Ryan Bishop: If you're doing a project, you have to be good for a couple of days, maybe a little bit longer if it's an intense project. If you're coming every day, that's what you're fighting against, complacency.
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Patrick Baldwin: Paul, I tracked down an old friend here.
Paul Giannamore: I see you did, Patrick, an interesting and entertaining one at that.
Patrick Baldwin: It's a storied history that you don't know. I went to elementary school with Ryan's sister. When he showed up at A&M, I was like, “I know you. We're from the same hometown. Also, I know your sister.” Here he is now running a commercial janitorial business. It’s been years since I've last spoken with him. I happened to see this on LinkedIn, connected with him a few years back, saw DTK, and I'm like, “What? This is interesting.” We've been talking about non-pest control but still recurring businesses. I was like, “It's a good time to talk to Ryan.”
Paul Giannamore: There are a lot of pest control companies out there, especially on the commercial side that does janitorial or commercial cleaning. In fact, ISS is the biggest one. ISS is the predecessor to Anticimex. A huge portion of Anticimex’s pest control portfolio was acquired from Anticimex back in 2014. There are a lot of companies that, on the commercial side in particular, are doing cleaning. They might be doing hygiene, they're doing pest control, and broader facility services.
As we talked about a little bit in the interview, Patrick, if you're running a commercial pest control business, you do not want to start adding commercial cleaning and I strongly advise against that. However, I have seen companies go out and buy a $10 million commercial cleaning business because you can buy it at a substantially lower multiple than you would pay for pest control.
Now you own the relationships with those commercial outfits and you can cross-sell. For example, we talked about supermarket chains, and I won't talk too much about it on the front end, maybe we'll come back to that on the back end and chat about how that could be an interesting opportunity for folks out there in the industry.
Patrick Baldwin: I love it. Let’s step into The Boardroom with my friend, Ryan Bishop.
Paul Giannamore: Let's do this, Patrick.
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Paul Giannamore: Welcome, Ryan.
Ryan Bishop: Thanks for having me.
Patrick Baldwin: He knew me before I was Fat Pat. I used to be skinny.
Paul Giannamore: Is that true, Ryan? Was he once thin?
Ryan Bishop: I have no room to talk.
Paul Giannamore: Years ago, was he fit and lean?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah.
Patrick Baldwin: I ask myself all the time how I end up at pest control. How did you end up in the janitorial service business?
Ryan Bishop: That's a good question. How long is the podcast?
Paul Giannamore: Did you start in junior high sweeping floors?
Ryan Bishop: No. What's funny about it is my friends who knew me in college would laugh at me saying that I'm in the business of keeping things tidy and clean because that's not how my college roommates would describe me. I'd gotten into it from a friend that I went to college with and he had worked here previously. I'd gotten to know the owner through a golf round with him and we hit a point in my career where I was looking to go out on my own and try something different.
I was in commercial real estate and reconnected with a guy, sat down with him one day, and he said he was looking to sell his janitorial company in town. It lined up with a good point in my life where I had been doing some soul-searching and it checked a lot of the boxes for something I was looking for in a company.
It was more of a process of elimination of what I did not want to do any longer. When this opportunity came across, it was a perfect opportunity to get into a business. It was in Houston, it was a service company. I like the repetitive nature of our business. I like the people we deal with and the service business. It's not for everybody but I tend to think it fits my skillset so I took a leap.
Patrick Baldwin: I love it. You come from commercial real estate. Is that what you've been doing?
Ryan Bishop: I've hung that hat up for the time being. When I got out of college, I came to Houston to help a well-known commercial real estate company start its Houston office. I did that for twelve years and then I bought this company almost five years ago to the date. On February 15th of ‘18, I bought it.
Paul Giannamore: I'm excited about this conversation because this is tangential to pest control and route-based recurring revenue services. In fact, there is a lot of history in the pest control industry of pest control companies also doing commercial cleaning and vice versa. For example, there's a Danish firm called ISS. Many moons ago, they acquired a business called Sanitors, which is based in Texas, and it may have been based in Houston. Does that name ring a bell?
Ryan Bishop: ISS rings a bell.
Paul Giannamore: It was based in Texas somewhere. When they bought it, and this is going back to the mid-2000s, it was doing somewhere around $300 million or so in revenue. It’s a large commercial cleaning business. ISS ended up having a tremendous amount of financial issues and is a fraction of what it used to be. They were a company that went out and did commercial cleaning and then they cross-sold commercial pest control and other allied services to their commercial cleaning base. You get into an office building, you establish a relationship, you're doing the commercial cleaning, and now it's like, “What else can we sell?”
Patrick, you and I have talked about this before where ISS went wrong is they were going out and spending a lot of money buying pest control businesses and then cross-selling lower margin commercial cleaning type stuff to pest control as opposed to doing it the other way around. That's neither here nor there. Commercial cleaning is one of those businesses that even has lower barriers to entry than pest control. In pest control, in almost all jurisdictions, you need to be licensed. I would imagine, in commercial cleaning, Patrick and I could take Franco out today and have him clean buildings, right, Patrick?
Patrick Baldwin: That would make my day.
Paul Giannamore: I know it would.
Patrick Baldwin: We would offend and lose every customer today.
Paul Giannamore: We certainly would but he would clean every strip club. There was a question in there somewhere.
Ryan Bishop: I don't even know who the guy is.
Paul Giannamore: You're better off that way. We're going to keep you innocent, Ryan. Let's talk a little bit about the fundamentals of your business. When I think about commercial cleaning, I think about the office building today. There's a company that the building contracts to, they have 2 or 3 resident custodians that are here all day and every day into the evening. Is that how your business works?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah, the day porters are usually the 8:00 to 5:00 to handle a restroom that someone destroyed, a coffee spill, or messes that people make up during the day. The night crew is usually larger. The night crew comes in at 6:00 and leaves at 10:00 depending on the type of building you're in. The security is usually gone by then too. It's a Monday through Friday for an office building and that's what we're doing. Probably the smallest portion of our business is cleaning the office.
There are little barriers to entry in that. There's some more specialized cleaning that we do for big churches and big schools. It requires a little more setups and takedowns and learning the calendar and stuff like that. Typically, Paul, you're probably leaving your desk in a similar manner every night and I am too and the trash can's full but we don't touch the papers and stuff like that. If you're trying to lump stuff into categories, cleaning an office building is pretty easy to clean.
