theses

3x Thesis: The “Blue-Collar SaaS” Rollup

Lee McCabe

12 Oct 2025 — 1 min read

Everyone’s chasing the next vertical SaaS winner in finance, healthcare, or HR.

Meanwhile, the trades are quietly becoming one of the best software rollup opportunities out there.

What I call “Blue-Collar SaaS”.........job schedulers, quoting tools, dispatch systems, customer communications platforms, CRMs for trades.

Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, landscaping, pest control. These industries run on tight schedules, field teams, and margin pressure. And most of them are still coordinating their operations on whiteboards, text threads and email chains.

This isn’t about giving them another dashboard. It’s about owning the workflows that make money move.

Here are three reasons this roll-up play is compelling:

1. Fragmentation creates opportunity.
There are hundreds of small, niche software players built by former tradespeople. They know the workflow, but the products are clunky, don’t integrate, and lack modern UX or analytics. Most are sub-scale. No one owns the stack.

2. The use case is mission-critical.
These tools handle quoting, scheduling, dispatch, and payments. Once embedded, they’re hard to rip out. You might churn a CRM but you’re not churning the thing that tells 12 vans where to be tomorrow.

3. Consolidation drives defensibility.
Buy the fragmented vertical tools. Build a shared platform layer......payments, SMS/email, routing, reporting. Layer in AI for quoting, inventory, and dynamic dispatch. Suddenly you’ve built the ServiceTitan of contractors doing $2M–$15M a year.

It won’t be glamorous. It’ll be FULL of onboarding headaches, support tickets, and integrations no one wants to pay for.

But it will be profitable. Defensible. And eventually, indispensable.

That’s the kind of platform PE used to get excited about.

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