Mike Hurley: Consultants will tell you about scale and they'll tell you about how you should scale your business. They don't tell you about all the birthday parties that you miss with your kids. They don't tell you about all the Christmases where your family eats dinner without you. They don't tell you about all that.
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Patrick Baldwin: Sensei, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: Fat Pat.
Patrick Baldwin: Why did I call you Sensei?
Paul Giannamore: I don't know. You've called me that a couple of times.
Patrick Baldwin: Is it because you're a black belt?
Paul Giannamore: Seth is the one with all the Asian stuff on his videos.
Patrick Baldwin: He has a big Japanese porcelain art collection. It's very intricate.
Paul Giannamore: He strikes me as a guy who watches Japanimation.
Patrick Baldwin: A little anime?
Paul Giannamore: I could see him doing that.
Patrick Baldwin: Is this because of the sessions with Seth? It sounds like you're jealous, you haven't had a session with Uncle Paul.
Paul Giannamore: I would like to publish a session with Seth and the Mexican is what I would like to do.
Patrick Baldwin: They did one.
Paul Giannamore: I know that. Wasn't it a fake one though? I don't think it was real.
Patrick Baldwin: It was definitely trolling. Was that at NWCOA? I was afraid that the Mexican’s swim trunks were a little too Daisy Duke-ish.
Paul Giannamore: I don't know if they did it in Texas. I think it was an Energy in Tampa.
Patrick Baldwin: No, it wasn't NWCOA. It was on a couch. It was before I got there. Good old Mexican.
Paul Giannamore: PB, we've got another interview.
Patrick Baldwin: I was going to say, “Look at us,” but look at you. I know it's been busy over here. You've filled in for me and lots of travel is going on. I know you grabbed Mike Hurley, which is funny. I met Mike in Orlando, him and his little Mexican twin running around the WorkWave conference. There's no filter and great energy. I'm going to tell you exactly what I think. The only other person that's like that in my world is the Mexican. The two of them were like two peas in a pod, two mistresses from another sister.
Paul Giannamore: That's not it, Patrick.
Patrick Baldwin: Maybe in West Virginia. He's from Virginia but he's wearing an old West Virginia hat. I love watching the two of them going around and slinging around Mexican business cards.
Paul Giannamore: Mike is certainly an interesting character. He grew up in a very humble abode and he's from West Virginia. He owns a pest and wildlife business that does north of $14 million in revenue. He grew it from scratch. He basically stepped out of a job, started it with nothing, and he's done a phenomenal job marketing that thing. Two thirds of the business is wildlife because that's his forte. Over a decade ago, he called me randomly out of the blue and he said an acquirer had approached him and he had some questions for me.
I gave him some suggestions and said, “You can grow the hell out of this business,” which is exactly what he did. He and I became friends over time. He came down to Puerto Rico at the end of 2023 and visited us. I haven't gone to conferences for quite some time. Now, as you know, I've been on the road and hitting some things up. I saw him down there at WorkWave when you saw him. He’s an interesting character, for sure. You're absolutely right, he says whatever's on his mind.
Patrick Baldwin: How is he down there? He came down to Puerto Rico and you all met up.
Paul Giannamore: That's right. He was here in November or December 2023.
Patrick Baldwin: I can't imagine.
Paul Giannamore: No, you cannot.
Patrick Baldwin: Not going to ask. What do you say we step in The Boardroom with Mike Hurley?
Paul Giannamore: Let's do this, Patrick.
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Paul Giannamore: Mike, we should have done this when you were down in Puerto Rico. We could have done this live with some drinks here.
Mike Hurley: Yes, that would have been great.
Paul Giannamore: I've got a lot of bottles of bourbon and scotch in my office. People see me drink on Potomac TV and they send me alcohol. I'm not that big of a drinker. I'm not like the Mexican. I've got a bunch of bottles here.
Mike Hurley: We could have done it up.
Paul Giannamore: We could have. Hold on one second.
Mike Hurley: We’d do it up now.
Paul Giannamore: Look at what a listener sent me, Mike.
Mike Hurley: Van Winkle.
Paul Giannamore: That's a fresh bottle of Pappy, twelve-year. I get some nice stuff in here.
Mike Hurley: You got some good listeners.
Paul Giannamore: I do. How's your listener base? Is it as good as ours? Do you get bottles of Pappy?
Mike Hurley: No. I'm probably getting some Busch Latte from my listeners.
Paul Giannamore: They still make that, Pabst Blue Ribbon?
Mike Hurley: My listener folks are blue-collar, traditional, 1 or 2 truck listeners that want to grow their business, and that have mutual respect for what we've done in our industry. My people are the people that strive to be successful in a very non-traditional industry. Does that make sense?
Paul Giannamore: That certainly makes sense. Mike, let's scroll back the clock here and take a stroll down memory lane. I remember first chatting with you in December 2014 and I remember that clearly. I remember that because I remember I spent six weeks that summer in North Carolina. I remember being in North Carolina and I got a call from you and I'm like, “This guy, Mike, sounds like everyone else down in North Carolina.” I remember where I was. Back in those days, you had that wildlife business. You were doing a little tiny bit of pest control, right?
Mike Hurley: Yes, sir.
Paul Giannamore: How big were you back then?
Mike Hurley: The first time I contacted you, it was probably $2.4 million in the 2014 year. We had $2.4 million in wildlife with about $32,000 in recurring revenue.
Paul Giannamore: What do you think you're going to end 2024 at?
