Dad & Daughter Garage Door builds a story, not just a business

Bryan Huddleston has had plenty of experience with rebrands.

As a product manager and tech council executive in Nashville, he’d watched companies shed old identities and emerge with new logos, color palettes, and signage that looked great on a business card.

So when he sat down with Ryan Chute and the team at Wizard of Ads to begin reimagining his newly merged garage door company, he came in with his guard lowered.

“I can deal with anything,” he told himself.

And he meant it. After 30 years in technology — Microsoft, Dell subsidiaries, startup ventures — Huddleston had learned to lead with curiosity and follow the data. Whatever the agency brought back, he was ready.

At least he thought he was.

Cornerstone of success

The story of Dad & Daughter Garage Door Service actually begins with a man named Jim Mulholland.

For 30 years, Mulholland, his wife Jo Lynn and daughter Christy ran Cornerstone Garage Door in middle Tennessee. Jim handled the technical side, including dispatch; Christy was responsible for the back office – the call center, accounts receivable, purchasing, inventory, ordering, customer care and fleet management. Jim developed his own system.  He had no software and no dispatch board, just a whiteboard in his head.

He could track 50 jobs a day on his own, routing seven to nine technicians by zip code alone. When an emergency call came in, Mulholland would hear the address, picture the grid, and know exactly which technician was close enough to help.

Together, the Mulholland family built a multi-million dollar business with that approach.

“Amazing,” Huddleston said.

Mulholland also is a man of faith. He’d chosen the name Cornerstone because he wanted a name that would reflect his belief systems. Some 17 years before the merger, Mulholland’s business had grown too big for one person. So he asked his daughter Christy to help. She remains with the business, now a teammate of Huddleston.

When Huddleston came to Mulholland in 2024 — he calls himself “the accidental tourist” because he more or less stumbled into home services after a career in enterprise software — Mulholland didn’t just sell him a business.

Mulholland wanted someone who would protect the customers, protect the team, and honor Cornerstone’s guiding principles.

“He wanted someone who would carry on that tradition because of his value set,” Huddleston said.

‘Melt your brain’

The merger closed in October 2024. Within 45 days, the entire operation had moved from paper and whiteboard to ServiceTitan, the cloud-based software for the trades. Technicians turned to iPads. The team grew. And Huddleston began thinking about what would come next.

He had already seen what most marketing agencies sold. Logo packages dressed up in the language of strategy. Visual identities built around what looked good on a truck wrap, with no story to anchor them. In his years as a product manager, he’d gone through product marketing training and come out the other side with a conviction that would now shape everything: story first, visuals second.

“The story you have is way more important than features and functions,” he said. “You have to attach problem, solution, and for the customer, there’s always an emotion.”

He’d already befriended Chute at Wizard of Ads, and when the two spoke Huddleston made his feelings clear: He wanted a story that exemplified the brand, so build around the story, then build a visual identity.

It was hand-in-glove with the way Chute works.

“Feelings are the cornerstone of our strategy,” Chute said. “If we can’t make people laugh or cry or feel something about what they’re facing, we haven’t done our job.”

The only way to do that, he said, is to learn as much as he can about the business and the team.

So Chute spent about two days with Huddleston, tapping into his history and beliefs. His tech background. His upbringing in rural West Tennessee, where he’d hauled hay and cut tobacco and learned what hard work felt like. His marriage. His three daughters, 19, 16, and 14. And one of the reasons he’d gotten into the garage door business in the first place: To give them somewhere to learn, to grow, to contribute.

The team at Wizard of Ads then spent another 45 days working with its team in development to create the right brand, image, logo and marketing to fit the story, centered around a basic human connection.

Chute and his team had found two natural stories – the connection between Mulholland and Christy, and the connection between Huddleston and his daughters.

“We try to make people feel something special about something they already feel,” Chute said.

It took 47 more days for Wizard of Ads to get the brand approved, and another two months to firm up the visual and editorial production. In a little under four months, Chute was ready.

