3x Thesis: The Trade School Flywheel

One of the most underutilised value creation strategies in PE right now.

Buy the education platform.
Buy the service companies.
Place the grads.
Repeat.

Think about it: if you’re investing in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, auto repair....any business reliant on skilled labour.....then you already know the bottleneck isn’t customers. It’s talent.

Technicians don’t fall from the sky. They’re trained. And right now, they’re being trained by someone else, somewhere else and someone else is monetising the pipeline.

So instead of fighting for talent, why not own the source?

Here’s the flywheel:

1. Acquire a trade school or certification business......ideally accredited, ideally in a growing region. They’re often small, cashflow positive, and non-sexy enough to trade at 5–7x EBITDA.
2. Acquire multiple labour-intensive service businesses. Pick your vertical, but go deep not wide. Local density matters.

3. Train workers to your exact spec......curriculum alignment, on-site practicums, “sponsored” job tracks. You create the exact worker you need, not the one the open market delivers.

4. Place the grads into your portfolio companies. Directly, no recruiters, no inflated salaries, no six-week onboarding. Just plug and play.

5. Rinse and scale. Need more techs? Train more. Want to expand geographically? Open a satellite campus and duplicate the model.

Now here’s where it gets fun:
• You save hundreds of thousands in recruiting costs across the hold period.
• You lower your time-to-productivity for new hires.
• You reduce turnover because grads are joining a system they were trained for.
• You capture job placement fees inside the platform, boosting total portfolio EBITDA.
• You wrap the whole thing in a DEI or workforce development story that institutional LPs love.

And if the trade school is non-profit? Even better. They often come with federal grant eligibility, deep-rooted community ties, and a reason to exist that extends beyond profit. You’re not just building a flywheel, you’re building a moat.

Most PE firms say “labour is our biggest constraint.”
Then they do absolutely nothing to structurally solve it.

Stop bidding up companies.
Start owning the inputs.