Matt Brill: [00:00:00] So, it's like a Waffle House Patty Melt.
All right?
Toast is good, right? A hamburger patty's good. Sauteed onions are good. Cheese is good. You put it all together and it's amazing. Right? And so, the marketing is the same. Direct mail's good. Billboards are good. Digital is good, but you put it all together and people see you in multiple places. It's just golden.
Patrick Baldwin: Good morning, Paul G.
Paul Giannamore: Hey, Patrick.
Patrick Baldwin: Hey! Welcome back.
Paul Giannamore: Thank you. What's on, what's on tap for today?
Patrick Baldwin: All right. So we went to Atlanta a few weeks ago. We have what I'm dubbing "The [00:01:00] Atlanta Sessions" 'cause I can't think of anything more creative than that. This is the first - we'll be spreading these out over the next few weeks - but we've got Matt Brill with Mr. Mister today.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah. Matt Brill will be a very, very interesting discussion. So Matt and his partner, Ryan, founded a business called Mr. Mister And it's a mosquito control business down in Georgia. And, was actually one of the largest non-franchised mosquito control businesses in the United States that was acquired by Terminix at the beginning of this year.
And, Matt and Ryan did a lot of things very differently, than other mosquito control businesses out there. You know, they started this - it's called Mr. Mister and it was started as a misting business, but over time, it morphed into more of a traditional mosquito control business so that, you know, roughly 90% of their revenue was traditional backpacks sprayers.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm super intrigued. I learned a lot during this interview. I just [00:02:00] want to say, before we get into this interview, we recorded this with, had a few cameras set up, so hop on over to YouTube and watch this interview.
Paul Giannamore: That's right. We do have it in video. That's right.
Patrick Baldwin: Well, I don't know if this is the Boardroom, but let's step into the Boardroom with
Matt. Brill.
Paul Giannamore: let's do this, Patrick.
"The Atlanta sessions with Matt Brill from Mr. Mister Welcome to the Boardroom Buzz Matt
Matt Brill: Thanks. It's good to be in the Boardroom.
Paul Giannamore: Matt Brill is a founder of Mr. Mister,
Matt Brill: Co-founder.
Paul Giannamore: Co-founder.
Matt and Ryan founded Mr. Mister which was a mosquito business back in - what year did you guys found Mr. Mister
Matt Brill: Originally 2012, Ryan came on in 2013.
Paul Giannamore: And, ultimately, ended up selling it to Terminix December of...
Matt Brill: No, February, February 1 of this year. It was supposed to be December.
Paul Giannamore: December
Matt Brill: Terminix made other [00:03:00] plans.
Paul Giannamore: Yes they did So you're what? Four or five months into this? How's it feel?
Matt Brill: It's been a long time since I've been an employee. There are pros and cons, for sure. I've never worked for a large company like this. All in all, we enjoy it. You know, the people we work with are really solid people. And most everybody there is really just trying to do their best.
The pros of being an employee is, you know, when one of our trucks rear-ends or gets rear-ended. and my GM calls me and I say, "I'm super sorry to hear this. You should call Terminix right away."
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: Pro.
Definite
pro Cons is, like any large corporation, there's bureaucracy. And, you know, sometimes to get, you know, where Ryan and I and our team would make decisions like that.
Right? If it was February 10th, you know, we typically start spraying, you know, [00:04:00] the last week of February. If it's February 10th and it's warm outside, let's turn it on. Let's spray. Right. Let's go.
Paul Giannamore: Yup
Matt Brill: It doesn't happen like that at a big company. And it can't - we understand that. That's a piece that we're not used to.
Benefits are great.
My
health insurance went from $1,600 to $336. It's
been good.
Paul Giannamore: Let's take a step back
for a second.
Now you guys founded this business 2012, 2013.
You grew it into literally one of the largest privately held
mosquito control services businesses in the United States.
Yeah. When I personally look at that market, you've got a lot of the traditional companies
are doing mosquito sprays.
And then when you look at pure play mosquito businesses, you have a lot of the franchise
wars, right?
Mosquito Squad. MosquitoNix. Mosquito
Joe. You guys were a kind of a standalone operation here in Georgia. Employing, I think, at your height,
how many
employees...
Matt Brill: During the season, [00:05:00] we've got 80 plus people.
Paul Giannamore: Yep. Why did you, when you guys were growing this at a rapid clip, again, one of the largest privately held mosquito control business in the United States,
Matt Brill: Which we were shocked to find that out Truly shocked. And we did not, I mean, we knew we were doing a pretty good job. We had no idea about that.
Paul Giannamore: No, you guys were just focused on the game.
Matt Brill: Yeah, exactly.
Paul Giannamore: So why did you decide to sell it in the first place?
I mean, what...
what
Matt Brill: So it's a good question. And, additionally, people frequently ask us, "are you glad you sold?" Yes, we are. Why did we sell? We look at, you know, one of the first things you talked about as being the largest privately held,
we
don't assume because we've made a decision that it's the right decision today, that it's the right decision tomorrow. So we always ask the questions again and again.
Franchising was one of those decisions, is it?[00:06:00]
And, every time we asked, we went through the exercise of, is it the right decision? And it wasn't for us. When it came to selling the business, it was something that we knew was the end goal. We didn't know when it would be. Having started domestically in 2013 - it sounds very fancy when I say domestically, like we're some Global, but we'll get to that story later. We'd only been in business during a strong economy: lots of disposable income, everything was..arrows going like this. And so we had no idea what the business would look like when the arrow pointed the other
way,
looking at, are there going to be regulatory changes coming up?
You know, so mosquito right now in a lot of states is not heavily regulated - Georgia being one of them. It is regulated. You have to be licensed, but it's not regulated like pest control
is. And
so, looking [00:07:00] at supply costs, looking at the economy, we felt that we could handle any one of those things reversing.
The question is if two or three of those things reversed, what does it do to our business? And we had no idea. We started looking and, you know, we talked about Andrew Barrows. Andrew became a friend of mine through a process of selling. We had a small pest control. We sold to him several years ago and I asked him, who should I talk to? And he gave your name. We'd gotten your emails.
Paul Giannamore: You weren't put off by those
Matt Brill: We were. We called anyway.
No,
No,
we weren't. There's
not that many bankers in this industry, right? So was there three? And it's easy to talk to all three. Yep. Actually it's not because one of them didn't call us back and we felt that it was [00:08:00] important to talk to somebody that knows the industry, that's respected in the industry, that has contacts in the industry, that's been doing this for a long time. After having talked to a couple people, and we did talk to people outside the industry,
as well.
I didn't want to hire somebody that had to get ramped up. Clearly, that's not the case with you. So we reached out and had a conversation. It was very clear that you were the guy for us.
We became friends during the process. We're friends after the process. And I said earlier to Patrick, that's great...and it's always nice to have a new friend, but if your friend can't sell your business, then that defeats the purpose. The proof is in the pudding, right? You gave us a range after kind of thinking on it and evaluating of where you thought the business would go,
and that's where it went.
But, because there've been no pure play mosquito transaction yet, you know, [00:09:00] we weren't sure.
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah.
Paul Giannamore: I wasn't sure.
Matt Brill: Yeah. Listen, I figured there would be tons of suitors. Ultimately, it came down to two. We thought it was going to be one before either of those were in the picture and they declined, which was shocking to us.
It was a good deal. It would be a good deal for anyone who was going to be the one that had the gumption to get it done. And, you know, they get us.
Paul Giannamore: You guys own that pest control business
and it was a small one, and you sold it off to EPS,
but you try to really do something different
with Mr. Mister. Now,
not only we're doing some misting systems, but the majority of your services was traditional mosquito backpack spray. Yeah.
But there was something particular about the service protocols and how you guys did business or do business. It was very, very unique.
in the industry
And I'd love to talk a little bit about that.
Matt Brill: yeah, A couple things. So Ryan, my partner, came from the mosquito industry. I did not, I was in financial services [00:10:00] and it's funny, my wife jokes: when I got into the mosquito business for a very brief time, I was an Audi guy for a very brief time. I had a BMW. Did not
like it.
Patrick Baldwin: Okay.
