THM Media CEO Believes There’s No Place Like Home Improvement for Mix of Events, Print, Digital and AI

In July of this year, THM Media, a multimedia company focusing on the home improvement sector, made its first move into events, acquiring Naylor Exchange Events. The company quickly rebranded it as TheHomeMag Exchange Events, an offshoot of its most well-known brand.

It was just the latest step forward for a company named number426 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest growing private companies.

The acquisition "has been a phenomenal tuck-in for us," THM Media CEO Tom Bohn told SIIA Media Alert recently. "It's already grown in the short period of time that we've had it. If you think about any organization trying to become an omni-media channel, you can't do that without having events. So that was very important to us. Picking up these platforms, now we can add other things onto them and scale from that. This gives us a really good opportunity to build out that umbrella."

It's no wonder then that at BIMS 2026, Feb. 2-3 in New Orleans, Bohn will speak at a session titled M&A Trends and Private-Equity Priorities for 2026 with Scott Mozarsky, co-CEO and managing director of JEGI LEONIS, and Craig Fuller, CEO and founder, Firecrown Media and FreightWaves. Adam Shaw, global MD, corporate finance, Collingwood, will moderate.

'I think it's fresh on my mind, and we've done quite a bit, whether it's internally buying back our franchises and bringing them onto the corporate platform, or buying this events business and some other things that we're looking at," Bohn said. "If done in a focused fashion, it can help you scale pretty quickly and get you past a lot of that startup confusion. Obviously, you have the risks of integration, which is always the critical part of it, but I'd rather spend the focus on integration than that chaotic startup feel where you're just trying to get traction. It's very hard to do, especially in events.

"Our goal is to be at the nexus point of any conversation, local or otherwise, related to home improvement, home beautification, home building, etc."

Bohn also brings a background in not-for-profits, where he was "kind of a pioneer in acquisitions in that world," he said. "It really wasn't a thing back when I started doing it, and now I see it a little bit more. It's just a really good way to help extend the brand platform in a very quick, aggressive way."

That brand, TheHomeMag, reaches more than 10 million homes monthly. Based in Cape Coral, Fla., THM Media operates in 70-plus markets across the U.S. with about 110 employees in corporate and 300 throughout the 72 franchises-25 of which the company now owns. About 70% of its revenue still comes from print with digital and events making up the rest.

The company was 100% print revenue when Bohn arrived three years ago. "So it's changed dramatically," he said, "and will continue to do so. There's something special in this events portfolio that we can expand upon. But for these first six months, it has been more about settling in that team we inherited, making sure they felt safe and confident that this was a good place for them to be. Culture is very critical to me. And then adding the resources that they need to help scale it overall."

Yet he knows print will continue to have a major role at THM, calling it "an absolute moat to AI. I am more convinced of that than ever, and that the organizations that have a scaled print capability and then do smart things with digital are going to be the ones that win. Because AI can't replace print."

Given that, Bohn has aggressively-and successfully-guided THM Media into AI with an online platform called AskHomey, an AI component built for the consumer to utilize. Simply scan a QR code, and you're having a text conversation that gives you everything you need to know about home improvement, home trends, etc., in your local market, Bohn said. "You're still interacting with the marketplace, but we're trying to reduce any friction."

He views it as a connector between the company and home improvement professionals, giving them the resources in a place where they can "get much more bespoke information. Chat and all that is great, but they're swimming in enormous data pools, so we're trying to apply the same types of experiences to a much more bespoke data set that will help."

"AskHomey.com was always envisioned as a digital twin to the print publications," Bohn added. "But we had to do it in a way that was unique. When we launched it two years ago-and this is going to sound crazy-the AI was literally cutting edge. Now it's good and gets better every day. It's much more accessible."

Bohn used external partners to build AskHomey. "We are a sales company first," he said, "and a marketing company second. We're definitely not a tech company, and I knew that for us to do that effectively, we would need to bring on partners. And frankly, if you look at the M&A world, there's not much benefit anymore to owning the tech stack because it changes so quickly that it's outdated once you build it. For us, as a media company, there wasn't an advantage in that."

Asked how he spends his days, Bohn said a third is spent on culture, "rallying the troops, making sure obstacles are being removed. The organization mantra is called Clear the Path which means reducing friction for the customer but also between each other as coworkers and teammates."

Another third is spent on operations, dashboards, how the business is running, and how revenue streams look. And the final third is spent on "ideating. Where do we go from here?" Bohn said. "Just look at what's happened in the past six months with the open web and Google. People have built their entire businesses around SEO. I do think that's going to come full circle with AEO [A stands for Answer] becoming the new SEO, and you'll just basically have different systems using different technologies. But they still have to monetize it the same way at some point.

"You have to stay on top of that. It happens at a speed that most people are not accustomed to anymore," Bohn added. "Fortunately, I love that."