Ep 86 - Risks On The Horizon: The Buzz Returns to San Juan

Paul Giannamore: Patrick, welcome back to my living room.

Patrick Baldwin: Thanks. This is The Boardroom Buzz studio all of a sudden.

Paul Giannamore: We're pulling this off because the wife's out of town. Patrick, while I'm sitting here, you realize it is offensive in the Middle East to sit with the bottom of my shoe facing you.

Patrick Baldwin: Is this intentional?

Paul Giannamore: No. It's the way I sit. Patrick, let's talk a little bit about what we've got on tap. We had Dylan and the crew down here in San Juan. We interviewed a whole host of clients, former clients. I had a due diligence session down here. We had Thompson Street Capital Partners come in. We had a lot of great interviews. One that was particularly exciting for me is Jared Borg’s discussion. Jared Borg recapitalized Pointe and Green Pest Services. It’s the largest past transaction for Thompson Street Capital Partners, which will be their residential platform for PestCo Holdings.

It's a super exciting deal because Jared is going to stick around. He's got a stake in the outcome there. He's going to run that business. On the residential side, Jay Keating, the CEO, came down. Jared was full of energy. My only regret from that entire week was not getting his wife behind the camera. In addition to Jared, who else did we have?

Patrick Baldwin: Specifically, Pointe is in the Midwest, Chicago Metro.

Paul Giannamore: We should clarify that.

Patrick Baldwin: There's Jacob Borg. There might be a brother that has a Pointe Pest.

Paul Giannamore: It's not the business in the Pacific Northwest. It's the Midwest and East Coast, Virginia.

Patrick Baldwin: Jacob is still operating. A thriving business is what your press release says.

Paul Giannamore: That's correct. What else do we have?

Patrick Baldwin: David Clark.

Paul Giannamore: The Clark transaction closed on December 31st, 2022. It’s a 230-man business in the Carolinas, largely in South Carolina. It runs a little bit in North Carolina and Georgia. That was a platform acquisition for Anticimex. What is going to happen is that'll be combined with Mike Rogers’ business in the Carolinas and that'll become one operation. They might brand it as Clark. Clark is a bigger business down there. David came down and spent some time in Dorado. He brought his wife down. Great time. Looking forward to getting that discussion published. What else?

Patrick Baldwin: Frank and Cindy Miller, I got to hang out with them.

Paul Giannamore: Frank has been in the pest control industry for 132 years. He's a former military guy. He's a fun dude once you get to know him. They were down here. They were fired by their children almost immediately prior to us recording this episode. We had a great discussion with them.

Patrick Baldwin: They are looking for a job. Also, Byron Gifford.

Paul Giannamore: Byron and his wife arrived and we'll be chatting with them. Byron is a partner in Evergreen out on the West Coast. That transaction closed at the end of 2021. He's down here for some fun in the sun. He's probably in the gym right now prepping for a full day with the Mex. We'll be sitting down with him.

Patrick Baldwin: Rentokil had their earnings call.

Paul Giannamore: When you think about what's gone on in 2021 and 2020, you had a lot of revenue in the pest control industry coming from disinfectants during COVID. That's rolling off. You've got a lot of intense pressures on wages as well as commodities like fuel prices and materials. That's putting pressure on margins across the board. Pest control is relatively insulated from that because a lot of these guys are fully hedged on the commodity side.

There was some pressure on Rentokil. When London opened Rentokil was down 9%. They’ve probably chewed back half those losses by now. It looks to me like that transaction is going to continue to move forward. Rentokil and Terminix applied for antitrust review with the FTC on January 10th, 2022. Usually, you have about a 60 day period. After that 60 day period, the FTC can come back and ask for clarifications. They might send over a document with questions. Around March 10th, 2022 or so, we'll probably have better clarity on what's happening.

Patrick Baldwin: Ripple effect. Rentokil was down 9%. That's 4% or 5%. It's a moving target. As you started scrolling through the other tickers, we saw Rollins was down. Terminix is down. There's an adjustment on the estimate. If Rentokil goes down, isn't the Terminix deal going down in value?

Paul Giannamore: Because of the extreme majority of that transaction, the Terminix acquisition price is pegged to Rentokil’s stock price. As Rentokil trades down in the market, Terminix becomes less valuable. That will change. Morgan Stanley had originally put a price target of 52 per share on Terminix. They revised downward to 48. I'm less concerned about regulatory risk at this point. If I'm concerned about anything with regard to that deal, effectively, it’s where equity valuations are going in this market.