Mike Hurley: Wildlife side, probably $17 million. Recurring revenue, probably $4.2 million.
Paul Giannamore: Let's talk a little bit about that. You've got a wacky and wild background. You're running one of the largest privately held pest and wildlife businesses. Your pest obviously is much smaller than your wildlife but you got a pretty damn big wildlife business. Most of them that I run across are 1 or 2 men in a truck, your lumberjack-style dudes that are out there wrestling animals. You're doing this for real and you're doing it based from your epicenter there in Virginia and you span out across the Eastern Seaboard.
Mike Hurley: Yes, sir. I serviced 244 counties across the Eastern part of the United States. Our processes are magnifiable to anywhere we want to go. We choose to service the locations that we choose. I can put trucks in California or Washington State. Anywhere I want to go, our process is magnifiable. It's not geographically limited.
Paul Giannamore: How did you get into this, Mike?
Mike Hurley: I've got an interesting background. I came out of Southern West Virginia when I was 26 years old. I didn't have a job, I didn't have an education, and I didn't have a future.
Paul Giannamore: You still don't, right? You don't have a job. You don't have an education.
Mike Hurley: I have none of that. I went to work for a little teeny company called General Electric pushing coal at a coal-fired power plant. There was a nice guy inside the power facility that took a chance on me and he put me through the schooling, he put me through Six Sigma, and I went all the way through Six Sigma. I got a black belt degree in Six Sigma. If you process people, you know a whole lot about Six Sigma.
Paul Giannamore: That doesn't help you in your street fighting though. That's another kind of black belt, right?
Mike Hurley: No, for sure. I'll tell you what Six Sigma did for me, it taught me a whole lot about process and a whole lot about process failure. I didn't know what it taught me until it taught me. When I worked for General Electric, I didn't use that education at all. When I got out into the world doing what we're doing, I used that educational background to formulate unstoppable processes.
Paul Giannamore: Let me ask you this. We've all heard of Six Sigma. I don't think any of us can actually explain what it means. Can you explain what it means?
Mike Hurley: Six Sigma, to me, allowed me to incept a process, see it through, and trial run it from baby process all the way through to completion. It changed my entire thought process by allowing my mind to work through processes to identify the failures in the process and make sure that you close up those process failures in order to complete an actual process. My whole philosophy was that strong houses aren't built on weak foundations. In order to develop a strong house, you need to have full-proof processes. It took a long time to develop those processes internally to where we felt that the process that we had was ready to grow. We've done a remarkable job since then.
Paul Giannamore: You skipped the part about how you ended up rolling out of General Electric and getting into wildlife though.
Mike Hurley: Yes, I did. I was working a DuPont shift. We worked a rotating shift. I was working 7 days a week, 20 hours a day, and falling asleep at my day job. I was running a computer console, running a computer board. I was putting so much effort into our wildlife business that I was suffering at my duties at my real job. The guy came to me and said, “Mike, you're a great person, and you have a good work ethic but you have to decide whether you want to work here and you make $120,000 a year or you want to go out and chase your dream of catching squirrels.” That was the day I decided that I was going to chase my dream of catching squirrels.
Paul Giannamore: How did you start it?
Mike Hurley: I got out, I closed my 401(k). I had $32,000 in my 401(k), I cashed it out, took a 10% penalty, it left me about $23,000 after I paid all my taxes, and I bought one truck. I had enough money to buy one truck, one ladder, and six traps from Wildlife Control Supplies and it started and away it went.
Paul Giannamore: That was what year, Mike?
Mike Hurley: That was in 1996. I had a child that year. I had a lot of responsibility. My wife thought I was crazy. She said, “You've lost your mind. You're quitting the job.”
Paul Giannamore: She still does, last time I saw her here in Puerto Rico.
Mike Hurley: She still thinks I'm crazy. You got to understand where I came from, I came from a very traditional place. The job that I had is a job that people desire. They love to have a job like that. Where I come from, once you get that job, you don't leave that job, and you die in that job. That's the place I came from.
Paul Giannamore: With a job like that, you probably died prematurely.
Mike Hurley: Yes, for sure. It was a traditional thing not to do what I did. I’m telling you, it caused lots of problems, for sure, but we chased our dream.
Paul Giannamore: The reason why I wanted to chat with you is, number one, you're a colorful and interesting character but you have done something that is difficult to do. It is difficult to take a business from 0 to $17 million, which is largely a non-recurring business. The Mexican and I have been talking a lot in recent months with financial sponsors and private equity firms as we start to think about the wildlife market.
When you were down in Puerto Rico, we had a drink, and we talked a little bit about the fact that the pest control market has gotten very pricey for people to enter. You've got wildlife businesses that sell big ticket purchases. It's expensive to do a wildlife job. The margins are great but it's not recurring. You seem to have rectified that problem in your own business. I want to talk a little bit about what you've done. You started in wildlife and what happened from there?
Mike Hurley: We have good ticket prices. It provided me with a good solid level of income. We did what we needed to do. We grew our business. 2008 came along, a backwards slide on the real estate market, and everything went to shit. I had to reinvent myself. I found myself with six trucks and we were pressure washing sidewalks.
We had to totally reinvent ourself in 2008 during that whole financial crisis. We did insulation, we dabbled in pest control, and we did whatever we needed to do to keep the wheels rolling on the truck. Even at that, we were probably only a $400,000 or $500,000 company. We hadn't reached our strides yet. We hadn't figured out the processes. I was working myself twenty hours a day, Saturday, Sundays. We never figured it out.
