No One Else Comes Close: Brooks Freeman on Choosing POTOMAC M&A for His Pest Control Business Sale
The itch for entrepreneurship after you’ve been there once it’s hard to just go back to being an employee again and I had to do it. I had the name and I had the logo and I had this image in my mind of what we would look like and I wanted to see it happen.
My name is Brooks Freeman. I founded Pest Solutions in Lebanon, Tennessee. A $5,000 used pickup truck that spent more time on a tow truck than it did in a customer’s driveway, a bunch of equipment from eBay — that was probably the first two or three months. And every now and then I would land a decent sized job and buy something nice. My first Christmas present to myself was a termite rig.
Every entrepreneur has the same story. The first few years you just put in a lot of work, a lot of time. I didn’t really have a work life and a home life — it was all one life. That’s the only way I could make it work. If I actually looked at the hours that I was working I probably would have been disappointed in the pay that I was making at the time, but then I wouldn’t be here.
I’d reached out to POTOMAC in ’21. Out of the blue, Franco called and just said, hey, I’ve got somebody who just made an acquisition close to you guys and you’re sitting smack dab in the middle of the area they want, and it just worked out really good for everyone involved.
I knew at that time that’s who I would work with. Just the level of professionalism is so above par. I haven’t talked to anyone in M&A that’s even close. Franco lights up a room — he owns the room when he walks in, same thing in a meeting or a phone call. Anytime I reached out, instant — if he could not answer the phone there was an instant text, I’ll call you right back, and a lot of times he called me right back before I had a chance to read the text.
POTOMAC’s a different level. There’s a reason they do most of the transactions. This deal would not have happened without POTOMAC. These numbers would not have happened without POTOMAC — there’s no way. You hear these local deals that go on where maybe someone passes away and you know another local competitor buys them out — gosh, it’s pennies. It’s never a good deal compared to the kind of multiples that you hear with POTOMAC.
A company always has letters sent to them of people that are interested in stuff, and anytime I mentioned that I worked with POTOMAC and any communication would be through them, I didn’t hear anything back. They were looking for probably a small guy that they could pick up cheap and run off into the sunset with — not a bad business strategy. I just didn’t want to be that guy.