Matt Brill: We got into the mosquito business and I drove my BMW to the Toyota dealership and literally did a key swap for a Tacoma The woman in financing was like, are you sure you want to do this? Like, are you trying to, unsell me a car?
Like, what are you doing?
So, I pulled up to the house in my new Tacoma and my wife called my dad and she was like, "you know, I married a guy that was in private equity and drove a Porsche. And now I've got this guy who's in pest control and he drives a pickup."
And it was the happiest I'd ever been.
I came from this background of ultra high net worth individuals and, you know, a different level of service. Ryan was my mosquito guy. That's how we met, know, so we moved into a house [00:11:00] 14 years ago, needed a mosquito solution. I had no idea what the solutions were.
I did my research. Ryan was with a company and we hired them. They put in a mosquito system and Ryan was the service guy and serviced me better than...it was extraordinary. Now you ask him, he'll say I was a such pain in the ass customer. I'd call him on a Sunday and be like, "dude, we're getting mosquito bites. and he would come over on Sunday and take care of it. When we started the company, our commitment to service, we felt that we're a service company that offers mosquito control, right? It's the paradigm of service deliveries, what we do. And it's what makes us unique. The chemicals that the vast majority of mosquito companies use last 21 days, not a day longer In a laboratory, they might? Nobody lives in a laboratory. We scheduled service every 21 days. We have property, you know, the [00:12:00] technician supposed to show up knock to announce that we're there, so nobody's outside in their underwear, the dogs aren't outside or whatever. They do a walk around the property, looking for issues.
They, you know, we put down mosquito bits, BTI - and then they do the treatment and our guarantee and our callback policy was different from anybody else. So if you have a problem, you give us a call, free retreats. Doesn't matter how many get, if you call us today, we'll be back tomorrow for a retreat. We run seven days a week.
Our motto was "mosquitoes don't take the weekend off. Your mosquito company shouldn't either."
And it showed. And
our hope was to deliver something that nobody would ever expect from their bug man.
And it's why we didn't like the pest control business. It's why we sold the pest company because the issue with pest is
we really wanted to bring in somebody [00:13:00] as a general manager that was not in pest control, which is a problem because he needed a DCF.
Paul Giannamore: Yep.
Matt Brill: And so it's this, you can only have people that have been in it for an extended period of time. And so trying to untrain people like that, it was very difficult. Where somebody called me, like, "I got ants in my kitchen, you know, our gym day, like, all right, we'll be out in a couple, few days.
And like, what? No way. We couldn't do it the same way that we could mosquito. And so that's why we had sold that business.
Paul Giannamore: But, given the fact that you guys were doing seven day a week service, with guaranteed 24 hour turnaround, a lot of times same day turnaround, your pricing was substantially
higher
than the median of the market. So when we looked at your pricing and we looked at everyone else's pricing, and, of course,
it continues to commoditize
right?
As more and more companies get into it, people are
doing like
$20 sprays now, ridiculous stuff, but your pricing versus everyone else,
was
substantially higher. I think,
in some cases, [00:14:00] 40-
50% higher.
Matt Brill: Oh yeah.
Paul Giannamore: Was it a particular sort of clientele that you guys were focused on? Particular types of neighborhoods or
not so much?
Matt Brill: Not so much. I was telling Patrick the story earlier. Andrew Barrows must've bought the list from PCTonline and sent out this mass email: "Hey, we want to buy your company. We want to partner with you, right?
I'm like, "oh, they want to partner with me. Oh,
that sounds great." So Ryan and I went and had breakfast about selling the pest company. And, at the end of the breakfast, you know, he was interested in the pest at the end of the breakfast. I said, "tell me about mosquito. You guys buy mosquito companies. Is anybody buying mosquito companies?
And he was like, "no, nobody wants to buy $45 customers."
I said, "yeah, I wouldn't either Ours are $82 customers." And he like, almost fell out of his chair.
Paul Giannamore: Yep.
Matt Brill: So, at that point, I knew that we were definitely doing something different and listen, we sell against pest control companies and other [00:15:00] mosquito companies all day.
And our close rate right now is like 74%, I think. So 74% of every call we get, it becomes a customer and they stay. I mean, you know, we lose 10 to 15%, maybe? When people come on, they stay on and we've got a great referral program, so if you're a customer and you refer Patrick, you get a free treatment and he gets
free treatment.
People love that. Some people refer so many people, they get a free season. It's a good deal. And we talked about with Matt Bierbower who's at Terminix,
is a great guy. He runs their mosquito program and he'll shoot me an email and ask questions because we do things differently than they do. We talked about that and his response was "if they leave, do you charge them for the remainder of the contract?" And I'm like, "no, no, you don't." Like, we reserve the right to charge them for the free treatment. If they get the free treatment and then quit, like, we'll go try and get that [00:16:00] money, but you get one star reviews, holding people
hostage and
reviews are everything, right? You know, we've got over 900 five star reviews and we focus on it Always did. And it is the personal touch. There were a couple reviews that I remember some guy left us a four-star review, talked about how awesome we were.
Paul Giannamore: He probably never gives five star reviews.
Matt Brill: That's exactly it. So I called him and I said, "Hey, you know, thank you for taking the time to leave a review. So glad you're happy with the service, that we're keeping you mosquito-free What can we do better to earn a fifth star?" And he's like, "well, I don't give five stars."
I said, "why?" He's like, "it would have to be something extraordinary to get five stars." So the next day I showed up at his house with a Mr. Mister Hat and a Mr. Mister T-shirt and I said, how's this for extraordinary?"
Paul Giannamore: Nope, not good enough?
Matt Brill: No. He gave us the fifth
star, you know, and then we have another one. We were at the kids, the high school [00:17:00] football game. It's eight o'clock on a Friday and I get an alert. Somebody left a two star review on Yelp and I called the guy immediately. And I was like, "what's the problem? What do you know, tell me what's going on." I went out there the next day to do a yard evaluation in nice areas. You know, one of the things mosquitoes love tires, right? Big time breeding habitat: protected, hold water.
You
rarely see that
in
our clients yards. this dude had tires and there were tarps over stuff.
There was refuse. if I was a mosquito, I would have moved into
his yard.
And explained to him, "Hey, listen, we'll come out every single day and give you a re-treat. It's not going to help until we do this. And so he was so impressed that, one, I called him on a Friday night and two, I was out there Saturday, that he gave us five stars.
That commitment to customer service is something that - I handled all those Had a really hard time delegating that and didn't really do it fully until [00:18:00] last
year.
Still have a hard time. I know my team will handle it, but if I see anything less than a five star, and it doesn't happen often. We had a great one come in.
This is an interesting one. So this fella leaves a three-star review and the review, essentially, this is not word for word said, "they've kept me mosquito-free for three years, Were doing a great job. I had some wasp nests come in, you know, in the yard. And my yard guy says, mosquito misting should take care of it.
So I called them and they said that they don't have the right chemicals, so I had to find somebody else." We're Mr. Mister Mosquito control, right? Not Mr. Mister Wasp control. I responded. My first response, I deleted. My second response was "so glad that we've kept you mosquito-free for three years. The products actually probably would work, but the application is totally different. We [00:19:00] are licensed for mosquitoes. We focus on mosquitoes. We do it better than anybody else you're ever going to find, but we'd love to have you back as a customer and continue to keep you mosquito-free So we get stuff like that, but we always respond. When you see companies that don't respond, they get a bad review and they just ignore it.
They don't go away. And if you don't respond, then it leaves the customer, their responses in their mind.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah. I mean, do you respond to both positive and
negative?
Matt Brill: I think. Yeah. So we thank all of our, "thanks for taking the time. We appreciate your business," all that kind of stuff. And then longer stuff for, you know, the few bad reviews that we've gotten
Paul Giannamore: When you think about, so mosquito control services are extremely high margin, especially if you get density and they're clearly fantastic Ad-ons for some of the larger players in the industry. Were you not shocked as you went through this process to learn that, you know, there are multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies in the United [00:20:00] States that do over a billion dollars of pest control services, and maybe do eight or 9 million. of The mosquito control
services?