Probably in late 2014, we started to figure out how to piece it all together, what degree of risk that we were wanting to take, trying to figure the software thing out, trying to figure out the recurring revenue, and just trying to piece it all together. In 2016, we bought a pest control company, which was a wildlife company out of Atlanta. They were primarily a wildlife company but had 260 pest control accounts out of Atlanta, Georgia and that was called Xceptional Wildlife Removal.
I didn't have enough money to purchase them on a down payment and make that monthly payment model. We got that paid off, took some of the processes that we learned from them, and injected those in what we were doing in our core area and started growing. That was 2017. 2018 came along and we had a solid year. 2019 came along, we kept growing the recurring revenue element of it. 2020 came along, COVID hit. That year, we grew our business by 87%.
That was a phenomenal year, probably one of the best years we had had in our twenty-year history, the year COVID hit. There are a lot of reasons why that happened. A lot of people were stuck at home. A lot of people wanted to inject money into their home. That was their life. We did a solid job in 2020. Installation sales, gutter replacements, gutter guard, and a lot of good things happened for our company in 2020.
Paul Giannamore: How do you run a business remotely? You're in Virginia, that's where your main office is. You've got offices all the heck over the place. How are you running a business in Atlanta? You go down there, you buy this on a down payment, and you pay these guys over time. Who's minding the shop down there?
Mike Hurley: Going back to that Six Sigma thing, we've created processes that allow us to operate a business anywhere we want. We’re headquartered in Fredericksburg, Virginia. We've got administrative people that look at software every day and they look at estimates as they come in real-time. We schedule as it comes in real-time. The technician is looking at a tablet. The software has allowed us to do what we've done. Without the software and the evolution of the software, we would not be able to do what we've done. That's some proprietary software. We own that software and we're continually evolving that software. That software is probably going to be for sale to the general public later this 2024.
Paul Giannamore: Why'd you go the proprietary route? What made you develop software?
Mike Hurley: I'm not a software guy, believe me. The trials and tribulations that we had experienced with the over-the-counter box software, the traditional pest control software, was not giving us what we needed. We needed line itemization. What we do is very specific, we line itemize everything. Photographs are one of the most important parts of any estimate and there was not one software that would give us every element of a perfect estimation process that we wanted. What better way just to go out and develop your own? It's very expensive. A lot of costs went into that but it allowed us to grow to the magnitude that we are now.
Paul Giannamore: Pest or wildlife, what do you like better and why?
Mike Hurley: I'm going to disagree with all the advisors or all the consultants. I've heard some of the ratios that they want. I've heard them push 50% on the pest-wildlife ratio. Negatory. Your money is coming from the wildlife. To be fair, it depends on what your end game is and what you're evaluating for. Your private equity group, they're looking for different than your traditional pest control.
Whatever your end game is, you need to try to figure out what your exit strategy is and what you're trying to grow your evaluation for. Are you trying to grow it for pest control? If you're trying to grow it for the pest control industry, then you need to focus on contractual sales. If you're trying to structure out for the private equity group, you need to worry about that ticket price and the profit margins on that wildlife sale.
Paul Giannamore: I'm no expert on wildlife by any means but when I compare a traditional general household pest treatment with any wildlife job, the level of complexity in the wildlife situation is substantially higher. You've got to be an expert in structures, you got to figure out where that critter is getting in, and you got to figure out how to patch it up right. What's it like hiring and managing wildlife technicians versus pest control?
Mike Hurley: Pest control is a very easy element to hire for. When you start the wildlife side, you have to hire more carpentry. It's more carpentry-based. It's roofer-based. The pest control folks hire whatever degree of skilled people they want but we have to hire skilled people that have roofing experience because half of everything that we do or touch can destroy someone's house with water or whatever.
Most of the work we do is on a roof and it's easy to get into the weeds when you're on someone's roof versus a spray jockey on a pest control truck. Two different skillsets that's needed for two very different jobs. I have pest control folks that we hire and it's easy to hire for the pest control versus the wildlife side. You almost have to develop your own people, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: You were a guy who was a wildlife guy who began to grow a pest control operation within your business. Generally, the reverse happens. A lot of the folks I talked to might have a $5 million revenue pest control business and say, “I'm leaving a lot of leads on the table. I get phone calls from people that there are raccoons in the attic and all sorts of jazz. We don't do any of that. I don't necessarily want to do wildlife but the last thing I want is somebody calling up another company that happens to do pest and wildlife. They come in, solve the wildlife issue, and then take my pest control.”
What advice would you give somebody like me? Let's say I'm out here running a $5 million pest control business and I think wildlife is an interesting opportunity like Orkin thought. Orkin and Terminix were tired of throwing wildlife leads in the trash. With Orkin, we get tens of thousands of these things in a year and then they went out and bought Critter Control, Trutech, and a variety of other wildlife companies. What advice would you give me? Am I better off home-growing a wildlife operation or should I go out and think about acquiring a small wildlife operation?
Mike Hurley: Either get into it or stay out of it.
Paul Giannamore: Dabblers always fail.
Mike Hurley: You get into it or really get into it or stay completely out of it. Work at an angle where you sell them to somebody like us or you do something creative with them other than exposing your company to liability that you have no idea of the repercussions of it. You try to put a pest control personnel on a roof, probably bad things are going to happen. The first layer of advice either is to do it and do it really well and hire the right people or completely stay out of it.
