compounding marketing engines.

Sheppard is the specialist marketing practice for private equity sponsors running residential home services platforms. We provide three integrated services: a structured marketing audit (pre-close as a deal-team input, or post-close as the Day-1 plan), value creation (the 100-day playbook installing the marketing operating system), and execution (running the marketing function across the platform through exit). We are measured on EBITDA contribution, not impressions.

Most agencies sell retainers against unclear briefs and report on impressions. Sheppard operates at the platform level: we build the operating model, run the full digital marketing engine (local SEO, paid search, paid social, lifecycle, CRO, content, brand, analytics, reputation), and tie outcomes to platform-level EBITDA. We work with three to five PE platforms at a time, not hundreds of clients. Portcos own everything we build — the next sponsor inherits it cleanly at exit.

Residential trades only: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, pest control, pool and spa, garage door, flooring, restoration, and landscaping and lawn. We do not work in commercial trades, consumer brands, or non-services categories. Each vertical has its own playbook respecting its unit economics, seasonality, ticket sizes, and competitive dynamics.

Any of four stages: pre-LOI (marketing audit as a deal-team input alongside your CDD provider's commercial DD work), first 60 days post-close (audit + 100-day plan), mid-hold (value creation acceleration or fixing a stalled portco), and pre-exit (data room prep, growth narrative, transferable systems documentation). Each engagement runs the same operating model, sized to the question the sponsor needs answered.

A marketing audit is typically a 3–4 week sprint, producing a working assessment with an EBITDA-impact estimate that the future operator uses as the Day-1 plan (and the deal team can use as a marketing input pre-close). The 100-day value creation install is 60–120 days. Ongoing execution runs through the hold period and into exit, either as an embedded marketing function or as managed-agency oversight on the sponsor's behalf.

No. Sheppard is built around the operating realities of residential home services platforms — multi-DMA roll-ups, lead-driven trade economics, dispatch and booked-call discipline, route density, seasonality, and the specific exit dynamics of this category. Specialization is the entire point of the practice.

Three structural reasons. First, the operator base is fragmented — tens of thousands of single-DMA owner-operators with no roll-up consolidator at scale until the last decade. Second, the unit economics are strong: recurring service contracts, high-ticket replacement work, defensible local moats, and weather-driven demand that doesn't move with the macro cycle. Third, the marketing and operations functions inside most legacy operators are structurally under-built — meaning sponsors can buy a fundamentally sound business and capture 150-400 bps of EBITDA in the first 18 months by professionalizing the operating layer. The largest residential HVAC platforms — Apex Service Partners, Champions Group, Service Champions — have demonstrated that consolidation thesis at scale.

Six metrics matter most: customer acquisition cost trend (normalized for channel-mix shift, not raw blended), sourced-revenue contribution by channel, booked-call rate, average ticket trend by lead source, brand investment as a percentage of revenue, and modeled EBITDA contribution from marketing levers. Generic ad-platform metrics — impressions, clicks, CPC, CTR — are lagging indicators that miss what's happening at the platform level and shouldn't appear in sponsor-facing marketing reporting.