Meet all of the 2025 Top 40 Under 40 HVACR Professionals
Ted Caruso
Company: Columbia Home Services
Title: Chief Financial Officer
Age: 29
As mergers and acquisitions continue to reshape the HVAC landscape, finance leaders are playing an increasingly critical role in driving sustainable growth. One of these leaders is Ted Caruso, chief financial officer of Columbia Home Services (CHS), who first got involved in the HVAC industry as an investor working on M&A transactions in the home services space.
During his time at CHS, Caruso, who has a background in investment banking and private equity, has built a top-tier finance and accounting team designed to support the company’s growth and refined the company’s acquisition and integration strategy along the way. Under his leadership, CHS has completed 13 acquisitions in the home services space and grown from a single location to more than 15.
“Our business development team deserves a lot of credit — it was truly a team effort underpinned by constant collaboration across all functions within [CHS],” Caruso said. “I think that one thing we did well was consistently evolving our M&A criteria and diligence processes after each acquisition.”
Caruso said the CHS team was committed to continuous improvement during these acquisitions, noting that they regularly evaluated what was effective and what wasn’t, while maintaining strong communication between operations and business development.
“Open communication across functions ensured real-time learnings were factored into our sourcing efforts,” said Caruso. “Proactively refining our M&A criteria helped us to be more efficient in identifying the companies that were the best fit for CHS and helped us accomplish a lot in a relatively short period of time.”
Now that CHS has established a solid foundation, Caruso’s focus is on scaling for long-term success.
“I will continue to support CHS as we build our finance and accounting function and broader corporate team while supporting various organic and inorganic growth initiatives,” Caruso said.
And after completing multiple acquisitions, that means deepening integration across newly acquired businesses and utilizing analytics for smarter decision-making.
“As our company evolves, we are laser-focused on analytics and leveraging data across 15+ locations to make better informed decisions within each market — along with supporting our business development team to find the next home services businesses to join the CHS family. … I look forward to expanding my network within the HVAC industry along the way,” Caruso said.