From Losing Everything to 6X Growth: Scaling a Roofing Company Lessons From Matt Balducci of Home Hero Roofing
In 2018, Matt Balducci sold the painting company he had built from age nineteen into a three million dollar business running seven hundred projects a year. He expected the sale to make him financially independent. Instead, a single clause his lawyer never caught, inserted on the other side of a deal with a man who had been his mentor for six years, gave the buyers full reign over the company’s profits. His two-year, profit-based earnout zeroed out, and after seven years of building, Balducci walked away with fifteen thousand dollars. Today that company, rebranded and unnamed at his own insistence, is on track toward half a billion dollars. His story of scaling a roofing company, Home Hero Roofing, from the ashes of that loss is one of the most candid episodes of Everyday Excellence yet.
Talking with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, Balducci refuses to play the victim. He forgave his former partner, and he credits the loss with forcing eight years of rebuilding that made him, in his words, bigger, faster, stronger. “I don’t think I was mature enough at that time to handle it anyway.”
He has since built three ventures at once: Home Hero Roofing in Chicago, on pace to grow from five hundred thousand dollars to three million in its second full year; the Evolve Restoration Mastermind, coaching sixty restoration owners nationwide; and the Lighthouse Brotherhood, his passion project for high-achieving men, launched a month before the recording with a book arriving October 22. His first piece of advice about all three: do not start multiple businesses at once. He didn’t.
The Two Failures That Built the Playbook
The Honeymoon Mutiny
Twelve years ago, Balducci promoted four sales leaders to scale his painting franchise, then left for his honeymoon. All four quit within a two-week window. Stunned, he followed his mentor’s advice and simply asked why, then went further: he had the four departed leaders plus six trusted people in his network each write a description of who he was. The picture that came back, pushy, aggressive, caring only about himself, was the exact opposite of the leader he believed he was. He spent ninety days in shock, seriously considering leaving entrepreneurship to join the Navy at twenty-seven.
Instead, he rebuilt the team around the feedback, and the experience rewired how he hires to this day: he sits down with every new hire and asks what they actually want, then makes helping them achieve it his job, whether they stay one year or ten. His book, arriving in October, turns that 360-degree exercise into a recommendation for every leader.
The Clause That Cost Everything
The exit lessons are just as specific. Set your business up for exit when you do not want to sell, because he was burnt out, desperate to be done, and got taken advantage of precisely because of it. If you are leaving completely, take all your cash up front rather than trusting a profit-based earnout someone else controls. And never make an emotional decision: take a day, a week, or a month before signing anything that matters.
“If a partner ever says we don’t need a partnership agreement, we’re buddies, we’re family, I don’t care if you’re blood. The only time you really use it is when you’re disagreeing.” – Matt Balducci
Every partnership he enters now has an agreement covering what he calls the five D’s, protecting both sides through death, divorce, and every other disruption. His newest one was drafted with Claude, saving the three to five thousand dollars a lawyer would have charged, a move both he and Baldwin endorsed as exactly what AI is for.
Partners Who Fill the Gaps
Balducci is blunt about his own weakness: lead generation. His gifts run to team building, sales, customer experience, and financial management, so every venture pairs him with someone who owns the go-to-market. At Home Hero, that is Andre Kasmirski, a friend of fifteen years and, in Balducci’s words, a marketing genius. Balducci originally tried to hire him; Kasmirski countered with a 50-50 partnership and refused to budge when Balducci floated 70-30. Taking the even split, Balducci says, was one of the best decisions he has ever made.
At Evolve, the complement is Alex Duda, author of Restoration Millionaire and the recognized influencer of the restoration world, plus third partner Ruslan Olinsky, who grew his own Seattle restoration company from zero to twenty million dollars in four years. The pattern is deliberate: a partnership is a marriage, expectations must be crystal clear, and the skill sets must not overlap.
What Is Working Now: The Value of a Lead
Home Hero’s jump from five hundred thousand to a projected three million dollars in one year traces to one metric. The company tracks what Balducci calls the value of a lead, the revenue generated per lead, and builds everything else backward from it: crew counts, the org chart, and net margin targets. Lead volume went from 250 in year one to roughly 1,200 at the time of recording, with 2,000 in reach, powered by Kasmirski’s marketing engine and some well-timed Chicago storms.
Reviews are the company’s claim to fame: 224 on the headquarters Google Business Profile while ten-year-old competitors sit at 80, driven by tracked, rewarded, contest-fueled review requests on every job. A second location opened three weeks before the recording, built to double lead flow for 2027, with its Google Business Profile and review engine being stood up the same way. The sales process is proving duplicatable: one rep sold nearly eight hundred thousand dollars in his first five months, a second sold two hundred fifty thousand in sixty days.
