Paul Giannamore: I can buy this business that does $200,000 in recurring or I can build that myself. It's the build versus buy decision and which one is less expensive?
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Patrick Baldwin: Let's get this party started. What do you say? We heat up the room.
Paul Giannamore: All right.
Patrick Baldwin: I've had my Chick-fil-A, I'm ready.
Paul Giannamore: Did you, really?
Patrick Baldwin: Yes, I did. It wasn't even with a family. I had to go to remedial audio-video training because, as you know, I can't even remember to plug in my headphones. I learned a lot of stuff at church about running audio.
Paul Giannamore: How's your cholesterol, Fat Pat? Have you had that check lately?
Patrick Baldwin: I got medicine for that.
Paul Giannamore: You haven't run any tests lately. Any diagnostics?
Patrick Baldwin: That's interesting. I got it checked a couple of months ago. Why? Do you think fried chicken makes my cholesterol worse, Paul?
Paul Giannamore: I would imagine the cookies and chicken you eat down there, that's probably the reason why you're on cholesterol medication.
Patrick Baldwin: I know. Don't tell anyone, I haven’t cut back on the cookies though. That'll be our secret. No one will ever hear this.
Paul Giannamore: No.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, I solicited questions and the reason I did this is, in FRAXN, we did our Ask Me Anything. We had you on as a guest and had a great time. We ran out of time.
Paul Giannamore: We're diving into the unanswered questions.
Patrick Baldwin: Yes. This is the extra innings of unanswered questions.
Paul Giannamore: Let's do it.
Patrick Baldwin: Uncle Paul, here we go. Any tips on how to handle going into a potential recession? Paul doesn't even think it's potential. I could see that on your face.
Paul Giannamore: I don't think it's potential. It's baked into the cake, Patrick. In the pest control industry, quite frankly, in all industries in the United States, people make a lot of purchases at the end of the year. From a tax perspective, you want to run additional expenses through mitigate taxes. When I think back to 2008 or 2009, that was not a great practice when there was a downturn because people had spent a lot of cash that they had on their balance sheet, “I don't want to pay taxes on it. I'm going to spend it as opposed to paying taxes on it and keeping it in reserve.” We have no idea what a recession would do to the pest control industry. We can look at 2008 and 2009 but it might be a different type of recession. Try to mitigate debt and keep your cash reserves high.
Patrick Baldwin: I agree, keeping a healthy balance sheet now. It is weird because I pay tax. You live somewhere where your tax burden is low to nil. As you said, it's against your religion.
Paul Giannamore: Down here in Puerto Rico, we export services and income tax rates are low. There's a 4% income tax rate down here whereas you're paying on a flow-through entity, whatever your marginal tax rate is in the United States could be 30%, 35%, or what have you. Plus, you've got state tax, maybe not in Texas. Although you guys have a business privilege tax of some sort or what do they call it?
Patrick Baldwin: We've got extremely high property taxes and then sales tax and then Federal income. If we talk about perverse incentives, then that's probably the bucket that my head goes to. You're almost incentivized to go have these expenses at the end of the year to lower your tax burden. It's weird because you don't have that. You're not even thinking about it, you're just running your business as healthy as you can, and you don't have that weird thought flowing through your mind at the end of the year.
Paul Giannamore: The tax wedge creates a lot of distortions in a market economy. I think about the pest control industry and all your friends in the industry. Come fall, these guys are spending a lot of money because they want to mitigate their tax bill, they're running a lot of personal expenses through a company because they want to mitigate their tax bill. When you have extremely low or zero taxes, you don't have these sorted distortions. Nowadays, you're running your pest control company and you think about, “I need to buy a bunch of computers, this, that, or the other. I might as well do it. The government will pay half of it for me.” That's what people say.
Really, you're paying for all of it. Puerto Rico is not the only jurisdiction around the world that allows this. Take a look at Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and all of these rapidly growing areas. Look at Hong Kong or Singapore, they got low corporate tax rates and low-income tax rates. There are not nearly as many distortions in those markets as there are in the slowly dying Western economies of Europe and the United States.
Patrick Baldwin: It's a little different now than a couple of years ago where you might go out and buy $2,000 in computers or office equipment or something and you can capture that expense in the same year but then you've got some low to no interest rate, you could pay it out over five years. Now, with higher interest rates, it's an even worse formula for you.
