Preservan

Every year, American homeowners spend billions of dollars replacing wood that did not need to be replaced. Rotted window frames, deteriorated porch columns, failing door sills, and decayed trim boards are ripped out and discarded when, in the majority of cases, a fraction of the material has actually failed. The structural wood beneath the rot is often sound, and the entire replacement project — costing thousands of dollars — could have been avoided with a targeted epoxy repair costing a few hundred. That gap between what homeowners are sold and what they actually need is the market Preservan was built to fill. Founded in January 2016 by Ty McBride and his wife April McBride in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the company traces its origins to a 2014 experience Ty had restoring a historic home in Oklahoma City's Mesta Park neighborhood, where he encountered the limitations of conventional wood repair and began experimenting with epoxy resin technology. McBride, who entered the home-building industry in 2001 working on construction sites for his grandfather's business, spent two years researching and testing before launching Wood Window Rescue with a mission he articulated simply as "Save the Future by Preserving the Past." A 2017 HGTV pilot — which aired in fall 2018 and brought April's brother Morgan Reinart into the business as operations manager — accelerated awareness and generated demand well beyond what a single Oklahoma City operation could satisfy. The Preservan brand identity emerged in 2020, and the company formally rebranded from Wood Window Rescue to Preservan in 2021 to reflect its expanded service scope beyond windows alone. The franchise system launched in fall 2022 at the Window Preservation Alliance Conference, and by September 2025, the brand had scaled to 17 locations across multiple U.S. states including Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia. Ty McBride serves as founder and CEO, with Travis Phibbs joining as Chief Operating Officer in early 2025 to support the brand's accelerating expansion phase. This is not a legacy brand coasting on recognition — it is an early-stage franchise with a differentiated service model, a proprietary technology platform, and a demonstrated ability to generate meaningful unit-level revenue in markets where older housing stock creates persistent, recurring demand.

The U.S. home services market represents one of the most durable investment categories in franchising, with the broader home improvement and repair segment generating hundreds of billions in annual spending. Within that market, wood preservation and rot repair occupies a specialized niche that benefits from powerful structural tailwinds. The United States has an enormous stock of aging housing — millions of homes built before 1939 are now approaching or exceeding 85 years of age, and tens of millions more built before 2000 are entering the window of their first or second major wood maintenance cycle. Wood rot is not a cosmetic inconvenience; it is a structural and moisture-related issue that worsens with every passing season, creating urgency among homeowners who want to protect asset values, particularly in a real estate environment where home equity has reached historically elevated levels. The American Wood Protection Association maintains a wood deterioration map that stratifies the continental United States by climate-driven rot risk, and Preservan's franchise expansion strategy is explicitly built around that map — targeting high-humidity, high-precipitation, and high-temperature markets where wood degradation accelerates fastest. Fragmentation defines this category competitively. The vast majority of wood rot repairs in the United States are performed by general contractors, handymen, and individual carpenters who lack proprietary materials, consistent processes, or quality guarantees. There is no dominant national brand in the wood preservation and epoxy repair segment, which means Preservan operates without a direct branded competitor at scale — a position that would be impossible to occupy in categories like residential cleaning, pest control, or HVAC services. Consumer awareness of epoxy resin as a repair alternative to full replacement is growing, driven partly by content-driven platforms and home improvement media, and the cost savings narrative is compelling: Preservan reports saving homeowners up to 90 percent compared to traditional replacement projects. In 2022 alone, the company reported saving its customers an aggregate of 21 million dollars in home repair costs, and in the first half of 2024, Preservan documented approximately 6 million dollars in homeowner savings — figures that function simultaneously as marketing claims and as proxies for the volume of work being performed across the network.