Matt Brill: Was shocking,
shocking,
shocking, and it was also shocking as we sat in these rooms with very smart and capable people and talked about our 20 day treatment schedule, that the reason they don't do that is because they can't do that because their technology, their software - won't allow them to schedule 21 days
Paul Giannamore: They have to do 30 day treatments
Matt Brill: And, which are not effective.
And you don't gross as much over a season. Yeah. So there are simple things that can be done. We're not rocket scientists. There's no secret sauce. Like when we were talking about the products that we use, it's not a secret sauce. We'll tell anybody what we use. We'll tell anybody how we do it. They can't do it. It's funny. I talked to my dad - I was at Home Depot and it is of the generation that knowledge is power,
right?
And that you [00:21:00] keep your information right here and you don't tell other people because then they copy you. I'm of the philosophy that I'll tell anybody how we do it. There truly is no secret sauce. I dare you to do it as well as us. You just can't You don't have the commitment to do it. You don't have the resources to do it. You don't have whatever it takes
to do it.
I can read a recipe from the best chef in the world. I still suck at cooking. And so it's a very similar thing. And so while I may suck at cooking, I'm pretty decent at marketing and getting customers to sign up for mosquito control.
Paul Giannamore: Absolutely.
Patrick Baldwin: Going all the
way back to when Ryan was your service technician with mosquito, you were in customer service with high net worth individuals.
I don't even really know what that means. I think about walking into like high-end nice stores, like a Rolex store, like a, maybe a Nordstrom's or [00:22:00] something, or maybe even like a Disney experience. What does that do when you bring that into the service industry?
Matt Brill: We have had customers leave us because the neighbor has a pool next door that is unused and collects water. There's no circulation. And the other neighbor has an overgrown yard and they're, literally, and we have offered both neighbors free treatments to see if it will impact this and the neighbors will say no. Zero we can do. Entirely out of our control. And the customer will leave a review that says "their customer service is the best I've ever experienced and, because of my neighbors, there's just nothing that we can do." People recognize that the challenge is to continue doing that. Right, as you grow. Have Terminix having acquired us and, you know, when we grow to 40,000 mosquito customers, can we continue to offer that same level of service [00:23:00] to 40,000 people? And the hope is yes.
Ryan had left the company that I had used for mosquito control and moved. Somebody else took his spot. And so, if I had a problem and I called Ryan, he'd add a new, another nozzle on my system here, he'd tweak something here, wouldn't charge. Because his philosophy and our philosophy is that you're not paying for a nozzle. You're not paying for a backpack spray. You're paying for mosquito control. And so whatever we have to do to make sure that the mosquitoes are controlled, you cannot eliminate cause you can't ever give a hundred percent relief, but you can make it where it's totally livable. Or you can go out where you may have gotten 40 bites in an evening.
Like maybe you get one? He left. And then I would call the new guy and he'd pop on a new nozzle or added something here and they'd [00:24:00] charge me for it. I'm like don't nickel and dime me. I'm a customer. I've been a customer for a long time. What the customer service builds is loyalty. Right? And we talked about this earlier, and so we put yard signs in every customer's yard and it's not the little yard sign.
It's the, like, a political size yard sign. A few years ago, somebody posted on Facebook. It was when Jon Ossoff and somebody else running, not this last round, but before, and somebody posted on Facebook, somebody I didn't know, said, "judging from yard signs this political season, pretty sure Mr. Mister is gonna win."
And
cause we blanket yard sites and people leave them up and some people take them down. Some people get really mad and I want you to come get this and we come get it.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: People leave them up and you'll see yard signs that are weathered, which annoys me 'cause our guys should be replacing them. And it's, like, it's just loyalty.
Paul Giannamore: How many [00:25:00] yard signs do you think you've put out in Atlanta per year?
Matt Brill: We order 15 to 20,000, maybe.
Paul Giannamore: And you use all those?
Matt Brill: Yeah.
Paul Giannamore: And yeah.
Your yard signs are sharp and they are big, right? They are the big, you know, I've seen them. They're attractive. Every single acquirer had actually mentioned your yard signage, right? Especially the ones down here who literally see it. I mean,
Matt Brill: Right. 'Cause Kim lives here - Kim Scott lives here. So she drives and sees our yard signs.
The other local company,
Paul Giannamore: Heavily serviced their neighborhoods.
of the
Matt Brill: For sure.
For sure. You'll appreciate this. A friend of mine sent a message in, saying, you know, he's collecting all the yard signs in his that we put in his yard and he's going to come put him in my front yard.
So I texted him a picture of our warehouse with 20,000 yard signs.
And I said, you will never win.
Okay.
Paul Giannamore: You're really [00:26:00] kind of the marketing genius behind
Matt Brill: I don't know about genius.
Paul Giannamore: Well,
What's a better word for that?
Patrick Baldwin: Expert?
Paul Giannamore: Well,
I would I'll
give you an example of genius. So when we were going through the sell side process, I'm trying to run the M&A process. We're focused on numbers, and this, and coordinating things. Matt's here in the background, you know, and Ryan's pretty focused on the task and Matt sitting back there thinking, "what can I do?"
So, what does he do? He finds the home addresses of the executives for different acquirers and then he sends his guys out to market heavily in the neighborhood. So when these presidents and CFOs drive home in the evening, in their neighborhood, the neighborhood is just littered with Mr. Mister Signs, even to the extent that these guys went out and got billboards in strategic locations.
Patrick Baldwin: I heard about a digital billboard earlier.
Matt Brill: Yeah. The marketing and the sales piece, it comes naturally for me.
And
and,
[00:27:00] I enjoy it.
I am not a good manager. Ryan is an extraordinary manager, truly. I mean like, operationally, I don't know anybody more sound than he is and is just, we're very yin yang. We stay in our lanes until we're asked by the other to come into the lane. Other than Ryan's a millennial and he was always talking about, we need to have an online sign up for people to be able to sign up and not have to talk to anybody.
And I feel like if it was a service that was more commoditized and didn't have to do with pesticides and people's yards and spraying and bees and dogs and cats and all this stuff, I would agree. We tried it. It didn't work. He would frequently
Paul Giannamore: want an online sign up.
Matt Brill: You want people to sign up without having to talk to somebody? And I felt like people have [00:28:00] questions, typically, and we try it.
And
Paul Giannamore: To what extent do you think the industry, whether mosquito control or pest control, will go that way
at some point?
Matt Brill: Yeah. Well, I think pest control should. I mean, pest control has been around for decades and when somebody calls Terminix to get rid of the ants in their kitchen, they don't have questions. The question is "how soon can you get here?"
I think for pest control, it makes all the sense in the world. There's still a ton of people that don't know mosquito control is an option.
Paul Giannamore: Yep. I agree with that.
Matt Brill: Pest control. The days of hitting every baseboard with a metal B&G and your house smelling like chemical. And there's still a couple of those folks out there, but for the most part, it's crack and crevice. Integrated pest management. There's less questions with us. You know, there's a lot of questions, you know, "is it gonna, is it going to hurt my plants? Is it [00:29:00] gonna, is my dog going to be safe?
Is,
you know, the kids?" And so there are questions that we have to answer and it's more than just somebody reading an FAQ, which is what we tried with the online sign up.
Patrick Baldwin: Yep.
Matt Brill: They want to hear somebody's voice and they want to hear somebody that they feel like they can trust. And, as an authority saying the right answers, that's what we give them.
Patrick Baldwin: On the seven day work week.
I drove the 10 minute drive from the coffee shop yesterday. I turned the corner and I saw the first wrapped
Mr. Mister - it was a van. Then went down a block or two, saw a yard sign, went another few blocks and saw another van.
Paul Giannamore: All on a Sunday.
Patrick Baldwin: On a Sunday.
Yeah.
The yard sign.
That's a 24-7 thing, but two vans on a Sunday
Matt Brill: You can't get Chick-fil-A on a Sunday,
but you can get mosquito control.
I
Paul Giannamore: I tried to at the airport.
I could
not.
Matt Brill: Did you really?
[00:30:00] Oh, come on.
Paul Giannamore: The Mex and I rolled in and we thought we're gonna get Chick-fil-A in CLT. Didn't happen.
