I spend a fair amount of my week around robotics, AI, and recruiting for technical roles, so I am not the guy telling you the new stuff does not matter. It matters. But I have also spent thirty years running operations, and the businesses I keep coming back to are the ones nobody writes about. Home services. Security. Investigations. Field repair. Staffing. Unglamorous work, done on a schedule, for customers who have a problem right now.That is not nostalgia. It is a bet about where durable value sits, and I think a lot of smart operators are missing it because the shiny end of the market is louder.
Three things make an unglamorous business hard to dislodge.
I have watched this play out across the companies I have been involved in. Kura Home is home maintenance. MPS Security and NBI are protection and investigations. Robo Reliance services robot fleets other people built. Riderflex fills roles that are hard to fill. Different industries, same underlying shape: a customer with an immediate problem, work that has to be done well by a person, and a market where reliability is genuinely rare.
Here is the part the "buy a boring business" crowd tends to skip. These companies are operator-dependent in a way software businesses are not. You cannot fix a service business with a strategy deck. The margin lives in scheduling, in labor utilization, in whether the tech had the right part on the truck, in whether the callback rate is two percent or nine. Those are all execution details, and they are all decided by people you hired.Which means the whole thing rests on recruiting and retention. I did not get into recruiting because I love the industry. I got into it because every operating problem I ever had traced back to a hiring decision, either a good one I made too slowly or a bad one I kept too long.If you are evaluating one of these businesses, look at turnover before you look at EBITDA. Turnover tells you what it is actually like to work there, and what it will cost you to keep it running after the deal closes.
This is where I part ways with both camps. The people saying AI changes nothing in the trades are wrong, and the people saying it replaces the work are wrong in a more expensive way.Nobody is dispatching an agent to crawl into an attic. But an enormous share of what a service company spends money on has nothing to do with the wrench. Intake. Scheduling. Quoting. Follow-up. Invoicing. Reminder calls. Estimating parts. Writing up the visit. In most small and mid-sized service businesses, that administrative layer is where the margin quietly disappears, and it is exactly the layer where the current tools are already good.So the practical answer is unglamorous, same as the businesses. Pick the two or three workflows that eat the most hours and produce the least judgment, put a real owner on each one, and measure whether the hours actually went down. If nobody owns it, it will not happen, and you will end up with a subscription and a story instead of a result.The competitive edge is not being the most sophisticated shop in your market. It is being the one whose dispatcher is not drowning, so the tech arrives when you said and the customer calls you first next time.
I have never seen a durable business built on being early to something. I have seen plenty built on doing an ordinary thing reliably, at scale, for a long time, with people who wanted to stay.That is a harder sell than a new category, because there is no moment where it looks impressive. It just compounds. Ten years of answering the phone, honoring the window, paying people fairly, and reinvesting in the trucks is a fortress, and it does not photograph well.If you are an operator sitting on a business like that, my advice is to stop apologizing for it. Get your hiring right, tighten the administrative layer with whatever tools genuinely help, and keep doing the unglamorous thing. Somebody still has to fix the furnace. It might as well be the company that runs it properly.
Connect with Steve: linkedin.com/in/stevepurban