A Valuation Beyond Belief: Tom O’Toole’s POTOMAC Experience

My name is Tom O’Toole. I am the former owner of Pestguard Limited which is based in Rathcoole in Dublin.

The company was set up in 1983. We traded for 38 years until we decided to sell.

I grew up in Wicklow, Garden County, which is next door to Dublin and I walked in Wicklow and then came to Dublin to walk into bars around Dublin. I was looking in the sense that I was able to walk in the bar at night time and run the business during the day. There was an opening for an efficient pest control company.

So what we’ve done initially was we bought the vans and we put two-way radios in them and my wife was a receptionist so when someone got a call we were there very quickly. We started work at seven, eight o’clock in the morning in pest control and then at six o’clock in the evening then we took off that jacket and we put on the cleaning gear and we went in and we cleaned restaurants around Dublin City here and we’ve done that up to ’94.

I sold off the country cleaning business and then I bought up my existing partner. Darren stepped in and Michael and my two sons and my daughter and four of us worked together. You know I would take a van, Adele who would be with me — she now runs the office — she would sit in as a helper and we would do Galway one weekend, we do Cork during the weekend and we do the north end of the country during the weekend. And we had that down to a fine art so we didn’t send the vans out the city wasting time. We don’t know ourselves.

And we enjoyed it, we enjoyed it. So if you enjoy your work you’ll probably succeed. If you find yourself, you know, not wanting to get up in the morning to go to the work then it’s time to get rid of it because at that stage it’s time to step out.

As I was getting near the retirement age I was approached initially by a mountain company who initially made an offer to buy the business and then they backed away. French companies who eventually bought the business, they made an approach and one of the multinationals that I worked for, they made an approach. So we said well let’s have a look at this and see how it goes.

And we can then engage Paul and then Paul took it from there and created an auction with five or six companies. It was run very professionally, it was run very quickly and that was the great thing about it. It was within a week, we’ve done it. There was no, you know, waiting for three or four months and as we had before, we were doing it a year before and we did come to a point where we were selling for, you know, not near what you get.

And what you generated in the end, well it worked out exceptionally well because of all — I mean we were more than surprised about what — I’ve got to say.