Eagle Merchant Partners entered the popular home services space with two acquisitions, Furniture Medic and AmeriSpec.
“We’ve been introduced to these two brands, and we’ve been looking to do something in home services for a while,” said Zack Taylor of Eagle Merchant Partners, adding that the pricing was right with them, unlike others in the field.
“We were part of a group of auctions and operations that ended up winning Neighborly,” he said, referring to the home-service franchise giant. “It’s incredible that those are in demand. Sharing a customer database makes sense. I understand why it’s such a hot sector. We were lucky to find these two segments that weren’t part of a large-scale marketing operation.”
Furniture Medic has been around since the early 1990’s, doing furniture restoration for those who want to repair rather than replace a sofa, table, or chair. “On the larger end, they do a fair amount of disaster recovery work,” Taylor said, such as restoring cabinets or a kitchen island after a flood. “It’s great for insurance companies, because unlike tearing everything up,” it’s less expensive to renew.
AmeriSpec inspects homes before selling, and has recently expanded into services such as radon detection, and commercial building inspections as well. Both companies are based in Memphis, and have existing management teams remaining, including CEO Chris Gammell.
This is the seventh investment of the franchise for Atlanta-based Eagle Merchant Partners, which previously bought and sold Planet Fitness giant United PF Partners and the restaurant brand Chicken Salad Chick, among others. Investments include Code Ninjas School, a computer programming school for kids; Enviro-Master, a 90-unit franchisee that does weekly deep cleaning, primarily for restaurants; and Puget Collision, CarStar’s largest franchise, which is part of Driven Brands.
Taylor said first-quarter headwinds such as inflation and bank failures were not slowing Eagle Merchant Partners’ deal flow. “The part of the market that has been affected is the really large debt syndication deals. The kind of business that we’re looking at you don’t have to raise,” he said.
