What Watsco’s acquisition of Jackson Supply reveals about building value in the trades—and why National Mechanical Services is pursuing the opportunity in commercial plumbing.
Picture a contractor pulling into a supply branch before the first job of the day. Inside are the equipment, replacement parts and people needed to get that job moving. Across town, a plumbing crew is preparing to restore water to a commercial building.
Neither scene looks like a major investment story.
Yet these ordinary transactions sit inside an extraordinary business opportunity: owning and strengthening the companies that keep buildings working.
Watsco has spent decades building around that idea. Its acquisition of Jackson Supply Company offers a particularly clear picture of the model—and of the opportunity National Mechanical Services sees on the contracting side of the mechanical industry.
First, understand the company doing the buying
Watsco is the largest distributor of air-conditioning, heating and refrigeration products in the Americas. It supplies contractors with the equipment and parts they install and repair; it is not the contractor sending the technician to the building. In 2025, Watsco reported approximately $7.2 billion in revenue. Watsco investor overview
Its distribution strategy began in 1989. The approach: acquire established businesses, then help them grow with capital, supplier relationships, technology and opportunities to expand. Watsco calls this “buy and build.” The second half matters as much as the first. Watsco business strategy
A buyer can increase reported revenue simply by purchasing another company. Building value requires something more: making the acquired business more capable, more productive and better positioned to serve its customers.
That is the part of Watsco’s model that deserves an investor’s attention.
Jackson Supply: more than warehouses and inventory
Founded in 1972, Jackson Supply had grown into a business with approximately $230 million in 2025 sales, 25 locations across seven Sunbelt states and roughly 5,000 customers. Its product range includes Goodman and Amana HVAC equipment, alongside supplies and parts. Jackson acquisition announcement
Watsco completed the acquisition on June 1, 2026. Its SEC filing reports consideration consisting of 517,884 common shares valued at approximately $186.2 million. Watsco second-quarter Form 10-Q
Consider what those operating facts represent.
Twenty-five locations mean a physical presence close to customers. Five thousand customers mean a network of relationships. More than five decades in business mean accumulated experience serving a market through changing conditions.
Our reading of the transaction is that Watsco acquired something far harder to assemble than inventory: an established position in the daily workflow of its customers.
Just as telling, Watsco announced that Jackson would retain its identity and existing leadership, led by Jim Durrett and Jennifer Ballsieper, while gaining access to the larger company’s resources. Jackson acquisition announcement
The local business did not have to disappear for the larger enterprise to grow.
NMS sees the parallel on the other side of the counter
Where a distributor supplies the equipment, a contractor supplies the skilled execution.
For a commercial plumbing company, the valuable assets extend beyond trucks and tools. They include the superintendent who understands a complicated building, the estimator who knows which work fits the company, and the customer who calls because the last job was handled correctly.
NMS’s thesis is that these operating strengths can become the foundation of a larger, professionally managed mechanical-services platform.
The parallel is not that NMS and Watsco have identical businesses. They do not. Distribution relies heavily on inventory, logistics and supplier access. Contracting depends on skilled labor, licensing, field execution and getting paid for completed work.
The parallel is how value can be built: acquire a business customers already trust, preserve the strengths behind that trust, and add the resources needed for its next stage of growth.
Watsco describes a corporate support structure spanning finance, procurement, technology, working capital and risk management, while local leaders continue running their businesses. Watsco operating philosophy
For NMS, the corresponding opportunity is to put estimating support, financial discipline, recruiting, training and operating leadership behind capable local plumbing teams.
What that looks like inside a plumbing company
Consider an illustrative founder-led commercial plumbing business.
The owner is excellent at the trade. Customers trust the company. The crews know their work. But the owner also reviews estimates, answers field questions, hires employees and chases overdue invoices.
An attractive bid arrives during a demanding project and gets delayed. Labor overruns become clear after the job is finished. An invoice sits unresolved because the person responsible for collections is also handling payroll.
The business may have room to grow, but its capacity is tied to how much one person can carry.
Now picture that same company supported by a functioning NMS platform.
Estimating becomes a tracked process: opportunities are reviewed, proposals move on schedule and follow-up has an owner. Field leaders compare labor hours with budgets while work is underway. A dedicated finance function manages billing and collections. Recruiting and training help prepare the next layer of supervisors. A general manager leads daily operations with support from the broader organization.
The name on the truck can remain familiar. The customer relationship can remain local. What changes is the organization behind the work.
That is the picture behind our acquisition strategy: help a business become less dependent on one individual and more capable of performing consistently.
The financial implications can be meaningful. As a simple illustration, a company generating $5 million in annual revenue at a 10% EBITDA margin produces $500,000 in EBITDA. At a 13% margin, it produces $650,000—a 30% increase without additional revenue.
That illustration assumes the improved margin includes all added management and support costs. It is not an NMS forecast, and EBITDA is not cash available to investors. It shows why disciplined operations—not just acquisition volume—matter.
Essential demand is the foundation. Discipline protects the investment.
A building does not stop needing functioning plumbing because interest rates rise. A critical water failure does not wait for a stronger stock market.
This is the demand characteristic that attracts us to the sector: the customer often needs the problem solved to keep operating.
But essential demand and dependable investment returns are not the same thing.
A repair-focused business and a contractor dependent on new construction have different revenue risks. Repeat customers are not automatically contracted recurring revenue. Even a busy company can run short of cash if customers pay slowly or projects consume more labor than estimated.
For NMS, a defensible investment case must connect the nature of the demand with the quality of the business and the terms of the acquisition.
That means evaluating customer concentration, job margins, management depth, working-capital requirements and debt obligations—not simply pointing to a full backlog.
It also means building scale deliberately. Additional companies can broaden the customer base and support shared resources, but only if integration works and the added overhead earns its place.
Resilience comes from combining necessary work with sound execution and a capital structure the business can support. No acquisition announcement makes an investment secure by itself.
The opportunity is in building the organization around the work
Watsco’s Jackson acquisition validates an important part of the NMS thesis: established mechanical-industry businesses can remain attractive acquisition targets precisely because their local presence, operating knowledge and customer relationships are difficult to recreate.
It does not establish NMS’s valuation, guarantee our performance or make Watsco a direct financial comparable.
What it does provide is a concrete example of a larger company backing an established operator while preserving the qualities that made it valuable.
NMS is pursuing that opportunity in commercial plumbing.
Our ambition is to connect strong operating businesses with the leadership, systems and capital that allow them to grow beyond the limits of standalone ownership. The work already matters. The customers already need it. The challenge—and the opportunity—is to build an organization capable of delivering it at greater scale.
The trucks are already on the road. The next chapter is about the company behind them.
Build the next chapter with NMS
For business owners: You have built more than a book of business. You have built a reputation, a team and relationships that deserve a thoughtful transition. Connect with NMS for a confidential conversation about succession, partnership and your company’s next stage of growth.
For investors and capital partners: If you see the opportunity in combining essential demand with experienced operators and disciplined acquisitions, connect with NMS to discuss our strategy, acquisition criteria and approach to creating value after closing.
National Mechanical Services
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