“I Won’t Back Down” | Tony Tudino’s POTOMAC Experience
I’m Anthony Tudino, and I started a professional pest elimination in 1990.
The first time he took me out on a real date he lost his baby — I lost my brakes on a college hill which is huge. And I would panic and I had to use an emergency brake. And I don’t know what happened, I forgot what happened, but my car was built for street racing so I took everything out of it to make it go faster. Remember I had no uh, had no vent in the door for the — it was just the beginning of Murphy’s Law for us. Everything was a challenge, I think, from the first moment that we met.
I had told her I always wanted to own my own business. If I didn’t do it then I wasn’t going to do it. I was 24 years old, I had a lot of ambition. I always went after commercial work. I had to take jobs in these neighbors that no one else wanted because I just started out. And then we would be out late all hours a night selling hotdogs and I was working at a newspaper. Just trying to do what we could to make ends meet — put a little money to the side to, you know, invest in equipment that he needed to get things off the ground. Thank God he’s ambitious.
When we first moved out of our house to our first building, we put the sign up and it was right on the highway where we are now. Remember we kept driving by — I must have drove by a hundred times on both sides of the highway. I went across the highway, I’m like, wow, look at how bright that is. I’m like, watch my business. And then I’d say, drive by it again and act like you just saw it for the first time. We used to laugh about it. Yeah, we should take pictures of it, you know, like from across the street, from on the highway drive by.
That was a big step, moving from our basement, moving to a commercial building. And it’s not — to really grow at that point, I wanted to be a quality company.
There was a car years ago, which you might not remember — this is called the Yugo. You remember that car? That piece of — okay, that’s the first thing you said was a piece of — you didn’t say that. It was $3,800 brand new, that’s what it cost. And that’s what everybody says. You asked, what do you want to say? My car was a piece of — and we have meetings and I would tell the guys, listen, you pick what you want to be in this world, okay? Because I don’t want to be a Yugo. Because the first thing you’re going to say — if you don’t do a good job, they’re going to forget that you were cheap. They remember that you did a terrible job. I said, if you do a great job, they’re not going to say, oh, that was really expensive. They’re going to say, hey, he got rid of my bed bugs. And at that point they don’t care what it cost.
And that’s really how I ran it, and I really didn’t care how big I was. All I know is that we were getting premiums for jobs and our customers never left us. I started out of a trunk of a Datsun 210 — it was my baby for 31 years. It’s like watching a kid grow up, that’s how I felt about it. And, you know, I didn’t want to see anything happen to it, and uh, to give it up, it’s a big decision to make. It really is a massive decision.
I read about Paul and Franco and I went with them. They made my life a lot easier. They had me interview with three or four large companies and I had to do it in my truck because I couldn’t do it from my office because I didn’t want anybody to know.
Right after that I got really sick with Covid and I was in the ICU. And the bids started coming in and I told myself — I’m really sick. Franco, I’m in the ICU. He was — oh my gosh. I’m pretty sick. And he said, don’t worry about nothing, I will take care of everything. He goes, you just get better.
I’m not — no, I said — you’re not going to be that, yeah, she’s going to say you’re not going to be that guy. You’re not going to get whipped this whole life and die, you know, from a virus? Forget it. I said, that is nothing. It’s not going to happen. You know, my primary kid doctor told me, he said, if you have an attitude, you probably wouldn’t have made it, but your mind has a lot to do with how your body’s going to react. It was the same thing with this business — I had in my head I was going to succeed no matter what.
They told me he had one of the most severe experiences of Covid in the hospital and he was a miracle. And she kept on saying to me, just think about the light at the end of the tunnel, you can do this. You can do — you’ve done worse, you can do this. And I was — I didn’t think I was that sick. I still don’t think I was that — I don’t know, maybe I was. But I just needed a little bit of help and once they gave me the help, you know, I got better.
What was the first thing he did when he got out of the hospital? — Yeah, he, um, he made me take him to pick up his race car. I called up the shop and said, leave my car outside, leave the keys in it, I’ll be there tonight. And they knew I was sick and they’re like, are you sure? I said, I’m picking up my car tonight. And I drove it home on the street, but it made me feel fantastic. It woke me right up. I felt great after.
Over the course of this whole process, we kept hearing the same songs. Yeah, we would hear “Don’t Back Down” by Tom Petty. Yeah. And what happened on the day of closing in our truck, when it was all over? My favorite song of all time came on — “Sympathy for the Devil” came on. They said, okay, it’s all done. I said, we’re all set, we’re closing. Yep, 12 o’clock tonight, it’s not yours anymore.
Franco was — he’s very sharp and he knows this industry and they’re all — I can say they’re fantastic. We’re great at building up businesses. We’re not great at selling them. That wasn’t my forte — that’s Franco and Paul’s and they’re very good at it. But, you know, it worked out in the end. Well, I’m glad that we didn’t back down.