Paul Giannamore: I would say, as important as Cash Balances is almost leverage because, at least in the near term, financing rates will continue to go up. I don't believe the Federal Reserve's done with what they need to do yet. If you look at the Fed Fund's future rate as of July 21st, 2023, they're predicting another increase here in the Fed funds rate. We likely will get another maybe 2 or 3 Fed funds increases.
Patrick Baldwin: About recession though, you said this might be a different recession than oh ’08 and ’09. As you're thinking through the other residential commercial service businesses, how certain industries or sectors will get hurt worse in a recession than others such as pest control, lawn care, HVAC, pooper scooper, security, or janitor? What is your thought across the board on that?
Paul Giannamore: All of those industries have relatively similar dynamics. On the HVAC side, it's more of a necessity, obviously, than pest control. Pest control tends to be a much smaller portion of any business or any home's budget so there's less sensitivity there to kill it. Your air conditioning goes out in Texas, you're going to sell the silverware if you don't have any cash in order to get that thing taken care of.
Patrick Baldwin: That's 100% true. Another question came in. We may have talked about this on The Buzz before but it was phrased in an interesting way and it's a two-part question here. The first one is when should a company start to cut out one-time services with lower revenues such as one-time general pests or stinky insects? Part two, does it make sense for some companies to cut higher ticket one-time services like termite if it's not going to generate recurring revenue?
Paul Giannamore: In the Ask Me Anything session, we talked about target levels of recurring revenue. The point I made, at least from my direct experience, is 80% recurring revenue is a pretty good threshold number. If you're at 80%, you're pretty healthy. I hear a lot of guys say, “I want to do 100% recurring revenue or 95%.” Of course, that's a great thing to do. I don't know that I would necessarily go overboard. Once you get above 80%, you're in great shape.
When you think about one-time services, I always ask people, “What are your one-time services leading to?” Typically, in pest control, a wasp job oftentimes will not lead to a recurring service plan. Sometimes you can sell that but I would say, for the most part, when you go out and do a $250 or $300 wasp job in the middle of July because somebody's having a party and there's a wasp nest and they want it taken care of, they're probably not going to get a home protection plan from you. It's a one-time wasp job.
Termite is a little bit different because you can do a liquid treatment, for example, and then potentially sell the renewal. It depends on what your business is. Are you doing liquid treatments? Are you just doing baiting? Over the last decade, increasingly, I've gotten more and more excited about the opportunities with baiting systems like Sentricon. Not every area of the country is ideal for baiting. If you could build a recurring revenue base with baiting as opposed to doing liquid termite treatments and then selling renewals, that'd be a good position to be in.
One thing that you could do is you could determine if doing a one-time service at your business is a lead generation for recurring revenue. If you can pull that up in your operating system and say, “Of these 100 one-time services we did, 20% of them led to recurring service plans.” That might not be bad. If it's much smaller than that, it might not be worth doing one-times.
We talk about opportunity cost and the allocation of resources. Where this gets into problems is guys will solve one-time jobs where they could otherwise be doing recurring service. They're screwing up routes because, “We've got this one-time service across town so we're going to make a couple of 100$ on it.”
When you start running the math on it, by the time you get a technician over there fighting traffic and you got fuel and all sorts of expenses, you didn't make much money on it. If one-time service is a great lead source for you and that's something you need to analyze, you are in the recurring revenue business, that's what ultimately builds value around your company so you should give that consideration.
Patrick Baldwin: Does the company Bravo do termite baiting?
Paul Giannamore: No. Arrow Exterminators out of Georgia, more than half of their revenue comes from Sentricon, which has extremely high retention rates in the ‘90s. It's profitable. You don't have to be in the termite belt to do this stuff. If you had a business in Minnesota, Michigan, or Kansas that doesn't have a tremendous amount of termite pressure and you're able to sell preventative termite baiting, it becomes a high-margin business. There are a lot of companies that have done a great job with baiting.
Patrick Baldwin: On the wasp job, would you tell someone, “Your WASP service should be $400 or $500 almost in lieu of an annualized recurring cone package.” What's the trick there?
Paul Giannamore: There was a company up in the northeast that had this idea once that if we're going to go out and do these one-time wasp jobs, for example, and we don't want to do them, but at some point, they are profitable if you're paying $450 for a one-time wasp job. They thought, “Let's do some price discrimination.” The difference of the delta between the one-time job and the recurring plan is narrow.” It's like, “You could pay $550 a year and get a home production planner or you can pay $400 for a one-time.”
