the Oklahoma City metro, including home shows, Google, Local Services Ads, billboards and over-the-top television. Each is judged on cost per lead. The bad ones are cut after a few months and new ones are tested in their place.

He warns owners against jumping from $5,000 of Google advertising to television before the basics are done:

• Are all of your trucks decaled and branded?
• Is everybody wearing a labeled uniform?
• Are you at the local home and garden shows?
• Can someone answer the phone quickly?

“You can get more leads, but if you can’t convert them, it’s like you’re just flushing money down the commode.”

Which numbers should a home service company track as it scales?

Will tracks three, and all of them fit on a spreadsheet:

1. The spread. Cash on hand plus accounts receivable minus accounts payable. That number should consistently go up.
2. Revenue per full-time employee. Every industry has its own range, and where you sit in it tells you whether the business is running healthy.
3. Debt-to-equity ratio, if you finance growth. A $1,200 a month truck payment looks fine until a downturn shows the company is insolvent.

He also tells owners to expect pain between $3 million and $5 million in revenue. Support staff, managers, call center people and a bigger marketing budget arrive together, and the profit goes away. He says it has happened in every business he has been part of.

For the financial side he recommends Martin Holland’s book The Profit Problem, and asking the best operators in your industry not just what they do but why.

How does performance pay work at Vesta Foundation Solutions?

Crews can see the labor budget for each job and keep what they save. Will and Sydney have paid this way for more than 16 years. A job might carry a labor budget of 15% of the sale price, or 100 man hours. If the crew finishes under it, the difference is theirs.

For years the math lived in spreadsheets the employees could not see. Three years ago Will built an app, now Performance.io, that shows each employee what is left in the budget and what their hourly rate works out to as they clock in. His production field employees have a base of about $20 to $25 an hour and average over $47.

He said more than 750 crews now use it, and gave these averages:

• 12 to 18% more output at companies that had no incentive program
• 8 to 12% more where one already existed
• direct labor down 5.2%
• employees’ hourly rate up by more than $13

“They’ll never hit a target that they don’t have,” he said.

What would he tell another owner about people?

Culture is not “sitting around a campfire singing kumbaya.” For Will it includes holding people accountable to the personal goals they have shared with him.

Vesta is 62% Gen Z, and he is a fan. His adjustment was communication: leaders repeat every message and put it everywhere employees look, including Slack, a learning management system that costs about $25 a month, and a $20 a month AI bot that pulls up safety data sheets on request. The bot was a 25-year-old employee’s idea.

Outside Vesta he runs Construct My Future, a nonprofit that puts 100 middle schoolers at a time through a week of electrical, welding, HVAC and heavy equipment, and places high school students in paid internships. Last year 80% of those interns received written job offers.