After finishing her active duty in the U.S. Air Force, Melissa Boatwright set out on a prestigious career path in corporate communications. While she climbed the corporate ladder, she hoped for a future with more community. She found that her strengths were in operationalizing strategy and figuring out how to take big concepts and distill them into day-to-day operations. By Kelsi Trinidad
A New Lease on Life
After finishing her active duty in the U.S. Air Force, Melissa Boatwright set out on a prestigious career path in corporate communications. While she climbed the corporate ladder, she hoped for a future with more community. She found that her strengths were in operationalizing strategy and figuring out how to take big concepts and distill them into day-to-day operations.
While earning his MBA, Boatwright’s husband took a class about buying businesses and making them more profitable. That planted a seed, and the Boatwrights began to look for businesses they could buy and transform to be profitable with their business experience.
In February 2020, they came across Ace Handyman Services®, a company that provides skilled local crafts people to handle commercial and residential handyman tasks, in Portland, Oregon. The couple saw this as a potential future corporate exit strategy while also adding a third revenue stream for their family in the meantime. In August 2020, the Boatwrights bought the location.
Given that the location had been in business for 10 years, it was already generating strong revenue, and the Boatwrights were able to have general managers run the location while they were working their corporate nine-to-fives.
“There was a ton of meat on the bone regarding the Ace branding,” said Boatwright. “The previous owner hadn’t had the runway to capitalize on that, and we just felt like there was more growth that we could give it in the first few years.”
In 2023, Boatwright was laid off from her corporate job and was able to dedicate more time toward the location’s growth, becoming the general manager herself.
In their first year of owning the business, they maintained the business’s revenue run rate from the previous three years while also adding health insurance benefits and adjusting employee pay to market levels.
“I don’t know that the construction industry has a great reputation for how it cares for its employees,” said Boatwright. “And so, we wanted to bring that to our business.” Since then, the Boatwrights have grown their business with a focus on taking care of our craftspeople, office team and estimators.
Kelsi Trinidad