Paul Giannamore: Even I can do that. You've got the office and you've got special situation-type things like churches. What other things do you do? What other end users?
Ryan Bishop: We do a lot of grocery stores.
Paul Giannamore: How does something like that work? Every evening you're sending folks in there?
Ryan Bishop: When we're cleaning a grocery store, it's coming in when the store closes down around midnight, 11:00. We're in there with the stockers. That can be an interesting dynamic. They're trying to get all the boxes opened, everything on the shelves, and we're in there trying to clean up what people made a mess of during the day, and usually what the stockers make a mess of at night.
A typical scope in a grocery store is will do an auto scrubber. If there's wax on the floor, we'll do a buffer. if they have any type of carpets, we'll vacuum those. Sometimes we're doing the restrooms, depending if it's in the scope or not. The offices, the back room where they do all the warehousing, we'll clean that area as well. It can be a pretty intense night at the store, especially the ones that are heavily utilized because there's a lot of junk on the floor.
Paul Giannamore: Back in the day, you're doing commercial real estate, and you decide, “Maybe I want to do something else.” You haphazardly meet some guys who got a commercial cleaning business and you decide, “I'm going to buy this thing.” That was over five years ago you said. What were you thinking? You're like, “I'm going to buy this commercial cleaning business.” Was the prior owner not scaling it? What was your thesis going into this thing?
Ryan Bishop: The story is I had a former coworker that introduced me to a guy who's now my competitor in the business and I thought he was looking to sell his company. He ended up not looking. That wasn't what he had in mind. We became friends. I look at that guy now as a friend and mentor. I had seen the business that he built.
I went on this journey around the same time with a mentor of mine that said, “If you're serious about wanting to buy and operate a company, I would do two things. First of all, I would try to do it before you turn 35.” The second thing he said was, “I'd start taking business owners to lunch and see if you thought you could do what they did.” I took another guy that I knew in the market to lunch and he was in the janitorial business as well.
The first thing he said to me is, “You think you want to own a company?” I said, “I don't know. I'm starting this journey out.” He said, “You should buy mine.” I said, “Is it for sale?” He said, “Yeah. I've hired a broker and we're on the market.” Paul, to answer your question directly, I saw someone else do it, I liked the model, and I liked the business that this guy had built. I paired the two together. I saw someone else doing it and then I saw an opportunity and it came together.
Paul Giannamore: The guy that you bought it from, that you took out to lunch, how did you stumble upon him, to begin with?
Ryan Bishop: It is funny when you guys talk about commercial real estate and maybe not even you but other people. That's a big shift from commercial real estate to the janitorial business. In some ways, absolutely. In other ways, who hire janitors to clean their buildings? The real estate companies. If you own your own facility, you're probably hiring them through a facility manager who works for that typical business.
Most of these buildings across major metro areas are managed by a third party and that's the type of firm I came from. I wasn't doing property management, I was in brokerage. I knew the property management business because I worked at a property management and leasing company. The guy who I ultimately bought the company from had taken me to play golf.
Paul Giannamore: He wanted business from you guys.
Ryan Bishop: Yeah. He tried to grow his commercial real estate contacts. There are a lot of different components or maybe ways to answer your question, how did I get into this business? One of them is this company that I bought was doing a lot of big churches so it started off cleaning in Houston, at least, megachurches in Texas in The Bible Belt. They're hubs for all sorts of different stuff beyond a typical church service. You're having schools meet there.
Paul Giannamore: I've seen some of those stories on the news.
Ryan Bishop: Not all of them have managed the business well or managed things well but there's a lot going on there, church school. I saw the opportunity to add some commercial focus to the company. It was something being in the market and being in commercial real estate that I came across this opportunity.
Paul Giannamore: That's great. You meet this fella, you guys go to lunch, and he says, “Why don't you buy mine?” You buy this thing and what was your first year like coming from real estate to now being the owner of a janitorial business?
Ryan Bishop: To go back to your point there, it was 360 days from that meeting to buying the company. It was February 20th and I closed on February 15th. It was a well-managed company with incredible accounts. The first couple of weeks was a shock because my inbox was light. Most of the emails were going to our operational people, which allowed me some time to get to know the team better, go to accounts, and understand everything we were doing.
Paul, I don't know the pest control business. The janitorial business is not that complex of a business sector. If I was going into healthcare, technology, or something like that, I would probably want to spend more time understanding everything and maybe even go back to school or do some continued education. The scope that we're performing at most facilities is pretty basic. Some of the time, I hear people in this business say, “We clean, clean facilities,” which means that we're not doing a deep clean every night. We're not there long enough to do a deep clean every night.
With some of the schools, it feels like we have to do a deep clean every night. There are schools that, unfortunately, some of the kids probably like I did in grade school, middle school, or high school, they'll do crazy things with the toilet paper or purposely try to make a mess in the hallway or whatever. We have to go clean that up. For the most part, it's a standard clean every night. I was able to learn the business during those first few months. Going out and trying to grow the business is what I've been focused on.
I'm a salesperson at heart. I like to grow things. I went out and tried to make new relationships in the grocery and commercial business and let the operational team that was managing the rest of our business do their thing and set up some new ways of meeting and communicating as a company. It took me a while to learn all the dynamics around running up.
Probably the thing that I had to grow the most on coming from being a commercial real estate broker is you're focused on you. Sell the property, lease the property, and go find new business. Once I sold a deal, usually, I was the person performing the work. This is a lot different. When we sell something, the sales guy passes it on to operations and that's when the work starts in the customer's eyes. Probably, I had to gain the most comfort with is trusting the team to get the job done because I was used to doing it myself. It’s a long way of answering your question. It was on-the-job training and on-the-job learning.
Paul Giannamore: You were in a fortunate position that you had strong ops when you came in so you were able to focus more on the biz dev side, which is effectively what you did in commercial real estate anyway. What were some of the things that you did when you came in and you started to maybe look at the business through a slightly different lens as far as business development goes? Did you start to think about, “We're doing a lot of churches. We need to get into supermarkets and other areas.” How did you expand that biz dev process?
Ryan Bishop: Talking to people in operations either in this business or potential new hires for our company. The thing that came back on repeat to me was ops people don't have time to do sales. I heard it enough to believe it. Traditionally, at our company, the ops people were also trying to bring in new business. The reality is when you get into a tough week or maybe a tough month, whether it's personal or professional when you add all that together, your focus goes on to reactionary-type tasks. To land meaningful business is a purposeful thing and not a reactionary deal.
