“I Wanna Be Like That Guy” | Jim McHale’s POTOMAC Experience

I’m Jim McHale, president of JP McHale Pest Management.

I grew up along the Hudson River, in a little town called Montrose, New York. Blue collar town, a lot of fun, everybody kind of knew each other.

My dad was a corrections officer at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He did 30 years on the right side.

My dad, hooked up with Pat McCauley from Austin Exterminating as a little side business. He was running a route for Mr. McCauley and I used to ride with my dad, and I learned very quickly that this industry was all about people and relationships. And my dad being from Ireland had a gregarious personality, you know, smart guy, knew how to handle people, kind of showed me the ropes that way.

Yeah, I learned very quickly that this could be a real fun business. So that’s why I pursued my degree in entomology at Cornell University.

The big breakthrough was when I went down to Dallas, Texas. I think that was my first Pest World experience, and I went down there, met pest control operators from all over the country, and you know, some very successful ones, like way more successful than I could ever imagine. PCT Magazine had a photo of Al Berger from Bugs Burgers Bug Killer, on the cover in his Miami home in his like lounge chair and I was like, I want to be like this guy.

I had aspirations to, you know, take this thing throughout the entire county, and Westchester especially. Southern Westchester with a tremendous amount of disposable income, you know, we wanted to go to New York City, Southern Connecticut, Northern New Jersey. You know, I’ll never forget when I sold my first job in Rockland County and he was like, that’s across the bridge, there’s tolls. Yeah, we could charge for all that. Yeah, we could do this.

You know, I liked a lot of the big large estates in Greenwich where we had property managers. We did a lot of celebrity homes, politicians, athletes, where they would have property managers. And I love the property manager business because they had connections to, you know, 20, 30 properties. That was exciting to me, getting out there and making things happen.

You know, we built the business up to almost 25 million dollars and the industry was consolidating at a very fast pace. Interest rates were low, multiples were high. I sat down with my brothers — who we all have children — and we decided, all right, do we want to have a third generation take over here? I mean, first generation to second generation is a 50% success rate. Second to third, the numbers dropped significantly.

I’ve known Paul Giannamore for over 15, 20 years. He understands the marketplace, he understands the industry, he understands finance.

New partners — at some point in the deal you have competing interests. This is where Paul really had value. You know, my brothers would say things that they probably wouldn’t say to me, they’ll say to him, so that we could get everything out on the table and open. And you know, again, Paul’s very strategic, a good critical thinker, a problem solver. So it was good that he was there to sort of buffer all that.

Now, I have the resources to do M&A and all the things I wanted to do. My vision and concepts that I’ve tried to push through for years, we’re actually executing on now because we have people. So now I have a leadership team, we’ve built up an infrastructure, we’re rolling up other companies. It’s enabled me to sort of achieve some of the goals that I couldn’t achieve on my own. It was a tremendous success, and I attribute a lot of it to Paul, keeping it going.

He just operates at a higher level and I’m glad I know him. I like him a lot.