“We made it!” | David and Terry Pomfret’s POTOMAC Experience

My name’s David Pomfret and I used to own Fahey Pest & Lawn Solutions here in Sarasota Florida, and I owned it for 27 years and this is my wife Terry and she’s been with me since 1996 in the business until the day we sold it in 2021.

I met my wife Terry in a bar yeah never thought I’d meet the girl I’d marry in a bar, but at the time my bartender, his bartender, we just started hitting it off right there I slide her some drinks, you know , and she’d bring her friends who dutifully followed her every week. And finally, they were so glad that we started dating that they didn’t have to follow her every week to Bennigan’s for happy hour.

I went in with my son Kyle who was one at the time, and so he was bartending that day and so I walked up to the bar with Kyle on my hip and, figured well better better time than yeah then this is it this is the family big time so, he immediately uh got Kyle’s heart they were best friends ever since.

Well we met in college at a bar, seems to be a reoccurring theme. I started working at Bonefish Grill which is a restaurant in Orlando and he was my trainer. And he kept trying to get me to go out with them and wouldn’t do it and then finally he broke me down, and we’ve pretty much been together ever since.

My dad actually went to work for Tom Fahey probably in the mid 60s. I think he bought it in 1965 until about 1993 and, that’s when I bought it. I was so happy to have the opportunity to buy the company and I said what do I need to do you know to give you a down payment or anything. He says two thousand dollars of your money so we scraped it together, and gave it to my dad and that was I mean that was everything we had, savings and everything and we signed the paperwork. He says this business will take care of you if you take care of your customers and you take care of your employees and the business cannot fail. It was great advice. It was great advice and that’s what I tried to do taking my ideas and and my philosophy in running a business and moving forward with it.

David was the president of our state association. He had headquarters was in Orlando. So we were going over for a meeting. After the board meeting, we said well let’s have Kyle for dinner. During dinner, he just kind of said so, what do you think about me coming into the business, and we were just kind of shocked because he really hadn’t indicated anything. You know before he’d worked during the summers and stuff, we knew we could work together obviously we had done it for years. We just wanted to be sure that we could work with him also in the business because you know family was most important to us. And then Hillary came into the business, and um so that you know there was another challenge. We wanted to make sure that all four of us could work together because that’s kind of different.

We all get along well together. We hang out. We have some drinks like we are super, um, open. I tell them things that are probably not appropriate, uh that they don’t really want to know. The only ones that bumped head was me yeah exactly me and Mom are stubborn, yeah we were getting arguments there’s only a couple epic battles but there was a there was only a couple. It was for you to allow us to take American Express, because we had a customer that called in and said let me get this straight you, uh my dry cleaner and the Chinese food restaurant, are the only people I’ll take my American Express. Got it okay. I was like, Ma, you want to be the dry cleaner and the Chinese food place. I was right. You were right. Yeah they took right to it, and you know they knew what they were doing. They learned from it.

So eventually after several years of them being there, um we started staying away on vacations a little bit longer and they did great. We always thought we were going to buy the business um, that was that was the plan. You know very similar to the way Dad bought the business from his dad but reality is it’s not the 90s anymore. People offer way more money than what they did back then to buy the business nowadays in the same fashion. I mean, I bankrupt the company trying to pay dad what he should get for that company and it would take 20 years instead of now. We sat down as a family and we made that decision that it was time to sell and everybody was on board in the end it benefited us all worked out really good.

After we had sold the business, Dad said something to the effect, of this tremendous weight was off his shoulders. Ultimately the weight of the business and the liability landed on their shoulders. It was kind of nice to hear it was like, he had this like relief you know that I didn’t even realize he had he never showed it, but he had it, so it was kind of cool to hear.

Dealing with Paul and Franco, I mean they knew who the players were that were looking for good well-run companies. And just talking with them, gave me a lot more confidence in in knowing that hey, I think we’re going to do okay. We felt really comfortable with Paul and Franco, I mean they made it they actually almost made it fun. Yeah you know they were fun to work with.

We felt really comfortable that they had our best interests in yeah in mind,. um more so than anything um and they fought for us yeah. They did they weren’t going to back down either so no, no you don’t be happy with that well you can keep going listen, go for it, go for it. They did. They were great to work with.

There was some party going on in our neighborhood here at some time, and we got the phone call from Franco and Paul and with the final offer, and we just looked at each other. And we said we did it, you know we made it, yeah, and hey we can go and enjoy some things. Do our traveling which we always talk about you know traveling visiting Europe, and just doing these road trips in our motorhome. I continue doing that so that was that was just a very happy moment very happy moment.