They did that for a summer and what ended up happening is people went onto Google. They would call up the company and they would maybe call Orkin and maybe call this company and call a couple of other companies. They would get some quotes and some guys were like, “We'll do it for $150.” People were then going onto Google saying, “This company is gouging customers. They're charging $400 for a wasp job,” for example. They quit doing that because, of course, in the world that we live in now, people are quick to get onto Google and give them a one-star that they didn't buy service from. They said, “They're trying to rip you off. Stay away from this company.”
Patrick Baldwin: It's interesting. It makes me think about Brian Peters and where they're selective in their customers like that where it's almost better to say, “No, we don't do that,” versus coming across as a guy that says, “Yeah, we could do it for X amount.”
Paul Giannamore: There are companies that say, “If you have a wasp situation, we can get you on our protection plan and it's going to cost you $200 today and then $38 a month or what have you.” I always tell people, “You need to test this for yourself, that might be a better way to do it.” It might be a better way to say, “We don't do one-time services. We do ongoing services. If you want us to do the job, here's how it works.” I can't imagine a lot of people would complain about that and be like, “This is how we do business.” Especially if you say, “There are other companies that'll do it for $250 if that's what you want.”
Patrick Baldwin: The question from the Ask Me Anything was about this potential exit ten years out, which you and Seth even chatted about that. Based on that, at the exit, that's the end of my runway here, is ten years out, then you want to make sure that you're targeting getting to 80% by that exit. Maybe you're at a point where you got to take as much cash in as you can, which, to answer this question, would be like, “Get what you can and get it in the door.” At some point, yes, there's an opportunity to cost as you grow and you got to figure out, “Where's my tech spending their time?” Even getting that larger one-time termite job or wildlife job or whatever it is, take it while you can.
Paul Giannamore: If you're doing 50% recurring, that's not an ideal situation to be in. However, if you've got some runway before your exit, you don't have to change things overnight. The first step here is omitting that you have a problem. Effectively, look at your portfolio, and you understand, “What is recurring revenue? What is not recurring revenue? What is it that I have? I've got 50%.” Now you realize you have a problem.
Once you can admit that, which is difficult for a lot of business owners, you can slowly begin to reallocate how you're doing services, how you're marketing them, as well as the incentive plans within your organization. You can say, “How do I incentivize my people to sell recurring services as opposed to one-time?” If you've got a good runway, this doesn't have to be accomplished overnight, you could focus on benchmarking against yourself and getting incremental improvement. If you've got five years and you can increase that 10% a year or 5% a year, you're moving the needle in the right direction.
Patrick Baldwin: Ladies and gentlemen, you learned it here first, the twelve-step program on getting your recurring revenue in line.
Paul Giannamore: Unfortunately, people need it sometimes.
Patrick Baldwin: Don't skip step one. Peej, the king of M&A, here's the question. Even as king, that's what we hear, are there P&L categories that are more important than others in the valuation process?
Paul Giannamore: If you're thinking about sell-side M&A, it's good to step in the shoes of the buyer for a second and try to understand what portion of the cost structure of the business would ultimately disappear or not. That always leads me to the gross margin line and above. Things that are fundamental to your business are your top-line revenue quality, which is effectively the routing of your business, how tight those routes are, and the relative pricing you're getting in the market. Are you selling at the right price? That’s question number one.
Are you covering too big a geography? Are you focusing on density because you're in a density business? The revenue quality doesn't necessarily show up on a P&L but it's important to understand that. When you get into the cost of goods sold, you can understand how efficient you are out in the field. For me, especially when it's an add-on or tech and acquisition, the gross margin department is probably the most important aspect of the P&L. When you look at things within the SG&A cost structure, you might have insurance down there and acquirers can get at different rates. There are things that will move around post-acquisition but higher up on the P&L is probably where you should focus your attention.
Patrick Baldwin: Chemicals, materials, supplies, or whatever you want to call it, that's interesting because, post-acquisition, larger acquirers or even these financial sponsors, they've got their own deals with the different distributors. They might even look at our chemical costs and say, “Once we take it over, it's going to be a lot less.”
Paul Giannamore: It probably won't be a lot less. First off, you'd be surprised at what you pay versus what they pay. The delta is not nearly as big though. Those guys can certainly buy that stuff at lower costs. When you're talking about 5%, 7%, or 8% of the P&L, even if you're able to decrease the cost dramatically, that's only a couple hundred basis points as a percentage of sales, which doesn't move the needle as much as let's say that you were getting relative pricing 10% higher than them. That's three times the effect of the change in the cost structure due to supplies and materials.