Paul Giannamore: You said potentially partnering up with somebody else who's doing it and who knows what the heck they're doing. I run my pest control business, you're saying one way to have at it is provide leads to a wildlife company and maybe the guy pays me a referral lead payment, he takes care of my wildlife, and he's not going to ever try to sell pest control to that customer because he's just doing wildlife and we've got an agreement. You're saying that's one way to handle that.
Mike Hurley: It is. There are companies like Baton. If you've seen Baton around, they're good people. They'll take your internal leads and process them, sell them out to whomever, and generate revenue for them and you. That's one way of generating revenue for your wildlife control leads, for sure.
Paul Giannamore: Have you done that historically for other pest control companies where you guys are handling just their wildlife?
Mike Hurley: For sure. I don't like to cut deals like that because ultimately, I'm going to buy every job lead I can buy and I'm going to end up with that customer anyway. I don't cut side deals with pest control companies because, 90% of the time, I'm going to end up with that customer anyway. Whether they do the work or whatever, I'm ultimately going to end up with that customer.
Paul Giannamore: When you guys go out and do maybe an exclusion job, how typical is it for you to be able to sell a warranty on that job?
Mike Hurley: There's a lot of chatter in the industry about warranties. I see that very differently. I don't like the liability. There are a lot of industry analysts that will disagree with me. I don't like the perceived liability of a warranty so I don't typically sell it.
Paul Giannamore: Let's talk about that. What do you see as the exposure there?
Mike Hurley: Unless the warranty is written well, which, in my opinion, a well warranty doesn't protect the customer. It protects the company but it doesn't provide the customer much value. I've heard the warranty topic and I've heard the debate of the warranty. I just don't believe in that philosophy. I would just rather run out and get the money the right way, which is the traditional way. I know that you guys in the recurring revenue space don't agree with that.
Paul Giannamore: My philosophy is if you're going to go out and do an exclusion job, I don't know all the terms of art so you'll have to forgive my ignorance, I don't even own a home. I got a raccoon in the attic or whatever, a squirrel, you guys are like, “This sucker ate through some sort of vent or whatever.” We're going to go up there, remove the babies, get mama out, or whatever you guys got to do.
Now, the critter is out. You find the entry point and you securely seal that. Why wouldn't you come to me and say, “Paul, we did this work. It cost you $3,000. We did $3,000 worth of work. These suckers might want to get back into your cozy attic. For X hundred dollars a year or what have you, we will warrant.”
What you're saying is, for me, the customer, I'm going to want the wildlife company to warrant the whole kit and caboodle. If the thing gets in in any which way, you guys will come back out and fix it. What you're telling me and why it's not necessarily always a good deal for me is the wildlife company might say in the warranty, “If this thing gets back through that same hole, if it guts that vent again and gets back in, we'll come out and fix that. If it gets in on the other side of the house, that's a whole another set of problems and you're going to pay us another couple of grand to get that thing out.” Is that what you're saying?
Mike Hurley: Yes, sir.
Paul Giannamore: For you, if it's written broadly, you've got a lot of exposure because if that house is a target, those creatures are going to try to get back in there. Now, you're working on all sorts of holes and all sorts of areas of the roof, which isn't good for you. If it's too narrow, it's not good for me, the customer because there's a chance it might find an alternate entry. Is that what we're talking about?
Mike Hurley: There are a lot of elements in that like smell, insulation, and insulation contaminated. There's a lot of things that go into that. We do sell warranties but we only sell a warranty to a homeowner that has everything done that we suggest. If they have everything done that we suggest, we are removing the pheromones, insulation, and anything smell related. We're talking a very sizable ticket. The average ticket on that type of job is probably going to push upwards of $8,000. In that case, when it's done the way we prescribed it, we will definitely sell them a warranty. The marketplace has not been appetizing for $8,000, $10,000, or $12,000 jobs.
Paul Giannamore: What would you say the typical wildlife job is? In your area, what animal are we dealing with and what damage it caused? What's run-of-the-mill and plain vanilla for you?
Mike Hurley: Squirrels, that's every day. Squirrels, raccoons, or bats, pretty much all the same deal. Entry point, insulation, and screening, it's all basically the same. Summertime comes, a lot of snakes. It revolves around the squirrels, the bats, and the raccoons.
Paul Giannamore: I was once told that if a home has a bat issue, it is almost guaranteed that I'll also have a mice issue. Do those typically go hand in hand?
Mike Hurley: No. I'll tell you what does. In the last ten, the bat bugs have fairly run rampant with the bat.
Paul Giannamore: Bat bugs?
Mike Hurley: Bat bugs, which is similar to a bed bug. There is a sales opportunity for the pest control world, which we do that and we do that with a heat process. Not mice though. I've not connected those dots that you indicated.
Paul Giannamore: What creature is most hated by the modern American woman?
Mike Hurley: Snakes.
Paul Giannamore: What snakes do you guys run into and where do they end up?
Mike Hurley: Mostly, everything that we end up doing, everybody calls and they got copperheads or rattlesnakes. No, they don't. They have black snakes or a rat snake. In my area, we have a lot of people from abroad. When you have people from abroad, a lot of traditional countries have venomous snakes that will kill you and bite you. Those folks that are from abroad have traditionally learned to be afraid of those. When they come to our country and they find out they have a snake in their house, they can't relate it to anything they've known their whole life.
Paul Giannamore: I don't care if it's venomous or not, I do not want a snake anywhere in my house. That would scare me shitless. I don't care.
