Travis Trentham, president of the successful Goody Garage Doors in suburban Phoenix, just needed to move out of the way to grow the company.
"You're stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime," his friends would tell him.
Mick Dapcevic, president of operations for Garage Door Medics in San Diego, admitted feeling a bit burned out. And that's significant for a fiftysomething thrill-seeker who surfs in the Pacific Ocean and leaps from airplanes.
Carrie Kelsch, the CEO and office mom of A+ Garage Doors in Salt Lake City, just wanted to take care of family.
And Ron Burns, brand president of One Clear Choice Garage Doors in Colorado, would benefit from the support and insight new teammates could offer.
Partnerships with Guild Garage Group have given these entrepreneurs and leaders of 21 other garage door companies everything they needed—and more.
"The opportunity to really grow and have the resources, not just monetarily, but systems, best practices, other companies to learn from all the things they have put together, is special," Dapcevic says.
From stone age to industry on the rise
Guild Garage Group, founded in 2023 by Jordan Dubin, Joe Delaney, and Sean Slazyk, buys majority ownership in garage door service companies. Guild provides resources, sales training, and networking and learning opportunities for those companies to unlock new growth.
Company owners retain a minority stake and keep their teams in place, and Guild leaves decisions on culture or how to train technicians to those brand presidents.
"We ask you, before we start integrating, 'what are the top three things you want to do in your business?'" says Tim O'Reilly, the Guild Garage Group CEO. "Most people want to develop their team. They want to have marketing resources. And they want to have great training and development for not only their technicians but their office support staff as well. That's where we spent our energy, time, and effort, getting the additional resources for brands to be able to level up."
Collectively, the Guild brands are pacing above $250 million in revenue for 2025. Guild employs a leadership team led by O’Reilly; Todd Ertel, chief financial officer; and Jake Wold, the chief operating officer whose Right Way Garage Doors also partnered with Guild. The Guild group totals 38 on its corporate team and more than 900 employees across a group of brands expected to grow from 25 to 30 by the end of 2025.
"We came in to build Guild, but we're stewards of Guild,” Dubin says of himself, Delaney, and Slazyk, who met while working for the private equity firm L Catterton. “It's about bringing the smartest and the best minds together, and then allow us to figure out the resources and the manpower to take the vision and your domain expertise and make it a national platform."
In fact, Dubin calls their partners the Mount Rushmore of an industry Guild views as high potential, a post-pandemic find for investors with, Dubin says, $16 billion in addressable market and 15,000 independent operators.
Dubin, who describes himself as a “serial M&A entrepreneur,” says trades industries such as HVAC, plumbing, and electrical are more modernized than the fragmented garage door industry.
“Within that backdrop, you have these few really powerful exceptions, exceptional owners, exceptional companies, that are so far ahead of everyone else in their market that they have this almost unnatural organic growth,” Dubin says. “Why? Because as we say, it's like going into a knife fight with a bazooka.
“When your digital marketing is so far superior, your training is so far superior, your price book is so far superior, your connection to digitalization is so far superior than everybody else in your market, it's unfair. It is an industry on the rise, and 99% of the industry is almost in the stone age and 1% is just running away from the rest of the industry.”
The connection to digitalization means a connection to ServiceTitan, a leading software provider that assists technicians in the field and maximizes garage door business revenue. ServiceTitan, required for use by Guild partners, delivers high visibility for data and KPIs that get shared across the platform and drive accurate benchmarking.
"You set a target, and people think it's crazy, but then you actually hit it,” Delaney says in an episode of ServiceTitan’s Toolbox for the Trades with host Jackie Aubel. “We send daily KPI reports; everybody sees everybody else's close rate. 'Oh my gosh, I didn't know you could get a close rate that high.' And all of a sudden, it becomes possible.
“Those daily KPIs actually unlock what is possible, and you see brands start to chase that and then meet and exceed that.
“And then we have to raise the target,” Delaney says with a laugh.
The three co-founders are also beginning to grow another venture, Galaxy Services Partners, for commercial door companies. And it’s that focus, on the door industry, that Dubin says separates Guild from being considered a private equity firm.
“We don't have multiple funds we manage,” Dubin says. “We don't have a massive group of limited partners whose pools of money we manage.
"This is a startup," he adds. "The investors who believed in us and gave us money in the very beginning, it was only to focus on the door industry. And there were no kind of lockup periods. And there were no fund bylaws like you have in a traditional private equity firm. It was a true startup structure. And that is how we always want to be."
Shared expertise, shared wins
Guild and Trentham's Goody Garage Doors announced their partnership in August 2024. The good-natured Trentham is matter-of-fact when explaining what Goody has been able to achieve in the past year.
"Getting me out of the way of growth would probably be a big thing because I was involved with everything," Trentham says.
In return for Trentham working on the business instead of in the business, Guild has helped fund new managers to whom Trentham could spread the work.
"To grow to a high number, you need to be able to diversify and delegate to many other people so you can actually grow," Trentham says. "We went from $5.5 million to this year at $12 million. I don't know if that would've been possible if I was doing everything that I was doing before and I didn't have all the managers in place and everybody helping and caring."
And there’s spreading the love, too. Guild also agreed to offer equity to Goody managers and high performers.
"I would never have been able to do or understood even how to do it," Trentham says, "and they've helped me make my team even stronger and better."
As part of the move to this partnership, Colorado-based One Clear Choice yielded its Atlanta market to Guild teammate All Four Seasons Garage Doors of Marietta, GA. Ron Burns, managing partner of One Clear Choice with founder and owner Chris Chapman, says revenue in the Colorado market is up 22% from 2024 to 2025, and it has grown five times since One Clear Choice partnered with ServiceTitan in 2018.
And now Burns benefits from guidance and expertise he can easily seek from other Guild companies leaders.
"It gives me confidence to be able to call and say, 'How did you do this?'” Burns says. “And that goes from everything from installing a garage door that might be more complicated than I've ever seen to marketing or human resources or payroll."
Dapcevic, whose company was among the first in the garage door industry to partner with ServiceTitan in 2017, similarly likes hearing key strategies used successfully by other Guild leaders.
“And being a part of something like that has given us that opportunity,” he says. “ It's given me new vigor in the business after 35 years."
And for A+ Garage Doors, their successful opening of a greenfield office in St. George, UT, was among the reasons Guild took notice. With the partnership in place, A+ has added to its portfolio with a Las Vegas office, opened in 2025, that has exceeded $90,000 per month in revenue in each of the last three months.
"We couldn't have done that without Guild," Kelsch says. "We can actually give it the resources we need to really launch a good location. That's a huge one for me."
Yet it’s not just the brands that are benefiting from Guild. That’s working both ways.
Dubin, who earned his undergraduate degree and MBA from Harvard, says the company owners in Guild have taught him more about business than anything he ever learned in a classroom.
"In actuality, building Guild was my real business school experience," Dubin says. "Meeting, becoming friends with, and learning from all our owners has taught me more about operations and leadership than any professor ever did. Every day I am in awe of the sheer brilliance of some of our brand presidents.
“I often joke and say that when I grow up, I want to be just like Carrie Kelsch, but it's really true. I hope to one day have the business acumen she has.”
