A homeowner in Oklahoma was quoted $250,000 to replace the wood windows on her house. Preservan fixed them for $3,000. That gap — $247,000 saved on a single job — is not a marketing claim. It's the core business logic that Ty McBride built a $1.3 million company around, starting with $300 and a bucket of epoxy his wife thought was a waste of money.
But here is what most coverage of Preservan misses: the niche is not the real story. Ty had already found the niche years before the business took off. He knew wood rot was expensive and underserved. He built an entire company around it — and that first company was not scalable. It nearly broke him when COVID hit.
The actual turning point came from a question his operations manager asked him: what if everything you need fits in the smallest car on the market? That single constraint — a Kia Soul — is what turned a regional service business into a franchisable system. The lesson isn't about wood rot. It's about what happens when you deliberately shrink your business model until it becomes impossible to complicate.
The Problem: A Market Nobody Was Serving
Ty McBride grew up in the construction business — his family's company, swinging hammers from the time he was old enough to be on a job site. By 2014, he had spent 13 years across every corner of home building. Then he took on a restoration project in Oklahoma City's Mesta Park neighborhood — a historic district of homes built in the early 1900s — and ran into a problem that would redirect the next decade of his life.
The homes in Mesta Park had original wood windows — large, beautiful, historically protected. They were also rotting. And because they were under historic preservation guidelines, homeowners couldn't simply replace them with modern vinyl. They had to restore the originals. But nobody in Oklahoma City had a reliable, affordable system for doing that. Contractors would quote replacement at $6,000 to $7,000 per window. For a house with dozens of windows, that meant a project running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars — for wood that, in many cases, was 80 to 90 percent structurally intact, with rot confined to small sections at the base.
Ty started researching how the National Park Service approached the problem. The answer was epoxy resin — a material that had been used for decades on historic structures, including the Statue of Liberty. The process: remove the rotted wood, inject a liquid consolidant into the remaining softened fibers to harden them, pack in a moldable epoxy filler, sand it down once cured, and paint over it. The result is structurally stronger than the original wood and, done correctly, invisible.
Ty spent two years testing, researching, and refining the process on his own 100-year-old garage. In January 2016, he and his wife April launched a company called Wood Window Rescue. The demand was immediate. Historic homeowners across Oklahoma City had been waiting for exactly this service and had no idea it existed.
The First Business: Right Niche, Wrong Model
Wood Window Rescue grew. By the time COVID hit in 2020, the business had expanded across four states — Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas. Ty had managers in multiple markets. The company was doing real volume. On paper, it looked like growth.
In practice, it was stretched thin and fragile. When COVID forced the company to pull everyone back to Oklahoma City, the weakness in the model became clear. The business had grown through managers — people who were competent but not fully invested, who could leave or underperform without the same consequences a business owner would face. The four-state footprint required coordination that a small team couldn't sustain under pressure. The jobs themselves were highly complex — historic window restoration involves intricate, detailed work that is genuinely difficult to train for and replicate consistently.
Ty has described this period directly: "Failure would be the reason" he went the franchise route. That's not false modesty — it's an accurate diagnosis of what the original model couldn't do. A service business built on complexity, managed through employees, stretched across multiple geographies, is hard to scale and hard to protect. You need people who are as committed as you are. Managers aren't that. Owner-operators are.
COVID gave him the space to rethink the architecture of the business entirely. He started reading about franchising. He came across the E-Myth framework — the idea that most small businesses fail not because of bad products but because the owner is doing everything themselves, without systems that can run without them. He connected with franchise attorney Charles Internicola, who became a mentor. The conversation shifted from "how do we grow?" to "what can we actually replicate?"
The first attempt at an answer was to franchise the existing model — Wood Window Rescue, with its full range of historic restoration services. Internicola told him it wouldn't work. The service was too complicated, too variable, too dependent on expert-level craft that couldn't be reliably trained across owner-operators with different backgrounds. Ty pushed back. Internicola held firm. He was right.
The Kia Soul Constraint That Changed Everything
The turning point came from a question Ty's brother-in-law and operations manager Morgan Reinart asked him. As Ty recalls the conversation: "What kind of business would we have if you could fit everything in the smallest possible car out there?"
That constraint — deliberately absurd, almost provocative — forced a productive stripping-down of the business model. They went through the full service list and started marking things off. What requires a truck? Gone. What requires a trip to the lumber yard? Gone. What requires specialty tools that don't fit in a compact car? Gone. What's left?
