From 1SEO to a $150M-Plus Roofing Platform: Lance Bachmann’s Next Act

Lance Bachmann made his name helping local businesses win customers. With LB Capital, he has moved to the other side of that relationship: buying into the businesses that answer the phone.

His latest move brings Guaranteed Roof, the Georgia company founded by Matthew Weeks and Chase Howe, into EM Exteriors. The September 25 announcement puts the roofing platform at more than $150 million in revenue across 16 partners. Guaranteed Roof will keep its name and leadership. Financial terms were not disclosed.

For Bachmann, it is another step in a career that has taken him from AT&T to digital marketing, from agency founder to investor, and from selling leads to building the companies behind them.

From the marketing budget to the owner’s chair

A young roofer joins a much larger team

Guaranteed Roof is a relatively young business. Its Better Business Bureau profile dates its start to July 2022. Today, its website markets services across Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, with an offering that includes replacement, repair, cleaning, rejuvenation and commercial coatings.

That mix gives the company several ways to serve a homeowner, including work short of a full replacement. Joining EM Exteriors offers Weeks and Howe a way to pursue the next stage with a larger organization behind them.

It is a different story from the longtime owner selling a company at retirement. Here, a business barely four years old is partnering for its next stretch of growth.

The appeal of that arrangement is easy to understand: keep the name customers recognize and give the people running the shop more help behind the scenes. For neighboring contractors, it also means the familiar local competitor may now have a much larger team supporting its marketing, purchasing and operations.

The digital marketer on the I-95 billboard

Before the roofing acquisitions, Bachmann was the digital marketer with his face on a roadside billboard.

In a May 2019 Philadelphia Inquirer profile, reporter Diane Mastrull described the former AT&T executive promoting 1SEO along I-95. He had founded the agency in 2009 and expanded into IT services with an acquisition in 2017. By the time of the profile, the newspaper reported more than $10 million in agency revenue, roughly $5 million from the IT business and 130 employees across the two operations.

The billboard was a fitting detail. Here was someone selling digital marketing who was perfectly willing to use an old-fashioned way to get attention. In the interview, his emphasis was on commercial results rather than website traffic for its own sake.

For a contractor, that distinction is familiar. A report full of clicks means very little when the schedule is empty. Marketing earns its place when it brings in work the company can sell and deliver.

Moving into ownership takes that idea further. The marketer is usually judged on the opportunities coming in. The owner lives with everything that follows: the estimate, the crew, the materials, the callback and the money still sitting in receivables.

Bachmann’s move into the trades puts those two jobs under the same roof. The growth opportunity is to improve how a company wins work and how it runs once the work arrives.

Watch: Bachmann talks roofing with Roofing Insights

In this earlier Roofing Insights conversation, Bachmann discusses his interest in buying roofing companies and the business behind the acquisitions.

Lance Bachmann’s business timeline

The agency, the investment firm and the roofing deals developed over more than a decade. Here are the milestones that connect them.

From AT&T to EM Exteriors

1SEO kept growing after the ownership change

The agency’s ownership changed in two stages. Skyharbor acquired 1SEO in 2023. Three years later, Scorpion announced its acquisition of the business. In Scorpion’s June 2026 release, Skyharbor managing partner John Shoaf pointed back to the 2023 deal.

LB Capital’s account of its majority sale emphasizes the work that came before it: building a management team, reducing dependence on the founder and getting financial reporting into shape. Those are useful lessons for a contractor approaching a sale, too. A buyer needs to know who will run the business when the founder is no longer making every decision.

The 1SEO story also puts Bachmann on both sides of a broader consolidation trend. Marketing agencies are combining, and so are the home-service businesses buying their services.

The businesses between 1SEO and EM Exteriors

Bachmann’s Build It To Sell It organization lists six sold businesses in its portfolio history: 1SEO, Shock I.T. Support, Cherry Roofing and Siding, Painting Pups, Dilling HVAC and Munz Roofing and Siding. The list spans marketing, IT, painting, heating and cooling, and roofing.

