Shine, a franchisor of residential and commercial window cleaning, holiday lighting and pressure washing, is joining Evive Brands, founded in 2023 by The Riverside Company. Chris Fisher, founder and CEO of Shine, will take on the role of brand president.
For inspiration to start his own business, Chris Fisher credited the advice of his grandfather, who was a prisoner in the Netherlands during World War II and then emigrated to the United States.
“His advice to me was, 'Chris, it doesn't matter if you make more or less money, just be your own boss,'” said Fisher, who founded Golden Eagle Window Cleaning in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1999, shortly after graduating from college.
Chris Fisher founded Shine in 1999 as Golden Eagle Window Cleaning. With the sale to Riverside, he becomes Shine's brand president.
In 2009, Fisher changed his company's name to Shine after adding pressure washing, Christmas lights and other exterior cleaning services to better reflect his offerings. Now present in more than 75 territories across 20 states, Shine is the latest add-on acquisition from Evive Brands, a portfolio company of investment firm The Riverside Company.
Founded by Riverside in 2023, the Evive Brands platform includes Executive Home Care, Assisted Living Locators, Grasons, Brothers Gutters, Maid Brigade and Pacific Lawn Sprinklers. Terms of the Shine deal, which closed in late November, were not disclosed.
The path to attracting a private equity buyer was anything but straightforward for Fisher. He and his wife, Michelle, had adopted a daughter from Ethiopia, and after traveling to East Africa and seeing the poverty there, he said they knew they wanted to make a bigger impact in some way, but “didn't know how to make it happen.” His wife was later diagnosed with breast cancer, from which she recovered just as Fisher moved up to the Shine franchise in 2012.
“We realized that life is short,” he said, and when they were asked to join a mission, “we really felt called to move our family to Uganda,” where they worked for Arrows + Hope for two and a half years. The organization provides education for orphaned and vulnerable children and has centers in Soroti and Entebbe.
Fisher hired his friend Matthew DeYoung to develop the franchise, which signed a handful of franchisees during that time. A few years later, after adopting two more children from Uganda and running a Shine business near Austin, Texas, Fisher returned to run the company and established its headquarters in Jenison, Michigan. The experience in Uganda, he said, solidified what he was already focused on at Shine: serving the people.
“When we went to Uganda, we focused on the people we served. In the franchise system, it's the same: you focus on the people you serve,” he said. “So whether it's franchisees, our home office team or the customers, that's where you put your focus, and that's one of our values: servant leadership. I think the overlap between the two works really well.”
To maintain the strong culture created at Shine, Fisher said he took things slowly after Grant Marcks from Riverside's founding team first contacted him two years ago, when Shine had about 50 stores. Meanwhile, Evive Brands continued to expand its portfolio, including by adding Brothers Gutters.
Fisher knew Brothers Gutters co-founders Ken and Ryan Parsons since they began their franchise journey around the same time, and when Ryan Parsons was named CEO of Evive Brands, Fisher said it became clear a transaction would be mutually beneficial.
“I knew we were on the same page in the way we approached business, that we were putting franchisees first and really trying to build something special,” he said. Riverside, he continued, brings the “firepower and resources” Shine needs to provide its franchisees with world-class technology, particularly with its customer management software, and to accelerate franchise development.
In 2006, Shine expanded its service offerings to include holiday and landscape lighting.
Marcks said from Riverside's perspective, Shine is a “natural complement” to the Evive platform and offers another cross-selling opportunity, both for consumers and franchisees of other Evive concepts. He noted that Shine does primarily residential work and has the opportunity to expand to large commercial jobs, while the Christmas lighting service helps “counter the seasonality” of window cleaning and pressure washing.
He also highlighted the strong branding – “I honestly can’t think of a better brand name than Shine.” – and healthy franchisee retention and validation, which is critical to Riverside’s due diligence process.
“We look for brands that have really strong unit economics and high franchisee satisfaction,” he said. “We’re really focused on how existing franchisees are performing and how new franchisees are coming up.”
Fisher will assume the role of brand president at Shine. The brand has a goal of reaching 200 locations by 2030, “so I was really hoping to be part of that growth,” he said. “That was important to me, and Riverside has a pretty good track record of working with founders.”
Shine hired investment bank Harrington Park Advisors as its exclusive financial advisor. Ashish Seth, founder and managing director of Harrington Park, also pointed to the strength of the Shine brand, which makes it particularly attractive as an acquisition.
“That's something that can never be underestimated, and we at Harrington Park truly believe that your brand has real value because you're not the only window cleaner out there. You're not the only Christmas lighting company out there,” Seth said. “So what sets you apart, aside from all the finances and growth? It's your brand that sets you apart.”
Seth said he worked closely with the Fishers to negotiate a transaction on terms that were “extremely attractive” to them, using a process consistent with Harrington Park's approach to achieve what he said were “best-in-class valuations, whether it be restaurants, consumer services or home services.”
M&A in the residential services franchise sector, Seth said, will remain active through 2026 as private equity firms look to create or round out platforms with concepts that cover the entire home. Many of the larger assets, he continued, “have already been acquired,” so companies will turn their attention to finding the next generation of high-growth franchisors.
“I think one of the most important things in this market is knowing who the hungry parties are out there and who is out there making acquisitions right now,” he said. “I think with Riverside and Evive we had a hungry party trying to fill a gap in the portfolio.”