To answer your question, I hired a guy who was seasoned as a salesman. He wasn't in the commercial cleaning business. Our scope is pretty standard. Within a few months or maybe a few weeks if you dedicate yourself, you can understand everything that we could do at an account. I brought a guy in from the outside, which frankly, I'm hiring typically for the skillset and not industry knowledge because it's a low barrier to learning in this business. It’s much more on the person and much more on the skillset than, “Do they have prior experience in the janitorial business?”
I did not rely on my ops guys, no offense to them, to go chase new business. Frankly, I was asking too much. I hired a sales guy within nine months of buying the company. I got a little distracted because we won some big RFPs within about five months. That took a little bit of a back burner. I started here in April of 2018 and I hired a guy over Christmas break of 2018.
Paul Giannamore: In addition to doing direct sales, have you guys also gone out in the market and taken any channel partners? For example, another company that might serve supermarkets that they could cross-sell your services to.
Ryan Bishop: We have worked with partners. We've talked with landscape companies, pressure washing companies, pavement, restriping, and stuff like that. We have great relationships with them. As far as relying on one another to pick up business, that hasn't been the primary way of winning a business. It goes back to what I said about ops, you get focused on the task that's directly in front of you. It’s human nature where you're taking care of what your primary role is.
We've started to do pressure washing with the cleaning business. It's a big relationship to hire a janitorial company. It's a little easier to hire a company to do a project. If we can become comfortable and they can become comfortable with us, having a one-time project to do with someone is a good way to start a relationship. It's like dating before you get married. It's the same thing in this business. We've started to try to do more of it ourselves rather than relying on other third parties to get us in the door.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm thinking about the custodians at our church. It's an outsourced firm. Are you all moving tables and chairs and staging classrooms and all that for the churches?
Ryan Bishop: Most of them, we do.
Patrick Baldwin: When I think about janitorial, I'm thinking about highly recurring business similar to pest control but I'm hearing there are a lot of these one-offs where it's adjusting the scope. You talked about Skinny Patty that was stuffing extra toilet paper down the toilet, that was me back in the day. I don't know what the case is but you've got these deep clean services. You've got moving furniture. It sounds like you're doing a lot of one-offs that are outside of the scope. How do you plan for that or adjust for that in terms of when you're selling a client?
Ryan Bishop: We think about the big picture. We want long-term relationships. You find people who are willing to do stuff to make the customer happy. Usually, the rest takes care of itself is what we've found. You say moving furniture and all that stuff is one time. It depends on the size of the church and it depends on the size of the school and how many programs they're having.
It's almost geographically relevant more to me in Texas may be as opposed to some parts of the country where churches aren't thriving. Some of these churches are having 200 or 300 events a month. An event can be a funeral or an Alanos Club, it can be a men's event one night and the next morning, it might be a lady's Bible study or something like that. Everybody wants their tables and chairs situated how they want them. They don't want to have to come in and do it themselves. You either rely on the people who are going to meet there to do it themselves, which typically doesn't work out.
Volunteers, if you don't have the budget, that's probably what you're going to do. You can hire a third party or you could hire them in-house. You're going to hire someone who's going to move all that furniture around. You have to think about it through the lens of a church that's vibrant. You can't think of it from a church that is having a Wednesday night service and a Sunday morning service and some funerals and weddings. It's different. It’s the ones that are having a lot of events.
Patrick Baldwin: How do you price that? I’m thinking about the extra events. Are you like, “Here's an estimate of how many events they have during the month,” is it per event, or is it per hour? I don't know how you do that.
Ryan Bishop: I try to look at a calendar and get a feel for how many events they're having in a semester. We try to extrapolate that out over the whole year.
Patrick Baldwin: You mentioned getting into business for yourself or doing something before you turned 35. You were right around that age when you bought the business if I'm not mistaken. Why 35? I've never heard this before.
Ryan Bishop: I would put in two camps. One is uprooting your family. When your kids are in diapers, it's different than when they're in middle school. That's part of the advice. I'm 40 and had my fourth kid so the timeline might need to be stretched out to maybe 40 or 45 because we're having kids later. These generations, including myself, it’s that.
Also, the older you get and the more senior you become at a company, the opportunity cost of leaving a company or maybe the perceived risk or maybe its true risk of leaving a company. It is a true risk leaving a company and what you would leave behind becomes more meaningful. It’s not always but typically when you've been at a company longer and longer. That can cause people to stall out on making a move. I'm far from the only one who's ever done it. Taking a leap, you do leave a lot behind.
If I had to guarantee you a loan and if it doesn't work, what do you have left? If they've been at a company longer and longer, they're going to be leaving more behind. That can make it harder to make a jump. Is 35 a magic number? By no stretch of the imagination. I had lunch with a friend and he's in his early 40s talking about the same thing and he had kids. I don't know though, Pat. Maybe the older you get, the more risk-averse some people get. It's a generalization though.
Patrick Baldwin: You can call me Patrick or Fat Pat but I won't go by Pat.
Ryan Bishop: Sorry. My bad.
Patrick Baldwin: Thanks to the man there, Paul. They gave me a nice moniker.
Paul Giannamore: I'm a branding expert, Patrick. That's what I do, I brand things.
Patrick Baldwin: Brian, you service 75% of the counties in Texas if I'm not mistaken, is that right?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah.
Patrick Baldwin: You're all across the state.
Ryan Bishop: We're all across the state.
Patrick Baldwin: How? Sales and operations, how do you do that?
Ryan Bishop: We are only pursuing the business in the large metro areas because we can staff those markets well. We’re trying not to have sales outrun ops. We've learned from experience the hard way. The exceptions we make are for large customers that need us to service all 254 counties in some cases. I don't know of one that we work for that's in all 254 counties but there are a few that are in 75% of them and we want all their business so we've made it work.
From a cleaner standpoint, if you find a good cleaner, a good janitor that’s doing the work at night, you can do it remotely. What you have to have is supervision. It's an economy-of-scale thing where if you have enough business in West Texas with a couple of customers, you can hire some good supervision to make sure that the scope's getting done.
Inevitably, people leave and you got to go backfill. It does make it tough but it works because we have enough business to allocate supervision and management salaries over enough business. It doesn't work to take on 1 or 2 accounts if you're trying to make money on it. That's how we've done it. It's got to be the right customer that will justify doing something like that and enough business to do it.
