Podcast: How Mehdi Khachani Built Sunny Bliss Plumbing and Air Into Miami’s Most Data-Driven Home Service Company
Mehdi Khachani was presenting his biomedical engineering thesis at an IEEE conference in Shanghai when a man handed him a business card. The man said his company might be interested in hiring him. Mehdi went back to Montreal, did a project for them, and got the email: they were impressed. Come to Los Angeles. The project was DARPA, the research agency for the Department of Defense. The work was prosthetic limbs.
He went from that to a Wharton MBA. From Wharton to a corporate career at Medtronic, one of the world’s leading medical device companies. From Medtronic to real estate investing. From real estate to a property management company, then a construction company, and finally to the company he believes is the best business he has built: Sunny Bliss Plumbing and Air in Miami Beach.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, Todd Baldwin sat down with Mehdi for one of the most technically sophisticated marketing conversations in this series. The episode covers what three separate businesses taught about recurring revenue, scalability, and data-driven operations; how the HVAC and plumbing industry is more competitive than most people understand; and what a Wharton-trained engineer thinks about Google Business Profile optimization, AI search, and what a good agency relationship actually looks like.
50 Jobs a Day and Miami’s Most Data-Driven Plumbing Company
Sunny Bliss Plumbing and Air operates out of Miami Beach and covers Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The company runs approximately 50 jobs per day in the residential and commercial HVAC, plumbing, water filtration, drain, and sewer space. The average job takes one to three days. With over 1,200 Google reviews at 4.9 stars, Sunny Bliss is among the highest-rated home service companies in the greater Miami market.
Mehdi describes the HVAC and plumbing business as far more sophisticated than most people assume. The image of the industry, technicians in trucks responding to service calls, masks what is actually required to compete at the level where private equity and advanced operators are playing. Weekly P&L reviews. Close rate tracking. Average ticket monitoring. Booking rate analysis. Membership retention. These are the metrics Mehdi watches regularly, not quarterly, not monthly, but weekly.
Private equity has recognized what Mehdi recognized when he chose HVAC and plumbing as his third business: it has recurring revenue, it is scalable, and it can create significant enterprise value through roll-ups. When multiple businesses with $300,000 each in EBITDA are acquired at a two-times multiple and combined into a single operation, the resulting higher net income earns a substantially larger multiple. The arbitrage between acquisition multiples and exit multiples is why PE is moving aggressively into this space.
Three Businesses, Three Lessons
Mehdi came into each of his three ventures knowing more than he did when he started the one before. The progression was deliberate, even if it did not look like it from the outside.
Property management came first. The lesson it delivered was the value of recurring revenue. A managed property generates fees every month. Retention drives the business. There is no need to sell in the conventional sense. Keep clients happy and the revenue flows continuously. That model, Mehdi recognized, was something he wanted to replicate in every subsequent business.
Construction came second. It produced a different and harder lesson: scalability. Every project in general contracting is unique. Every structure is different. Building repeatable processes in an industry where the product changes every time is extraordinarily difficult. It is why the contracting space remains fragmented. The lesson was clear going into business number three: if the product or service cannot be standardized and systematized, growth hits a ceiling quickly.
Sunny Bliss was built with both lessons applied. Recurring membership revenue anchors the business. Processes are documented and streamlined. And last year, Mehdi added a third tool he had not used in the earlier businesses: acquisition. “That acquisition honestly bought us three or five years of work.” When organic growth is the only strategy, scale comes slowly. An acquisition compresses that timeline significantly, particularly when the acquired business brings established customer relationships, trained staff, and existing market presence.
What’s Working Now: Five Pillars, 12% Marketing Spend, and GBP as the Foundation
Culture at Sunny Bliss is built around five pillars that Mehdi presents to every team and in every internal meeting. Integrity: always do the right thing. Accountability: if you say you will do something, do it. Constant improvement: never settle for where the company is today. Teamwork. Desire to win.
The constant improvement pillar carries a phrase Mehdi uses to describe it that Todd Baldwin immediately declared he was going to steal: “This is the best we’ve ever been as a company but also the worst we’ll ever be.” The current version of Sunny Bliss is better than it has ever been. It is also the least impressive version of what it will become. That framing turns every achievement into a floor rather than a ceiling.
The marketing stack reflects the same data-first discipline. Sunny Bliss spends approximately 12 percent of revenue on marketing, above industry average, because the company is in active growth mode. That spend demands accountability. Mehdi tracks ROAS by campaign and channel and knows what each marketing activity is returning.
The channel hierarchy he describes starts with Google Business Profile as the unambiguous foundation. Without an optimized GBP with a consistent review drip, photos, and posts, digital visibility is severely limited regardless of what else a company invests in. Reviews need to arrive regularly, not in bursts, because inconsistent review velocity is a signal that undermines both consumer trust and Google’s ranking algorithms.
