“The Right Way To Do It” | Jeff Annis’ POTOMAC Experience

If I talk to one more guy who says, you know, when I die all this wealth is going to pour down to them — I’m thinking, well, you know, I have some pretty strong spiritual beliefs too, but I’d rather see it at eye level. Okay, I don’t want to be going — or some people think I’d be going either way — either way, I want to watch it.

There’s three essential freedoms in the world. There’s a freedom of money, freedom of time, and a freedom of worry. You make a list of all the worries you have with 55 buck trucks running around the countryside — I’m not worried about that anymore. My other worry is going to be okay now. My worry is how’s my investments, what are they doing.

My message might be though to people — I’ve seen plenty of times when they called Paul because they had to. I don’t want to be my widow wife calling Paul and saying you’re not gonna believe it. I don’t want it to be because I’m done. I wanted it to be we chose when we left, and we left on — we left on the top. And I certainly didn’t want my estate or my heirs to be calling Paul. That’s no way to do it.

What would you say to the other pest control owners that are just considering selling, or don’t know what their business is worth, they don’t know where they want to take it, if they want to hand it down to their kids? I’ve never seen a family transaction that was good for the seller and good for the buyer. What I see all the time is that the buyer and the seller are both angry when it’s a family sale. Daddy thinks he sold it for too little and the kids think they got killed. So why would you go through a family transaction and then have both sides feel like they’re angry about something, or resentful, or they have remorse? That’s an awful situation.

So it’s a lot cleaner to do the thing the way we did it. Paul never had any hope that we’re going to call him one day and say sell this business, make yourself a fee. No one ever had that thought. We just talked to each other a couple times a year for years and years and years, and I felt like he always was just listening to me and he was giving me tips and information, and he wasn’t telling anybody’s secrets to me. I respected that too. Found this guy’s got some integrity.

There’s no one else I would have been involved with. I just know that going with a firm like what Paul does is the right way. And I’ve learned what Paul’s done with other companies, and everybody’s first hand recommendations of Paul — really strong.