Mike Hurley: You want it gone.
Paul Giannamore: I want it gone, I can certainly relate to that. Where are these homeowners seeing these things?
Mike Hurley: Everywhere. It's from the foundation of the house to the attic of the house, everywhere in between.
Paul Giannamore: Do you mean they'll show up in a bedroom?
Mike Hurley: For sure.
Paul Giannamore: Really?
Mike Hurley: In the middle of the night crawling across your bed.
Paul Giannamore: Really?
Mike Hurley: Every day, yes.
Paul Giannamore: This discussion has turned into a horror show.
Mike Hurley: Getting weird, isn't it? That's an everyday phone call, “I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a snake stretched across my bed.” That is so common of a call.
Paul Giannamore: How often is it that you run into proper venomous snakes in the mid-Atlantic?
Mike Hurley: 4% or 5%.
Paul Giannamore: What type are they usually?
Mike Hurley: Copperheads.
Paul Giannamore: Has anyone on your staff ever been bitten?
Mike Hurley: Fairly often. Usually, reaching over the crawl space door, something along there. In 2023, we had two technicians bit by a copperhead. It’s usually on the pinky or somewhere on the hand. That goes along with it. That's part of it.
Paul Giannamore: I can't believe there are snakes across beds, Mike.
Mike Hurley: A whole different world out here, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: Mike, if you think back to the ‘90s when you started this thing, you left your gig, you were supposed to die there, you didn't, and you said, “I'm out of here.” You started this wildlife business. Having learned what you've learned over the years, if you could start this over again, what would you do differently?
Mike Hurley: That's a good question. To be honest with you, you're probably the first person to ever ask me that. I think about that a lot because I'm a processed person. What would I have done differently? If I had to rewind it all the way back, I would have not developed the relationships I had with my local hometown pest control companies. What kept me out of the pest control business for many years was I wanted to nurture the relationships with the pest control companies because they were the folks that would send me job leads.
If I would have started selling pest control on day one, I would be the single largest pest control company in the state of Virginia right now. That was a mistake that I had made. If I had to do it all over again, I would have foregone the relationship element of my business with those pest control companies. I would have done a better job of marketing my services in a broader way. I would have sold pest control from day one.
Paul Giannamore: Why didn't you sell pest control from day one and then what made you decide to do it ultimately?
Mike Hurley: To be honest with you, looking back at it, it was the wrong thought process. I thought I needed those pest control companies to keep my lights on. I thought I needed those pest control companies to pay my mortgage payment. In retrospect, I didn't need that at all. I just needed to work harder to get the information about them.
Let's face it, in the 1990s, nobody knew what a wildlife control company was. They thought it was a hillbilly in a truck with a ladder. Everybody knew what a pest control company was. That was back in the days of the yellow pages where the pest control guy paid all the money every month for the full-page ad in the yellow pages. That was the first person that they called. That was the relationship that I thought I needed. Does that make sense?
Paul Giannamore: What was the inflection point where you're like, “I don't need these guys to pay my mortgage and keep the lights on. I can get these wildlife leads on my own. Now, I'm going to sell pest control.”
Mike Hurley: I was at a lady's house and I had a two-way agreement with a pest control company. The lady had termites. I had done a crawlspace job for her. She had a skunk in a crawlspace. I was in the crawlspace, found termite tubes, and said, “I'm going to give this lady an estimate for these termites.” It was $4,600. I called the pest control company that we had the agreement with and I said, “I got this sold for $4,600. Where do you want to try to put this on your schedule?”
He said, “That's not enough.” “What do you mean that's not enough? That's more than what your termite guy would have sold it for.” He said, “We don't have time to deal with it. We're busy.” I never had a $4,600 ticket in my life and I was handing this guy a $4,600 ticket and he wouldn't take it. It wasn't enough. I thought, “What am I doing? I'm on my ladder chasing a squirrel or a skunk for $100 and this guy don't want a $4,600 ticket.” That was the moment we decided, “Let's get into business here,” and we did.
Paul Giannamore: Where would you have been more aggressive if you could do it over? We talked about the fact that you would have done pest earlier and you wouldn't rely on these other people. You would have said, “This is my game. I'm doing this.” Are there any areas of your business where you, in retrospect, may have been a little bit risk averse and could have been more aggressive?
Mike Hurley: I've always tried to be aggressive on everything we've done. I try to buy every job lead in my marketplace. I'll buy every piece of equipment that we need to buy to be more successful. I don't feel like I've left anything on the table as far as business and risk goes. I feel like we've done a good job of mitigating risk but being targeted in what we're doing. What we normally do, we try to do it the best we can. I don't feel like we left anything on the table.
Paul Giannamore: As the CEO of this company, what's the most important thing you do as CEO?
Mike Hurley: I have to be the cheerleader. Pay is not really enough. People want to be connected holistically to your company. In order for them to be connected to the company, they need to be connected to me. I have a Zoom every day at 6:30 with every employee that I have and I'm all jacked up like I normally am. I am the cheerleader, that's what I've become. I've got human resource people. I've got accounting people. I've got a job specialist. I've got material order people. I have become the cheerleader of our business, that's the best way to say that.
Paul Giannamore: You do a morning meeting every morning with your staff.
Mike Hurley: Every day, two meetings a day. I've got a management staff that I have a meeting every day at 6:00 and then I have a full staff meeting every morning at 6:30.
Paul Giannamore: What happens? What's a typical meeting like?
