Since Juxtapose was founded in 2015, we’ve been focused on building industry-transforming businesses in sectors with massive, yet overlooked, pain points, like dental, home buying, and life insurance. We build these companies from scratch, often spending a year or more understanding the market, developing the concept, testing the product with future customers, and finding the most talented and experienced partners to join us as co-founders and CEOs. While most of the growth in our businesses comes organically, we opportunistically leverage inorganic growth and tuck-in acquisitions to accelerate the growth of our companies.
In 2022, we formalized this new dimension to the way we build businesses by introducing Platform Builds, led by our Partner, Geoff Miller. A Juxtapose Platform Build approaches the same spirit of creation and innovation in a multi-pronged way, accelerating our build-from-scratch capabilities with inorganic growth and a novel, typically technology-driven, intervention designed to create a transformative experience for operators and customers alike. With Platform Builds, we were excited to take what we’ve learned from de-risking and building technology businesses from scratch and combine it with the M&A expertise within our firm to drive value at a scale that has the power to truly shift industries at a more rapid pace.
Our first Platform Build, Zephyr, is a home-services platform focused on improving service and satisfaction for HVAC end customers by empowering one of the industry's most overlooked constituencies: the technicians themselves. Zephyr acquires local service providers in targeted markets, integrates them into a unified technology and productivity platform, and drives growth at those local brands with centralized support in recruiting, training, marketing, operations effectiveness, finance, M&A and more. By reimagining the technician experience, Zephyr is driving efficiency, retention, and profit for local HVAC brands across the country.
For our first Platform Build, we wanted to bring on a co-founder and CEO who had deep experience running essential, multi-location businesses and a vision for empowering operators. Enter Shawn Weidmann.
Before partnering with Juxtapose to build Zephyr, Shawn had run the largest network of retail florists in the world (Teleflora), was the COO of the largest self-storage company in the world with over 2,300 locations throughout the U.S. (Public Storage), and most recently built, as CEO, the largest network of private schools in the country serving over 50,000 children in 200 different school locations from preschool through high school and grew revenue from $150M to $750M (Spring Education). Earlier in his career, Shawn had been a consultant at McKinsey and EHS Partners, and before that started his career as an Army officer. The throughline through each of these roles has been Shawn’s passion for building high-performing teams that create outsized value.
Shawn has already assembled an amazing team at Zephyr, including Chief Financial Officer Michelle DiPasquale, who has more than 20 years of PE-backed CFO experience and deep, multi-site M&A experience, and Chief Product & Technology Officer Kevin McDunn, who has 20+ years experience developing mobile-first productivity applications. Zephyr was also co-founded by the company’s current VP of Strategy and M&A, Deklan Robinson, who brought significant consumer services and M&A experience from his roles at Harry’s and L Catterton.
In his seat as founder and CEO, Shawn has driven early success for Zephyr, including the acquisition of multiple local HVAC services companies in the metro areas of Washington, DC; Houston; and Denver / Western Slope. Zephyr is also growing organically over 40% per year, in part thanks to technical innovations like a three-dimensional home modeling tool and AI copilot delivered to our technicians in the field through our proprietary suite of applications..
We’re thrilled to have Shawn as a partner as he and his team redefine what it means to work in home services and drive value for technicians and customers alike. We’ll share more about Zephyr in the coming months, but in the meantime you can follow Zephyr on LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest.
