My name is Jason Pananos. I grew up in western part of Massachusetts and spent my whole life here until college. I moved around a little bit in New England, but we moved back to western Mass once my wife and I had kids. It’s been a great, great place for us since we’ve been back here.
Jay Davis is my business partner. We met as first-year students when we were getting our MBAs at Harvard Business School. We got to know each other really well that first year, and then when we came back to campus our second year, neither one of us knew what we wanted to do but we both had aspirations at some point in our careers to own and build a small business, so we spent most of our second year exploring exploring ways we could do that. We thought it would probably happen later in our careers, but luckily we were able to find investors and entrepreneurs who had bought companies as younger entrepreneurs. It’s called the search fund model. The concept is that you raise some capital before you find the company, so it gives you some money to pay yourselves a salary and travel to visit businesses, and do due diligence.
Two and a half years after we started our search, we bought this company called Vector Disease Control, which is based in Little Rock, Arkansas and focused on mosquito control programs, mainly for municipalities, cities, counties, and government agencies — that was, at the time, mostly in the Southeast but we ended up buying 14 companies over really the next five years, about a seven year journey and we ended up with you know one much bigger company with a mosquito control and a naked pond management division.
We felt like this could be a company you may want to own forever potentially so as we thought about mosquito control and even getting into lake and pond management, we never thought about it as you know, let’s get this ready for sale and let’s have certain ownership time period but you know, we thought it would be smart obviously to pay attention to what was going on the market and get to know Paul.
We learned a lot from him about the pest control industry and Paul had a lot of intelligence about what was going on — both on the M&A but you know on the strategy side. It was great to have that line of communication, and we get to know him well. We kind of became friends before we ever thought about selling the business.
We were about seven years into our journey around the time where we started thinking about selling the business. We knew there was lots of opportunity for the people and the company with a larger owner. I think there’s a personal aspect to it as well so you know Jay and I had been at this seven years, a lot of travel away from family and you know we had taken the company from 35 full-time year-round people and 100 seasonal , about 350. Again we were in the pest control industry sort of but it was very niche specialized business within that broader market. So you know, for us to understand what are valuations in this market, who are the larger players, how they think about various types of services within the industry. You know, Paul was really really helpful on that, had a lot of market intelligence of what was going on with some of the larger firms. I think we knew, we needed an advisor if we were eventually to sell a company. And in our view, there was nobody better on the planet that we wanted to work with us than Paul.
The Rentokil North America team understood our business. I think the best, and had a better plan for how they were going to grow it — and they have done so, it’s been four years now, and I couldn’t be more proud of how they’ve given our people the opportunity to take bigger roles in the company and help grow the business which is more than twice as big as it was when we sold the company.