Patrick Baldwin: Where I would focus is probably top-line revenue, the quality of the revenue, density, routing, and then labor is a big one if you have a way to get that work done in an “inexpensive way,” efficient way. Would it drive you bonkers if you saw two of your service vehicles in the same neighborhood? Me and Bobby were like, “I don't want to see our two trucks passing each other in the same neighborhood. They should be in different parts of town.” As I was leaving, I saw two pizza delivery trucks, the same company, right behind each other. They could have put two more pizzas in that car and not run ten minutes out of town.
Paul Giannamore: Agreed. As you know, routing is difficult. It's not easy to efficiently route for most companies. That's a capability that you can build up over time, the efficient use of your technicians out in the field. A lot of people listen to things like The Buzz and get an idea and there are certain things that you can make changes immediately. You could say, “I'm going to go to a recurring monthly billing plan. I'm going to put cards on file,” all that. You can implement that relatively quickly. Other things like trying to figure out how to efficiently route are incremental changes over time. This is a multi-year process.
A lot of times, guys will get frustrated because, in one season, they don't get this all sorted out. That's not what happens. Everyone needs to sit back and say, “I'm going to get a handle on all the various aspects of my business and try to incrementally improve them and also focus on certain aspects of the business and figure out what are the most important things and focus on those things first.” If you've got low pricing out there, you need to focus on your service organization. You got to focus on raising prices before you focus on routing, I would start with that.
Patrick Baldwin: Have you seen a company in which they paid some of the technician's production pay and some of the technician’s hourly pay maybe based on the work they're doing if it was residential or commercial or maybe it was termite and rodent work?
Paul Giannamore: I have.
Patrick Baldwin: Did you see a good reason to suggest that that's a good case study and others should follow in their steps or do you know if it caused issues?
Paul Giannamore: I remember seeing a company that did both residential and commercial and they paid the technicians differently, one was production and one was hourly. If I remember correctly, that came because they weren't doing commercial and they made an acquisition of a company that was doing commercial and paid the technicians differently. I stay far away from the production versus hourly debate because, to me, at the end of the day, all I'm concerned about is what this does to gross margin. Clearly, there are thousands of companies out there that prove each day that either one of them is viable. I never even entered that debate.
Patrick Baldwin: This question came in, we were talking about acquiring the older business, the smaller 1 or 2-man business on the Ask Me Anything, and so this was a follow-up question. This question came in and said, “It was hard to integrate the customers into our customer database because they were priced so low and used to the one man who had been coming out there. Any tips on helping to integrate customers?”
Paul Giannamore: We talked about how much value can be created by going out and doing small deals. The company doing $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000 a year in revenue. The problem that you have is, unfortunately, with those small companies, they may or may not have a technician, and it might just be the owner whose wife might be running the office side and the owner is out there in the field all day. They do that for decades and then it's time to sell and the customers have a personal relationship with the owner, they're calling them at home, and they're calling them out his mobile.
It's hard for a bigger company to transition those customers into a varied route-based network of multiple different technicians. Furthermore, a lot of the smaller guys do have pricing problems. When it's just the owner and his wife, they tend to retain customers so long and never increase the price. A lot of times, they were undercutting the big boys back in the day when they took the customers on to begin with, and then, by not raising prices, it's low.
They know the customers personally and they know that Susie Smith in the suburbs, her husband passed away, and can't afford more than $319 a year. They're hesitant to raise the prices. I would say that there are certainly opportunities to raise prices when you make one of those small acquisitions. When you go out and acquire one of those smaller businesses, you need to make sure that you've shifted the risk to the seller. The seller, through ignorance, has not built a business. He's got a job and he's got some customers.
When he ultimately wants to sell, that relationship that he's built with the customers, which has been great all those many years, is now a detriment to value as is the failure to ever raise pricing. When you buy one of those companies, you have to go into it knowing that there's going to be high attrition rates when you raise prices and knowing that there's going to be high attrition rates when other technicians are doing the services. You have to build that into the structure of the deal. If customers fall off, the purchase price is adjusted.