Patrick Baldwin: It's interesting what you said about learning the hard way in sales outrunning operations. What controls have you put in place or what lessons have you learned from that?
Ryan Bishop: I review every bid. I've read a lot about stuff that you should give up in running a company. I've set parameters on what we will chase and what we won't chase from that. Also, I like to look at the bids. You're not paying a commission on the bids. I want to make sure that we've got these bids looked at.
Having some controls in place and reminding people and say no if something's outside of that parameter. That can be hard for some people and I've fallen into that camp because I like growing. You also got to think about your reputation and the brand that you have out there. Frankly, doing the right thing. If you can't service the business, you got to say no. Knowing your limits is something that I learned probably in the first 12 to 24 months the hard way.
Patrick Baldwin: You hired your first full-time salesperson back in late ‘18. Do you have more now?
Ryan Bishop: Right now we have one full-time salesperson that's focused on schools and religious facilities. The one salesperson I hired back in early ‘19 when he started focused on church and school because that was the low-hanging fruit for us. We had a lot of street cred if you will. We're trying to get into areas that have density.
We opened a San Antonio office so that's where we're trying to grow in central Texas. The demographic is moving along the I-35 corridor between Dallas and San Antonio. We have more business opportunities out there that we've taken on and we think those are good markets to grow. Long-term, we'll have people in those markets. We have done a fair amount of business development from our Houston office in San Antonio and Austin.
What I've looked at is before we go into those other markets, let's saturate Houston. We've been doing a good job of that on the church and school side with the sales guy that we brought on. Now, we're focused on growing the commercial as well. It's easier to grow in your own backyard and that's where we've focused right now. San Antonio and Austin are on the horizon.
Patrick Baldwin: There's a big grocer based out of San Antonio. Have you had any success there?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah, that's our biggest customer.
Patrick Baldwin: Congrats. That's awesome. Do I need to come and do a little quality assurance in the middle of the night? We got a few here.
Ryan Bishop: Text me.
Patrick Baldwin: As you're spread out, you've got this distributed team if I can call it that. You're all across the state. How do you think in terms of culture? I'm thinking that's important for you.
Ryan Bishop: It's hard. You got to know your limitations on that. First of all, there's a language barrier a lot of times in this business. In 2022, I've been taking full-time Spanish lessons with a tutor. The goal is to be able to communicate with all of our employees. Right now, the best option we've found for the people that we don't see or I don't see daily is through text and then direct mail. We sent a birthday card to every employee, all 150 employees. We send a birthday card to them.
We do a fair amount of text with stuff about our core values and little stuff. We've hired a third-party chaplain agency that goes to a lot of our accounts but they also offer a service to every DTK employee. It's not all spiritual matters, especially over the last couple of years with COVID. A lot of it is dealing with the stress of life, whether that's finances or illnesses, you name it. Trying to provide resources to our employees through direct communication with them.
Granted, Patrick, text message is a pretty low bar. It's hard to get to 75% of the 254 counties. Those are the hardest people to reach, the people who I never get to see. We do a lot of trying to train the managers, the 50 or 60 people that manage the supervisors and the supervisors manage the cleaners of who we are, what is our mission statement, what's our vision statement, and what are our core values. Also, allowing them to have that information to go out and try to deliver that message to our employees.
Patrick Baldwin: I can't imagine what training, turnover, recruiting, and all that looks like for you right now.
Ryan Bishop: When you're talking about barriers to entry and barriers to scale, a big one is recruiting, retaining, training, and making sure people are in compliance. We are a W2 employee company running background checks and all that with our employees. It takes a dedicated team to get that done and it's a lot of staying on it every day. How are you differentiating yourself from your end client? What makes DTK different than XYZ?
Patrick Baldwin: I talked about it a little bit, the direct approach. We're not hiring subcontractors. There's a direct line of communication from the customer to the manager and that manager is talking to a DTK employee. We know what type of supplies, what type of equipment, what type of training, and who is there.
For some people, especially if we're there during the day, your kids and the people at a church and school know who's in the facility cleaning it. We can offer that, which some people don't because it's expensive. It's expensive to have our team members be W2 employees. It's expensive to run background checks. It's expensive to provide the uniforms and all that we're doing. That's probably the biggest differentiator between us and our competitors. We're locally owned. In Texas, I get involved in making sure that we're overseeing the accounts the way we sold them.
There's a fair amount of people who are giving a proposal and then within a few months, you grow complacent and move on. We’re not perfect but we're doing things to make sure that complacency is not something that our customers would define us by. That's probably a difference between a cleaning company or any type of company that's doing a repeat service. If you're doing a project, you have to be good for a couple of days or maybe a little bit longer if it's an intense project. If you're coming every day, what you're fighting against is complacency. We've been told that we do a better job in most cases than our competitors. Those are the two biggest things.
Patrick Baldwin: The closest I can think of about coming from pest control was maybe complacency. We intentionally had the technician go in different directions around the home. He would go a minimum of three times around the outside of a home and it would give him different directions. If they find themselves doing the same direction and the same lap each time, they're probably going miss something on the back of an air conditioner like a termite tube or something like that. I don't know, when it comes to complacency, if you have a checklist of things like, “This is how we avoid complacency.”
Ryan Bishop: We're trying to let technology help us with that. Unfortunately, sometimes when you get the checklist on that stuff, how do you get checklists from all around the state? You have to have people scan them in and then they forget or maybe a checklist gets left out. Trying to move more and more to letting technology help you with that is what we're trying to do as a company. We haven't read any books about how to avoid complacency but it's a daily thing. If you can let technology help you with it by doing a checklist and seeing if people are doing it, you have a better chance of success. It's not foolproof but has a better chance of success than doing it with paper.
Patrick Baldwin: What technology? Sending pictures in?
Ryan Bishop: We're doing homegrown, a lot of it, like using QR codes to check in like a checklist. Making sure they do the scope of work every night. Sometimes, at a grocery store, you can let people check you out. Have a QR code and let someone with a grocery check you out to make sure the scope got done.
You don't have that at an office building because, usually, you're there by yourself. Having people report if they got to the whole scope that night, you have to take their word for it because a lot of times, they're there by themselves. It's ideal if you can get a supervisor to do it, a supervisor who's not having to work the whole night but they have some hours built in for quality control and to make sure the scope gets done.
Patrick Baldwin: You mentioned 50 to 60 managers. Is that right?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah.