Matt Brill: No Jesus chicken on Sundays.
Every other day of the week?
It is the best.
Paul Giannamore: We did have barbecue, though. So
Matt Brill: Where'd you go for barbecue?
Paul Giannamore: Well, we were at Charlotte, at the airport.
Matt Brill: Oh. You ate barbecue in the airport?
Paul Giannamore: We didn't have any other options and we were starving because we still live in a world where U.S. air carriers believe that, well, they're taking advantage of COVID, right, where we're not going to serve you any food.
Patrick Baldwin: Pretzels?
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: Pretzels and almonds.
Paul Giannamore: So you're seven day work week question
yeah.
Matt Brill: Sorry.
We digress.
Patrick Baldwin: Well, from a responsive, I love it. From an operational, how do you even pull that off? What's a working week schedule look like for a technician?
Matt Brill: It's either 5/2 or 4/3. Our senior technicians that come back year after year after year get the choice of days. Jonathan and Eric and [00:31:00] our office do all the scheduling.
And we use past routes, which is a pretty decent CRM platform. We've been relatively happy with them. I mean, it's just a matter of staying on top of it. And we talked earlier that if we have a technician show up at a house and he flags it as "can't treat," because dogs in the yard or the landscapers are there, Jonathan or Eric see that and they plug in another stop.
And so we keep our guys working and it's how we are able to service so many
customers.
Paul Giannamore: Well, you don't see Saturday and Sunday as a weekend. It's just another business
day, right? I mean,
that's just how they operate.
Patrick Baldwin: So even the call center, someone's answering the phones?
Matt Brill: Yeah. We've got two customer service people on weekends.
We have a sales person every day on the weekends. It's a little slower, cause there's some municipalities locally that don't allow service providers to do their thing on Saturdays or Sundays. But the rest of [00:32:00] the municipalities, it's fine.
It's just another work day.
Patrick Baldwin: Customer service. It's interesting. Right? You're an outside-only service provider, which I love.
And just the volume you can do in a certain day. It's less touch. Like knock the door. I think you took a break during COVID of knocking, but you're outside. You're able to get a lot more stops in. Customer service-wise, what does that look like? As far as what you're looking for when you're hiring technicians and the number of technicians you have on the road?
Matt Brill: We do what we call high velocity hiring because the mosquito season is compressed. And so we will hire the best candidates that we can. If they have issues, we coach them up. If we feel that we cannot coach them up in a relatively short period of time, we coach them out and backfill the position, something we also do is if we have a full route booked out, we'll have backups come in - in the morning that we'll pay them for an hour or two. In the event we get a [00:33:00] no-show, because if we get a no-show and a truck's down, that's a lot
of money.
Paul Giannamore: You have a backup come in who sits there? And
Matt Brill: For an hour.
Come in. Work an hour, maybe two, maybe there's something in the office you can do. But what would happen is we would have somebody call in for a no-show, if we're down three
trucks
and a truck is doing $1500 bucks a day and $1,000 to $1500, like that's a problem.
Patrick Baldwin: So y'all own a warehouse with all the - they park the trucks at night right? And you're sharing these trucks on these varied work weeks?
Matt Brill: So that is a challenge, right? So in pest control - John, Pest Tech - that's his truck.
And he treats it like his truck and it's cleaned like it's his truck. And it's taken care of like it's his truck. Our guys, we had issues with
Patrick Baldwin: that.
Matt Brill: And we had guys that it wasn't their truck and, you know, so we had to find solutions for that to make sure that [00:34:00] they were held accountable for taking care of the vehicles.
Patrick Baldwin: Early on, you started misting systems, installing systems and servicing them. And I think ,over time, you figured out it's really 21- day.
I mean, there were even some 30-day in there, but you figure 21 is a sweet spot.
Matt Brill: Well, 20, 30 days, if somebody calls in, we quote them at 21 days. And that's too much money for them.
We will,
we offer a 30 day protocol, but we don't guarantee the last week. So if you have mosquitoes during that last week, you don't get a re-treat.
Patrick Baldwin: Okay.
Matt Brill: Because the products only work for 21 days.
Paul Giannamore: And
We're telling you that now.
Matt Brill: We're telling you that ahead of time.
Very clear about
it.
We do have some thirties. We do very few one-times because, for us, it's just not necessarily worth it. We charge more for them.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm just wondering, as far as even billings in my head, also, as you're saying that like a 21-day
Matt Brill: Billing's easy.
Patrick Baldwin: Billing,
So is everyone on credit card? Or ACH or
Matt Brill: [00:35:00] 85% are on credit card
Patrick Baldwin: You would take a check?
Matt Brill: Mail.
Technicians don't handle payments at all,
which was something we found fascinating when we started our pest control company and talking to technicians, I think they were responsible for their own routing.
They're responsible for collections. That seems crazy to me. Our technicians, all they have to do is learn how to treat mosquitoes as well as you possibly can and go do it and be nice to customers.
Patrick Baldwin: You were mist systems and you transitioned to
Matt Brill: So, so we originally, Ryan's back background was,
majority,
automated mosquito misting systems. It's a better solution. Without question. They're more effective, installed around your outdoor living areas. They go out three times a day, comes with a remote control. I mean, it's awesome.
Paul Giannamore: And this is basically pumping out
Patrick Baldwin: by
Paul Giannamore: pyrethrins
Matt Brill: so the,
those permethrin, yeah. It's pyrethroid that those are pumping out. We use [00:36:00] Sector in ours. The Sector lasts for a couple hours and then it's gone.
Great
solution. Super effective.
They are
at least $3,500 upfront like 125 bucks a month. So they're very expensive.
And so, as I was trying to get more leads, generate more leads for the system, I'm like banging my head against the wall. Like, how do I get more? How do I get more? How do I get more? And then we talked earlier, it was this moment where I was
like, oh, I don't care if I sell any more systems, I want more customers
and let's let the customer decide what it is they want.
And for a system, somebody might see that and think, "oh, I don't want a system. I don't want an install." We didn't want to turn people off. So when we get them, we ask, you know, we let the customer self-select. You know, we might sell 60 or 70 systems in a year.
And we, [00:37:00] you know, sell them $1900 backpack treatments.
Patrick Baldwin: Wow. It's on the truck and I have the C2 vans, but it sounds like you really went towards the small pickup truck.
Matt Brill: We do the Frontiers. Although Terminix does Rangers.
Patrick Baldwin: Okay. But there's not much equipment if you're just going out. Yeah.
A
Matt Brill: backpack.
There's a
tank,
yard signs and a blower.
Paul Giannamore: So why even use a truck then?
Matt Brill: As opposed to a van?
Patrick Baldwin: Or a car?
Matt Brill: Well, you don't want to be in the car with the gas. There are vapers. It's one of the reasons we don't like the vans is because you have to install the vents on the roof and
not, it's not great. And those NV200s also, like if you hit a large bug, it totals the vehicle.
Patrick Baldwin: A large bug. Now, out here, they're pretty big, but it's, I know it's a big billboard. So for you, it's probably a hard decision.
Matt Brill: No, cause the truck we would, the trucks look great too. [00:38:00] Once upon a time I was in advertising. And so I reached out to the friends that I made in advertising who are some of the best creatives and copywriters that I'd ever been around. Really funny.
And, and they do our stuff. Like I don't, we don't take ourselves seriously. And so neither does our marketing,
you know,
like on the truck, it says "on our way to ruin a mosquito's day," or, you know, "this vehicle gets a million mosquitoes per gallon" or, you know, so we try to be clever so that people remember it, and it's not like this, you know,
stiff kind of, we had one ad that was "millions will die."
And then small under that is "millions of mosquitoes, that is," and so it really isn't,
you know,
we just want to get people to remember us. The marketing - so it's like a Waffle House Patty Melt. All right? Toast is good, right? [00:39:00] A hamburger patty's good. Sauteed onions are good. Cheese is good. You put it all together and it's amazing. Right? And, so, the marketing is the same. Direct mail's good. Billboards are good. Digital is good. But you put it all together? And people see you in multiple places? And that's what gets it. And then they add the yard sign and the customer referrals and it's just golden. And so we came up with a marketing formula that worked and was effective and is effective.