Mike Hurley: We don't talk about successes. We talk about failures. We talk about what we could do better to address the failures. We learn nothing from our successes and we learn everything from our failures.
Paul Giannamore: Can you give me an example of a failure you addressed?
Mike Hurley: We had a $42,000 job that fell off of our schedule. The task was to identify the process that failed that allowed that job to cancel. Why wasn't the customer took care of? Why wasn't the customer serviced? What caused that customer to cancel? They come back at me with three different ways that we could correct it so it doesn't happen again.
Paul Giannamore: Do you ever not have anything to talk about in that meeting with your management?
Mike Hurley: No, never. Sometimes the time is not enough. Seldom do we not fill the time up with talking about what we could do better. You try to be successful in every element of your business and always look for improvement.
Paul Giannamore: What about your full staff meeting? What stuff happens at that?
Mike Hurley: We talk about the successes of the day before. We talk about numbers. We go through every person's numbers. Psychology of that is nobody wants to hear zero attached to their name. We call everyone's name and we let them know what their total was for the day before. If it's a zero, then we indicate that you had zero. We say their name with a zero behind it. Nobody wants to fail. What that normally does, that propels that technician not to have a zero today. It's structured. We're a structured group of people. Even though you guys think we're a bunch of hillbillies, we're a very structured group of people.
Paul Giannamore: When did you start doing those daily meetings?
Mike Hurley: COVID. Every day since 2020.
Paul Giannamore: What were you doing before that? Was it weekly meetings or monthly?
Mike Hurley: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We were still having the meetings. We weren’t utilizing technology the way we should have. COVID has taught us a lot though. We've learned a lot during COVID.
Paul Giannamore: Would you ever run a business now without having those daily huddles?
Mike Hurley: Never. We were at NWCOA and I didn't see you there.
Paul Giannamore: I was not there but you saw our little friend there, the Mexican.
Mike Hurley: I did see the Mexican. We drank some beer together.
Paul Giannamore: He had the closing dinner for Bob Jenkins’ business. Bobby Jenkins sold his company down there. You got an opportunity to meet Bobby and Mike, great people.
Mike Hurley: Me and Bob are from the same neck of the woods. Me and Bob Jenkins share very similar stories. Bob Jenkins was a wonderful guy. He’s probably one of the only people that I can look at and say, “Anybody that was at NWCOA knows Bob Jenkins.” He was living his best life. He was probably the happiest man that I've ever seen, to be honest with you.
Paul Giannamore: He's such a wonderful fellow. I spoke at a Texas conference back in 2007 and I met him there. He said, “Anytime you're in San Antonio, I want you to stay with me. I got this ranch.” I usually don't take people up on that but he was such an interesting character. I said, “I'm going to do this.” I stayed over with him and his wife one night I was in Texas. We’ve been friends ever since. It was great to finally see him exit.
He called me up in 2023 and said, “Paul, I'm off in years. I'm finally ready to do this. Let's pull the trigger. Let's get this thing done.” I said, “Bobby, what do you think you’re wanting for this? Where do you think we're going to be?” He told me a number. The Mexican got it done at two times the number that he thought he was going to get for that business. It was spectacular.
Mike Hurley: Bob told everybody in that building that he got him twice as much as what he wanted for that business. It was truly a great moment. The man was 85 years old and truly the happiest person at that point in time that was in the entire building. Gracious for what you guys did for him, appreciative, and nothing but super positive words from him about you guys, for sure.
Paul Giannamore: I love the guy. I told him, “Bobby, why exit when you're 85? You're too old now. You should have done this years ago.” He loved the business, it was a family business, and he grew up in it. I'm glad you got an opportunity to spend time with him. You're saying he's from West Virginia. I didn't even know that.
Mike Hurley: He's a hillbilly too. To be honest with you, if you talk to Mr. Jenkins, he operated his business with the same foundational group of values that I operate mine. We operate our business as in we take care of the customer and the money will take care of itself. Mr. Jenkins operated under that same philosophy.
Paul Giannamore: You guys might be hillbillies but I'll tell you one thing about people from the south, you guys are respectful and the organizational hierarchy that you guys establish and the lines of respect, you guys run some fine businesses. Speaking of the NWCOA conference, I have never attended. One day, I may. The Mexican thinks wildlife is the new pest control and I have supported him in that because I think there's some phenomenal opportunities out there to buy a ton of cashflow and build the shit out of stuff. He said that you are the Wildlife King. He said that everyone came by to kiss the ring and you’re known across the land.
Mike, you're a very generous guy who's spent a lot of time helping people over the years. You and I have known each other over a decade now. I've met so many folks that said, “Mike Hurley, I called him up, I picked his brain, and he helped me with this and that.” You spent a lot of time helping people out in the industry grow their businesses.
Mike Hurley: My wife gets onto me for that too. She says I give away too much intellect. Here's the way I see that. To be honest with you, Paul, the world was good to me. Back when NWCOA started, the various scepters of that organization were Tim Julian and James White, whom I trained under. All these old dudes gave nothing but information. They wanted nothing in return for it. They wanted to help.
To be honest with you, I've not lost that at all. I don't ever want anything for the intellect that I'm going to give you. I want you to respect me. You see these folks and they travel around and they hit all these conferences and you say, “What are you doing here?” “I'm just here to help.” “No, you’re not.” People don't come to help. People are there to make money. That's the way the world is. Not me. I want to genuinely help everybody that I can. I'll talk to a lot of people.