Patrick Baldwin: That's a lot.
Ryan Bishop: It is.
Patrick Baldwin: Over 1,500 employees or 1,600 employees, somewhere in that range. How are you managing your management team?
Ryan Bishop: I focus on my direct reports from a standpoint of weekly managing them. I mentioned this to you but we started EOS in November.
Patrick Baldwin: How's that going?
Ryan Bishop: It's been good.
Paul Giannamore: What made you attempt to do EOS, to begin with?
Ryan Bishop: We have outgrown our old organizational chart. To use EOS terms, I was trying to act like the visionary, the integrator, and probably the final say on operations. We had three guys with the same titles overseeing operations and all were qualified guys. I have nothing against them. EOS would say, “You got to have one person leading that.” I don't think that's unique to EOS, that's common sense. If you have too many people with the same title, stuff is going to fall through the cracks. As we've grown, I had a keen or something telling me that, “Our org chart isn't going to work to take the next step.” I'd had enough people around me using ESO and they spoke highly of it.
Patrick Baldwin: You have the managers. Are they spread out across the state and then they've got supervisors, even more, spread out?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah. The managers, the majority of them are here in Houston. The hard part with janitorial companies, and I'm sure it's the same way in every industry, is everybody uses a different name for the same title or for the same position. If it's a big account, we'll have a project manager. If it's a small account, we'll have a route manager where they have 20 or 30 accounts, however many they can handle based on their workload. Above the manager, whether it's a project manager or a route manager, will be a regional manager.
When I say the word manager, I'm encompassing all three of those levels. The supervisors are more account centric, they're focused on that account. It depends on the size of the account to tell you how many people they're overseeing. A lot of the time, the supervisor will have maybe some light cleaning duties. Predominantly, it's making sure that everybody's there on time and everybody's getting the scope done. If a piece of machinery is not working, they're trying to fix it. If supplies aren't in the right spot, they're delivering them to the right spot.
Shutting down the facility at the end of the night. A lot of times, we're the ones locking the doors at night. A huge part of our business is making sure the doors are locked both internally in the private offices and then externally. That's how we get to 50. I could give you the exact number, I don't know off the top of my head, but they're spread out across predominantly Houston but then Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and then some in Panhandle West, Texas, and South Texas.
Patrick Baldwin: We talk about compensation a lot. I don't know what the norm is for janitorial. I would imagine it's hourly, at least for the janitors, the ones doing the service. What about your supervisors and managers? Are there incentives in place or is it purely hourly?
Ryan Bishop: Most of the managers are on salary. We have some incentives. We're changing some of our bonus structures. We've had a bonus structure in place that we pay quarterly based on some metrics that we've set up for managers and then on up throughout the company.
Patrick Baldwin: Let's talk about it. We got the three of us right here. Let's figure out your new commission structure. What do you want? How can we help you?
Ryan Bishop: I probably should pay you if you can help me with this. To let you look under the hood, what helped me a lot is being involved with the peer group. There are all sorts of different peer groups out there now but I joined one that's been helpful for me. I did the overview of my business in February and some of the feedback I got was the bonus structure at different levels wasn't stuff that people could control. Why tie it to something that you can't control?
I haven't even announced to the team the exact specifics so I'm not going to do it here. It's stuff they can control. There's more clarity behind it. We're all, hopefully, trying to better ourselves. One way I've had to try to better myself is to make sure that the bonus structure is stuff that they can control. Being involved with a peer group has helped me.
I equate it to a person who's like a pastor of a church or someone who's in an up-top position. They can be lonely. They don't have people to talk to. You can't ever say you don't know the answer. You have to have all the answers. That's a bunch of garbage. We all have more things that we don't know about than that we do know about. That is the same way for leaders of a business.
At least for me, Paul, to your question earlier about how I learned the business and get to know the business. The actual day in day out work we do for janitorial, a lot of it's not very complex. There are some things chirping or waxing a floor and removing some things off the floor you don't want to mess around with. General cleaning is pretty self-explanatory. Leading people is challenging whether you're at ExxonMobil or you're at a janitorial company. That's where I've had to grow the most. Continuing education and being involved with a peer group have been huge for me. I came out as a broker where you are focused on the production and this is different.
Paul Giannamore: When you talk about peer groups, is it other janitorial companies or is it a variety of different businesses?
Ryan Bishop: I've gotten involved with both. The homogeneous one would be a BSCAI, Building Service Contractors Association International. I've gotten involved with that. I've gotten involved with the peer group, with people across the country. It's 5 people, 5 including me. One is in Atlanta and one is in Indiana, Illinois, and then Montana. We have a monthly call. We get together once a year at an industry event.
The best part, I got involved with it in 2022, is we audit each other's businesses. We're on a rotation once a year. I went to Champaign Urbana in 2022 and I did a peer review for one of my friends in the peer group I'm in. Talk about a fun experience to get to walk through the challenges of leading a company with other people doing the same thing but it’s also rewarding. Hopefully, it was rewarding for him. I'm hosting the group this 2023 in Houston so we'll see. Maybe I come out with some black eyes. That's peer group number two.
The first one I got involved with is heterogeneous, we meet once a month, and it's called C12. We meet once a month as a group and we meet one-on-one with a guy who works for C12 and talk through issues. I was hiring a salesperson and it was great timing because I was working on the offer and we sat down and talked through it, some pros and cons. Having someone who's on your side who, figuratively, has the pom-poms up and cheering for you in a position where it's traditionally been where you don't admit you have any problems. Having someone who's helping you out, working through issues, and working on a little mini-board that you have has been helpful for me.
Paul Giannamore: Have you looked into YPO?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah. I've got some friends who do it and they love it. I haven't done much further than that because I've felt like I've tapped out a little bit with peer groups. I've heard YPO is amazing.
Paul Giannamore: I am in YPO and my forum, which is similar to a peer group, meets monthly. We go on a forum retreat to India or Djibouti. I'm not sure where we're going this 2023. I've been pushing for India but we'll take 4 or 5 days and it's the people in the forum. What I like about YPO is I am by far the least successful individual in my forum. In my forum, I've got the founder and president of a company that does $1 billion a year in revenue. I've got a woman in my forum who was on the Federal Reserve Bank Board of Governors. Interesting people.