Wood rot repair with epoxy. Just that. No replacement. No full restoration. No historic preservation consulting. Just: identify the rot, remove the damaged material, inject the consolidant, fill it with epoxy clay, sand it smooth, paint it. Two days. One vehicle. One technician. Everything needed fits in the back of a Kia Soul or a hybrid Ford Maverick.
This is the insight that is consistently underreported in coverage of Preservan: the constraint wasn't a limitation imposed by circumstance. It was a deliberate design choice. By deciding that the business had to fit in the smallest possible car, Ty and Morgan forced themselves to strip every element that added complexity without adding proportional value. What remained was something that could be trained, replicated, and operated by someone who had never touched epoxy before.
In the fall of 2022, Preservan launched officially as a franchise system at the annual Window Preservation Alliance Conference. The new brand name — chosen to signal broader scope than just windows — covered wood rot repair on doors, porch posts, columns, rails, stairs, and any other wooden exterior elements. The service remained the same. The vehicle remained a Kia Soul. The constraint became the brand identity.
The Numbers: What the Business Actually Looks Like
The financial profile of Preservan is worth examining carefully, because the margins are unusually high for a home service business — and the reasons why matter for anyone thinking about the model.
A typical Preservan job comes in around $3,000 at the average size, though smaller repairs can run as low as $500 and large projects — full window facelifts on older homes, multiple entry doors, a porch with columns and railings — can reach $10,000 to $15,000. The gross profit margin on a $3,000 job runs at 65 to 70 percent. On that job, the business keeps roughly $2,000 after materials.
Why are margins this high for what is essentially a skilled trade service? Three structural reasons.
First: no materials trip. Traditional contractors spend a significant portion of labor time and overhead on sourcing materials — driving to suppliers, waiting on orders, managing inventory. Preservan's entire material supply fits in the vehicle. There are no lumber orders, no window sourcing, no hardware runs. The only consumables are the proprietary epoxy products, which are stocked in the van before each job and replenished in bulk. This eliminates an entire cost category that most home service businesses carry.
Second: no comparison shopping pressure. When a homeowner gets a quote to replace a wood window, they can get three bids from window companies and compare prices. When they get a quote from Preservan, the comparison isn't to another epoxy repair company — there essentially aren't any at scale. The comparison is to replacement, which costs 10 to 20 times more. The pricing conversation is not "why are you more expensive than the other guy?" It's "why would I pay $7,000 per window when you can fix it for $400?" That's an entirely different negotiation, and it gives Preservan pricing power that most service businesses don't have.
Third: low overhead by design. No physical location. No large trucks. Minimal tools. One to two technicians per vehicle. The Kia Soul constraint means overhead is structurally capped. After royalties and disclosed expenses, franchisees retain approximately 40 percent of revenue — a take-home rate that compares favorably to most franchise categories in home services.
Ty's Oklahoma City corporate location — a single territory — did just over $400,000 in its first year with a 65 percent gross profit margin. In its most recent reported year, the full company across all locations did $1.3 million. Franchisee technicians are paid above $25 per hour — deliberately above market — which Ty credits with attracting people who treat the work as a craft rather than a gig.
| Metric | Figure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Average job size | $1,500–$3,000 | Range: $500–$15,000+ |
| Gross profit margin | 65–70% | After materials, before overhead |
| Franchisee net (after disclosed expenses) | ~40% | Per FDD disclosures |
| First-year OKC corporate revenue | $300,000+ | Single territory |
| Liquid capital required to franchise | $70,000 minimum | SBA financing available |
| Time from agreement to launch | 90–120 days | Includes training period |
How the Franchise System Works
Preservan's franchise model is designed around one key problem that Ty identified from his years running the original multi-state operation: speed to lead kills field service businesses. When a technician is on-site doing a repair, they cannot simultaneously answer the phone, schedule an appointment, and send a follow-up quote. The jobs suffer or the lead dies.
Preservan's solution is a centralized contact center — what they call "the HUB" — that handles all inbound lead management for every franchise location nationwide. When a homeowner in Nashville calls about a rotting porch railing, that call goes to the HUB, not to the Nashville franchisee's mobile number. The HUB qualifies the lead, accesses the franchisee's schedule via Jobber (their field service management software), and books the appointment directly. The franchisee gets notified. They show up. They do the work.
