Carrie Kelsch slipped into the office, largely unnoticed, and settled in at her desk.
That day in October 2022 marked Kelsch’s return to A+ Garage Doors, then in Sandy, Utah, two months after the death of her daughter, Kailee Brynne, of brain cancer.
Kailee was 26.
“I just stared at my computer,” Kelsch says. “I couldn't gather my thoughts to do anything."
Losing Kailee — Kelsch’s lunch-and-shoe-shopping bestie, the life of any dance party, and always a friend to the underdog — devastated the company CEO. At the time, getting back into the office provided no solace.
She gave it a couple of hours.
"It was just kind of a numb day," she says. "And then I left."
Kelsch had stepped away months earlier to act as Kailee’s caregiver, leaving the executive team —Mitch Kelsch and Parker Kelsch, her cousins, and Ryan Rowell—to steer the business she had started from scratch.
"Rowell, you guys can run this company," she told her colleague. “I don't even know where I fit.”
More days like that first day back followed. Finally, Parker and Mitch asked the CEO what made her happy.
"I like growing the business," Kelsch told them. "That makes me happy and gives me a lot of purpose and drive."
Their response?
"All right, let's go for it," Parker says.
Kelsch calls her daughter’s death and what followed the single biggest trajectory change in the two decades of A+ Garage Doors, which is pacing toward $50 million in revenue in 2025.
Rowell says it also helped Kelsch evolve as a leader, from “very vulnerable to being the strong yet compassionate person she is today."
The pain and emptiness from Kailee’s death remain. But those emotions also steel her determination to make sure her families are taken care of.
"I know how much they give, with their life," she says. "When I say my family, this is not just people related to me. This is everybody who comes here.
"People I care about so deeply will be able to have life-changing money, so I love that."
It’s what Kailee would have wanted.
Her early fight to succeed
The path to financial security was hardly traditional for Kelsch, who grew up in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, not far from Park City. Her father, Gary, ran a successful cabinet company despite limited education. A "hero, mentor, and idol," he inspired entrepreneurship for Kelsch and her 12 siblings. She calls her mother, Faye, a "badass" for raising the lot with limited use of her right arm and a limp.
"My mom inspired me to keep going and to not let limitation win," she adds.
But Kelsch certainly faced limitation. Tiny Silver Creek Academy dissolved during her 11th-grade year, and she planned to homeschool.
"Instead I got married very young, at age 16," she says. "And once you're like, 'Oh, I'm married. I don't have to finish school. And now I have a baby."
With Elijah in tow, Kelsch never completed that education. At 18, she gave birth a month early to a second child, Camron, but an illness and a fragile immune system took him after just 12 days.
In the year after Camron’s passing, when she was 19, Kelsch started her first company, Cuter Kids, producing headbands and foot frills and earning placement in stores.
The birth of Kailee and another son, Mason, expanded the young family, which struggled to manage money and moved from basement to basement for shelter.
"We just lived and mooched off people," she says.
"Not a lot of people believed I would ever amount to anything. My personality and my competitive nature pushed me to prove them wrong. I was doing it out of survival instinct for me and my kids.”
Her entrepreneurship, and moxie, would prove vital. After 10 years of marriage, a divorce made Carrie Kelsch a single mother of three.
"Us against the world,” she says. “Just like all the single moms out there."
A new door opens
Kelsch worked at Home Depot and sold timeshares, and by the time of the divorce, Kelsch had come up with enough money to buy a house, providing stability for her children. She took a job working with a mortgage broker in 2003.
Then she began dating Ryan Humphreys, who inspired Kelsch to open her own garage door company.
"You'll have a place for the kids to work," he told her.
"Oh, I do want that," she responded.
In 2005, using Kelsch’s entrepreneurial spirit and $75,000 investment and Humphreys' knowledge of the industry, A+ Garage Doors opened for business out of her home in Herriman.
Humphreys would soon move into a career as a consultant, but the two married a year later and eventually became parents to a son, Stratton.
Growth came slow and steady in the first few years. Perhaps appropriately, A+ would add a garage at Kelsch’s home, about four times the size of a standard garage, as the company began to expand.
But two key events — a strategic decision and a second personal tragedy — would be transformational for both A+ and for Kelsch.
Triumphs and then tragedy
A+ Garage Doors, in those early years, grew, in some ways, in spite of itself.
"Oh my gosh, we were a mess," Kelsch says. "Nobody was running the company. I owned it, but I had no idea who was running it."
After learning about a Goldman Sachs program, 10,000 Small Businesses, Kelsch went to school in 2013. The 13-week program introduced her to new ways to evaluate A+’s finances and to be more intentional about hiring the right people and putting them in the right jobs.
The experience inspired system and workflow updates and introduced new marketing tools. It also taught her that her company had a culture, a lesson essential to what A+ has become.
Kelsch learned the power of delegating. She would add CFO Del Goehring, who bolstered her confidence when he told her, "You run this company better than I've seen most corporate men run a company."
A+ had taken off. Revenue began to grow 30% annually.
But by April 2019, lights and shadows began to create negative impacts on Kailee, so Kelsch took her to a hospital emergency room.
The diagnosis: Glioblastoma.
“We got rushed right in to get brain surgery,” Kelsch says. “I was the caregiver for maybe two weeks, and then she's off living her life again.”
Two months later, Kailee required another hospital visit. After a significant seizure in October 2021 and one more surgery, Kailee decided that would be the last one.