For me, YPO is probably been one of the best professional decisions I've ever made. I got back from Doha and anytime I'm in a different city, I always get together with a local chapter and there's one everywhere. It's something to look into. It's a time commitment though. We're all strapped for time as it is. For me, irrespective of where I am in the world, if we've got a forum meeting, I've got to stop, get on a plane, fly 5,000 miles, and come back for it. attendance is mandatory but it's worth it.
Ryan Bishop: Paul, I've noticed peer groups through YPO, Vistage, and C12. Another guy reached out to me. There are local ones too where it's like, “We're getting together.” Paul, you said it well, it needs to be mandatory. It's hard if you miss every other one and you see them six times a year. It's hard to keep a pulse on what's going on with a big issue they had.
Paul Giannamore: For me, when I think about YPO in general, at the end of the day, you got guys running billion-dollar businesses but they all have the same issues. Everyone's got the same issues, family, friends, business, this, and that. When you talk about peer groups, we look across a lot of the industries that we work in like HVAC, pest control, and lawn care.
Patrick, in pest control, an example would be U Group where you have a lot of relatively similar-sized businesses. Those are great because they're a way to cross-pollinate some ideas, look at somebody in a different area of the country, and compare your business to his. Those are all interesting things. What I've enjoyed about YPO is there are revenue hurdles and there are a number of employee hurdles. You've got to be a big enough business to be able to join it. It tends to skew to larger companies.
We all live in our own bubbles. As you said, Ryan, it's lonely at the top. You're running your business and you're supposed to be right about everything. For me, it's opened up ways to do things that I've never thought about or peers that are roughly the same size as me so to speak don't think about. Guys who are dramatically bigger in managing workforces of 30,000 people. There's been a lot of interesting takeaways for me in doing that.
Ryan Bishop: I agree with you. The fact that you have people with that size of companies in a peer group or whatever you call it speaks to a great trend in the business world. We're all hopefully humble enough to know that other people can help us even if they know very little about our business other than what they hear on a monthly basis.
It's like the quote that you give your best friend the advice that you should give yourself. Without the power of another person seeing what you're saying, you could miss out on it. It's a shame if that's your whole career. I was fortunate enough to have a friend of mine in the HVAC business recommend the heterogeneous one that I'm involved with. It's been huge for me for my development.
Paul Giannamore: That's great. I'm happy that you brought that up because I do think we all get in our own bubbles and think we're doing everything the right way or the only way and getting those additional ideas is healthy. Ryan, this was a risky decision for you to go out. You got kids and responsibilities. You left a successful career to do this. Looking back, was it the right decision for you?
Ryan Bishop: Absolutely. I've grown a lot in different areas that I would've not touched if I wasn't in this role. That's one component of it. Building equity in something is something that few people have the opportunity to do. I’ve been thankful that that opportunity was afforded to me. I look at it more in the sense that I'm a better business person than I would've ever been staying in a role as a broker. That's hopefully more meaningful in the grand scheme of things than building equity in a company. I've grown a lot and it stretched me in ways that you can't do without getting into a position like this.
Paul Giannamore: As every business owner says, over time, as the business scales, the hardest part of it is leading people. Finance skills and accounting skills, those things can be learned relatively easily. Growing as a manager and leader is probably the toughest. You've got 1,650 employees now?
Ryan Bishop: Yeah.
Paul Giannamore: It’s not an easy task.
Ryan Bishop: It's not an easy task.
Patrick Baldwin: That's why he did EOS so he only has to worry about five.
Paul Giannamore: We'll see how that works, only worrying about five.
Ryan Bishop: It's good. I put a little deal, like, “Here's what the visionary does.” I tried to boil it down to ten things and I taped it to my desk when we started doing EOS because it wasn't clear what my role was. My old boss used to say, “The higher up you get in an organization, the more unclear it is on what you do each day.” To put it in our industry, if you're in charge of cleaning the restrooms at a building, unless you haven't been trained, you probably have a good idea each day what your tasks are and you could check them off a checklist.
If you're the visionary or you're in charge of looking out for the future of the company, day in and day out, that's a little harder to measure. Whether it's EOS or finding something else, EOS would say that every company is operating on an operating system. Some don't know what system they're using. I fell in that category. It was a well-run lifestyle type of business when I bought it. I have grown through peer groups and stuff like that but for me, the operating system was part of it that I still did not have. People like to know what they're operating on and this has helped. I don't think it's the only one though.
Paul Giannamore: You talked a few minutes ago about self-improvement and education outside of EOS and peer groups. What are other things you're doing to further your knowledge and abilities as a manager and leader?
Ryan Bishop: Reading.
Paul Giannamore: Like what?
Ryan Bishop: I've been reading some Patrick Lencioni stuff. I finished The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. It was great. That's an easy book to read because it's a fictional book that takes the principles that it's trying to preach and puts them in a fictitious setting and then it ends the book going through them. Reading would be outside of those two. I talked to a guy who's in a different industry, a similar size revenue, and a lot less employees, but it doesn't matter.
You hear a lot about culture. Everybody talks about culture. I asked this guy if he had to frame it or put it in one bucket, how much time does he spend as a CEO on culture? He shocked the people in the room with how he answered the question, he said 75%. I was like, “Wow.” 75% of your time, you're trying to go out and live out and encourage people with this culture. Coming from a business where I was tactical, day in and day out, moving into more strategic and focusing on that culture.
It's not just to say you did it but especially in this generation who’s been in the workforce for the last 10 or 15 years and the generation coming out, they want to work for a company with a purpose. I've seen some stats about recruiting and retaining people for companies with a purpose versus not a purpose. It is definitely weighted to companies with a purpose that live out a culture and stuff like that. I've had to dedicate more and more of my time to that and try to live out the things that we say we're doing.
We added impacting lives to our mission statement. There's other stuff in the mission statement but impacting lives. Most people in our organization are focused on the day-in and day-out tactical. I have to consistently remind myself to be strategic and think about culture and setting up stuff to accomplish that.
As far as learning the business and all that, over the last five years, that's been the one thing that I've had to work on the most because I came from only focused on tactical. It's something that I look back at. If I would've tried to allocate my time when I first started here properly, I would not have included culture may be over 5% or maybe over 10%. I've realized through running a company how much being involved with other people who run companies and how much time it takes to do that well.
If you're not focused on it as the visionary or the CEO or president, people are going to take their cues from you. Even though I might not meet all of our 1,600 employees, the managers that do see me, and the people in our office that do see me, if I'm not making that a priority, they're going to take the cues from me on that.