I'm a busy person at those seminars and it's not because I'm the most outgoing person and it's not that I'm the best at conversation, it's that I'm respected for what I've done in this industry. I'm quick to tell you if you're telling me a lot of shit. I know my numbers. I live my numbers. The reason I know my numbers is because I live my numbers.
The numbers that I can give you and the information I can give you is not regurgitated bullshit. I know these numbers for real. In order to be successful at any business, your business lives, dies, and grows by the numbers. To be honest with you, you taught me that. Whether you think you did or not, you helped me along years ago by giving me or pointing me in the right direction and that was even before you had the little Mexican kid.
Paul Giannamore: Way before that.
Mike Hurley: You taught me that and I've never forgotten that.
Paul Giannamore: I appreciate what you do out in the industry. When we started this discussion, we were talking about these bottles that get sent over here from our listeners. I got to tell you, I close big transactions all over the world and it's not that exciting to me. What's exciting is guys like you. I've got so many people that are listeners who have followed us over the years and who have called me up and asked me questions. When they call me up and say, “Paul, you don't remember me. You and I spoke six years ago. You told me X, Y, and Z. This is how it changed my life. This is how it dramatically improves my business.” That is an awesome feeling. It's an awesome feeling to do that.
There's a lot of people that are very generous like you with their time but I encourage everyone out there to help because it does come back and it makes you feel great when you can see other guys who have learned from your trial and error. You're leaving a mark. You're leaving a legacy. Every person that you help, you're improving their family's life, you're improving their life, and you're improving their employee's life. It's a great thing.
Mike Hurley: Money is not always the best gauge of success. The information that you can pass along and the help that you give others is ultimately going to define how an entire organization looks at you. In the entire wildlife industry, nobody knows how much money I make. I don't tell anybody. To be honest with you, I don't want anybody to gauge me on how much money I make. I want them to gauge me on how I treat them.
Paul Giannamore: That's why you're a sleeper hit. Not for nothing, Mike. I don't think you've got money. You look like you just crawled out of the tree stand hunting a deer. You run a massive business that's extremely profitable and you've got an awesome staff. I remember you wandering around at WorkWave. There was a pool company there and you were helping them set that up. You were just on and on.
We should probably give people a way to get in contact with you if they want to talk about wildlife business, pest control, or anything. You'd be a great guy for people to talk to. If you don't mind me doing that, I'd like for you to continue in your tradition that you do at those conferences and helping folks. We're going to give your contact information and people can reach out directly to you. In closing here, before, you were doing a podcast. Are you still doing that podcast? You're going to start that again? Where are you on that?
Mike Hurley: We started that. We went back to it. It's informal. You’re probably going to hear some curse words in that. You're probably going to gain some solid information in there somewhere. The way that we have that scheduled is we’re going to go off the comments to figure out what we're going to talk about. It's a way that we're going to get back. Am I going to get anything from it? I hope not. I don't want to gain anything from it other than I want to give back information to the industry that's made us successful in what we've done and that's the only thing.
Paul Giannamore: Is your podcast more technical in nature? What are some of the things that you cover? High-level so I can get a sense.
Mike Hurley: An example to that is we did one where we talked about scale. All the consultants will tell you about scale and they'll tell you about how you should scale your business. Here's the thing they don't tell you, Paul, and I'm going to try to do this without crying because I get all choked up every time I do it. They tell you about scale but they don't tell you about all the birthday parties that you miss with your kids. They don't tell you about all the Christmases where your family eats dinner without you. They don't tell you about all that.
One thing that we're going to try to do with that podcast is to keep the information real. It's all great when you look at a spreadsheet and you say, “I need to do this and I need to do that.” That takes time. As human beings, we only have a certain amount of time in our given week. We're going to use that to keep shit real. There's not enough real out there in the world. Is that okay?
Paul Giannamore: That makes total sense. That always goes back to that old saying, “You can have anything you want, you just can't have everything.” There are trade-offs. As you're building a business, you're missing a lot of important things. I respect the businessman who can turn down that growth engine to spend more time with the family. It's a difficult thing to do. When you look at the Elon Musk's of the world and all these guys, these guys are working 17 or 18 hours a day. There are sacrifices and there are trade-offs. I know almost every person reading this right now has missed a ton of family shit and it's hurt them.
Mike Hurley: People don't talk about how important their partner is. I did a Facebook video, it's funny, and it was talking about, “I got one thing that I can tell you about being successful. You got to get one of these.” I then panned it around to my wife. That's it. You can't be successful without a partner that has the same mindset or the same goal set as you. We talked about that in the podcast. We go across numbers a little bit but we're going to talk about real stuff. We're going to talk about the things that matter more than the numbers. Believe it or not, in the great big world, there are other things that matter more than numbers.
Paul Giannamore: One of the worst things that you can do for your professional life and your personal life is have the wrong partner.
Mike Hurley: For sure. That great big empire that you worked hard to build, now you're going to split it in half because you don't have the right partner. The real-world shit, that's all we're going to try to talk about over there.
Paul Giannamore: That's great. I look forward to tuning in. What is it called?
Mike Hurley: It's called the Wildlife Pro Group, a Facebook group. All you gotta do is click on it. It's a private group. They do share some photographs of dead animals from time to time on there.
Paul Giannamore: I’d prefer photographs of women as opposed to dead animals.
