Dean didn't set out to start an investment firm. In 2025, he went with his wife to a Joann Fabrics store to buy craft supplies and found out the chain was shutting down, nationwide. That struck him as odd for a company that had been around forever, so he dug into what happened. The more he learned, the worse it got.
Joann had been acquired by private equity about 13 or 14 years earlier. What Dean calls "Wall Street private equity" did what it does: it ran the company into bankruptcy in 2020, brought it out supposedly reformed, and by 2025 it was bankrupt again. The company disappeared. Only the name survived, and Michaels bought that.
"My first thought was, I can't believe that not only is this legal to do in the US, but companies do it on purpose," Dean says. "And I thought, someone has got to do something about this. And my very next thought was, well, I'm an entrepreneur, why don't I do something about it?"
That was the birth of SoFlo Acquisitions. Dean had an extensive background in the trades, HVAC specifically, and he lived in South Florida, where HVAC runs year round. The pieces came together, and SoFlo went looking for Main Street businesses it could buy and actually keep alive.
Ajith asks the obvious question: is this an anti-private-equity model? Dean's answer is more precise than that.
"We do use the private equity model for the acquisition. They have a great model for acquisitions," he says. "It's what happens after the acquisition that sets us apart."
He describes one of the standard moves: private equity firms often strip assets out of a company after buying it, then force the company to lease those same assets back. That creates an expense that never existed before and never needed to, on top of other financial engineering, and it's a big part of how these firms drive companies into the ground.
SoFlo is structured differently by design. It isn't a fund charging a management fee. It's a holding company, so instead of fees flowing to a manager, profits flow directly to the company and its investors. Dean sums up the mission plainly: rescue Main Street jobs from Wall Street private equity.
The other place SoFlo departs from the standard model is the exit. Most private equity wants out in five to seven years. SoFlo's planned exit is for employees to eventually purchase the investors' equity, turning ownership into a retirement plan for the people who actually run the business.
That structure changes incentives all the way down. Because SoFlo isn't pulling profit out through fees, it can pay employees better, and it pairs their compensation with the company's growth so they have a direct stake in its success.
Dean treats development as part of that same bet. "The skill sets that get you to a million or five million dollars a year in revenue are not the skill sets that are going to get you to twenty," he says. Helping employees build those skills isn't a perk bolted onto the business model. It's the business model: the company grows, the people inside it get more valuable, and both get paid accordingly.
Dean sees roughly two kinds of owners in HVAC, plumbing, and roofing. One wants to keep the business in the family and take it from five million to ten million to a hundred million. The other is looking for an exit in three to five years and assumes private equity is the only buyer with real money.
SoFlo pays competitive, market-rate prices either way, so price isn't the differentiator. The differentiator is what happens to what the owner actually built. "Most of them have invested a lot of their blood, sweat, and tears," Dean says. For an owner near retirement, or one who's grown the business as far as their current skill set allows, the fear isn't really about the sale price. It's about watching a company they spent their life building disappear two or five years later.
Dean is direct about what that legacy actually is. "For most of these owners, the legacy is not their customers. The legacy is their employees." When private equity buys a trade business, he argues, the workers leave, because the culture shifts from taking care of the customer to squeezing out an extra dollar. Keeping the people is what keeps the legacy intact, not keeping the name on the door.
Ajith raises a theory that circulates in tech and investing circles: that private equity will eventually roll up 70 or 80 percent of the home services market, leaving four or five dominant players. Dean doesn't buy it.
His reasoning comes down to a structural feature of the trades that most roll-up strategies overlook. Technicians in HVAC, plumbing, and similar fields hold individual licenses. Whenever they want, they can hang up their own shingle and start a competing business, and the cost to do that is low. "It's what we call a very fractured industry," Dean says.
Combine that with the attrition private equity roll-ups tend to cause, workers who feel like a number instead of someone whose boss knows their family, and you get an industry that keeps regenerating small, independent competitors even as consolidation happens. "In many ways, private equity is actually fragmenting the market more," Dean says. Those departures don't just work against consolidation in the abstract. They become a steady pipeline of future acquisition targets for a firm like SoFlo, five, ten, fifteen years out.
Asked what he'd tell an owner stuck around two or three million in revenue, struggling to make payroll, Dean doesn't hesitate. First: if you're struggling to meet payroll, raise your prices. It usually means you have good people and good service you're underpricing. You won't lose customers, he says, you'll get better ones.
Second: once there's some breathing room, bring in outside help. "There is no founder that can do it all," Dean says. "Business is not a solo thing. Business is a team sport."
SoFlo's near-term plan is concrete: $36 million in acquisitions over the next 12 to 18 months, funded by a $6 million capital raise that already has more than a million dollars committed. The first acquisition is expected to close by the end of this quarter. The team behind it includes a director of finance who helped take a commercial landscaping business from $6 million to roughly $250 million in revenue before it exited to private equity, and a director of operations who's a two-time HVAC exit owner himself.
The initial focus is Central and South Florida, a market Dean sizes at $6.5 billion once you combine the Tampa/Orlando, Southwest Florida, and South Florida regions, likely a top-five HVAC market in the country. From there, the plan is to expand into other trades, electrical and plumbing beyond HVAC, and eventually other geographies. Dean's long-term vision is a multi-billion-dollar company built around one idea: long-term, sustainable jobs in the skilled trades, run by people who never have to watch their legacy get sold off in pieces.
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