PPC and Local Service Ads follow. PPC is a demand capture channel: someone searches, sees the ad, clicks, and hopefully calls. LSA removes a step: the lead is a guaranteed phone call, charged per lead rather than per click. Sunny Bliss maxes its LSA budget to whatever Google allows, frustrated that Google caps the lead volume regardless of appetite to spend more.
SEO is the long-term highest-return investment, with an important caveat Mehdi delivers directly: the SEO game has changed fundamentally. The rankings that blogging and traditional link building produced for years are being disrupted by AI. The pie of organic traffic is smaller. The ranking signals are different. Investing in SEO now requires adapting to what the algorithms are actually doing, not what they did three years ago.
The Lesson: Crises as Opportunities, AI as Superpowers, and What Good Agencies Look Like
Mehdi’s framing of the AI disruption to search is worth capturing precisely. Where others see panic, he sees a familiar pattern: “Crises are not bad. When the deck is shuffled, it’s not a bad thing.” Many of the most significant moments in his entrepreneurial career came from disruption. Something stopped working, a market shifted, a platform changed the rules, and the response to that disruption produced something better than what existed before. He applies the same mindset to AI search.
For answer engine optimization, the emerging field of making content readable and citable by AI platforms, Mehdi is experimenting with FAQ sections on service pages, Reddit mentions, and the platform partnerships that AI companies are building with review sources. He acknowledges directly that nobody has fully figured this out yet, and that the companies treating the uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat will be positioned better when the picture clarifies.
On Claude AI specifically, Mehdi is ahead of most home service business owners. He is using it to build custom web applications for his team and to rebuild his company website by coding directly with Claude rather than going through WordPress. The ability to talk through what you want and have it produce functional code has changed his relationship to technical development entirely. He describes Claude as giving superpowers to whoever uses it, while being clear it does not replace specialists. It makes specialists dramatically more effective.
What separates a good marketing agency from one that just sells services: transparency, accountability, cutting-edge AI capability, and acting as a genuine extension of the team rather than a vendor managing an account. Mehdi wants to know what each campaign is producing, what the ROAS is, and what is being done to improve it. That is the partnership he is looking for.
At Everyday Media Group, Todd Baldwin and the team work with HVAC and plumbing companies at every stage to build the Google Business Profile foundation, PPC and LSA strategy, and AEO content infrastructure that Mehdi describes. The companies investing in all of it now, with the right partner tracking results in real time, are the ones who will be positioned to scale when the acquisition opportunity arrives.
Key Takeaways
- “This is the best we’ve ever been as a company but also the worst we’ll ever be.” This is not humility. It is a growth operating system. Every current version of the business is the new floor, not the ceiling. The team is trained to see where they are as the starting point for the next phase of improvement, not as an achievement to protect.
- Crises are opportunities when the deck gets shuffled. AI has disrupted traditional SEO. The operators who treat that disruption as a reason to stop investing are making a strategic error. The operators who treat it as a new game to learn and win early are positioning themselves ahead of the majority who will still be reacting six months from now.
- Google Business Profile is the foundation, not a tactic. Before PPC, before LSA, before SEO: the GBP needs to be fully optimized with a consistent review drip, regular posts, and current photos. 1,200 reviews at 4.9 stars did not happen by accident. It is the result of a systematic process built into every customer touchpoint, running consistently over years.
About Mehdi Khachani
Mehdi Khachani is the owner of Sunny Bliss Plumbing and Air, a Miami Beach-based HVAC and plumbing company serving Miami-Dade and Broward counties. He holds degrees in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering, and an MBA from Wharton (University of Pennsylvania). Before founding Sunny Bliss, Mehdi worked on prosthetic limbs research at DARPA, held a corporate career at Medtronic, and built two other businesses: a property management company and a general contracting firm. Sunny Bliss runs approximately 50 jobs per day, holds over 1,200 Google reviews at a 4.9 rating, and completed a strategic acquisition last year as part of its growth toward becoming the number one home service company in Miami.
Search “Sunny Bliss” or “Sunny Bliss Plumbing and Air” on Google, or connect with Mehdi directly on LinkedIn.
Is Your HVAC or Plumbing Company’s Digital Foundation Built to Compete?
Mehdi Khachani spends 12 percent of revenue on marketing and tracks every channel’s ROAS weekly. Most HVAC and plumbing companies in Miami and across the country are not operating with that level of accountability. Everyday Media Group works with home service companies to build the GBP optimization, PPC, LSA, and AEO content strategy that matches the sophistication Mehdi describes. Schedule a conversation with Todd Baldwin and the team.
