After the Acquisition: Rebrand or Leave It Alone?

**John Wilson** (0:00)
Today, we're talking re-branding.

**Jack Carr** (0:02)
You don't need branding, man. Like, you can grow a big business without branding.

**John Wilson** (0:05)
This will cause disruption. Is the juice worth the squeeze?

**Jack Carr** (0:08)
When we start to think about re-branding, where are the benefits start to pop out at?

**John Wilson** (0:12)
The big thing for me has been, are the people excited to work here?

**Jack Carr** (0:17)
One team, one dream, baby.

**John Wilson** (0:18)
We are just building one big business. You're sort of like riding the bus on this. So like, how do you think about this is going to go down?

**Jack Carr** (0:24)
I've tried branding. The reason that we never did branding before is we just burned money.

**John Wilson** (0:35)
Welcome back to Owned and Operated, a top 200 business podcast.
I'm joined by my good friend today, Jack Carr, a top 150 US Business Podcast, as he has enjoyed reminding me over this past week. Congrats on that. That's freaking huge, dude.

**Jack Carr** (0:52)
Thank you, thank you. Yeah, welcome back.

**John Wilson** (0:54)
You and Greg Cardone.

**Jack Carr** (0:55)
This is a solid way to start. No, it was Tony Robbins. It's like my face next to Tony Robbins' face, which is the weirdest thing. I never would have thought that would have happened.

**John Wilson** (1:03)
We're famous, we're famous.

**Jack Carr** (1:06)
I told you the other day, I got spotted at the gym.

**John Wilson** (1:09)
That is crazy.

**Jack Carr** (1:09)
I was like, this is weird. Z-list celebrity status.

**John Wilson** (1:12)
Dude, Z-list. And you were getting yoked.
Spotted and yoked.

**Jack Carr** (1:16)
Yeah, it comes with zero benefits. There are no benefits.

**John Wilson** (1:21)
That's hilarious. Anyways, on this show, we talk home service, we talk about how to grow home service, and we generally have a lot of fun doing it. So today, we're talking rebranding.

**Jack Carr** (1:32)
Why are we talking rebranding, John?

**John Wilson** (1:33)
Why are we? Why are we talking rebranding, Jack?

**Jack Carr** (1:38)
You have any plans to do any rebranding?

**John Wilson** (1:39)
I do have some plans to do some rebranding. So we've we have bought we have bought 14 businesses now. We closed on another one last week. If you are keeping score from your car, that was our fourth one this year. We actually are thinking about putting our fifth one under contract here early this week or next. So look out.
Yeah, which that's pretty cool. We have like a nice a nice pipeline, which is awesome. And as we as we are doing this, we have now five brands that we're working with, which is a lot. And so we're starting to think about, okay, when should we rebrand? Who should we rebrand? And like, should we rebrand at all? Which I think is a kind of a reasonable question. There's a lot of PE aggregators out there that don't rebrand.
They build like, you know, they have 20 brands or however many in their business. But yeah, so like, what do you think? Why rebrand at all? We actually had a really similar conversation with Rich Jordan six months ago.

**Jack Carr** (2:47)
Most don't, right? Most don't rebrand.
Interestingly enough, yeah, Rich and I talked about this at SMBash quite a bit as well. So, I mean, there's some definite, to put some guardrails on both sides of it, right? There's some definite times to rebrand and there's some definite times not to rebrand, right? So, starting off with definite times to rebrand is really small tuck-ins that have zero brand whatsoever, you know, sub 400,000 in top line. There's nothing there. Like, if you're buying that business and merging it into yours, right, there's no brand.

**John Wilson** (3:22)
I have done that on Tuesday.

**Jack Carr** (3:24)
It takes a week. Like, don't even worry about it. Just rebrand, rip it and call it a day. So that's the easy ones, right? Nobody cares about Joe's Mechanical if it had 200 customers. Like, and if they did, they're probably not going to become your customers. So it's not a it's a win win either way.
And then on the other side of that coin is the don't rebrands. And that's, I think, for this podcast, like Apex, like all these big the big, I don't know of any big consolidators that are rebranding.

**John Wilson** (3:55)
I don't, I don't know. I mean, I think the neighborhood underneath, they do potentially underneath. So like the way to think about if it's private equity, there's like there's Apex and then there's a company Apex owns. Like I think Frank Gay in Florida is Apex. So they've got Apex. Apex does not rebrand. If Frank Gay buys a company, they probably rebrand.