And you know, this year has been interesting. So our 20 or 21 new sales numbers, so revenue's still significantly higher than last year. New sales is off last year. Well, number of new leads. Sales is still tracking very closely. I'm prone to panic. I mean, it's just kind of how I react to things as I panic. And so I panicked and I'm talking to [00:40:00] marketing folks and we're digging into the numbers and they're doing reports and we're tweaking stuff on the website instead of, you know, "start now," it's "get a quote," maybe "start now" is too aggressive. Let's change the variation of the orange. Let's, you know, doing all this stuff.
And, you know, we got a couple more here and there. Then I called around to our peers in mosquito and everybody's seeing the same thing. My initiative then was to be down less than
them.
Right? So if they're off 50%, I want to be off 25, at the
most. And it's worked. The number of leads is off of last year and where we wanted this year.
It's not as, not as bad as our peers.
Patrick Baldwin: With COVID, do you find the client base if you're just looking at pest control compared to mosquito control, is that client base typically a little more affluent, like disposable income?
Matt Brill: Yeah. Maybe. When we [00:41:00] look at who we market to, we're marketing to home values of three and a quarter up. And three and a quarter is lower than what I thought it'd be or lower than what marketers that I've talked to thought it would
Patrick Baldwin: be.
Paul Giannamore: When you say lower, what do you mean by that?
Matt Brill: Like they thought it'd be like 450, 500, but it's not. People will spend. I mean, and once you get it, I mean, it's really remarkable. People like swear by it. You know, my favorites, you know, somebody will call up, a new customer, and we do a treatment and they call back and they're like, "you know what? We don't need it.
We're not seeing any mosquitoes."
Like
Yeah. That's cause we treat it. It's because you're doing something
about it. Yeah.
Paul Giannamore: So you guys went, you know, you started in 2012, which of course, is like a stub year. 2013, you really started to get going.
Matt Brill: Well, '12 is when we started in St. Martin.
Paul Giannamore: Ah, that's right. I forgot about St. Martin. That's right. Matt wanted to be an [00:42:00] island mosquito guy.
Matt Brill: Terrible idea.
Yeah.
Sounded like a lot of fun. It was a terrible idea. And that's, so, that's how I got into business with Ryan is we started the company in St. Martin, called Ryan, said, "Hey. You want to move down to the Caribbean and run a mosquito company?" And he's like, "yes." His fiance was like, "no."
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: She was the smart one.
We had so many issues.
There was one time, we went down for an install. There, we were - it was for the systems. And, like, the guy that worked for us was, like, barefoot and they're drinking beer at lunch. I'm like, "what do you do when we're not here?" I mean,
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: Like, we couldn't get bank accounts. We had labor issues.
Pretty sure I still own a Peugeot somewhere on the island of St. Martin. That, you know, we used for the company, we literally sold it to a friend of ours for a dollar just so we could close it. Yeah, [00:43:00] it was terrible. And, in 2013, Ryan called me in February and said he was leaving his company. He wanted to start something in Atlanta. I said,
"I've got a brand, we've got suppliers, we've got, let's roll." I lent the company money to buy a used Ford F-150 and we rolled March of '13.
Paul Giannamore: Yep.
And you guys continued to grow that business, which added better reporting pest control company definitely would have been on the PCT top 100 from a revenue perspective.
But you grew that through, like you were talking about earlier, your multi-phased marketing program. You guys did a ton of direct mail. A lot of folks don't do that. You made that work, you do a ton of these yard signs. A lot of folks don't do that, made that work. And then, on top of that, you got billboards.
Of course, you were spending tens of thousands of dollars a month in online marketing. So anything else that you were doing that you felt was particularly unique from a marketing
perspective?[00:44:00]
Matt Brill: I mean, we tried a lot of different stuff. We did radio for two years and didn't get a great return on that. We do billboards. So we did a market study
in
2018
because at that point we're trying to figure out, do we open it in a new market? What is the market here look like? And there's no data You can buy global mosquito data, but there's no local mosquito data.
And so we hired a guy named Andy Abend, who I've known forever, a really smart marketer data guy came in and did some analysis for us. And what we found was
that
way, there, way more people in Atlanta would try or want mosquito control and way fewer people know about us than we thought did, which is great. So it was an awareness [00:45:00] issue.
So one of the best things for awareness is billboards. And so we did billboards in 2018 or 2019.
We did them again in 2020, and then quickly took them down in March because it looked like the walking dead and there wasn't a car on the road. Then we were back up this year and I think billboards are effective for that purpose. This year,
the new thing that we're trying is better online
content
for YouTube. And, I mean, more people watch their content on YouTube and it's the second largest search now is YouTube. And so we've got some really good content on there that we're running.
Yeah, I mean, it is, it's the mix of all of it and making sure that my thing is if somebody searches for mosquito control, they need to, I want to make sure they see us and they do. Whether it's through SEO, and we've done a good job at that, or [00:46:00] paid search and our reviews.
If that's the case, and they call, and there's a 73% chance that we close them? I mean, that's a recipe for growth.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah,
absolutely.
Patrick Baldwin: Take me back to when you decided you built that over $300,000 pest control business,
Matt Brill: Oh, you make it over 3000, yeah.
Patrick Baldwin: Over 300,000?
Matt Brill: It was, but it was, like, hey, that's tiny.
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of routes in there. Well, why the decision, you know, you could grow that brand, grow pest control, grow mosquito control, right? Separate lanes. I know, like, I think you had the people that separate, right?
Matt Brill: Oh, they were totally separate companies. So it was called People's Pest Control and the whole idea behind it, I had this
kind of
great vision for the marketing and it was going to be pest control for the people with, like, this kind of Russian propaganda, like, 1980 image poster.
And then, [00:47:00] then the
Paul Giannamore: It would have gone along well with Schindler's Mist.
Matt Brill: Yeah, would have been better than that until the first Trump campaign and the whole Russia thing. In my vision of this, it would have been a great campaign, this Russian propaganda, Neo-pest control for the people with like the hammer and the, I mean, it would have been amazing.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: It turned out not to be.
So we didn't do that. We wanted to start a pest control company model on the customer service that we offer at Mr. Mister. What we found is that it is much more difficult than we thought. There were a couple of things I thought were true that were not. I thought that 20 to 30% of our client base would switch over to us like that.
What I learned is that people don't switch. They either have to move or something terrible
has
to happen.
Paul Giannamore: Meaning you thought that you'd be able to cross sell your [00:48:00] mosquito customer base pest control. And these guys are already using other pest control providers?
Matt Brill: We weren't sure how many of them were, but the ones that were, we thought they like us so much, they'll change.
Well, you know, Jeff has been our pest guy for seven years. He knows the dogs. Like they're not, and these are my friends
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah. Right.
Matt Brill: that weren't going to change. And so
that was something that was unexpected. It was interesting. So Sanford Orkin is a friend and I took him out to lunch and wanted to, and he's the one that sold to Rollins and, you know, I wanted to pick his brain.
He is the nicest guy. He and his wife are truly some of the loveliest people you'll ever meet. So we're having lunch and I said, "Mr. Orkin, you know, I'm going to start this pest control company. What can you tell me?"
And he said,
"Matt, listen. Rollins paid me a lot of money.
And I signed a non-compete. And I just can't
tell you much."
Paul Giannamore: In [00:49:00] 1964?
Matt Brill: In 1964.
That's how honest this guy is. Right? He wouldn't talk to me about it. And he said, but he did say one thing. He said, "you make sure you take care of your technicians because if they leave, so do the customers." And that's really what it is. Right? So, if Larry is one of my friends, pest guy, has been for seven years, they're not going to change. If Larry leaves? They're going to change. And so that was an issue for us. It was also, we went through two general managers. Both of whom were capable people. They couldn't wrap their mind around, hey, if somebody calls today because there's ants in their kitchen, get out there today or tomorrow.
Paul Giannamore: Yep.
Matt Brill: Well, that messes up the route and that does this and that. That was foreign to us. If somebody is using one of the pest control companies for mosquito control and they call on a Friday afternoon because they have mosquitoes?
