Sonntag & Co. is led by Justin Sonntag, who has spent his career on the operating side of the table, responsible for the people, the payroll, and the results.
Justin's first operating job came in his early twenties, running thirty-day house flips in the Pensacola area for his mother. He lined up contractors, kept the schedule honest, and picked up the tools himself when someone didn't show. Then the 2008 crash taught him what happens when inventory, debt, and timing turn against you.
He co-founded his next company with his own pickup truck, burying service lines to homes as a subcontractor. It grew into a full field-service operation: a large fleet, a dispatch center, appointment windows, and technicians inside customers' homes. With that came damage claims, injured employees, and the customer who is upset for a good reason.
Growth brought its own pressure. He made payroll in weeks when a large client paid late, and put together the loan packages, credit lines, and land and facility purchases to fund growth that outran the cash.
He acquired a second company, integrated the two, and moved the combined business into infrastructure construction, from subcontractor to prime contractor. It grew roughly fourfold, and he led it through its sale to a private-equity-backed platform.
He stayed on to run operations across several states, helped combine three companies into one division, and developed frontline employees into the managers and directors who lead it today. He also owns and operates a residential and light-commercial service business, most recently moving an acquired, decades-old company from paper onto modern systems.
Those hard stretches are why his advice starts with cash, people, and risk, not only strategy.
Justin grew up in Wisconsin on Packers football and Vince Lombardi, and learned early that a standard is something you hold people to, starting with yourself.
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
He has coached his boys in football and lacrosse, took a high school lacrosse program to the deepest state playoff run in its history, and still coaches as a volunteer and serves on the board of the local youth sports association. Coaching and running a business teach the same thing: set the bar high, watch the film honestly, and put in the reps until the result holds without the coach.
He decides with the data as his guide, not his excuse. Every significant change gets a few measures before it starts, so the team knows within weeks whether it is working. If the numbers move, double down. If they don't, admit it, change course, and measure again. That is how Sonntag & Co. works with clients.
Moving a business from one person's judgment to a team with clear roles and measures, and developing the people who can run the next stage.
Buying a company, combining systems, teams, and reporting, and making the deal pay off.
Raising the performance of office-based functions: billing and collections from large commercial clients, purchasing and payables, project administration, customer service, and shared services across combined companies.
Loan packages, lines of credit, and land and facility purchases, plus the reporting and pace that come with private-equity owners, from both sides of the table.
Fleet, dispatch, scheduling, and teams spread across markets, plus the claims, safety, and customer-trust issues that come with sending people into homes and businesses.
Implementing and fixing the systems a business runs on, including CRMs, accounting platforms, and major field-service platforms such as ServiceTitan, from moving off paper to getting real value out of the reporting.
Drawn from Justin's own company. Details are withheld.
Growth
A services company acquired a smaller competitor. Rather than run them side by side, the combined business was reorganized around the higher-value work both could do together. Roles, teams, and pricing were rebuilt around that focus, and growth over the following years far outpaced what either company had managed alone.
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