The Preservan franchise cost is structured to provide a relatively accessible entry point compared to brick-and-mortar home services franchises that require facility buildout. The initial franchise fee is 54,000 dollars for a single geographic territory, with each territory defined by a fixed household count adjusted for wood deterioration risk, typically ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 households. The total initial investment required to launch a Preservan franchise, according to the most current 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document figures, ranges from 117,300 dollars to 185,900 dollars, encompassing the franchise fee along with equipment, supplies, business licenses, and working capital. It is worth noting that earlier FDD iterations disclosed lower ranges — a 2023 source cited 83,800 to 142,400 dollars, and an older figure stood at 55,000 to 110,000 dollars — reflecting the brand's investment in building out its support infrastructure as the system matures, which typically increases startup costs but also increases franchisee success rates. The 2025 range is the operative figure for prospective investors. The ongoing royalty rate is 7.0 percent of gross sales, which sits at the higher end of the home services franchise category average of roughly 5 to 7 percent, but must be evaluated against the centralized support infrastructure the fee funds, including a corporate Contact Center that handles lead generation and appointment setting on behalf of franchisees. The brand development fund, or advertising fee, is currently 1.0 percent of gross sales, a comparatively modest figure that reflects the brand's early-stage marketing investment model. Total ongoing fee burden — royalties plus brand development fund — runs approximately 8.0 percent of gross sales before technology and contact center fees. The FDD's Item 19 data reveals that combined franchise fees including royalty, brand development fund, software, and contact center services totaled 18,194 dollars, or 13.24 percent of gross sales, for the operational outlets in 2024. Preservan offers a 10 percent discount on the initial franchise fee for honorably discharged U.S. military veterans and qualified Native American franchisees who hold majority ownership, reducing the entry fee to 48,600 dollars; these discounts apply only to the first territory and must be requested during the initial application process. The mobile service delivery model — no retail location, no commercial lease, no facility buildout — eliminates the single largest capital requirement in most franchise categories, making the Preservan franchise investment structurally lean relative to food, fitness, or brick-and-mortar service brands.

The Preservan franchise operates as a mobile, owner-operator or managed service model built around a service vehicle as the primary operational asset. A franchisee's day revolves around technician deployment to residential and commercial properties for assessment, epoxy application, and finishing work — a repeatable, process-driven service that does not require a permanent customer-facing location. Staffing begins with one to two trained technicians per service vehicle, with scale achieved by adding vehicles and technicians as revenue grows; the brand projects the potential for franchisees to generate 160,000 dollars per vehicle at a 65 percent gross profit margin, giving a clear unit-of-capacity framework for growth planning. Prior construction experience or knowledge of epoxy chemistry is explicitly not required. Preservan provides 82 hours of initial training at the corporate location in Oklahoma City, combining classroom instruction with hands-on, on-the-job application designed to master the brand's proprietary epoxy repair methods. This training culminates in the exclusive EpoxyTech certification program, which functions as both a quality credentialing system and a marketing differentiator. Franchisee Stephen Eppling, who came from a marketing background with zero prior construction experience, reported being hands-on with epoxy from day one of training and field-ready by day four — a notably fast skills ramp compared to trades-based franchises that typically require weeks of technical preparation. The centralized Contact Center handles inbound lead management and appointment scheduling, removing one of the most operationally demanding functions from the franchisee's daily workflow and allowing owners to concentrate on job quality and team development. Corporate support extends to technician recruitment, website management, directory listings, and a dedicated marketing team. Preservan structures the launch process across four phases — pre-launch, alignment, ignition, and take-off — with the explicit goal of completing the franchisee's first revenue-generating project within approximately 90 days of signing. The brand describes its operating philosophy as "Built Together," and the turnkey support model is designed to allow franchisees to operate from day one with minimal operational ambiguity, which is particularly important for investors entering the trades and home services category without industry backgrounds.

Preservan's 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document represents a meaningful transparency milestone: it was the first FDD the brand issued to include Item 19 financial performance representations, providing prospective investors with actual franchisee revenue and expense data rather than theoretical projections. For the fiscal year 2024, the two franchise outlets that were operational for the entirety of both 2023 and 2024 — Preservan Tulsa and Preservan Orlando — reported materially different results, offering a realistic picture of the performance range within the system. Preservan Tulsa recorded gross sales of 137,427 dollars with technician labor costs of 54,450 dollars, while Preservan Orlando achieved gross sales of 406,300 dollars with technician labor costs of 91,699 dollars. The spread between these two units is significant and instructive: the top performer generated nearly three times the revenue of the lower performer, suggesting that market characteristics, owner engagement, and operational execution all play substantial roles in outcome differentiation. Operational outlets in their first year of activity generated gross sales ranging between 321,585 and 406,300 dollars, which provides a more forward-looking benchmark for new franchisees who have the benefit of the brand's refined launch playbook. According to data aggregated across 11 units in 2024, the average unit revenue for Preservan was 271,864 dollars. The business model's gross profit structure is a meaningful strength: operational outlets achieved a direct gross profit of over 65 percent, and after accounting for disclosed operating expenses, realized net profitability in the range of 37 to 47 percent of gross sales. To put those margins in context, the FDD documents that the primary post-gross-profit expenses for 2024 included marketing at 21,904 dollars representing 15.94 percent of sales, combined franchise fees at 18,194 dollars representing 13.24 percent of sales, service vehicle fuel and maintenance at 5,485 dollars representing 3.99 percent of sales, and insurance at 795 dollars representing 0.58 percent of sales. At the 406,300 dollar Orlando revenue level and a 37 percent net margin assumption, owner earnings would approach approximately 150,000 dollars before the franchisee's own compensation — a figure consistent with the brand's published potential of 160,000 dollars per vehicle at 65 percent gross margin. The payback period on a total investment of approximately 151,600 dollars at the midpoint of the current investment range would fall within two to three years at Orlando-level performance, though the Tulsa unit's 137,427 dollars in revenue would extend that timeline considerably.