They're going to be out next [00:50:00] Tuesday, probably? At best?
Where, if they call us on a Friday afternoon, we're out Saturday. So there, there was a gap there. We were at a point where we were either going to have to spend a lot more time and a lot more capital on the business or sell it.
Paul Giannamore: And you were scaling the mosquito side of the business so much more rapidly. And so, you know, what was the point, I guess,
to focus on the pest control side early?
Matt Brill: Yeah, I mean, pest control, it wasn't for us, but it's a great business and it's a such a marketable business. I mean, if you want to start a business that you are, 100% ,chance that you can sell? Pest control. I mean, you can sell it.
Somebody will buy it.
And if they hire you that you, somebody will buy it for more than they thought they could sell it for.
And so, and so, my experience with the pest control business, I reached out, I [00:51:00] called. It was me calling the pest companies M&A people. I didn't hire somebody to do it. So we got what we thought was an okay price. I mean, we just wanted
Paul Giannamore: get rid of it.
Matt Brill: And, even if I had hired you at that point, and even if you got me 20% more, it wasn't
Paul Giannamore: Wouldn't move the needle.
Right.
Matt Brill: But it is an interesting business and just ripe for acquisition. And it's the only way the strategics can grow.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: If you have a decent business that, you know, you can, you can do it.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Patrick Baldwin: On the employee side, relatively, roughly, a nine month season for you. So you're pulling back to management and leadership for about three months. Ryan being out sometime in February, you're back in service.
What does that look like, as far as how do you get that many people hired and trained [00:52:00] in...two-part question, especially with what's going on with unemployment benefits. How much harder was it this year to get people back on?
Matt Brill: So a couple of years ago, we hired an in-house recruiter. They didn't have a recruiting background. It was just somebody that, that was their job: to deal with the Indeed ads, to handle the calls, to interview the people.
And that was very successful for us. So for a company our size to have an in-house recruiter is not the
norm,
but because of what we need,
it was
Paul Giannamore: You needed a full-time worker, right?
Matt Brill: And so we are constantly hiring. Constantly during the season at no point do we turn it off. Because if we get somebody that's really great, we can push out somebody that isn't. And that way, we can always have the best that is available.
We definitely got the calls that people would say, "Hey, listen, [00:53:00] as soon as my benefits run out, I'll call y'all back." We would say, "don't bother." The labor pool is shallower. Well, it was,
right?
I think at this point,
the pool is probably a little deeper, but people are having fun in the pool.
Patrick Baldwin: Right.
Matt Brill: Or not,
I don't know about fun, but, or complacent, maybe? And listen, it's a tough job. I mean, it's very physical. You carrying a 60 pound backpack, 90 plus degree weather, 200% humidity. It takes a certain kind of person, but we do a pretty decent job of keeping those filled. And we essentially become a placement firm starting September.
We start looking for other opportunities that are countercyclical to our business for our technicians. So we have a guy that has a Christmas light company. We offload some guys to him. We have contacts at FedEx and Amazon that we can offload people. So we're looking for [00:54:00] countercyclical jobs that are ramping up as we're tapering down.
And that taper down as we ramp up, which has been, and some of the guys are just fine not to, you know, they just want to take a couple, a few months
off.
Paul Giannamore: Now
I've got one last question that's on my mind. And I remember when we were running the M&A process, we had a lot of different discussions about pay plans for frontline
employees.
You guys had experimented with stuff over the years,
and there's always these debates in the industry. I would love to hear your thoughts on paying frontline technicians.
Matt Brill: So we paid hourly for a number of years
and
we're getting a ton of time theft.
Paul Giannamore: And by the way, working with you, that's the first time I'd actually heard that term.
Matt Brill: It may or may not be a real term. I don't know, but that's what we call it.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah. Makes sense. I use it all the time now. Time is being stolen!
Matt Brill: It is what it is. [00:55:00] It is time theft. Right. What we did was we changed our compensation plan for the technicians to a tiered plan, that if they hit a certain amount of stops or a certain amount of revenue and had a callback rate below, we would pick randomly pick five technicians, blend their callback rate, and you had to be at, or below that.
And then
forgetting
what the third thing is.
But we'd take that. And essentially, if you hit those, you can make 20 bucks an hour.
So we change it to this plan and we had guys prior to that, when they were getting paid hourly, they would clock in at 7:30 and they would clock out at, like, 5:30 and they would have done eight stops. We change this and they would clock in at 7:30 and they would clock out at 3:30, having done 10 or 12. [00:56:00]
Effectively.
Not just rushing
through them. Yeah.
Time theft went away. Terminix, being moved into a large company who it was tougher to do that. And the guys didn't always understand it. Right? I mean, like, the amount of time we spent explaining it to the guys, they thought we were trying to get one
over on them
and we never were like, wait, listen, we want to pay you 20 bucks an hour. Do these three things and you get
it.
And 20 hours.
I mean, that's, that's a great rate. And it's more than anybody else was paying. It was tough for them to understand. They always
thought we were trying to
get one over on them.
Having moved over to Terminix, we're back to hourly, but we're way more focused and keeping an eye on potential time theft and we check it daily and it's been okay.
But it was just as a function of moving into a large [00:57:00] corporation, but
hadn't done that before.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah,
well, you know, they worry about wage and hour type issues.
Matt Brill: As did we, right? I mean, so that was one of the things I'm guessing that, you know, companies our size didn't have a labor attorney and we do, right. Like, because that's good business. And you know, if we have a labor question or a labor issue, we call Nicole - calls our labor attorney. We would get the right answer. Ryan and I both always wanted to operate way above board.
We pay our taxes. We don't run stuff through the business. Like it had to be pretty easy for you to do the SIM because we literally run no - ran, when it was ours -no personal expenses through the business.
None.
Paul Giannamore: Yep
Matt Brill: because
I don't want to put my head on my pillow thinking, "am I going to get caught?" There's nothing to get caught for it, right? So for us that wasn't an issue. Yeah. It's been great. It's been great.
Patrick Baldwin: We pay our technicians production commission. So I [00:58:00] probably haven't put much thought into hourly in this time theft component. Well, if someone's paying their technicians hourly, what does time theft look like?
Matt Brill: Hourly is, they clock in at 7:30. They clock out at 4:30 and they're just taking their time. They'll have done eight stops. When now we know they can do 10 to 12. They're just dicking around there. They go park in a parking lot and sit and, you know, we track them.
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah.
Matt Brill: If you, you know, if you're paying say 15 bucks an hour and somebody steal two hours a day and you multiply that out by 35 trucks? I mean, it gets really expensive. So that was something we actually accounted for in the SIM that you
built was
we had recently switched to this new compensation method and we're saving [00:59:00] 140 a year,
at
least.
We accounted for, we explained that away in this, in the
SIM.
Paul Giannamore: It's exactly
right.
Matt Brill: And the SIM was good.
And like, you know, the SIM that you'll bill, we felt good putting our name on it. It wasn't fantastical. It wasn't like this. It was a legit
Paul Giannamore: Yeah.
Matt Brill: Image of the business. So we were supposed to close 1230 with Terminix of 20. And do you remember what the date was that we had the call was
It after was Christmas?
Paul Giannamore: Eve. I was in Turkey.
Matt Brill: So it was Christmas Eve.
Paul Giannamore: I arrived on Christmas Eve. And that's when it was.
Matt Brill: We got a call from Paul or no, not even
Paul Giannamore: from the Mexican.
Matt Brill: Yeah. That Terminix needed to delay. That there was an issue that their diligence firm had found. And they had said that because of Terminix's size, ACA was going to play a role - Affordable Care Act was going to play a role [01:00:00] and they were going to have to offer benefits to all our technicians, which is not something we did.
We provided benefits for full-time year round
people.
And so they pumped the brakes and they were clearly very committed getting to close. I mean, we weren't worried that the deal was going to blow up.
I think Paul and Franco were way more irritated and angry than Ryan and I were.
Paul Giannamore: Yes.
Matt Brill: In that they wanted to take some off the purchase price too, because they calculated a certain amount was going to have to be spent on benefits.
And that would be taken out of EBITDA.