We've got WTI oil. Every time we do a Buzz episode, oil is going up. It was $70 a barrel, $85, then $95. Now, it has reached $113 a barrel for WTI oil. A lot of that is related to the risk in Ukraine. Also, a lot of that has to do with the fact that governments around the world are lambasting the oil industry. These guys are investing less. There's this whole push for electric vehicles. I've been an energy ball and I remain an energy ball.

Patrick Baldwin: In a gold ball.

Paul Giannamore: In low growth. We’re recording this on March 3rd, 2022 in Puerto Rico. When I look at the market, I'm talking about every market, I'm talking about the US product, but also pest control. We're going to be in a different position on December 31st, 2022 than what we are in March 2022. There are increasingly more risks on the horizon. We've been talking about that. We're starting to see the dynamics and industry change.

Terminix is not doing deals now. They might buy a small company here or there. For the most part, they're not doing deals. Rentokil remains extremely active in the rest of the world, Europe, Asia, and other areas, both on pest and hygiene. They're working on nine transactions in the United States, all relatively small. 2022 is a different year from 2021 when I say it's going to be different now versus the end of the year.

The only thing that helps companies like Jared’s business, Pointe, which was doing more than $20 million in revenue, David Clark's business, Clark's, was doing more than $20 million in revenue, is scarcity. Remember, that was the theme of 2021. We did Unhinged. The scarcity theme continues and that props up asset prices. We had Thompson Street down here. We had a client down here, we did diligence meetings, and we're going to start doing as much DD from Puerto Rico as we possibly can. We haven't had to twist the arms of the acquirers to come down here.

Patrick Baldwin: It’s hard to say no to this.

Paul Giannamore: It is going to be a different year. If I look at the US economy, finally, the Atlanta Fed revised down growth to effectively zero for 2022. We've got a Fed tightening into a decelerating economy. It is going to be different. If you are thinking about selling, if you are on the fence, you need to accelerate plans. This is consistent with the theme that we presented at Supernova.

Patrick Baldwin: I want to ask about Terminix. Rentokil is interesting. Terminix is not doing M&A, Rentokil is but not domestically. Also, I'm hearing you say that you've never had a busier first quarter. The Mexicans are all like, “We're redlining on this.” What does that look like as far as the market right now?

Paul Giannamore: All the other acquirers are out there hitting on all cylinders. We have a lot of private equity support in this market that's picking up for some of the loss of Terminix/Rentokil. I wouldn't say Rentokil is not doing anything. Andy Ransom runs an M&A machine over there. In 2021, they did a deal a week, right in line with almost what Potomac did in 2021. The buyers in the market are keeping us busy. For the past years, we had a lot of these tax concerns. We had the general election in 2020. In 2021, we had The Build Back Better legislation and that scared everyone.

Now, it's all about valuation. When you look at Rentokil, Rollins, and Terminix, Rollins is probably down between 22% and 30% from its November 2021 high. You start to see the public equity markets roll over, it makes people start to think. In addition to Rentokil and Terminix, in addition to the Fed hiking in a rapidly decelerating US market, you also have changes at Anticimex.

I don't even know if this is public yet but we'll talk about it. Jarl stepped down as CEO of Anticimex. He'll become chairman of the board of Anticimex. They brought in an executive from Erickson who will run Anticimex. It's the end of an era with him. He was aggressive on the M&A front. I'm not sure what the new guy is going to be like.

Our dear friend, Olav, who had an M&A in Stockholm is now gone. He's out. For those of you who don't pay attention to Anticimex, they had a large recapitalization. Folks got some money. They kicked that business to a longer-term fund. Now, it's going to take another 5 to 7 years in order to get liquid on investment there. These guys are looking around.

We had our former co-host, David Billingsly. He is the former president of American Pest Control in the Mid Atlantic. Anticimex’s head of the West Coast in the United States has now departed. David is a sharp guy. David is an honest, great operator. David's going to have some interesting things to do. If any of you guys know David, reach out to him and maybe you can use his expertise. He's a good guy to talk to.

Patrick Baldwin: Frank and Cindy Miller and David Billingsley are looking for jobs if you know anyone. What does that signal? Jarl is staying. It's not like Jarl is going by the wayside. He's staying on as chairman of the board. Bill Talon is the COO. I don't know if we've talked about that but he moved up from Turner President. There's this restructuring.

Paul Giannamore: In my mind, Brian Alexson has been on the job for over a year. We interviewed him in Atlanta. Brian is relatively new to the role. When he looks at the US organization, he probably disagrees with some of the ways that Mikael Vinje ran it. Mikael is a guy like me, he's a finance and M&A guy. He came in, set up the North American business, made a lot of acquisitions, bought a lot of premium assets.