The systems philosophy behind it is refreshingly unglamorous. Year one ran entirely on Google Sheets. “Go sell something, collect the payment, and make sure you’re profitable,” he says; the shiny CRM came later, in year two, alongside SOPs and team building, the sequencing he teaches as the normal arc of a company built to explode in years two and three. His general manager, Gina, holds phantom equity on a vesting schedule, disclosed transparently as phantom, because Balducci once lost everything to equity he did not realize was phantom. If the company exits, she wins with it.
You Don’t Make Winners, You Find Them
Balducci rejects the trade-first identity entirely: he is not a roofer, he is a business owner, and a business owner keeps two funnels full, sales and recruiting. He maintains what he calls a recruiting bench, staying in touch with winners he cannot hire yet, so that when leads surge, as they did before the recording, the next rep is a phone call away. His three filters: have they won before, in athletics, the military, sales, or a prior role; are they coachable; and are they appreciative, down to whether they thank the server at a coffee meeting. Skills can be taught. Culture cannot.
Coaching sixty restoration owners, after years coaching gym owners, chiropractors, and home care agencies, has shown him the same three struggles everywhere. First, ninety percent of owners do not know their numbers, running the business off the bank account balance instead of CAC, cost of goods sold, gross profit, and net margin. Second, inconsistent lead flow. Third, no real sales process. Get those three right, he says, and it is pretty challenging not to win.
“Just plug your Claude into your QuickBooks and tell it to give you a weekly report. I just started doing that personally, and it’s been unbelievable.” – Matt Balducci
He means it literally. The night before the recording, he prompted Claude to act as an expert CFO, audit his QuickBooks data, and simplify it to client acquisition cost, cost of goods sold, monthly net margin, and gross profit percentage. The audit surfaced a line item bleeding roughly ten thousand dollars a month that he had missed, now scheduled for correction within sixty days. His caveat is the right one: AI is only as good as the person prompting it, so expect a few rounds of back and forth.
An Operating System for the Rest of Life
The newest venture turns the same systems thinking on the home front. After his financial loss, Balducci told no one but his wife and, in his words, suffered in silence, a pattern he believes most high achievers share. The Lighthouse Brotherhood, launched a month before the recording with his book arriving October 22, gives driven men a network and what he calls the Lighthouse Operating System: EOS for everything outside business. Its anchor practice is a quarterly meeting with your wife, adapted with credit from the Family Board Meeting, which he says transformed his marriage in three years, alongside a standard every busy parent can hit: twenty minutes of truly intentional time with your kids every day.
The Lesson: The Three Struggles Have the Same Fix
Put Balducci’s three universal struggles side by side and a pattern appears: they are all measurement problems. Owners who do not know their numbers cannot judge their marketing; owners without consistent lead flow cannot feed a sales process; and owners without a sales process waste the leads they paid for. Home Hero solved all three by making one metric, the value of a lead, the center of gravity, and then building reviews, locations, and hiring around what the number said.
That is the same discipline the team at Everyday Media Group builds into every client relationship: lead generation tracked to closed revenue, review systems that compound the way Home Hero’s 224 reviews have, Google Business Profile launches done properly for every new location, and reporting that tells an owner their real client acquisition cost instead of leaving them to read the bank balance. Balducci told Baldwin on the recording that his sixty restoration owners are always looking for marketing agencies and that good ones are rare in the space, a reminder that the home services world still runs short on exactly this kind of measurable partnership.
Key Takeaways From Matt Balducci
- Protect the partnership on paper. One uncaught clause cost him his entire buyout. Every deal now carries a full agreement covering the five D’s, no matter how close the partners, and his latest was drafted with Claude.
- Build backward from the value of a lead. Revenue per lead drives the org chart, crew counts, and margins at Home Hero, and growing leads from 250 to 1,200 is what turned $500K into a $3M pace.
- Ask for the mirror. Ten honest descriptions of who he really was sent him into ninety days of shock, then rebuilt his leadership. He now asks every hire what they want, and makes delivering it his job.
About Matt Balducci
Matt Balducci is the owner of Home Hero Roofing, a Chicago-area roofing company he co-founded with partner Andre Kasmirski, co-founder of the Evolve Restoration Mastermind alongside Alex Duda and Ruslan Olinsky, and founder of the Lighthouse Brotherhood, a community for high-achieving men with a book arriving October 22. A serial entrepreneur since founding his first home service company at nineteen, he runs all his companies on EOS. Connect with Matt on https://homeheroroofing.com/.
Ready to Know the Value of Your Leads?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses build lead generation worth measuring: SEO, Google Ads, review systems, Google Business Profile launches for new locations, and reporting that connects every dollar of marketing to closed revenue. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the owners behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation or connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
