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Adam Taylor and the art of keeping the local keys
After a career leading airport and facilities workforces, Adam Taylor now runs Legacy Service Partners. His next assignment is to help local home-service businesses grow while keeping their leadership close to the work.
Kyle Beste and the value of playing both ends
Before he became CEO of Clarion Home Services Group, Kyle Beste scored 1,445 points for Carleton and earned recognition for his defense. His route through wearables and service businesses leads to a new team of hometown brands.
Stellar
Stellar is a Dallas-based, technology-driven marketplace that connects property managers and homeowners with vetted local tradespeople to get home maintenance and repairs done right. Founded in 2016 as IFM Restoration and rebranded to Stellar in 2022, the company pairs software, AI and a network of thousands of contractors to resolve maintenance at scale, initially for the single-family rental industry and increasingly for homeowners across the U.S. Sun Belt. It serves major single-family rental operators and books repair appointments for homeowners across 30-plus markets.
Evan Brown
Evan Brown is the CEO and co-founder of Rebar, a New York vertical-AI company building an operating system for the HVAC, electrical, and plumbing trades. Rebar's platform reads blueprints and spec books, pulls out tens of thousands of data points per project, and turns estimating and quoting work that once took days into a task of minutes. Brown grew up in his uncle's HVAC supplier office and later spent years as an estimator and sales engineer before starting Rebar in October 2024 with Andrew Schwartz. In March 2026 the company closed a $14M Series A led by Prudence.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
Stratus
Stratus is a cloud-based BIM-to-fabrication platform built for MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) contractors. It connects the digital model - Revit, AutoCAD and Autodesk Fabrication - to the prefab shop and the field, handling spooling, smart labeling, bend sheets, weld maps, material tracking and real-time productivity metrics so trade contractors can move from design to installed pipe, duct and conduit with less waste and fewer manual handoffs. Developed by GTP Software, Inc. (formerly GTP Services), Stratus serves large mechanical and sheet-metal contractors across North America and raised a $32M Series B in 2025.
Housecall Pro
Housecall Pro is an all-in-one, cloud-based business management platform built for home service professionals - plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, cleaners, and other tradespeople. It folds scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, payments, marketing, and customer management into a single mobile-first app, increasingly layered with AI tools that answer calls, book jobs, and answer accounting questions. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Denver, the company serves tens of thousands of service businesses and has powered well over 100 million completed jobs.