Mike Hurley: For sure, me too. It's a good group of like-minded wildlife people. Not a lot of pest control folks in there right yet but 800 or 900 people in there that all own businesses. We're going to focus on them. To be honest with you, I've done fairly well in my life. The back end of my career is probably going to be me giving back. I'm probably going to get more fulfillment out of that than all the money that I've made.
Paul Giannamore: That's good. The Mexican is collecting donations in case you feel like you have too much of that. You can certainly send some his way and he'll be happy.
Mike Hurley: He needs a new chain.
Paul Giannamore: He does need a chain.
Mike Hurley: He's got a Rolex.
Paul Giannamore: He's received two watches. Did you know he got another one since you saw him?
Mike Hurley: No.
Paul Giannamore: A client just sent him an Omega. He got me a watch as well, which I was shocked and astounded and that was a kind thing to do. A client showed up here in Puerto Rico and had two watches and said, “You guys changed my life. This is something that I want you to remember.” The Mexican, within a two-month period, received two watches.
Mike Hurley: I'm doing something wrong. I can't even get him to buy me a beer.
Paul Giannamore: No, you can't. He's a stingy Mex. The next time you're down, I'll take care of you. Mike, I've seen you quite a bit in recent months now. It’s great seeing you. It’s great chatting with you. I look forward to catching up with you the next time you're down here in PR.
Mike Hurley: No worries, buddy. Good talking to you.
Paul Giannamore: Good talking to you.
Mike Hurley: Thank you for the time. I don't get people that want to talk to the old hillbilly.
Paul Giannamore: That's right.
Mike Hurley: Thank you for everything, Paul. Thanks for being there for me. Thanks for giving me good advice. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. To be honest with you, without you, we would probably still be flapping around $4 million with zero recurring revenue. Thank you for everything you've done for us.
Paul Giannamore: I appreciate you, brother. You've demonstrated what's possible out there with hard work and smarts.
Mike Hurley: Yes, sir.
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Patrick Baldwin: Maybe it was the black belt in Six Sigma, that's why I'm calling you Sensei, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: It's probably what it was. I was listening to him talk about Six Sigma. I'm not quite sure how it tied into wildlife. I didn't explore that as much as I should have with him. Although, when you're talking about tolerances, defects, and you're doing exclusions around the home, having those systems and processes become extremely important. He's an impressive guy. He started that business from nothing and does more than $14 million in revenue today. One of the things that I didn't know and I had learned while we were at the interview is that he does those daily huddles with his team twice a day.
Patrick Baldwin: Managers at 6:00 and everyone at 6:30. The only person I've even thought came close to that was Mike Rogers.
Paul Giannamore: He used to do the 7:00 AM huddle.
Patrick Baldwin: Mike is up a little bit earlier, that's crazy. It’s on Zoom so they're all virtually spread out everywhere and getting it done. There's a book somewhere behind me, I don't know which one, but from a family discussion, every day, the kids come home from school and they're going to talk about what goes wrong. “What did you learn today? Where did you fail?” Lo and behold, Mike's doing it in their business, “Give me three solutions so we don't do this again.” I love it. Who is this guy?
Paul Giannamore: When he was talking about that, it reminded me of the discussion we had with Chase. Where he's talking about, “Let's make the determinations before we fix something. How did it happen in the first place?”
Patrick Baldwin: Make sure that plane doesn't crash again. I don't know if you knew you were stepping into that one. Was it a $40,000 lost job because of some scheduling issue? You definitely put salt in that wound, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah, I didn't know I was stepping into that either but it's valuable for us to hear.
Patrick Baldwin: I love it. Down to earth, making fun of the education there, but he's got the grit, the attitude, and the spirit to get it done.
Paul Giannamore: As we discussed in the interview, if anyone out there needs assistance from a man like Mike Hurley, he's a super friendly guy. He's personable. He'll chat with you. He'll tell you exactly what he thinks about you and your organization. It's almost like having a call with a Mexican.
Patrick Baldwin: Except you can understand Mike.
Paul Giannamore: Exactly. If you want to submit yourself to that, you can track him down. He will definitely talk to you and tell you what he thinks.
Patrick Baldwin: We're going to throw that information out. Paul, are you traveling?
Paul Giannamore: I'm not going to be traveling for a bit, PB. I've got to go to Istanbul and then I will be going over to Manila after that. I'm going to miss Legislative days this 2024. Guess who will be showing up?
Patrick Baldwin: At Legislative day?
Paul Giannamore: The Mexican.
Patrick Baldwin: You're sending a delegate then.
Paul Giannamore: We're sending our delegate from Puerto Rico up to Legislative days.
Patrick Baldwin: Are you serious?
Paul Giannamore: He's got meetings up there that he can't miss so he's going to go.
Patrick Baldwin: You’re sending a translator?
Paul Giannamore: It's going to be interesting.
Patrick Baldwin: That would be perfect, Paul. You need to send a translator with him.
Paul Giannamore: We can hire a local one, an interpreter right there in DC.
Patrick Baldwin: He can say anything he wants. Make them blush.
Paul Giannamore: If you're going to be at Legislative days and you want to see the Mexican, he will certainly be running around there. I don't think he'll be going into any of the actual sessions by US members of Congress but he will be there.
Patrick Baldwin: He could find his way in. He's got a gift of working his way into any situation or crowd or room, I don't know how, or first class, he does it.
Paul Giannamore: True.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, thanks for getting Mike on. I'll see you next episode.
Paul Giannamore: Sounds good, PB. Until the 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.
Mike Hurley
Xceptional Wildlife Removal
Wildlife Pro Group