Patrick Baldwin: Yep.
Matt Brill: And we were annoyed and, you know, but still like them and felt that they were being honest with us. It wasn't - they didnt' just make this up.
It turned out that they were correct on the number, [01:01:00] which I didn't think that they would be, but they were kind of right on, on the number. Still irritated. I mean, we're bumping right up against it. And the issue is if you go past February 1st, our season starts. So like once our season starts, we don't want to talk anymore until the end of the season. 'Cause we're about to grow a lot and you're going to pay more.
Paul Giannamore: And it's just chaos.
Matt Brill: Chaos.
Patrick Baldwin: The The question back to I had not thought about having an in-house recruiter until just a few months ago.
This is the first I've heard of having a labor lawyer. I don't know, on staff?
Matt Brill: She's not on staff and
Patrick Baldwin: on retainer?
Matt Brill: Well, and I'm trying to remember if we hadn't written the call on retainer. I don't know if we have her on retainer
maybe,
but we have labor issues, right?
So like hiring and firing, you know, what's okay.
Patrick Baldwin: We messed up on our labor stuff.
Paul Giannamore: The, I think the [01:02:00] point of, it's not necessarily, they've engaged a law firm and they have, that law firm has a specific labor attorney who's basically on tap. So it's not like they're paying a monthly bill to have on retainer, but they're
Matt Brill: and listen, if Nicole has to answer a question, she doesn't charge us. If she has to do a document or give an opinion, then she does. And she's fantastic. And we've had issues. We had
had a guy who had hurt himself and we came to find out that he had been shot before in the knee, but re-aggravated the injury on the job, so that's work comp.
Paul Giannamore: Yep.
Matt Brill: Well, how do we discover that in the future?
Right? And so we needed her opinion on that. And we came up with ways to do that in which is a
Paul Giannamore: Strip everyone down, check for gunshot wounds.
Patrick Baldwin: Absolutely.
Matt Brill: Yep, yeah.
That's not problem
in Georgia. [01:03:00]
No. So we do a post-offer medical questionnaire and, you know,
so we've already offered them the job, which means we're not discriminating.
Have them complete this. And if there are certain things that they check, then we have a conversation with, "Hey, we have serious concerns about your ability to carry a 60 pound backpack. And we don't want you to hurt yourself where you have problems later in life."
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah.
Matt Brill: And so, usually through those conversations, we're able to work through that, which, for us, was important.
Paul Giannamore: It's an extremely valuable piece of advice there.
Matt Brill: Yeah. And, listen, firing people. Like there's things that you gotta do.
Patrick Baldwin: There's things you can't say.
Matt Brill: Definitely are things that you can't say.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm wondering what other professionals would you recommend just to have access to?
Matt Brill: So, a labor attorney. We have corporate counsel, a guy named Steve Lang, who's an attorney.
Paul Giannamore: Steve's a great guy. Recommend him as an attorney.
Matt Brill: Extraordinary thorough. [01:04:00] So we do that. We have a bookkeeper. Okay. These are all, I'd say half, that are all hads.
A bookkeeper.
I was doing our bookkeeping and it would have been a disaster. You know, on the marketing side, I work with people. You know, I find specialists that help in certain areas.
So
Brooks Donner does our SEO and digital and paid search. And Andy helps with our market research and strategy. We've got a firm called Liger Partners that helps with our social media. So, you
know,
I'm a good generalist, but keeping up with
these,
especially paid search and SEO, you have to know every single day
what the changes are.
And I don't, and I'm not going to.
And so bringing in people and, you know, I, we just, we really don't have ego in it. I mean, like for us, it's we just want to grow the [01:05:00] business,
give
Paul Giannamore: people gainful
Matt Brill: employment, have a good time, stay out of trouble.
Paul Giannamore: Thank you for joining us in the Boardroom, Matt.
Matt Brill: Listen.
Thank you for having me. I haven't been in a boardroom since we were going through
process.
Paul Giannamore: That's true. You have not.
So it's good
to,
good to be back on your home turf here in Georgia. Next time
Matt Brill: We'll get you some real
barbecue.
Paul Giannamore: That's exactly right. I knew that when I said that,
Matt Brill: as it came out of your
Paul Giannamore: offended
Matt Brill: mouth.
As a
Paul Giannamore: As somebody who literally is smoking something every day, right? I mean,
Matt Brill: So yesterday I smoked eggplant.
I made baba ganoush from scratch. It's delicious. Should've brought you some.
Paul Giannamore: I'd like that.
So
Well,
thank you.
Patrick Baldwin: Thanks, man. It's great meeting
you.
Matt Brill: You too, man.
Thanks for, thanks for having me. And I'm glad we could make this work. This was fun.
Paul Giannamore: Absolutely.
Matt Brill: I'm going to go snake my sewer lines now.
Paul Giannamore: There you go.
Matt Brill: There's your ending.
Paul Giannamore: There you go. [01:06:00]
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, I have not watched a lot of Seinfeld episodes. I'm sure you know, by now, but one of the ones you did recommend was the one with the dentist that converted to Judaism.
Paul Giannamore: For the jokes. That's one of my favorite episodes. I don't remember precisely what episode that was, but down here in Puerto Rico, I have converted a Puerto Rican for the Puerto Rican jokes. I have also converted to Judaism for the Judaism jokes. No, but Matt Brill, who's Jewish. He's hilarious. He's got a really dry sense of humor and he said some crazy stuff. And before we filmed this, he was talking about all the different businesses that he had started. And, you know, he's a real kind of branding advertising guy, right? Although he comes from financial services, he's really, really sharp when it comes to this sort of stuff. And he was talking about before they started Mr.
Mister, that he wanted to call it "Schindler's Mist: the final solution in [01:07:00] mosquito control." What was the, what was the tagline?
Patrick Baldwin: Oh, I forgot.
Paul Giannamore: "The mosquitoes will Na-zi us coming."
Patrick Baldwin: That's right. Yeah.
Paul Giannamore: But he felt like it probably wouldn't have gone over very well at his synagogue, so he decided to go ahead and not go that route, but I thought it was hilarious.
The guy, yeah. He really has a great sense of humor. And, as you can tell when you listen to him.
Patrick Baldwin: The marketing. It's set apart, right. They were fully committed. I feel like it's easy to kind of half-do some marketing, but when you're buying 15 to 20,000 yard signs in a season, right, you have fully-wrapped vans all over Atlanta and that's serious commitment.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah. These are, these two guys set up this business. I don't think their intention was to sell in 2021. I think it was market conditions, which made them look around and say, okay, now is probably the right time to do this, but, you know, they were [01:08:00] attempting to grow a long-term sustainable asset and they did everything.
Right? You heard him talk about how they had an HR attorney. They hired a market research firm to do market research study. They had advertisers, copywriters. I mean, these guys were doing this, they were doing this for real. And Matt was very focused on data. It was very data driven for him. And, you know, one of the things that for me, the results tend to be in the financial statements.
So it's an extremely profitable, very, very fast growing business, but also pricing. I look, I always look at people's relative pricing in the market, right? And when I look at Mr. Mister, you know, when we benchmark in local markets prior to going to market, and in fact, in the SIM, we had a benchmark that we had done some of the regional players and some of the big guys, some of the national players were doing mosquito control services for a half an acre between 3 and 500 bucks per annum.[01:09:00]
You had Mosquito Joe, which is more expensive, about 790. You know, Orkin was about 672 per annum in that market. And Mister Mister's average annual account value, Patrick, was $869 bucks.
Patrick Baldwin: Okay. Oh, man.
Paul Giannamore: And they were able to get that pricing because, seven days a week, literally 24/7, I mean, these guys were dialed in and so they were able to get that price.
Patrick Baldwin: Oh, I love it. I mean, I think I was just drooling over the model when we were sitting there, just listening back to it now. I love everything about it. And my question to you is when it comes time to sell it, how does that process look differently with the pure play mosquito business? And this is not handling municipalities.
This is almost purely residential. What would that look like?