Of course, the seller is going to say, “That's not fair. You guys are going to do things differently.” My answer is that's true, we have to. Unless you can go out and find somebody like you who you're going to work with for a year or two and who is an individual who wants to take your business over at this level of pricing and build relationships with your customers, you've effectively have an unsellable business. You have to go into it knowing you're going to lose a lot of these things and that's okay but you're not paying for them.
Patrick Baldwin: Would you sweeten the conversation to the potential seller by giving them a share of the upside? If I increase your pricing by 20%, then you're going to get part of that also as long as they take their service.
Paul Giannamore: I wouldn't. I wouldn't do it because, at the end of the day, probably at that level of pricing, you're not making a whole lot of money anyway. You need to get that pricing up in order to turn the acquisition into something profitable. Everything is case by case and there might be opportunities to do that. I'm not saying be a total dick and go out there and say, “I'm buying this. I don't care what happens. Things fall apart, old man. I don't care. I'm not paying.” That's not what I'm saying.
Oftentimes, especially on smaller 1 or 2-route operations, those that are doing those transactions haven't had a lot of experience doing deals, and they haven't gotten their asses kicked yet. You become calloused and hardened over time. When you see these deals, you see what happens, and then you get an act for it, and then you know how to do it. If you're wading into this, it's a great way to create value, you just have to make sure it's structured right.
Patrick Baldwin: If I heard you right, you're almost putting no value on one-time business. You're exclusively looking at recurring business and making an offer.
Paul Giannamore: 100%. What I said was when you look at a business that's doing $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000 a year, it's not a business. Oftentimes, you're not even getting a tech. You might get the owner who's going to work for you for a while but you're not buying a business or a going concern. If the owner gets hit by a car, that entire business would fall apart. It's not a business. The way that I look at it is if you're buying $100,000 or $200,000 per annum in revenue, you're effectively buying accounts.
It's akin to the old way that Orkin and Terminex used to do deals. If you think about it, you got Terminix, a big company. Historically, what Terminix would do is they would look at the $1 million to $3 million business in the same way that you, Patrick, would look at the $100,000 business for an acquisition for Bugs.com. In their mind, they were buying accounts.
Historically, Terminix was the king of this. When they would put together their offers, it was like, “We're paying X for the accounts. We're paying Y for the fixed assets. We're paying Z for AR and anything else that goes on top of it.” That's what they looked at and they were buying accounts plus whatever else you got laying around, “And we're taking your technicians.”
Over time, as the industry has gotten more and more sophisticated, people are beginning to look at the businesses that can honestly be called going concerns, actual businesses as actual businesses. With valuation metrics, the focus has been on the cashflow stream as opposed to buying accounts. You, owning a privately held pest control business, buying a small 1, 2, or 3 route business, need to sit back and say, “I am buying accounts. How do I value this? Do I value it on cashflow? No, I can't do that because, first off, if they even have financial statements, they're probably not meaningful.”
How do you even come up with a valuation metric? You're not going to compare it to acquisition multiples that large strategics are paying. What you're going to do is you're going to say, “I can buy this business that does $200,000 in recurring or I can build that myself.” It's the build versus buy decision. Which one is less expensive? If you buy it, the travel time from point A to B is much lower. If you were to build it yourself, organic tends to be a little bit stickier, it's your customer from the start, and it's probably higher priced. There are those sorts of considerations.
For me, from a valuation perspective, it is a comparison between buying and building. When we talked, I don't even think about one-time services, I am just thinking about recurring accounts because you're only buying accounts. The fact that you, Patrick, may have done a wasp job on July 3rd and collected some revenue for it, I don't care about that because I know that that's not an account. The seller is going to say, “We did such a great job. Probably, next July, they're going to call us back.” Who are they going to call? You're not going to own the company anymore and your wife's retired, that didn't add up.
Patrick Baldwin: Customer acquisition cost came up in that conversation in which you're comparatively looking at, let's call, $400 a year annualized value if that's an account you're purchasing. Numbers got thrown out from $0.50 on the dollar to $1.25 on the dollar in this scenario. If my customer acquisition cost is somewhere in the $100 and $250 range, am I not even looking or am I saying, “I can only afford to pay $0.50 cents on the dollar because that's the closest I can get to $150 per customer.” Is that where your head starting and thinking about the process for a smaller business that's acquiring $100,000 or $200,000? What's your customer acquisition cost?
Paul Giannamore: That's a reasonable assumption. When people buy small businesses, if it's purely to tuck in accounts, you can compare your customer acquisition cost versus the cost of acquiring that customer base. If you do the math, there are things that are important to think about, one is you're going to get some synergies, and you will increase route density so that will cause an incremental uptick in your own gross margin in that particular service area.
