LeafFilter started in a Stow basement with one dealer and his cell phone
Matt Kaulig signed on in 2005 as one of 91 dealers for a stainless steel gutter guard, and within five years he controlled the whole brand.
Hudson, OH
By 2022, Matt Kaulig had worn the same rubber bracelet every day for nearly 15 years. One side read LeafFilter. The other read TNT, short for “Today Not Tomorrow,” the phrase he used to set the pace for the people who worked for him. Cleveland Magazine described it as a sense of urgency, not pressure.
“It’s a culture of getting things done,” Kaulig told Cleveland Magazine in 2022.
The name on that bracelet belonged to a gutter guard Kaulig did not invent. In 2005 he quit a job with a remodeling company to become one of 91 authorized LeafFilter dealers in the country. He worked out of the basement of his home in Stow, Ohio, with two employees, an installer and a marketer. Inventory went in the garage.
The dealer then outgrew the arrangement that supplied him. He took control of the brand in 2010 and built it into a national installer whose offices were company-run rather than franchised. Gridiron Capital, a Connecticut-based private equity firm, has owned a majority interest since 2017. By the end of 2023, Leaf Home, the umbrella company Kaulig created to hold LeafFilter and its sister brands, counted more than 200 offices in the United States and Canada.
Kaulig was born in Columbus and raised in Cincinnati. His father sold brake parts, and his mother worked for the Mars candy company. The family moved to Chicago when he was 14, but he came back to Ohio to play football and earn a business degree at the University of Akron, where he was a backup quarterback for the Zips from 1992 to 1995.
“It’s all leadership,” he told Cleveland Magazine. “Being a quarterback in college made me comfortable in a leadership role and having people follow you.”
He married Lisa Workman, a Copley native he met at Akron, in 1998, and went to work in sales for Erie Construction and Mastershield. LeafFilter’s own company history says he spent several years with a remodeling company in Akron before he struck out on his own.
The product he chose to sell was a stainless steel micromesh filter meant to keep everything but water out of a gutter. Kaulig’s bet was that nobody in Ohio was really selling it. His company was called LeafFilter North, and at first it bought the product from the manufacturer like every other authorized dealer.
For the first few years he ran nearly all of it himself. He scheduled appointments and took sales calls on his personal cell phone. He handled the administrative work. He learned accounting through QuickBooks, then taught it to his father, who joined the company after a few years.
“I literally sold every job, from Mentor to Lorain,” he told Cleveland Magazine. “You just do everything at first, but the great part is then you know every piece of the business.”
The company had seven employees in 2007, according to its published history. The next year Kaulig opened his first three offices, in Pittsburgh, Toledo and Columbus. He could no longer be in every room, so he started recording himself.
“I couldn’t be in the office every day, so the only way they could get to know me was by sending a video by email or text,” he told Cleveland Magazine.
The morning videos stuck. So did the method. He paid for growth out of his own profits and added about three offices a year for roughly a decade, each one built on the same template.
“We recognized pretty quick that we could just replicate what we were doing in all the other offices,” Kaulig told Smart Business in 2023. “You can do it with the same product, with the same processes, with the same people over and over again, and you get really good at it, and the processes get perfected.”
The turn came at the end of 2009. LeafFilter North had seven offices, and Kaulig wanted to go to Chicago. The manufacturers told him no, because four dealers already worked there. He did not want to stop growing or be shut out of whole cities. So in January 2010 he started a distribution business. The manufacturer now had to sell to him, and he sold the product to the contractors. In effect, the dealer had bought the business.
He went on to take over all the other dealerships until only one LeafFilter dealer remained, his own. According to the company’s account, he came to own the manufacturing, the patents and the trademarks as well. The basement operation that started as one of 91 dealers had become the brand.
By 2016 the company had about 350 employees across 31 offices. In June 2017, Ernst & Young named Kaulig its Entrepreneur of the Year for Northeast Ohio.
A second line of work grew up alongside the first. Kaulig got into NASCAR in 2014, when his company sponsored Go Fas Racing in the Cup Series, and he opened his own Xfinity Series shop the next year. LeafFilter sponsored the Kaulig Racing car for 24 races in 2015 and went full time in 2016. By 2020 the LeafFilter car was the No. 11 Chevrolet Camaro.
When the sponsorship was renewed for a fifth season, Kaulig said the car would carry “the same paint scheme we had since the very beginning,” according to Motorsports Tribune in 2020. In the same statement he counted 68 LeafFilter locations in the U.S. and Canada.
The count was climbing faster by then because of the 2017 Gridiron deal. After the firm took its majority stake, the company stopped adding three offices a year and started adding one a month. LeafFilter opened its first Canadian locations that same year.
In February 2019, Kaulig launched Leaf Home as an umbrella over LeafFilter, betting that the sales and installation system he had refined on gutters would carry over to other parts of the house. In the years that followed, that came to include in-home water purification, bath conversions and garage flooring.
“Our processes and customer service are so good that we can do this with any product for your home,” he told Smart Business.
By 2023, Kaulig had moved to a seat on the Leaf Home board and the role of executive chairman of Kaulig Companies, his family office. Jon Bostock became Leaf Home’s chief executive in March 2023 after several months as interim CEO. He described the operation he inherited in car terms.
“Coming into this environment is like walking into a garage and seeing a Lamborghini that’s ready to go,” Bostock told Smart Business.
At the close of 2023, Smart Business reported, Leaf Home had more than 8,000 employees and partners in its network. Unlike some home improvement platforms that subcontract jobs to local third-party providers, the magazine noted, they all followed the same processes and systems Kaulig had put in place.
In 2022, Kaulig Companies worked out of a series of open-concept offices along Georgetown Road in Hudson, with a multimedia production studio, a full kitchen and a Kaulig Racing stock car inside. Kaulig’s cell phone, the one that served as the work line in the Stow basement, still had the same number.