Every chief estate, so to speak, is going to have a different idea of how they want to organize a business. He's going to make changes. He changed the West Coast operations. He'll probably change some things on the East Coast. He got rid of Dennis Dube, the president of Modern. He brought Bill Talon up. He's COO now. Congratulations to Bill. I don't know what this ultimately means. If I do make it to London, I'm going to swing through Stockholm to see what's going on. I'm going to have a chit-chat. I'd love to get an outgoing discussion with Jarl. If I can record it for The Buzz, I'll do it. I'm going to try to swing through there if I can.

Patrick Baldwin: Going back, I might be chasing this private equity. Thompson Street was here. Do the phones continue to ring with a new private equity and shop every day? What’s that look like?

Paul Giannamore: Yes. A lot of the private equity firms are not going to be able to pay to play in this industry. There are some that are out there doing it. When we talked before, we said we started a process. There were around a dozen private equity firms and a handful of strategic. The indications of interest are due on that transaction. It will be maybe two strategics betting on that but it will be largely private equity and that'll probably be a private equity platform. Similar to what Jared and Kyle did at a Pointe, partnering up with PestCo. This one will likely be a private equity partnership.

What we're trying to do here with private equity is when I look at the private equity space, people look around this industry and they see a few of these companies that have partnered with private equity, there's a spectrum. You've got everything from venture capital on one end of the spectrum. You've got value investors and private equity. You've got aggressive growth equity investors in private equity. Every different private equity firm or every class of private equity firms is focusing on a different transaction.

Thus far, the private equity firms outside of Imperial, Thompson, and EQT that own Certus, Anticimex, and PestCo, these private equity firms have been not so much growth capital but knocking out shareholders. I don't see that some of the other firms that are in the space are going to be as aggressive in growing their investment. Thompson Street is going to be aggressive. They're going to try to grow the hell out of that business. I don't run into Certus as much. We put 60-some odd deals in a spread and maybe 1 or 2 of them were Certus. We did one deal with Certus out of 40-something.

Patrick Baldwin: The bug guys.

Paul Giannamore: We're not doing as many Certus deals. I haven't seen them as active. The Mexican was with Mike Givlin, probably disappointing him greatly by showing up in my stead. He looked into it and said, “Here's the Mexican.”

Patrick Baldwin: I would run away too. I'm thinking about limited capacity, taxes were in front of mine coming out of ‘21. You spoke about limited capacity. Rentokil could only do three deals a month. There was a definite constraint. In a calendar year, December 31st, only so many deals can get done. This is different.

We don't know this unknown of where the market is going to look like. I didn't know this about the Federal Bank saying, “There's going to be no growth this year. We've got somewhere between 2 to 5 interest rate hikes not knowing if we're creeping up at 25 or 50 basis points.” What does it look like with the capacity? I'm thinking about $5 million guys are like, “Do I need to do something now?” What's the capacity of the buyers?

Paul Giannamore: Here's the way that I look at it. Every market cycle is different. I can only think about things from a historical, contextual perspective. I graduated from university in 1999 and I started to work in bulge bracket investment banking. I was out in California in the tech group and we were taking a company public every other week. Frank Quattrone was one in that group. We were the most active bulge bracket investment bank in the technology space in the late ‘90s. These guys were effectively printing money. We all know there was the dot-com bust. Another massive down cycle was the great financial crisis, effectively 2007 through 2011 or so.

When I think about what happens in M&A and consolidating markets, I have direct experience in those booms and busts. Government staffing, IT services, all these different consolidation booms going back into the ‘80s and ‘90s are well documented. What I tend to see is when you have a consolidation boom, acquirers come in, you get publicly traded strategics like Rollins and Rentokil. You get private equity-backed amalgamators and consolidators.

What ends up happening is as there's a run-up, everyone's buying everything. These investors tend to be indiscriminate. It runs up the price of everything. You end up in a position where there's almost a melt-up or blow-off top. It's similar to the public equity markets. We saw that in Q4 of 2021. I'm going to go out on a limb. I said 2018 was the height for that market cycle. Everything started to roll over in 2019. Of course, we had COVID. We had this massive fiscal monetary stimulus.