He called Huddleston and conveyed a simple message: “You need to sit back; we’ve got a concept that’s going to melt your brain.”

Huddleston’s response to himself: Whatever.

A brand you can feel

The Wizard of Ads team was not pitching a new logo. They were pitching a world — two characters, a dad and a daughter standing back to back to become the living embodiment of the business.

Dad represented the technical side. The trained technician who understood the difference between an insulated and non-insulated door, who cared that homeowners were safe, worry-free, and proud of their home..

Daughter represented the business side: accounts payable, scheduling, customer calls, inventory. Together, they didn’t just split duties — they created something. A family. A partnership. A story that anyone could feel.

“We tried to represent Dad in an upright, and honorable manner,” Chute said. “And to respect women in so much as we respect their diverse perspectives in the trades, their attention to detail and their ability to run a solid operation.”

Wizard of Ads had written radio scripts. Sitcom-style, serialized, the two characters bantering back and forth about the business, about homeowners, about their life. The ads would run like episodes, not commercials.

Then came the last script.

In it, the Dad looks at his daughter and tells her she’ll be running things. And then he says they’re changing the name. To Dad & Daughter Garage Door Service.

The script ends expressing with the two expressing the most important of words to each other: I love you.

Huddleston wasn’t ready for that.

“I suspect we might have made him cry,” Chute said. “We have a win when we do that.”

Huddleston sat with it. He talked to his wife. He talked to Christy. What he heard confirmed what he was feeling.

This wasn’t a brand strategy. This was truth expressed in fictional form. It was Mulholland and Christy. It was Huddleston and his own girls. It was every ‘girl Dad’ sharing the future with his daughter. It was also every family that had ever called in because their garage door was broken and felt, for a moment, a little vulnerable.

He said yes.

Value and validation

The rebrand launched in March of 2026. Two vans rolled out wrapped in the new identity — the dad and daughter characters bold against the paint — and the radio ads began airing across middle Tennessee.

The results were immediate, and the reactions not something Huddleston had planned for.

One evening, one of his technicians stopped at a grocery store. When he exited, there was a man standing in front of the van, holding his newborn daughter while his wife photographed them.

“I was just blown away by that,” Huddleston said.

Then came the call from Mulholland.

Mulholland doesn’t listen to the radio, so he hadn’t heard the ads. But some of the men he goes to church with had pulled him aside to say they’d heard the commercials and that they were awesome.

Mulholland went online and read the About Us page Huddleston had written — the careful, honest account of what Cornerstone had been and what Dad & Daughter now was.

He called Huddleston.

“I really like what you wrote there,” Mulholland said.

Huddleston said he felt that was Mulholland saying, ‘Hey everything is OK.’

Huddleston had made the name change not on impulse but after prayer, reflection, and long consultation. He had carried Mulholland’s legacy into it, and Mulholland’s legacy would carry forward.

“I promised him I would do that … ” Huddleston said. “My responsibility is to provide, which means providing the way for everybody on the team to be better than what they were while I honor what Jim has built. That they have opportunity for the future. I'm just more pumped about that than anything else because I love every person on the team.”

There’s even more to the story

Dad & Daughter’s approach has led to success. The goal for 2026 is to double the $3 million it reached in 2025, with hopes to reach $20 million by 2028.

“Then we’ll figure out if we need to go to $100 million,” Huddleston said.

That matters, obviously. But to him what matters more is the story.

Huddleston is thinking about dad-daughter safety pamphlets. He’s thinking about how to teach his AI voice agents to speak with the warmth and banter of the two characters his brand is built around. He’s open-minded about any way he can help the connection between any parent and any child.

Underneath the strategy and the technology and the growth targets, there is that human element.

“If we can help one family and just one family have a better connection between a father and a daughter or anyone inside of the family, a mother and a son, whatever that is,” Huddleston said, “then all of that's worth it.”