It's not necessarily a one-to-one analysis in a standalone vacuum of, “Here's what I pay for a customer and here's what I would be charged to buy it.” There are other situations where a lot of times when people buy smaller businesses that are attempting to buy a specific capability that they don't own. I'll give you an example. You take a look at the Philadelphia market, there are a lot of companies in New Jersey, and there are companies in rural Philadelphia and Maryland. People might want to get into that tri-state area. They might say, “I'm in New Jersey but I want to be in Philadelphia.”
It becomes more difficult to start a brand new greenfield operation in Philly than it does to say, “There's a business doing $350,000 in revenue. It's an owner and a technician and a half, for example. I can buy that. Now I have an office in Philadelphia, I can rebrand that, I'll keep the owner on, and then I can build from that, increase pricing, and so on and so forth.” In that particular case, that's serving some sort of strategic purpose versus just buying accounts in New Jersey and putting them into your route.
Everything can be reduced to math. You could sit back and say, “I want to be in Philly, what's the occupancy cost? I got to go out and run a place. Who am I going to have to manage it? Do I have to send a guy out there? Do I have to hire somebody from scratch?” You can calculate the costs of this and I encourage people if you're going to make these acquisitions, you don't have to run a spreadsheet. If you get a decent-sized napkin and a pen, you can jot down and get some very high-level ideas as to what the buy versus build decision should look like.
Patrick Baldwin: Interesting. I don't think about it because as you've let us all know, I'm in the armpit of Texas and it's at least four hours away from the inner state. I've not thought about that. Interesting point.
Paul Giannamore: You have thought about that because you're in Waco and you've thought about Temple, Killeen, and other areas.
Patrick Baldwin: Just not expanding into another state.
Paul Giannamore: The border of a state is an arbitrary line on a map, isn't it, Patrick?
Patrick Baldwin: From a licensing perspective is what I thought.
Paul Giannamore: There you have it, licensing is another consideration, for sure.
Patrick Baldwin: What are some hot markets in the M&A market right now?
Paul Giannamore: It's a different era than it was a couple of years ago. As things continue to cool, I don't know that there are any particular hot markets because hot markets were often driven by strategic acquirer activity. With Anticiomex, Rentokil, and Rollins not doing a whole lot, when I think back to 2019, 2020, and 2021 when we had these discussions, we looked at places like the Mid-Atlantic, for example, super hot. Back in the day, when Tony Sfreddo and the Kramers and all those guys were selling those businesses, that was a big battleground. Absent of strategic acquirers doing a lot of deals, there are not really hot markets.
Patrick Baldwin: That's all.
Paul Giannamore: There's nothing else to add on that.
Patrick Baldwin: I feel like there's something you're not telling me, Paul. There's a hot market but no one's going to know it.
Paul Giannamore: There are hot markets. There are a few that are more active than others where you have certain financial sponsors attempting to make deals. I'm getting on a plane, which is why we're doing this, to go to what I view as a very hot market.
Patrick Baldwin: You're not saying where.
Paul Giannamore: If you can figure out where I'm going, then you'll know what market that is.
Patrick Baldwin: I'll keep an eye out. Is that secret sauce for the financial sponsors or even the acquirers? They don't want others to know where they're looking to do acquisitions.
Paul Giannamore: There are no secrets in any of this. The hot market I'm going to is New York Metro because we just closed two financial sponsor deals in the metro market. When you get two brand new financial sponsors in a small geographic area both with platform companies, there's going to be a race to get scale.
I would say, in New York, Metro, New Jersey, and Eastern PA, probably the next 5 to 6 months is going to be a good time for sellers because they will likely, in competitive processes, end up getting 25% to 30% more now today than they would have two months ago due to the competitive nature. We always talk about the participants in the supply and demand in a particular market. Yes, it's New York Metro and it's going to be a particularly hot market in the relatively near term but, of course, that, like everything else, will fade away.
Patrick Baldwin: Very interesting. Peej, you're headed out, and I'm headed out. I got a little travel. We’ve got guest lined up.
Paul Giannamore: That's true. You're back on the road.
Patrick Baldwin: My weather will be a lot worse than yours.
Paul Giannamore: Absolutely, it will be worse. Safe travels and we're back at it with a guest next episode.
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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.
