“Bringing More to the Table” | Andreas Olsson’s Potomac Experience
When I first heard about Paul, we had no idea how connected he was and that he was making most of the deals within the pest control industry which is fascinating.
The more I have got to know Paul and kind of researched Paul, the more you understand how imperative it is for the pest control market, talking about M&A’s.
I remember my first encounter with Paul, that was when one of the presentations that we made for one of the potential buyers — very relaxed, obviously very familiar with the situation and of course you are nervous. I mean you’re coming in as a CEO, director of sales, the CFO and myself sitting presenting what you built to a potential buyer. Basically when he describes what he has done in the past, what M&A’s he’s been involved with, makes you feel at ease.
You and I were talking earlier about private equity and typically private equity is talking to investment bankers or there are groups of other advisors, other private equity guys — they live in that world. What took the direction to having a conversation with Paul and Potomac versus the normal exit?
You know when you take in private equity they’re normally going to add value to your company and then they sell you on and they have a cluster of companies and shareholders they work with. Paul was a unique person, somebody they have heard of. He knew so much more than they could have ever anticipated. This was something amazing to have him coming in and add value to the whole situation because I think otherwise we would have been most likely gone from one private equity company to another and I think that’s very common that, that happens if you’re involved with private equity.
You know at the end of the day it’s how many potential clients can you get in the door when you’re selling a company. If you get five or ten potential clients bidding for something, obviously most of the times I would say the more potential buyers you can get into the door to start a bid on your company the better it is. And that’s what we saw Paul doing — he added value in a lot of various ways and one of them for sure being adding five more potential clients to the table.
No, I couldn’t envision this because we did — you know the first kind of exit for us was in 2015 when taking into private equity and we had some hysterical multiples on our EBITDA, you know where we sold for — and I could never imagine that this could happen twice. This was the best thing for at least for the team, the Nomor team, that could happen — is to get Paul involved and having his outcome. I have to be honest, like this was so much better than we had anticipated.
