As the troubled Menomonee Falls-based home improvement company Window Select continues navigating the bankruptcy process, hundreds of homeowners will soon have outstanding work from the company completed.
Even before Window Select, which sold windows, siding and doors, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February, customers had been complaining for months of incomplete and improperly finished renovations.
Now, a newly formed West Allis-based home improvement company called TruVista is moving forward with fulfilling a sizable chunk of Window Select’s outstanding contracts.
TruVista was formed in January and is backed by a group of shareholders with experience in the management consulting business. Spearheading the company’s efforts is Mohit Shah, president of TruVista. He’s an entrepreneur who most recently served as a senior project director for North Carolina-based management consulting firm Cogent Analytics, which is leading Window Select through its bankruptcy proceedings.
“I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve built and scaled several businesses in a high-intensity environment, so it seemed like a good fit,” said Shah.
He’s also no stranger to contractor fraud. He and his family were victims of a scam that occurred at their Mequon home when he was a child.
“We were putting an addition on the house. It was coming up on winter and the contractor opened up the entire side of our house, took my dad’s money and ran off,” said Shah.
He began his career as a renewable energy developer in 2007, which is when he founded his first business, NGSolar. Shah ended up selling NGSolar and its eventual portfolio companies in 2011. From there, he launched an ed tech company called Yaphie. The startup offers a platform that helps high school students prepare and apply to colleges. Shah owns the intellectual property for the software but is in talks with a Washington D.C.-based software company that would like to purchase it.
Following his time launching NGSolar and Yaphie, Shah moved to India in 2015 and formed a research and development/management consulting company called Emanar Enterprise.
“I did commercial development, residential construction … I’ve done projects for cities, whether it be retrofitting an entire city with LED lights or retrofitting schools with energy efficient applications,” he said.
He once again built up that business into a larger portfolio of companies and ended up selling it. In 2022, he was recruited by Cogent Analytics. Discussions on taking over Window Select’s unfulfilled contracts began last year.
Divvying up the contracts
In January 2022, Window Select hired Cogent Analytics for management consulting. That September, Cogent decided bankruptcy was the only solution to Window Select’s problems.
North Carolina-based Phoenix Investment Group Holdings then announced it would be willing to take over Window Select’s contracts at a projected loss of $1 million. Phoenix said it would create an entirely new entity, TruVista, to do so.
During the bankruptcy process, any remaining contracts were broken down into three buckets: those that were profitable endeavors, those that would break even and those that would come at a loss.
“I wasn’t looking to cherry pick (what contracts I wanted). For me, it was saying whoever wants to move forward, I’ll take all the work. I don’t think anyone else did that,” said Shah.
From February through April, TruVista contacted all 1,700 customers who still had open Window Select contracts. From there, approximately 600 wanted to move forward with TruVista.
TruVista is currently working through the process of “re-measuring” homes for each project and confirming and ordering materials.
Before an installation can be completed, each project must go through the re-measuring process. Since June, when TruVista was officially awarded the remaining contracts, 20 installations have been completed. Shah said that number will exponentially increase as the company works toward the end of the list of homes that need to be re-measured. He expects all 600 contracts to be fulfilled next spring.
Once the remaining Window Select contracts have been handled, Shah wants to continue developing TruVista into an end-to-end exterior home improvement company. He believes the company can grow to bring in $20 million to $25 million annually within the next three to five years.
“There aren’t very many contractors in the state of Wisconsin that are going to perform 600 jobs in this calendar year,” he said. “I think that opportunity could drive organic growth for us in a way that very few competitors might have experienced.”
Next steps for Window Select
While hundreds of customers are approaching the end of their home improvement journeys, Window Select is still deep in the throes of the bankruptcy process. Cogent Analytics has allegedly discovered that Window Select’s founding chief executive officer Justin Kiswardy paid $4.3 million to insiders. Kiswardy not only paid $3.8 million to himself, but $298,210 to his significant other, $118,461 to his brother, $54,785 to his mother and $59,555 to his father “for which no apparent consideration (was) received by the debtor,” according to a recently filed liquidation plan in the case.
An attorney for Kiswardy did not respond to a request for comment.
The legal counsel guiding Window Select through the bankruptcy process sought to locate any assets that could possibly be paid to creditors and found the payments to company insiders. The plan of liquidation says the $4.3 million was paid between 2020 and 2021, the same time customer complaints of incomplete work and improper installation began streaming in.
That’s not the only noted discrepancy in Kiswardy’s finances. The liquidation plan also mentions Window Select’s attorneys learned of $210,000 being held in escrow from the sale of a building in Ohio.
“Justin Kiswardy had directly tried to obtain the funds by filing a suit under the name of ‘Justin Gabel’ as the plaintiff,” according to the liquidation plan. “The body of the complaint identifies Justin Gabel as ‘Justin Gabel aka Justin Kiswardy.’ Gabel is Justin Kiswardy’s mother’s family name.”
Out of the $210,000 that was held in escrow, $160,000 could be traced to transfers made from Window Select’s bank accounts, according to the plan.
“Cogent Analytics is working with the authorities through the bankruptcy proceedings and is unable to comment on litigation against Window Select owner Justin Kiswardy,” the firm said in a statement.
The proposed liquidation plan in Window Select’s bankruptcy case is awaiting final approval. Some objections to the plan have been filed, including one on behalf of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. Through its attorney, DWD said it has filed a proof claim in the amount of $18,754 for unpaid employee wages. DWD argues the liquidation plan does not account for the organization’s secured claim and violates “numerous bankruptcy code provisions,” so it cannot be approved as is.