Quality control runs through a tool called Company Cam — a photo documentation app that allows Preservan's Franchise Success Coach to review every stage of every job from anywhere in the country. Day one application photos, day two finishing photos, final paint photos. The coach can identify technique issues, inconsistencies, or problems before the customer ever sees them. This is how a 15-location network maintains consistent standards without Ty flying to each job site.
Training takes three weeks and combines classroom, online, and field components — including real jobs in Oklahoma City on actual homes. Ty deliberately chooses training jobs that cover a range of conditions: older homes, newer homes, windows, doors, and porch elements. The goal is to expose new franchisees to the full range of repair scenarios before they face them alone in their own market.
The epoxy system itself — branded as Everesin — is proprietary to Preservan and not available through any retail channel. This is deliberate: it ensures consistency across locations, gives Preservan a differentiated product story (a 10-year warranty, which no off-the-shelf wood filler carries), and creates a supply relationship that supports the franchise network rather than directing customers to Home Depot alternatives.
Marketing on $3,500 a Month: The "Digital Door Knocking" Strategy
Preservan's marketing budget per location runs between $3,000 and $3,500 a month — modest for a service business operating at $300,000 to $400,000 annual revenue. The strategy Ty calls "digital door knocking" is built around a hyperlocal targeting logic that most home service businesses don't apply with this degree of specificity.
The primary channel is Meta ads — Facebook and Instagram — targeted geographically by neighborhood rather than by city or region. Before a job even starts in a particular neighborhood, Preservan runs ads in that specific area. The logic: if a house on Oak Street has visible wood rot on its porch columns, there is a reasonable probability that the houses within three blocks also have aging wood that homeowners haven't yet addressed. A before-and-after video ad showing a repair on a house that looks like theirs — in a neighborhood they recognize — converts at a far higher rate than a generic home services ad.
The content itself is low-production on purpose. Ty's view — stated directly in interviews — is that an authentic video of a technician doing an actual repair in a real neighborhood carries more credibility than a polished, AI-generated advertisement. The budget goes to targeting precision, not creative production. This is supplemented with direct mail in the same hyperlocal areas, and yard signs placed at job sites during the two-day repair window.
Preservan also uses the American Wood Protection Association's wood deterioration map to prioritize franchise expansion markets. Hot, humid states — Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi — have higher baseline rates of wood rot due to climate conditions, which means demand is structurally higher. Markets with a high concentration of pre-1940 homes add another demand layer: older homes have more original wood, more surface area exposed to decades of moisture, and owners who are often more motivated to preserve original materials than replace them.
What I Learned From This Startup Story
The detail that keeps coming back to me is how long the right niche existed before the right business model caught up to it. Ty identified wood rot repair as an underserved, high-margin opportunity in 2014. He launched in 2016. By 2020, he had a four-state operation that was genuinely fragile. The niche was never the problem. The architecture of the business — complex service, employee managers, no replication mechanism — was the problem, and it took a near-failure and a pandemic to surface it clearly enough to fix.
The deeper insight is the Kia Soul question. It sounds like a gimmick — "what fits in the smallest car?" — but it's actually a rigorous design tool. Most businesses grow by adding complexity: more services, more staff, more equipment, more locations. The default assumption is that adding capabilities adds value. What the Kia Soul question forces is the opposite: what is the minimum viable scope that still creates real value for the customer and can be replicated by someone who isn't you? That kind of forced subtraction is genuinely hard to do on your own business. You need someone outside the system to ask the uncomfortable question, which is exactly what Morgan Reinart did.
The pricing structure also deserves more attention than it usually gets. Preservan doesn't compete on price against other epoxy repair companies — because there essentially aren't any at scale. It competes on price against replacement. That's a structural advantage that most service businesses never achieve. When your only comparison is something that costs 10 to 20 times more, you have enormous pricing power within a range that still feels like a bargain to the customer. This is a deliberately constructed moat, not a lucky accident.
What I'd push back on, though: the model's scalability is real but geographically constrained in ways the coverage doesn't always surface. Preservan is deliberately not available in California, Washington, and several Northern states — partly regulatory, partly climate-driven. And the $70,000 liquid capital requirement, while reasonable for a franchise, is a genuine barrier for the demographic that might be most excited about this kind of business: skilled tradespeople who already understand wood repair but don't have significant savings. The SBA financing path exists, but navigating that process requires a different kind of commitment than just buying a bucket of epoxy and starting in your garage.
Key Takeaways
- Ty McBride found the right niche in 2014 but built the wrong model first — the franchise version came after a near-failure during COVID.
