“Now Is The Time” | Chris Eby’s Potomac Experience
Hi, my name is Chris Eby and I own HomeShield Pest Control that operated in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve lived in all four corners of the country. I was born in Long Beach, California. The day after I graduated high school, I moved to the Seattle area, and then I met my wife in the Boston area, and then we moved down to the Nashville area.
A family member that had come to me and said, “Chris, I’d worked for a pest control company, they had sold out. I want to start at my own but I can’t — I know nothing about running a business.” I said, “All right, I’ll run the business if you go out there and sell.” And the crazy thing was, he’s like, “I can bring a lot of customers just by knocking on people’s doors.” I thought the kid was nuts. He proved me wrong. And so we started HomeShield Pest Control in February of 2007. I ended up selling that in July of 2021.
It’s your baby. It’s blood, sweat, and tears. It’s everything that you poured in. It’s all the sacrifices that you make just to turn this over to somebody else. That’s tough. It was just time for me to pass the baton on to someone else. And that was one of the nice things about working with Potomac, actually, is because I had great, great relationships with all these other potential buyers. It put me a lot at ease. And to have someone that could put on the kid gloves, walk me through it, explain things to me, and help prep me for what’s coming along — Potomac was absolutely a blast to work with. It just allowed me to take a step back, regroup, take that next step forward.
Tyler is definitely our baby and it’s neat just to see the young man that he’s growing up to be. And he’s bright, he’s extremely athletic, he’s energetic, and he’s kind, and he’s everything that you’d hope your son would be.
What are things that you look forward to doing with him these days? Spending more time. You know, that’s the thing about this is — before, you’re so involved with your business, in hopes of one day, you keep telling yourself, “Okay, at one point, someday I’ll be able to take more time.” Nowadays we’re able to go do a ton of things together and actually spend that quality time with him.
The things I do now are for fun because I want to — I don’t feel like I have to. I didn’t think I deserved or would have, you know, some of those successes that I’ve had in my life. And so sometimes that hurts me when people say, “Well, the American dream’s dead.” I’m like, it’s not dead. If Chris Eby can do it, literally anybody can.