Shine, a franchisor of residential and commercial window cleaning, holiday lighting and pressure washing services, joins Evive Brands, which The Riverside Company formed in 2023. Shine founder and CEO Chris Fisher will move into the brand president role.
Chris Fisher credited advice from his grandfather, who was a prisoner of war in the Netherlands during World War II and then immigrated to the United States, for inspiring him to start his own business.
“His advice to me was, ‘Chris, it doesn't matter if you're making more money or less money, just be your own boss,’” said Fisher, who started what was Golden Eagle Window Cleaning in 1999 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, not long after he graduated college.
Chris Fisher started what became Shine in 1999 as Golden Eagle Window Cleaning. With the sale to Riverside, he becomes Shine's brand president.
By 2009, after adding pressure washing, holiday lighting and other exterior cleaning services, Fisher changed his company’s name to Shine to better reflect its offerings. Now at more than 75 territories across 20 states, Shine is the latest add-on acquisition to Evive Brands, a portfolio company under investment firm The Riverside Company.
Formed 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 far from a straight one 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 more of an impact in some way, “but didn’t know how that was going to happen.” His wife was later diagnosed with breast cancer, which she recovered from just as Fisher was ramping up to franchise Shine, which he did in 2012.
“We realized life was short,” he said, so when they were asked to join a mission effort, “we just felt really called to move our family over to Uganda,” where they worked for two and a half years with Arrows + Hope. The organization provides education to orphaned and vulnerable children, and has centers in Soroti and Entebbe.
Fisher put friend Matthew DeYoung in charge of growing 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 lead the company and established its headquarters in Jenison, Michigan. The experience in Uganda, he said, solidified what was already his focus at Shine: serving people.
“Our focus when we went to Uganda was the people we were serving. It's the same thing in the franchise system, that you're focused on the people you're serving,” he said. “So whether that's franchisees or our home office team or the customers, you put your focus there, and that's one of our values, servant leadership. I think that crossover works really well between the two.”
Wanting to preserve the strong culture created at Shine, Fisher said he took it slow after Grant Marcks on Riverside’s origination team first reached out to him two years ago, when Shine had about 50 outlets. Evive Brands in the meantime continued to build its portfolio, including with the addition of Brothers Gutters.
Fisher knew Brothers Gutters co-founders Ken and Ryan Parsons, as they started their franchise journeys 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 aligned in how we approach business and put franchisees first and really try to build something special,” he said. Riverside, he continued, brings the “firepower and resources” Shine needs to provide best in class technology to its franchisees, particularly with its customer management software, and accelerate franchise development.
Shine added holiday and outdoor landscape lighting to its service offerings in 2006.
Marcks said from Riverside’s perspective, Shine is a “natural complement” to the Evive platform and provides another cross-selling opportunity, both to consumers and to franchisees of other Evive concepts. Shine does mostly residential work, he noted, with an ability to expand into large commercial jobs, while the holiday lighting service helps “to combat the seasonality” of window cleaning and pressure washing.
He also called out the strong branding—“I honestly can’t think of a better brand name than Shine.”—and healthy franchisee retention and validation, which are key to Riverside’s due diligence process.
“We are looking 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 ramping up.”
Fisher will transition to the role of brand president at Shine. The brand has a goal of hitting 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 engaged investment bank Harrington Park Advisors as its exclusive financial adviser. Ashish Seth, Harrington Park’s founder and managing director, likewise noted the strength of Shine’s brand, which he said made it especially attractive as an acquisition.
“You can’t ever underestimate this, and we firmly believe in this at Harrington Park, which is, your brand has real value, because you're not the only window washing business out there. You're not the only holiday light business out there,” Seth said. “So, what makes you different, beyond all the financials and growth? It's your brand, how it stands out.”
Seth said he worked closely with the Fishers to negotiate a transaction with terms that were “highly attractive” for them, running a process in line with Harrington Park’s approach to driving what he said are “best-in-class valuations, whether it's restaurants, consumer services or home services.”
The M&A in the residential services franchise sector, Seth noted, will remain active through 2026 as private equity firms look to create or round out platforms with concepts that cover the whole home. Many of the larger assets, he continued, “have already been picked over,” so firms will turn their attention to finding the next generation of high growth franchisors.
“I think one of the key things in this market is knowing who are the hungry parties out there, and who are just out there making acquisitions,” he said. “I think with Riverside and Evive, we had a hungry party that was trying to fill a gap in the portfolio.”