Paul Giannamore: that is a great question. You know, prior to the Mr. Mister deal, if you look around the United States, you had top three, really the only three, the big three in regard [01:10:00] to vector disease control and mosquito control. We sold two of the top three to Rentokil. The third is still an independent. And those are businesses that focus on mosquito abatement, districts, and municipalities, right?
You've got the municipality of Waco, for example, and a company like VDA might come in and say, "okay, Waco, you're spending 3 million bucks a year on mosquito control. We can come in there, we can do this better. We can do this for less." Right. And those businesses are extremely, I mean, they're almost all recurring and they're long-term contracts.
They're highly profitable. They're extremely valuable, but it takes a very different skill set, right? You've got to have, you know, those businesses on airplanes, right? They were literally spraying mosquito control product from planes.
They had a tremendous amount of data mining, so very different resources.
The Mr. Mister business, I had never sold [01:11:00] a residential mosquito control business prior to this because, quite frankly, the majority of them tend to be either part and parcel with the pest control business or a franchisee. And so when I looked at it and we heard about this in the interview, when I looked at it, I said, "Matt, you know, I don't know exactly how the strategics are going to look at this."
And my thought process was if we take this business out to market out to the strategics, to me, this looks as if it could be a standalone brand under our Rentokil or Rollins or Terminix. So we started this process in late fall of 2019. We had our meetings in early 2019. Our final meetings were in February of '20 and we had started the bid process.
And then, of course, everyone knows what happened. COVID came along and things fell apart. And we picked this back up during COVID and were supposed to close it at the end of the year, and, and of course rolled over into early 2021, but [01:12:00] it turned out that's exactly what Terminix wanted to do with it. They wanted to buy that business, have it be somewhat of a standalone mosquito control division, and ultimately learn from it and roll that out across the platform. The mosquito control market, particularly on the residential side, tends to be dominated by franchisees. And you and I have talked about this extensively, where if you've got a mosquito control franchise, typically in your franchise agreement, the franchisor will own those customer relationships or otherwise you can't sell that business without explicit permission from the franchisor.
And the problem that a lot of these guys run into, let's say that you build a $5 or $10 million mosquito control franchise. You can't turn around and sell that business to Orkin or to Terminix without the franchisor giving you explicit, written permission to do so, which they will not because, you know, Rollins is probably not going to run a mosquito squad franchise.
And so now that kind of [01:13:00] limits your buyer universe to private individuals. Potentially private equity firms, but still yet, it makes scant sense to invest a bunch of resources into growing a business that you can't otherwise sell. And so that's the problem that I think a lot of the franchisees have, and I've gotten tons of calls from these guys over the years.
And, and you know, I look at it and say there's not a lot you can do. And that's why the market is pretty untested because there's not a lot of standalone mosquito control businesses. The other thing is, although Mr. Mister did do some misting, you know, heavily, companies that focus heavily on misting have problems as well, because although the misting is far more profitable than traditional sprays, there is a lot of regulatory concerns.
There's acquirers that won't touch that because they get concerned that municipalities and states will ultimately come down [01:14:00] and say, you can't have a mister. You can go out and spray a yard, but you can't have a constant misting system because you're sending, you know, you're sending the product, basically, the chemical in the air and it's going to the neighbor's yards and it's not controlled.
So, you know, there's some theories in the market that the misting systems will, at some point, come to an end. Now, you know, your guess is as good as mine as if that'll actually happen.
Patrick Baldwin: This is a high priced, very dense, not mosquito, not a lot of misting systems,
very low. I mean, it looks like a pest control route, except you're really just doing exterior only. Like it looks like a super attractive business.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah. It is a super attractive business. All of those things are right. High growth, very high margin, high pricing, relative density in the market. You know, the only concern - when we ran the process, it was really getting the acquirers to think [01:15:00] through the seasonal workforce. So the large national players do not like seasonal businesses.
And, you know, when we went through the mosquito control services deal and the VDA deal with Rentokil, those companies use somewhat of a seasonal workforce because of course, activity swells in the summer, right? So
I think VDA was maybe bringing on a couple of 2-300 additional employees in-season, and there's really a skill set to managing seasonal workers.
So one of the issues that the acquirers had with this particular business is it is seasonal, right? It is not operating in December, January, and February. So it's getting them over that hump. The other thing is the national players have really been relatively slow to embrace mosquito control. I mean, when we sat down about a year ago with Rentokil we talked about it and they're doing $8 or $9 million dollars in nationally in non-VDA [01:16:00] mosquito control services, which is really spectacular in a business doing a billion plus dollars a year.
Patrick Baldwin: Insane. That blows me away, by the way.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah. It blew Matt away, as well.
Patrick Baldwin: I mean, to me it screams opportunity. I just don't know why it really hasn't taken off.
Paul Giannamore: Yeah. You know, we sold a business last year to Rollins called Mainely Ticks. And that was a very interesting business that did tick. I mean, their main focus was tick. They're in the Northeast, so there's a lot of tick pressure. It's main focus was tick, but tick and mosquito often go hand in hand cause you're using bifenthrin and similar pesticides to kill ticks as you are mosquito.
So a lot of companies, especially up in the Northeast, will have tick and mosquito programs, which are very, very similar. And I still think there's a ton of runway in the pest control industry to do add on mosquito control and tick control services. [01:17:00] You can use the same technicians. Obviously the service frequencies are different, but there's a lot of cross-sell ability.
And I watched that, for example, with Anticimex platform companies over the years. And when you look at Modern and American, and Killingsworth a lot of these platform businesses when they were sold, didn't do much mosquito. I mean, on the almost 20 million in revenue that Modern was doing, I think they had the mosquito program for a year or two, and they maybe were doing, you know, 3 or 400,000 in mosquito on the day of the sale, but there was a tremendous opportunity to cross-sell ticket mosquito services to that main Massachusetts customer base. Look, if you're out there and you run a pest control business, thinking about how you could add a mosquito control service line to your business, it's probably a pretty good idea.
Patrick Baldwin: I really enjoyed meeting Matt Brill. I know we've mentioned his partner, Ryan, a couple of times in the episode - would have really loved to meet him.[01:18:00]
Paul Giannamore: Ryan Claterbaugh, who is Matt's partner, they definitely are yin and yang. So Matt, in his own words, is the neurotic Jew. And he's, you know, kind of the marketing guy behind it. He's a numbers guy. Ryan is the operations guy. And when we were going through the process is very interesting and they're polarizing figures because one acquirer looked at it and said, "well, if we do this, we have to have Matt, right? He's the advertising guy. We need to have him. We got plenty operation guys." Other acquirers looked at it and said, "Matt can get out of here. We absolutely have to have Ryan."
So. Really interesting partnership because they're very, very different people. And Ryan is the pure operations guy and we invited him, you know, he lives in Atlanta Metro as well.
We invited him on the show, but he was on a, as you heard, a workcation in Florida at the time. So we missed out on it, but he's a great guy,
Patrick Baldwin: Not in St. Martin that week?
Paul Giannamore: Not in St. Martin.
Patrick Baldwin: I just, I [01:19:00] love that story. I also think of it from where Matt came from in the finance and the PE background coming into pest control and looking at it from outsider, looking in like this is a great business and pulls the trigger on it and ends up walking away and just doing a great job.
I love it.
Paul Giannamore: As he said, they ran a clean business. I mean, usually there's all sorts of discretionary items that need to be removed from a P&L. In this particular case, the only adjustments to that P&L were really related to things like time theft and certain one-time charges, expenses that should otherwise been capitalized, typical run of the mill stuff.
But no, you know, half a million dollars running through it for God knows what. So they ran a very clean business, a great business. And it was a fun transaction. I really enjoyed working with those guys. And as Matt said, I actually consider him a close friend. I've become friends with those guys and it's always good to see them.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, I appreciate you inviting Matt to one of our Atlanta Sessions. Look forward to [01:20:00] a few more to come the next few weeks. Paul, I hope you have a great week.
Paul Giannamore: Absolutely. Patrick. Great interview. Catch you next week.
Patrick Baldwin: All right. All right. See you, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: Bye.[01:21:00] [01:22:00] [01:23:00]
Patrick Baldwin: This episode has been co-produced, edited, and mixed by Dylan Seals of Verbell.[01:24:00]