The Boardroom Buzz: Grow, Sell, or Exit

Not a week goes by where Paul and Patrick don’t hear about Episode 10 with Mike Rogers (if you haven’t listened to that episode, you might want to before you listen to this one). Any Buzz listener would agree that Mike is the kind of guy that you want to hang out with and chat about life and business. No stranger to automobile love affairs, the road trip was made complete with Dylan making the dri...

Jeremy Kreer grew up in a family pest control business. Jeremy opens up about Advanced Pest Management ’s operations behind closed doors. All seems on-track for future generations until Jeremy’s parents go through a divorce. Dealt a bad hand, how did Jeremy buy out his Mom’s shares, and how did that affect the family dynamic? To drive the wedge even further, how did Jeremy’s dad respect Jeremy as...

How do you make a show about tax more exciting? That is a low bar, but Paul and Patrick invited Dylan Seals to spice it up. Dylan literally hears every cough, um, and extracurricular story. The audio engineer keeps the Boardroom Buzz out of trouble. It’s interesting to hear what Dylan has picked up that Paul and Patrick have put down. Straight out of the gate, Cory Vargo isn’t afraid to address th...

It is one thing to look at the best industry performers, but what happens when you dig deeper into profit and loss statements?  Anticimex CEO Jarl Dahlfors attended ‘Pest World Congress in Nashville USA’ to research best in class in the industry to understand what was possible for Anticimex. Paul explains how Jarl now focuses on internal benchmarking. Taking a play from Michael Porter’s value chai...

Jim McHale's dad knew his way around the bars. He cleaned beer taps when he wasn't logging hours at New York's Sing Sing maximum security prison. The prison guard network jumpstarted the family into finishing at #32 on the PCT 100 before selling to Anticimex in 2019 .  In this episode, Cornell grads, Jim and Paul, continue their banter from their 10+ year relationship.  Conducting skip meetings an...

Paul literally steps into Anticimex's boardroom in Stockholm and sits down face-to-face with CEO Jarl Dahlfors, for this intimate and hard-hitting interview. Although Paul prides himself in being the preeminent, global expert on pest control valuation and M&A, our team here at The Boardroom Buzz is wondering if he missed his calling as a 20/20 journalist. As CEO of Loomis , Jarl turned a low-p...

High pricing for pest control got Svein Olav’s attention as COO of Swedish retail coffee chain, Espresso House. Little did he know that he’d follow the white rabbit into pest control ownership, and bring a company back from the brink of bankruptcy.  After taking over as Nomor ’s CEO, Svein Olav quickly made the rounds conducting interviews with both employees and customers. His employees didn’t kn...

Jeff Annis avoided pest control growing up. In fact, it’s the last thing on earth that he would choose to do. Which path led Jeff to building a flagship company in Augusta, Georgia? If you could summarize Jeff Annis and Dena Thomas’s business, Advanced Services, then it may be unique. Or it could be innovation. Or it could be culture. Maybe it’s accountability. It’s hard to pin down a single takea...

As you can imagine, only a few people ever dream or imagine of getting into pest control as a career. Joe definitely took a unique path for his world to collide with the pest industry. Although law school was Joe’s best idea after hanging up his uniform, he found himself at Harvard Business School where he adapted by learning from his private equity and consulting experienced classmates. Paul and...

Brandon Hier recalls his experience responding to the responsibilities he inherited when his dad passed away and then ultimately selling the family business five years later. As a young teen, Brandon donned a respirator as he followed in his father's footsteps. His life took a turn as he shelved his college education to return home to run the business. Brandon was thrust into an impossible work-li...

Private equity has demonstrated increasing interest in the pest control industry. What’s the draw for the Clairvest Canuck combo of Michael Castellarin and Mohit Kansal? How much longer must they eagerly wait before the right opportunity presents itself? Now, if only Patrick can properly pronounce their names… Paul is familiar with private equity’s ‘second bite of the apple’ cliché, but is it appe...

As newly minted grads from the University of Georgia, the world was their oyster. But finding themselves in careers that no longer excited them, they decided to head off into the world…ending up in the US Virgin Islands working at a diner. After retiring to St. John in their early 20s, they decided it was time to make their mark on the business world by taking over their father’s pest control “bus...

