The Army sergeant who built three private equity-backed companies, bought 58 businesses along the way, and delivered $2.5 billion in exits explains how a founder actually gets from $10 million to a sale — and why most of them never make it past $30 million.

Adam Coffey started as a guy in a truck. He served as an Army sergeant, learned to run a business inside GE when it was the most admired company in the world, and then spent 21 years as CEO of three national service companies backed by nine private equity sponsors. He has sat on both sides of the table more often than almost anyone Doug Foley has talked to, and he discusses scaling, raising capital, and selling the way a mechanic talks about an engine.

He starts with the unit. Revenue growth is not the number. The number is what one truck, one crew, one location earns, because if you fix the economics of one you have fixed the economics of six thousand. From there he lays out the 30-20-10 rule — thirty percent gross margin, twenty percent overhead, ten percent net profit — as the benchmark for whether a business is actually healthy or just busy.

Then he explains the stall. Founders get stuck between $10 million and $30 million because the business still runs through them. The loyalty traps, where the people who were there at the beginning quietly become the ceiling. The 30:1 manager ratio. And the shift he says most founders resist: stop playing first chair and become the conductor.

The middle of the conversation is about money. Growth is expensive, and self-funding it is slower and riskier than most owners admit. Adam takes apart the myths about private equity — what a buyout fund actually is, why selling a minority stake can cost a founder more than they expect, and the Rule of 130 for telling whether your net worth is dangerously concentrated in one asset. Money, he argues, is a separate expertise from operating, and the founders who raise it well treat capital better than it’s used to being treated. He walks through how a well-written thesis raised $100 million before a single company had been bought, and the deals he still rejects in five minutes.

He closes with the exit itself. What to fix twelve months before you go to market: sell-side quality of earnings, moving to accrual accounting, and understanding the EBITDA multiple you will actually trade at. Then a story that makes the whole conversation concrete — a founder who went from $500,000 in profit to a $31 million offer in two years.

If you run a service business or a blue-collar company and want to scale past $10 million, work with private equity, or plan your exit, this is the playbook.

In this episode: the billion-dollar exit that changed everything, from Army sergeant to GE turnaround specialist, fix one truck and you fix 6,000, why founders stall between $10 million and $30 million, loyalty traps and the 30:1 manager ratio, the 30-20-10 rule for gross margin, overhead, and net profit, why growth is expensive and the limits of self-funding versus private equity, the truth about private equity and buyout funds, the Rule of 130 and diversifying your net worth, why selling a minority stake can cost you, why money is a separate expertise, treating money better than it’s used to being treated, how a thesis raised $100 million with no company attached, the deals Adam rejects in five minutes, what to fix twelve months before selling your business, sell-side quality of earnings and accrual accounting, where to find Adam Coffey, why not you, and the founder who went from $500,000 in profit to a $31 million offer in two years.