I read a book by Sam Walton and he used to say something to the tune of, “Why create ideas or go through all that process when you can see what other people have done and apply them at our stores?” You've asked what I've done. I've tried to find people who've done it well and see what's worked for them and tried to apply it at DTK and it hasn't worked every time. I would say that for most of the new ideas, I've got to be banging that drum for much longer than I thought I would be on something new.
Creating a culture is probably easier than changing a culture. I'm not saying we had a terrible culture by any stretch of the imagination. We had a great culture but there have been things I've tried to institute. In the busyness of anybody's normal course of work, when you add stuff to that, you might have to remind them a few times before it sticks. It's trying to do less and better than doing more and not having it stick has been one of the humbling parts of leading.
Paul Giannamore: To your point, your reference to Walton, trial and error is a stupid way to run a business. We can all do that but there are much more efficient and effective ways of doing that, which is to look at what other firms have done and what other managers have done and trying to learn from that. I appreciate that point. I don't do enough of that.
Ryan Bishop: I even read a book about the CEO of Ford. He came from Boeing. They were losing something crazy amount each quarter and he had his seventeen vice presidents have different KPIs. It’s like green light and red light, if it's good, green, and if it's red, it's not going well. At the first meeting, everybody was green. In the second meeting, everybody was green.
In the third meeting, one guy had a red and the CEO stands up and starts clapping and he's like, “Why are you clapping?” He goes, “We're losing millions and millions and millions of dollars each quarter and everything's green. Something's wrong.” It was something like the trunk wasn't working properly for one of the cars they were making in Ohio and a guy in Calgary was like, “We had that same problem.” He said, “Why don't you fly out to Calgary tomorrow and I'll help you?” They got it fixed like that.
At the next meeting, not surprisingly, there were a ton of reds. I tried that. We've replaced it. I took that same thing and started doing it with our company. We've done away with it a little bit with EOS but I try to find successful people and see what they've done. I think of myself as a normal guy but if I can learn from people who are smarter and more experienced, it's going to save me a lot of time and they're probably going to be able to come up with better ideas than I would on my own. That's probably the way I would answer it the most. I get a lot of that through reading about interesting people. Fat Pat, you got any other questions for me?
Patrick Baldwin: Ryan, I'll talk to you in 20 years. See you, man.
Paul Giannamore: Is that the last time you guys talked to each other? 20 years ago?
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah. It would've been 2003.
Ryan Bishop: Patrick, you have a little less hair than I do in twenty years probably in two months. I'm trying to go all the way. Is that the way to go?
Patrick Baldwin: A warning. How old is your oldest child?
Ryan Bishop: 10.
Patrick Baldwin: I came home and Cole would've been 11. A warning, I came home on my 38th birthday four years ago and I did not tell my children, and my oldest thought I was sick because I came home without any hair.
Paul Giannamore: You didn't have any hair before anyway.
Patrick Baldwin: It was thinner. He thought I had cancer, some terminal illness, why I came home that way. You might want to warn your kids. If you want to learn from others' mistakes, learn from mine and tell your kids before you decide to take it all off.
Ryan Bishop: Noted.
Paul Giannamore: Is that why you chubbed up? You don't want to look like you had cancer. Ryan, thanks for joining us. I enjoyed hearing about your journey. It's a great story, leaving real estate, buying a janitorial business out of all things in Texas, and scaling it to having over 1,600 employees and covering 75% of the state. It's a great story.
I also am excited to see you further your knowledge and education as a manager because in my experience as somewhat of an observer over the years is that the constraints of senior management are also the constraints on the growth of the company. If we're not constantly learning and improving our ability to lead and manage, the business doesn't grow. To me, it was a great discussion and I appreciate your time.
Ryan Bishop: Thanks, guys.
Patrick Baldwin: Ryan, thank you so much. I learned a lot. I appreciate you. Hopefully, we keep in touch this time.
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Paul Giannamore: Patrick, one of the things that struck me about Ryan is he's measured and thoughtful but he's also a humble guy. He left commercial real estate, he bought a janitorial business, and he's tried to learn it over time and he's focused on educating himself, no doubt about it, the things that he's involved in. Overall, it's a great story of an entrepreneur that's growing a business. Quite frankly, with 1,650 employees, it's not a tiny business by any means, it covers the whole state of Texas.
Patrick Baldwin: We are friends with Floridians but we do have our own unique identity here. I’m proud.
Paul Giannamore: You guys are close to Floridians from a cultural perspective.
Patrick Baldwin: A little bit. We speak a similar language.
Paul Giannamore: Pre-market so to speak and gun rights. A lot of trailer parks.
Patrick Baldwin: Careful, Paul. You're pushing it. That's part of the culture though. As Bryan Benak would say, this distributed team. He's running the employees across the state, which he doesn't directly interact with. The culture to him is a big thing when he is thinking, “How do I manage this?” It is cross-cultural in the essence that he's learning Spanish to even communicate directly with his employees.
Paul Giannamore: Like me.
Patrick Baldwin: I’m thinking about his target market, grocery stores, churches, and schools. We talked about not just doing residential or commercial. What if a pest control company “tried” to pull off this model? What if they went across a state or geography like this and pulled off a niche business with churches, grocery stores, and schools?
Paul Giannamore: There are real examples of that. Nicheing down is a great way to grow your business. A lot of times, it's hard to focus purely on something. If you think about Potomac, 80% of what we do is in the pest control space, and another 20% is in allied industries, route-based, and recurring revenue businesses, resi, and home services.
It used to be a lot more but as we've seen the consolidation boom and pest control over the last 5 or 6 years, it's been way more pest control than other things. You don't have to focus on a niche to the exclusion of everything else. Getting niche expertise is extremely helpful. We do see that. Think about Tony Sfreddo. You've sat down with Tony. They had a niche in these big federal government buildings.
Patrick Baldwin: I'd love to have his grocery store chain as a pest control customer.
Paul Giannamore: Think about it. If he's doing the commercial cleaning there like we talked about here before the interview, if his business were acquired by a pest control company, if you were doing pest control services cross-sell right into that supermarket chain, if he's doing a great job on the commercial cleaning side, and he's got the relationship, it becomes a lot easier to do that.
Patrick Baldwin: He did say he’d pay us to figure out some compensation structures. Maybe he'll pay us to figure out how to cross-sell pest control. Ryan, if you're listening to this, we've got some ideas here.