Paul and Patrick start the show by celebrating The Buzz’s #1 business podcast ranking in Seychelles. Episode 14 — Buy-Side: “The Opposite” tipped the scales with listener questions. Patrick thought the he could one-up Paul by blindsiding him with a question or two from the mailroom, but Paul rope-a-doped with an extended sell-side role play scenario. Sell-Side Sensei and M&A Master Paul Gianna...

Brett Ponton is rolling out of rubber retail into the revolving ServiceMaster CEO seat. Does he check guest co-host and EPS M&A Director Andrew Barrow’s boxes, or will the Board be calling in their own retreat? Paul doesn’t always agree with return guest Jamie Clement, but Paul gives his ‘million percent’ ( 💯 ^ 💯 ^ 💯) approval of Jamie’s take on a company going public. Speaking of going pub...

Asset managers, hedge funds and private equity firms, collectively managing almost $1 trillion, call on Tim Mulrooney for his investment advice. As William Blair’s service analyst, he covers 20 stocks, but spends more than 50% of his time focusing on the pest control and three key players, Rollins , ServiceMaster and Ecolab . Tim and Paul have debated valuation, asset price inflation, industry gro...

For nine years, Patrick has asked Paul about buy-side M&A in order to grow his Texas-based pest control firm. While Patrick knows that Paul’s true love is sell-side advisory, he also knows that Paul used to work for one of the largest buyout shops in the world and has advised publicly-traded companies on setting up their M&A departments and buy-side M&A processes – such as valuation mo...

Industry colleague Andrew Barrows, head of M&A at Environmental Pest Service , joins The Buzz this week as guest co-host to interview equity research analyst Jamie Clement. When Andrew listened to Episode 6, he contacted Paul and Patrick and said that he wished he had been in the room with them to talk shop with Jamie. This week, his wish was granted. He was brought on The Buzz for a lively di...

In this Episode, Patrick and Paul discuss Terminix Commercial pulling millions of dollars in Copesan accounts from Copesan partners and affiliates, Potomac's Nomor transaction being nominated for European Transaction of the Year in the Nordic Region, three kinds of benchmarking (internal, competitive and world class), the subjective nature of value and its impact on incentive structures.... and al...

Attorney Mike Stanczyk has advised on over a dozen transactions in the pest control industry, many of them with Potomac. Paul and Patrick along with Mike, discuss the expertise that a specialist attorney brings to the table when the stakes are high. Mike’s practice focuses on transactional law issues, including mergers and acquisitions, buying partners in and out of operating entities, executive c...

Paul and Patrick respond to two PCT Top 100 listener questions with a previously glossed-over term from Episode 3 , proximate objectives. By the way, what are proximate objectives? Don’t worry, Patrick asks for you. The strategic acquirers are doing some thing(s) right, depending on the company, the point-of-view, and apparently what today’s date is. Does it matter? We drop a few names such as Ren...

Mike Rogers started Killingsworth Environmental of Charlotte in a double-wide trailer. Who could have imagined that a high school-educated Rogers, would end up turning his street smart salesmanship into a multi-faceted multi-million dollar conglomerate? Mike took the leap and bought out the owners when Killingsworth was at $5 million in revenue. Within a decade, he grew the business to almost $24...

Patrick and Paul’s longtime friends Lenny Gray (author of  Door-to-Door Millionaire ) and McKay Bodily (author of some emails and a birthday card) – partners at Rove Pest Control -- sit down to a surprising discussion on door-to-door trends over the last quarter century. What do these businesses sell for? What is the future of door-to-door sales in pest control? While Paul  hates  door-to-door sal...

In this episode, Paul and Patrick answer listeners’ questions and discuss topics that were raised in previous episodes with Tony Sfreddo , Mike Givlin and Jamie Clement . Topics include: Understanding what drives acquirers to make acquisitions and how value is created by a business combination. Making the hard decision to say “no” to too many disparate service offerings. The advantages of decoupli...

When he’s not making maple syrup snow candy, sipping barely-drinkable coffee at Tim Horton’s, or waiting in a long line at Health Canada for his flu shot, Mike Givlin , CEO of Certus , is building the next US national pest control firm. In this episode, Paul Giannamore and Patrick Baldwin find out what it’s really like to raise private equity funding to build a business. In this interview, Mike ho...

Jamie Clement has worked on Wall Street for investment banking and research institutions for over two decades, providing actionable insight to hedge funds and institutional investors on pest control and other industries. He is an important part of Paul’s inner circle and one of his go-to guys for insight on pest control and other industries. For many years, the two have debated valuation, value cr...