Cherry provides a clear example of where a local contractor can fit into a larger organization. On December 30, 2024, Victors Home Solutions announced that Cherry had joined the company, giving Victors its first branches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

For Bachmann, those businesses form the bridge between the agency years and the current roofing platform. Customer acquisition remains part of the story, but so do hiring, production, management and preparing a business for its next owner.

A network that reaches beyond the deal table

Build It To Sell It also offers coaching, shop tours, conferences, sales training and a podcast. That puts Bachmann in regular conversation with the same kinds of owners his investment business wants to work with.

There is a practical advantage to that kind of visibility. An owner may encounter the brand through a conference or a shop tour long before considering a sale. It gives the business a way to build relationships around the everyday problems contractors are trying to solve: getting work, developing people and making the company less dependent on one person.

Keep the local name. Share the back office.

EM Exteriors lists Bachmann as founder and Bill Rossell as chief executive. Its website describes a shared setup built around ServiceTitan and Hatch AI, in-house search and paid-media expertise, group purchasing and unified accounting. The company also describes the platform as debt-free and says it is working toward a collective liquidity event.

The pitch is to let local teams keep serving their markets while the wider group supplies capabilities that are expensive to build one shop at a time. That can mean better purchasing terms, more help with marketing or a finance team that gives managers useful numbers quickly.

For the contractor across town, this is where consolidation becomes tangible. The logo on the truck may stay the same. The resources behind it can change considerably.

Growth has to show up on the job

Buying another business can make a platform bigger overnight. Making it run better takes longer.

The work shows up in ordinary places: calls answered promptly, estimates priced correctly, materials arriving before the crew, and a manager catching a margin problem while there is still time to fix it. A customer should feel the improvement even if they never hear the parent company’s name.

For any roofing group, the useful measures go beyond total sales. Existing branches should be getting stronger. Rework should be controlled. Good people should have reasons to stay. And the money shown on the sales report needs to make its way into the bank.

Those are the details that turn a collection of acquisitions into a business that can keep growing.

What a smaller contractor can take from this

You do not need 16 companies to borrow the useful parts of this approach.

Start with the jobs only the owner can do today. Can someone else price the difficult estimate? Can a manager handle the schedule without calling the owner six times? Can the bookkeeper explain last month’s margin while there is still time to act on it?

Write down how the work gets done. Give managers clear expectations and enough authority to meet them. Track the full cost of a job, including the return trip. Connect the advertising budget to completed work rather than stopping at lead counts.

That makes a company easier to own before it makes it easier to sell. It also gives the owner more choices: keep building, bring in a partner, pass it to a successor or pursue an exit from a stronger position.

Thinking about a partner? Ask what changes on Monday morning.

• Who will control pricing, hiring and local purchasing? Get clear on which decisions stay with the branch.
• What does the shared support cost? Understand the fees and overhead allocations alongside any purchasing savings.
• What happens to the equity you keep? Have your deal and tax advisers explain your rights and the terms of a future sale.
• Who handles the transition for crews, subcontractors, customer records and warranty work? Ask for a practical schedule and named responsibilities.
• What has improved at other branches? Talk to owners who have already gone through the process.

From getting attention to building a company

The I-95 billboard and the roofing platform belong to different chapters of Bachmann’s career, but the connection is clear. Both begin with winning the customer.

EM Exteriors adds the larger challenge: building an organization that can deliver on that customer’s expectations across more brands and more markets. Guaranteed Roof is the latest addition.

For contractors watching the story, the useful question is close to home: what would have to change for your company to grow without everything coming back to you?

Methodology

Reporting draws on the September 25 Guaranteed Roof announcement, Diane Mastrull’s 2019 Philadelphia Inquirer profile, Scorpion and Victors Home Solutions acquisition announcements, and company histories. Sources were reviewed September 27, 2026. Company figures and portfolio dates are attributed in the text and timeline.