It’s a trap! Mike Prosperi’s POTOMAC Experience | Selling a Pest Control Company to Rollins
I’m Mike Prosperi, Bug House Pest Control — this is my wife Darlene. We’ve owned it for 29 years, and we’re here in Puerto Rico.
When I was in school at the University of Georgia, I took an entomology course where 80 percent of your grade was attendance. Harry Pratt, the guy that was doing the class, he was like, “How can you mess this up?” We got to be buddies, and he said, “You know, you ought to get in the bug business — you’d be perfect.”
Then I came to “Millyzone” and started Bug House. And it was an uphill battle, I mean, I spent all my money trying to keep this thing afloat, and I went to my dad and said, “Dad, I only need about fifteen thousand dollars.” He said, “Son, if you can’t get the money on your own, it’s not meant to be.” And luckily, we were on a lake, Lake Sinclair, and all these people from Atlanta started coming down.
I got a banker to give me a little line of credit. I told him my story — the lakes were starting to get going, I’d run out of money, you know I’d been doing this almost three years. He said, “Will twenty thousand do?” I said, “That’d be perfect.” Then he asked if I had any collateral. I said, “I have no collateral.” He said, “Can you sign your name?” I said yes — and that’s how it got going. That’s back in the old days when bankers had a little leniency.
The gentleman who gave him his first loan so he could do his own business is actually the gentleman who fixed us up. His daughter was one of my best friends, and she said, “My dad wants to fix you up with somebody — don’t worry about it, I’m sure it won’t go anywhere.” And lo and behold, here we are.
She’s the secret ingredient that helped us grow, freed me up to where I could take care of things, you know that meant the world to me, and it meant the world to our customers.
I had just turned 60, and it’s the longest our country had ever been without a recession. It’s bound to happen and I’m 60 years old. I didn’t want to go through another recession like I did in ’09, 2010, 2011. I didn’t want to do that again. You work your butt off to build something, and at the end they’re saying you know — from inheritance tax to property tax, whatever — it never ends. And you see what they do with the money makes it even worse.
I would have lost a ton of money if I hadn’t done the right thing. Luckily, a friend told me to get a broker. I called Paul, and next thing you know, it turned out to be the greatest thing we ever did. Him and Franco, you know coached me through the whole thing. We were worried to death, I wasn’t sleeping — and Franco kept on saying, “oh, it’s okay, okay, everything’s good, everything’s great.” I’m like, “It didn’t feel like it, but it is, I do this every day.”
Anybody that’s looking at selling a business — do not do it on your own. It’s a trap. There are so many loopholes you will not know. You pay a little for the broker, and it’s well worth the money, because they earn it and then some.
Someone asked me a couple years ago, “What drives you to be successful?” It’s one word: fear. I watched my parents have hard times during the Carter years — they lost everything they had. It motivated me to where I never want to be poor again. “It is a crisis of confidence”. It drove me every day to want to do better.
