Fire and life safety is one of the hottest sectors in the lower middle market, with over 240 deals in 2025 alone, roughly 50 acquisitions a quarter, and a total addressable market now pegged at $35 to $40 billion. So why is capital piling in now, and how much runway is actually left?

In this episode of “Why We Like It”, Sam sits down with two people who see the sector from opposite sides of the table. Luke Webb, Managing Director, Business Services at Lincoln International, has advised on more than 100 transactions including the sale of Guardian Fire Services to Investcorp and Altus Fire and Life Safety to Apax. Scott Elkins, CEO of Zeus Fire and Security, is a second-generation entrepreneur who has completed 25 acquisitions, scaled to eight regional hubs and nearly 1,000 team members, and won EY's 2025 Entrepreneur of the Year for Greater Philadelphia.

Together they unpack the investment thesis behind the consolidation wave, why we may only be in the "third or fourth inning," what separates a business that commands a premium from one that doesn't, and how Zeus's "house of brands" model preserves decades-old local reputations while integrating everything on the back end. They also get into the technology shift reshaping the industry, from analog to AI, and from capturing events after they happen to preventing them before they do, plus where the whole space is headed over the next decade.

A look at both halves of a fast-moving market: the person advising on the deals, and the person building the platform from the inside.

Accounting has been around for five thousand years. The modern profession has been around for one hundred. And for most of that century, almost nothing about it has actually changed.

Then in five years, it all moved at once. Over $200 billion of private equity capital across roughly 150 deals. Eleven of the top thirty US firms now PE-backed. AI absorbing workflows that hadn't been touched in a generation. The industry that quietly underwrites every business decision in the economy, being rebuilt in real time.

In this episode of Why We Like It, Sam Tidswell-Norrish sits down with two people on opposite ends of the same grid.

Frank Longobardi spent forty-five years inside the profession, the last of them as CEO of CohnReznick. He explains what private equity actually saw that the partners didn't - the capital problem, the governance trap, and the moment a generation of partners realized their equity was worth multiples of what they'd been told.

Ariel Harmoko is the co-founder and CEO of Artifact, the agentic AI platform now cleared by HMRC to file tax returns directly with the regulator. A former Formula 3 driver and Cambridge machine learning researcher, he delivers one of the sharpest unscripted answers we've had on the show - on where the $900 billion value-creation story actually lives, and who really wins the next decade.

Two generations. Two vantage points. One profession being re-engineered in real time.

Conference realignment. The transfer portal. A $20.5M-per-school revenue-sharing mandate that didn't exist two years ago.

Streaming platforms spending north of $14B on rights. Sports is being rebuilt from the ground up and on this episode, Sam talks to two people whose careers have shaped many of the defining moments along the way. Chris Bevilacqua built the proof of concept that became every conference media network you know today.
Chris Marinak spent nearly two decades inside MLB, helping deliver innovations like the pitch clock and the ABS challenge system.

Now both at Playfly Sports, they discuss media rights, college sports, hyper-personalization, and what fans should expect over the next five years.