Think Maids started in Washington, D.C. with seven hundred dollars and no industry experience. I ran it from Japan for eight years without meeting a customer, and it grew into a national cleaning company before an industry buyer acquired it in 2024.
Other owners kept asking how it worked, so in 2017 I built Inova Local, the first virtual staffing agency dedicated to home services, to make the same model possible for them. It served companies across North America, including national franchises and Inc. 5000 operators, until private equity acquired it in 2025.
In between, I bought two more cleaning companies, in Florida and Texas, put them on the same playbook, and sold them on within the year. Four exits, none of which needed me in the building.
The Local Business MBA began in 2018 with a simple question: what would business school look like if the final project were a company you owned? More than 250 students in sixteen-plus countries have been through it since.