Paul Giannamore: It's quite easy as you well know.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, you talked about Tony Sfreddo in terms of niching down. When a one-time project can turn into a recurring business, we see that at a termite job, it’s like, “One time we're going to do this $1,000 or $1,500 liquid termite job or installation. Naturally, you've wanted or need it to become recurring. I've thought about it in the terms of his clients. If I go after a grocery store chain or if I go after these large churches, how can I get my foot in the door with a one-time service and then show them how we do it? He said that the focus and the quality are there. You're not lazy or complacent. You get into the recurring model.
Paul Giannamore: At the end of the day, when you're selling a service, a service is not tangible like a vehicle. You want to buy a new car, you go to the dealership, you get in the car, you drive it around, and you know exactly what you're getting. With a service, you're selling a promise. If you don't have any direct experience with that service provider, you're just buying a promise that they're going to ultimately live up to what they say they're going to do. It's almost like a sample, “Let me show you a sample of work.”
I have this discussion quite a bit. Here on The Buzz, we've talked about recurring revenue. One question, as a matter of fact, I got when I was in London, I was sitting down with a colleague in the space and he said, “I don't want to just go entirely recurring.” In Britain, they call it job work as opposed to one-time work. We'd call it one shot and one time. They call it job work. He said, “If I do all recurring and I don't do job work, no one is able to sample my wears, so to speak.” On the commercial side, you raised a good point. That's a much better sales tool doing a one-time job for a commercial because they can potentially turn into big lucrative accounts.
I don't know that you should worry so much about doing the one-time wasp job out in the suburbs at somebody's home because what's that going to turn into? A $500 or $600-a-year account? If you look at it, you might get a $20,000 $50,000, or $ 100,000-a-year account. Standing back and saying, “I'm not doing it unless I have a recurring contract,” might be counterproductive. I do tend to agree with that. There's some balance there.
Patrick Baldwin: We're still recurring-minded centric, focused, and even turning away one-time work. I am thinking back, bedbug work, there were two large accounts that it started with us doing bedbug work and earning their trust with bedbugs and showing proficiency there. That ended up turning into two of our largest, if not, two largest clients based on getting our foot in the door with bedbug work. It does make sense, I agree, especially commercial work where it’s like, “Test us out. We'll show you. We show up on time. We do a good job. We'll do good service at a good rate.”
Paul Giannamore: You remember Jeremy. He used to go out in the mid-Atlantic and be plan B for the clients that were using Terminix, Rentokil, or the big players. He would roll into a place, a manufacturing center, or a warehouse and say, “Do you guys have pest control services?” “Yeah, we do.” “Do you mind if I ask who you're using?” “Yeah, we use Orkin.” “How long have you been using them?” “Two years.” “Are you happy with them?” “They do okay. We’d hand them their card and then a little document and say, ‘I wish you guys the absolute best.’”
“Inevitably, if they mess up, I want to be your plan B. You call me 24/7, call this number. If it's 2:00 in the morning, I don't care. Somebody's going to answer your call. If they don't come out, we will come out and take care of it and we'll give you a good deal.” That was one of the tools he used to build up that business as being plan B for the big boys. He would go in and he would cut them a nice deal and he'd save them. They've got a situation, there's a rat running around in a warehouse, and it's going to get shut down. They would get out there, take care of it, and that's if the big players couldn't get out there in time. Sometimes, as we know, that happens. Not always but on occasion.
Patrick Baldwin: There you go, plan B pest control. If Fat Pats doesn't deliver, there's always plan B.
Paul Giannamore: It was the morning after pest control.
Patrick Baldwin: I didn't think the two of you were going to nerd out about peer groups. You're in YPO. I remember it was Emily Thomas Kendrick that pushed you over the edge on that. Am I right?
Paul Giannamore: Emily pushed me on it for quite some time. It was finally Jason Pananos who was the one that made me say, “I'm going to do this.” I did that some years ago and it's been an all-around great experience.
Patrick Baldwin: It is lonely at the top if you will. It's hard to speak to your subordinates about certain issues. Sometimes your issues are about subordinates, your coworkers, and colleagues. Going somewhere else where they've attempted things at work and attempted things that don't and learning from others' mistakes, you're okay with that.
Paul Giannamore: I love to learn from others' mistakes as much as I possibly can. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked out very well for me because I'm often learning from my own mistakes. As a matter of fact, I had a YPO buddy who I'd never met in person who runs a huge business down in Panama. He flew into Puerto Rico for some business and got an opportunity to hang out with him. He's an accomplished guy. He spends a lot of time with the World Economic Forum and Davos. I would've never met him otherwise if it weren't for YPO.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, this is great. I've enjoyed getting to talk to these other owners as we're talking about this YPO. We have other industries in which high recurring good gross margins. We're learning from each other here. Maybe there are opportunities for cross-selling and maybe adding those own opportunities to your own business. We'll see.
Paul Giannamore: Absolutely, Patrick. Thank you for bringing Mr. Bishop into The Boardroom.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, safe travels. You're headed out here pretty soon.
Paul Giannamore: I am. As a matter of fact, I've made some changes to my itinerary, Patrick.
Patrick Baldwin: Are you coming to Helberg? You can come to Waco. I’m excited.
Paul Giannamore: I'm not going to Helberg. I have some reasons to be in South Korea. I'm going to Seoul. I'm going to go eat some spicy tofu stew. I'm going to load on some kimchi, that's for sure.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm jealous but you have a good time.
Paul Giannamore: Sounds good, brother.
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Dylan Seals: Thank you so much as always for supporting us at The Boardroom Buzz. We know your time is valuable and the fact that you spend 45 minutes or an hour with us means the world. All the media that we put out from Potomac is meant to honor and celebrate you, the service industry owner. As Paul would say, “Yee who toil in the pest control vineyards.”
As part of giving back, we have this podcast, but more than that, Paul and I have been working our tails off over at POTOMAC TV. We've spent a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources to build out that platform to bring you market updates, to bring you visual breakdowns of the merger acquisition process, and to tell stories and present information in ways that, frankly, it's not possible for us to do on The Boardroom Buzz.
Adding the visual element takes it to the next level. I want to invite you to go to YouTube and find us, it's POTOMAC TV. Potomac.tv will get you there. Go there and subscribe. Check out some videos and leave some comments. Let us know what you like and let us know what you don't like. Let us know what you want to see more of and we'll see you over there.
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