We Backed Out of a Signed Deal on Closing Week – Here’s the $150K/Month Business We Built Instead
Introduction
Most business origin stories get cleaned up in the retelling. The failed deal becomes a “strategic pivot.” The cash crisis becomes a “growth challenge.” The person who stole from you gets quietly omitted.
This one doesn’t get cleaned up.
In Episode 1 of Surge Ahead, Forrest sits down with his business partner Jaron McAnally to walk through the real start of Keil Electric – from a Florida acquisition they walked away from on closing week, to two active locations, a Texas launch that hit $100K in four months, and a holdco structure designed to scale to five locations by year’s end.
Here’s what actually happened.
The Deal That Fell Through – and Why That Was the Win
Forrest and Jaron met in Atlanta through the Dealmaker Wealth Society, a community focused on business acquisitions. Their original plan: find a home-service company to buy, install systems, scale it, and repeat.
They found what looked like a solid electrical company in Florida. They went through the full SBA loan process – which, as Jaron notes, “took a lot longer than promised.” They made it all the way to closing week.
Then they backed out.
“Even in the honeymoon period it was still really difficult,” Forrest says. “We thought – this is only going to get worse.”
They lost money on the deposit. But Jaron’s takeaway stuck: no deal is better than a bad deal.
The silver lining? They had already hired a GM named Andy to move to Florida and run the operation. Andy had a small electrical shop in San Diego doing about $4,000 a month – and he was planning to shut it down.
Instead, they asked a simple question: why don’t we just run the playbook here?
Building Keil Electric From $4K/Month
When Forrest and Jaron stepped in, Keil Electric (San Diego) had almost nothing. No Google Business Profile. No backend CRM. No marketing. Andy was calling around and picking up work by reputation alone.
They split ownership in thirds: Forrest would handle marketing, Jaron would fill gaps and drive acquisition strategy, Andy would run the field.
Within 12 months, they were approaching a $1 million run rate.
The first few months were survival mode – mostly commercial work with thin margins, just enough to keep people busy while they built infrastructure. They launched a website, created a Google Business Profile, collected reviews from friends and customers, and set up Go High Level as the operational backbone.
“It’s almost like Microsoft Windows for a computer,” Jaron explains, “but for our marketing and backend system. Every lead that comes in goes into this platform. Call recording, call forwarding, attribution – we know exactly what we spent and what we got back.”
They also brought on Jessica as their CSR early – a hire Forrest credits as foundational. “The quality of the business is really determined by the quality of the team.”
Hard Lessons: Stolen Work, Loose Standards, and Cash Always Tight
Year one wasn’t clean. One long-tenured employee was caught taking side work and had to be let go. The team learned to trust but verify – and noted that AI and automation now make monitoring easier than it used to be.
They also identified a pattern in their early management style: too lenient, not enough standard-setting. “Earlier on we were a lot more lax,” Jaron says. “Anything below this is not acceptable – it took time to get to the point where we were willing to stand up and say that.”
Cash was a constant pressure. Growth consumes cash – new hires, new equipment, months before anyone is fully efficient. Compounding that, they were doing a heavy volume of commercial work: long payment cycles, thin margins, jobs where the bid didn’t always hold.
The pivot to residential changed everything.
“You get the lead in, go out the next day, maybe do the job that day, get paid right after,” Forrest says. “The cash cycle is way faster.” Residential also allowed them to charge a service premium – the experience, the relationship, the speed – versus commercial, where the lowest price usually wins.
Replicating the Playbook: Texas in Seven Months
By the time they turned their attention to a second location, they weren’t guessing anymore. The systems were built. The marketing was dialed in. The compensation structure had gone through five iterations and landed on something performance-based that paid top performers more than a union job.
The Texas opportunity came through Andy’s brother – a strong salesperson who wasn’t interested in moving to California. Rather than push, they built around him.
“It was much more of like a just turn it on,” Forrest says. “When we first started in California we didn’t really know. Once we dialed that in, we just copied and pasted in Texas.”
Within four months, the Texas location broke $100K. Garrett – the salesperson on the ground – is a big part of why. He’s skilled at helping customers understand why a full fix beats a patch, and that ability to help people see the real solution translates directly into higher average ticket sizes.
Seven months in, they were already at $150K/month.
The Holdco Restructure: Giving Up a Piece to Build Something Bigger
Partway through Year 2, the team restructured. They sold both operating companies into a holding company, brought in new partners with exit experience – including one who had completed more than ten acquisitions – and used the capital injection to stabilize cash flow and set a cleaner financial foundation.
“Are we willing to trade a piece of the business?” Jaron asks. “If we make that trade to get a higher probability of the outcome we’re optimizing for, and get there faster and bigger – is that a good trade? Unanimously, yes.”
The new model also shifted strategy: instead of building one company to $10M in a single market, build multiple locations to $1.5–2M each, bundle them together, and hit the same outcome faster. Two different skill sets; they already knew how to reach $1.5M. They didn’t yet know how to get to $10M.
Who They’re Recruiting (And Why)
With Location 3 on deck – likely San Antonio, given its proximity to their Texas base – and a goal of five locations by year’s end, the bottleneck isn’t marketing or capital. It’s operators.
They’re looking for two types:
The Andy persona: The one-man shop. Skilled, respected by customers, working 60-hour weeks, and not making what they should be. The offer: plug into the team, focus on the field, work 40 hours, go home and switch off, and actually make more than before.
The Garrett persona: The strong salesperson working for someone else with no equity path. Building someone else’s business, making good money, but nothing to show at the end. The offer: own a piece, benefit from the multiple-on-exit, and watch what happens when individual performance is part of something that compounds.
“What a lot of people don’t realize,” Jaron says, “is that the value of the business is a multiple of the profit – and as you get a larger profit, the multiple actually goes up. Even if they own a smaller piece, the aggregate of being together means it’s worth two, three, four times as much as they’d have on their own.”
What’s Coming Next
Beyond the operator search, the team is building AI-powered onboarding and permitting infrastructure to remove administrative bottleneck from multi-location management. The vision: operators plug in, focus on the field and the customer experience, and let the backend run.
Forrest also officially merged his marketing operation with Dunzo at the start of this year – partnering with Brandon Vaughn and COO Jenny to focus the agency exclusively on electrical companies. It’s a deliberate niche: they know the space from the inside out, test everything on their own companies first, and build a flywheel of improvement specific to one vertical.
“I don’t know any other marketing agencies out there who own electrical companies,” Forrest says. “We have a unique perspective – we can see what it’s like to be on both sides of it.”
The One Line That Stuck
Jaron’s SpaceX quote landed at the end of the episode and it’s worth repeating:
“Waste money, not time.”
They could have figured all of this out alone. They could have avoided the partners, kept the full cap table, and ground it out. But three years in, with two locations, a functioning holdco, and a path to five locations by year’s end, the math is hard to argue with.