"Then we just rode it out," Kelsch says.
Late that year and into 2022, caring for Kailee took top priority for Kelsch. Guiding A+ Garage Doors became the responsibility of Mitch Kelsch, the chief business officer; Parker Kelsch, the chief operating officer; and Rowell, the general manager. They’d reach out for her insight at times.
“I can't tell you anything,” Kelsch remembers telling them. “You're just going to have to figure it out. I just mentally can't help you at all.”
‘My way of dealing with life’
In August 2022, Kailee’s fight ended.
“I was messed up,” Kelsch says. “I was angry.”
Husband Ryan offered strength, first in care and then in her grief. A+ Garage Doors grew, and Kelsch’s passion began to return. Yet the feelings wouldn’t subside.
"I literally wished I was dying," Kelsch says. "’When is it my turn to die?’
“My other kids are like, 'Ouch, Mom.' And I'm like, 'I know. It just … hurts … so … bad.'"
She remembers her first venture into a shoe store without her bestie.
"I broke down crying and had to leave," she says. "And it tears me up even thinking about it."
When work eventually provided some refuge, she dug in.
“It's just my way of dealing with life,” Kelsch says. “Do I think it was healthy? No. But I also feel like it helped get me to a stable place."
The company founder found a new niche: Face of A+ Garage Doors. After being involved in every aspect of the business for so long, it was a shift.
"When I first started," says Mitch Kelsch, a nine-year employee, "she was very involved in the business and wore a lot of hats. Very involved in every aspect of the office.
"It took a little bit for her to find out where she fits in the company again. But she did it amazingly.”
Soft-spoken by nature, eager to give credit to others, Kelsch has stepped into this even more visible role with the 144-employee company, whose home base is now a sparkling facility in West Valley City.
Kelsch draws applause at team meetings even before she distributes raffle winnings. She wears a paper crown and parades through the office to award bonuses to loud music and cheering.
Kelsch also plays along with the executive team’s inside joke. “The Imperial March,” Darth Vader’s theme, accompanies her walk to the front to address the A+ team.
“You can feel the love and energy,” Rowell says. “She's really embraced (her) role, which has taken the culture to even a higher level.”
Outside of the company? Parker Kelsch, her longest-tenured employee at 19½ years, can’t avoid her, whether it’s seeing a commercial while filling his gas tank, watching a morning show, or scrolling social media.
“She's all over the place,” he says. “In the last couple of years, she's really stepped into that.”
Without question, others have noticed.
Acting on purpose
Jordan Dubin, a co-founder of the Guild Garage Group with Joe Delaney and Sean Slazyk, reached out to Kelsch in August 2023 to inquire about a possible acquisition.
For Dubin, it went poorly.
"We didn't have a single company under LOI (letter of intent)," says Dubin, who was 26 at the time. "She let me give a two-minute spiel and then hung up the phone on me.
"And as she jokingly, but also not jokingly, says, 'He was a punk-ass kid who didn't know what he was talking about.'
“She's a hundred percent right.”
That story doesn’t surprise Ellen Rohr, the Brand and Industry Marketing Lead for ServiceTitan and a founder and an owner of Zoom Drain. Rohr met Kelsch at Pantheon, ServiceTitan's conference for customers, a couple of years ago, and the two communicate most weeks and are part of a text group called "The Sisterhood."
"If I have a business challenge,” Rohr says, “she's my first phone call."
Rohr calls Kelsch a high-level thinker and “always the smartest person in the room.”
“She's soft-spoken, but don't let that fool you,” Rohr says. “She is a boss."
Dubin knows that, too. And it turns out he might have known what he was talking about, after all.
“That punk-ass kid knew exactly the company to call, and it was A+,” Dubin says.
By 2024, Guild reached an agreement to partner with A+ Garage Doors. The transaction was structured similarly to a merger, Dubin says, “with A+ opting to take no chips off the table but instead rolling 100% of their equity with the transaction.”
Rohr has watched her friend welcome this new role as “queen of the company.”
“Her job is to represent,” Rohr says. “I think she'll be very eager to step into that role as the representative of A+ and of Guild."
Dubin has "zero doubt" that success in the Salt Lake City market and in offices opened in St. George, Utah, and, in 2025, in Las Vegas will propel the company past $100 million in revenue by 2030.
Dubin, who holds undergraduate and MBA degrees from Harvard, calls Kelsch "the single most impressive entrepreneur I've ever met in my life."
Regardless of all of that high praise, for all of the success experienced, the partnership with Guild Garage Group has an even higher purpose, one she “really, really leaned into after a tragic event,” Dubin says.
Caring for family, changing lives
Dubin refers to Kelsch as the “mother to us all” at A+ Garage Doors. Kelsch hears similar affection from her work family.
"Mama Carrie's got us," she says, echoing one employee, “and it's that they know I've got their backs.”
She lived that out in the transaction with Guild.
"I was able to hold some of the shares, so I can give those shares out to the employees," Kelsch says. "When we do turn again eventually, they have skin in the game and they'll be able to get rewarded for that. And it was a substantial amount. So I feel like I'm able to change some lives."
And those around her will have stronger foundations and more financial peace of mind.
It’s what Kailee would have wanted.
"It's either inspired by her,” Kelsch says, “or I'm trying to fill the gaps of the pain.
"She was always very proud of me. So I know she would've, a hundred percent, been supportive.
“She would’ve been incredibly proud of where we are and how many people's lives are changing because of the work that we've all put in."