- The "Kia Soul constraint" — deliberately stripping the business to what fits in the smallest car — is the actual founding insight of Preservan as a scalable system.
- 65–70% gross margins are achievable because there are no materials trips, no comparison shopping pressure, and overhead is structurally capped by the vehicle constraint.
- Preservan's HUB handles all lead management centrally — solving the speed-to-lead problem that kills most field service businesses.
- The marketing strategy targets neighborhoods, not cities — hyperlocal Meta ads + yard signs + before/after content at $3,000–$3,500/month per location.
- The business competes against replacement costs, not against other repair companies — a structurally different pricing conversation with far less downward pressure.
- $70,000 in liquid capital is required; SBA financing is available; 90–120 days from agreement to launch.
FAQ
How much does it cost to start a Preservan franchise?
Prospective franchisees need at least $70,000 in liquid capital. SBA financing is available for qualifying applicants, which lowers the cash requirement for the initial investment. Preservan's FDD (Franchise Disclosure Document) details the full fee structure, including the initial franchise fee and ongoing royalties. The 90-to-120-day launch window from signing the agreement to opening is consistent with what Ty has described publicly.
Is wood rot repair actually a viable business in most US markets?
Demand is real but not uniform. Preservan uses the American Wood Protection Association's wood deterioration map to identify high-risk markets — primarily hot, humid states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, the Carolinas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Markets with a high concentration of pre-1940 homes also tend to have stronger demand. Preservan is currently not available in California, Washington, or several Northern states, either due to regulatory restrictions or climate considerations.
What did Preservan's corporate location make in its first year?
Ty has stated publicly that the Oklahoma City corporate location — a single territory — generated just over $300,000 in its first year at a mid-60s percent gross profit margin. In 2024, that same territory did just over $400,000. These are figures Ty has disclosed in interviews; individual franchisee results will vary based on market conditions and operational commitment.
Do Preservan technicians need prior construction experience?
No specific prior experience is required. Preservan's three-week training program — combining classroom instruction, online learning, and real jobs in Oklahoma City — is designed to bring someone without an epoxy background to operational competence. That said, franchisees who hire technicians with some trade background tend to reduce the ramp-up period. The proprietary Everesin system is also not available in retail stores, so all product knowledge comes through Preservan's own training pipeline.
Why did Ty choose franchising instead of hiring managers to expand?
His direct answer: because managers didn't work. The original multi-state expansion of Wood Window Rescue ran on hired managers — people who were competent but not financially committed to the outcome the way an owner-operator is. When COVID forced a contraction, the vulnerability of that model became clear. Franchising solves the commitment problem: franchise owners have invested their own capital and carry their own risk, which produces a fundamentally different level of operational engagement than a salaried manager does.
What is the Everesin epoxy system and why is it exclusive to Preservan?
Everesin is a proprietary epoxy system developed specifically for Preservan in partnership with its manufacturer. It is not available at home centers or through any retail channel. The exclusivity serves two purposes: it ensures consistent quality across all franchise locations (everyone uses the same system), and it backs Preservan's 10-year product and workmanship warranty — which no off-the-shelf wood filler can credibly offer. The system consists of a liquid consolidant injected into softened wood fibers and a moldable epoxy clay used to fill voids and rebuild form.
If the model of a low-overhead, high-margin home services business interests you, the Sasquatch Pest Control story covers a similar pattern — a founder who left a low-paying career to build a $600K/year service business from scratch — and the structural differences between building your own versus buying into a proven system. And for a broader look at which business categories are producing these kinds of results in 2026, the six boring businesses making millionaires piece covers the pattern across categories.
Conclusion
The practical next step, if you're evaluating whether a model like Preservan's is worth pursuing, is this: before looking at the franchise numbers, look at your market's housing stock. Check what percentage of homes in your target metro were built before 1960. Check the climate category on the AWPA wood deterioration map. If both are favorable, the demand side of the equation is likely real. The business model is documented enough — through Ty's public disclosures, the FDD, and franchisee interviews — that you can stress-test the economics before spending anything.
What started with $300 of epoxy and a skeptical spouse is now a 15-location system that has saved homeowners over $50 million in replacement costs. The niche was always there. The scalable model required a pandemic, a near-failure, a mentor, and a question about the smallest car on the market to find its shape. That sequence — find the niche, build the wrong model, strip it down to what actually replicates — is more common in successful franchise stories than most founders want to admit.