The Preservan franchise growth trajectory since its fall 2022 system launch has been one of the more aggressive ramps among emerging home services concepts. The brand grew from five to ten territories in approximately six months during its early expansion phase, then awarded four new franchises and opened five new locations in the first half of 2025 alone. By July 2025, the total location count reached 16, rising to 17 by September 2025 — a pace that reflects both the strength of the franchise value proposition and the brand's investment in a structured sales and onboarding infrastructure. Travis Phibbs's arrival as COO in early 2025 signals the corporate team is building the leadership depth necessary to manage a larger network without compromising training quality or franchisee support. The brand's competitive moat rests on three reinforcing pillars: proprietary materials and methodology protected through the EpoxyTech certification program, a centralized support infrastructure that would be prohibitively expensive for an independent operator to replicate, and first-mover advantage in a category with no nationally branded competitor. Preservan's expansion strategy is analytically grounded rather than opportunistic — the American Wood Protection Association's wood deterioration map explicitly guides market selection, prioritizing geographies where climate conditions create persistent demand. The brand has identified Houston, Texas, as a particularly high-priority expansion market, with analysis supporting a capacity for up to 20 new units and a near-term plan to open six new units in that market alone. Additional expansion targets include Arizona, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, selected for a combination of rapid population growth, aging housing inventory, strong real estate transaction volume, and climatic conditions favorable to wood rot development. The HGTV exposure in fall 2018, which aired a full episode featuring the brand's predecessor Wood Window Rescue, established a media credibility asset that most emerging franchises never acquire, and continues to support consumer trust in markets where the brand is newly introduced.

The ideal Preservan franchisee does not need a construction background — the training program is explicitly designed to bring non-technical operators to competency — but does benefit from management and marketing orientation, as growing a service territory requires both team leadership and local business development. The franchisee profile that has demonstrated the most success in the Preservan system to date appears to include operators with strong community ties and marketing instincts, as illustrated by the success of the Orlando unit and the experience of franchisee Stephen Eppling, who leveraged a marketing background rather than trades knowledge to ramp the business quickly. Territory exclusivity is granted based on household counts adjusted for deterioration risk, with territories typically spanning 100,000 to 300,000 households, providing a meaningful protected addressable market within which to build recurring revenue. Available territories are concentrated in markets identified through the wood deterioration analysis, with active opportunities across the southeastern United States, Texas, and the emerging Arizona, Ohio, and Pennsylvania markets. The structured 90-day launch process from signing to first project completion sets a clear timeline expectation for incoming franchisees, reducing uncertainty in the critical early-stage period. Multi-unit development is consistent with the brand's growth ambitions — particularly in large markets like Houston where the brand has publicly identified capacity for 20 units — and experienced operators interested in portfolio-scale investment will find a system that can support it. The mobile operating format means territory geography is fully utilized without the constraints of a fixed retail location, and adding capacity requires only an additional vehicle and technician rather than a new lease.

For franchise investors conducting rigorous due diligence on the Preservan franchise opportunity, the investment thesis centers on four converging factors: a large and fragmented addressable market with no dominant national competitor, a proprietary technology platform protected by certification and training, a mobile service model with structurally lower capital requirements than facility-based franchises, and a first Item 19 disclosure that demonstrates 37 to 47 percent net profit margins at operational outlets achieving 300,000 to 400,000 dollars in annual gross sales. The brand is early-stage — 17 locations as of September 2025 — which means early franchisees accept more uncertainty than investors in mature systems, but also secure territories in high-demand markets before the pipeline closes. The Preservan franchise investment range of 117,300 to 185,900 dollars, a 54,000 dollar franchise fee, and a 7.0 percent royalty structure represent a mid-tier entry cost with above-average margin potential relative to the home services category. Leadership depth has been deliberately reinforced with the addition of a COO in early 2025, and the brand's analytically driven expansion strategy — targeting markets using climate and housing data rather than purely opportunistic deal flow — suggests operational discipline at the corporate level. PeerSense provides exclusive due diligence data including SBA lending history, FPI score, location maps with Google ratings, FDD financial data, and side-by-side comparison tools that allow investors to benchmark the Preservan franchise opportunity against competing home services concepts across every relevant financial and operational dimension. Explore the complete Preservan franchise profile on PeerSense to access the full suite of independent franchise intelligence data.