The Riverside-backed commercial services platform will teach owners across seven brands, from 1-Tom-Plumber to U.S. Lawns, to build AI agents in the same building as the walk-in coolers.
Most franchise training centers teach owners how to fix the thing. EverSmith Brands' new one also wants them building the software.
EverSmith, the commercial facility services platform The Riverside Company formed in 2020, opens EverHUB on Oct. 22 in Milford, Ohio, the company said Oct. 21. The 12,000-square-foot center will serve owners across seven brands: 1-Tom-Plumber, Clintar, Kitchen Guard, MilliCare, Prism Specialties, The Seals and U.S. Lawns. Together they cover roughly 800 territories and more than 340 ownership groups in seven countries, and EverSmith says it is aiming for more than 1,200 territories within three years.
Most of the building is what you would expect. Brand-specific stations simulate commercial job sites, including a walk-in refrigerator contributed by a partner, and an 80-person room handles onboarding and meetings. There is also a podcast studio.
The part worth watching is the AI lab. EverSmith says it is equipped with computers, workstations and virtual reality gear, and will "support the development and training of AI agents built using Claude," Anthropic's model, with a focus on helping franchisees support their teams and improve customer service. Owners will see live demonstrations and case studies on daily operations and technician training.
"Franchisees choose a platform for the support behind them," CEO Justin Ghadery said. "As we grow beyond 1,200 territories, every new owner will start here."
Here is why the location matters. Putting the lab in the training building, not in a corporate IT office, treats AI as an owner skill, like learning the equipment. That is a different bet from Batteries Plus, which built its agents centrally and rolled them out across the system, or from the in-house builds at Wingstop and Pokeworks that we argued most brands cannot copy. EverSmith is betting that owners can learn to build. I think that bet is right for operators who run trucks and crews, because they know which calls get missed and which follow-ups slip. I am less sure a lab visit turns into an agent that runs every day.
The release leaves out what decides that: which agents, what they cost owners, and who owns the call and customer data they produce.
Revscale, which publishes this site, builds AI agents for franchise and multi-location businesses on the same premise: agents are configured in natural language, so an owner who can describe a workflow can set one up. Its off-the-shelf configurations include a Voice Agent that answers inbound calls, captures caller details and transfers to a person when needed, and an Inbound Agent that qualifies leads and routes them within minutes. For a commercial services owner, the hard part is rarely the model. It is deciding what should happen to a 6 p.m. service request and where that record lands, whether in Revscale's CRM or the system the business already uses.
EverHUB opens Thursday. Whether owners leave with agents they actually run, or just a good demo, will say more than the ribbon cutting.
Revscale Media is published by Revscale.
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