When I look at it, I say to myself, “Not 100% certain but it is likely that Q4 of 2021 was the height from a valuation perspective in this industry.” You get this big run-up, investors are indiscriminate, meaning they're buying everything, big or small it doesn't matter. You then start to get scarcity. Quality assets become scarcer and scarcer. Those will continue to hold from a valuation perspective. As acquires become more and more selective, they're not willing to pay what they used to pay before for businesses that they don't view as scarce assets or premium assets.

What ends up happening is you start to see a bifurcated market and you'll start to see acquirers continue to pay. When I look at valuation, you've got average multiples, medium multiples, the mode, and the distribution. I always thought to myself, “Median and average multiples don't make a lot of sense because it depends on how the bell curve and how the distribution is shaped.” When I look at it, I say to myself, “What I am seeing now in Q1 of 2022 is that we're starting to see a bifurcated market.” We're seeing some of the large strategics decelerate. Rentokil and Terminix would be great examples.

We are seeing private equity step in. Private equity doesn't have the same network or platform that the strategics have. They can't be as indiscriminate. They can't go to the middle of Wyoming or somewhere in Arkansas and buy things that Rentokil, Terminix, and these companies can. I always look at the margin, what's happening on the margin? We're seeing valuations decline on the margins for businesses that are scarce. My gut tells me we'll continue to see tremendous valuation and upward pressure on scarce assets.

I'm wondering, who the hell knows what's going to happen? When I look at the economy, we're going to have a $1.3 trillion run-off in fiscal spending. When you comp Q2 of ‘21 with Q2 of ‘22, there is a $1.3 trillion government spending hole. That's when all those checks went out in February and March of 2021. It started to hit the economy in March and April of 2021.

When we look at publicly traded companies, when we look at earnings, we are comparing year-over-year growth on both the revenue and earnings side. We've got almost this earnings cliff that we're going to start to hit. We're going to hit this earnings cliff at a time where we've got oil at a decade high where we've got commodity prices ramping 10% overnight. There are some Ukraine and Russia effects here. We're hiking into a decelerating economy with tremendous margin pressure, which could potentially impact things.

If I'm an owner of a rare, scarce, and valuable asset, I'm not extremely concerned right now but I'm starting to take notice. If I have a less valuable asset, not as scarce, if my business is not highly differentiated in its marketplace, I am selling less now in March of ‘22 than I sold for in December of 2021. That's a fact.

Patrick Baldwin: You said a lot. Let me try to unpack some of it or ask you questions. Going into Supernova, one of the graphs that comes to mind is the multiple expansion. It wasn't just an uptick, It was also the vertical from 1 to 3, it got to 4 and got higher. You hit some record deals. They may or may not have been here in San Juan. You got some killer deals. Going to Seinfeld and the opposite, if that's what the run-up was, are you calling this as multiple contractions?

Paul Giannamore: I haven't thought about it from that perspective. The word multiple expansion is thrown around in a lot of different ways. Let's define what we mean by that. It can be defined simply as an increase in transaction multiples. A transaction multiple is enterprise value or the value of the whole firm to sales. We can say that enterprise value is whatever metric we want to use for cashflow, EBIT, EBITDA, EBITA, and so forth. It can be simply defined as an increase in transaction multiples.

When I think about multiple expansion, I think about how transaction statistics change from the short end or the low end of the market. Quite frankly, What I mean by that are small companies all the way up to the big ones. You'll start to see a spread. A basic example is I own a $5 million business and it does $1 million per year in EBITA. I might sell it thirteen times EBITA in this market. Had I grown that business to $22 million and run the same margins, instead of selling it thirteen times, I might have been an 18 or 19 times business. That spread between 12 and 13 times and 18 and 19 times is the expansion zone.

We did Aftermath during COVID. We've done a lot of these presentations. As market multiples increase, you try to get the arbitrage into play. You try to go out and say, “I'm going to buy these smaller businesses. I'm going to buy them for $1 and sell them for $3. I'm going to buy them for $1 and sell them for $4.” In 2021, it was almost like, “I'm going to buy them for $1 and sell them for $5.” The multiples were so high then.

When you look at the market, the best way to look at it is that you're not going to see this bell curve where you've got the big companies on the high end getting high multiples. The majority of them are in the middle and the smaller companies trailing off. You'll see more of a barbell. You'll see more start to cluster on the lower end. The median and mean might stay the same. It might be that the distributions are different. That's why averages and medians are dangerous because it doesn't tell the whole story of dispersion. That’s the way I look at it.

Patrick Baldwin: Let's define scarce asset then. I could be like, “Look at me, I'm scarce. I’m one of a kind.” From the acquirer’s standpoint, what are they have eyes for? All the way back to Mike Givlin’s interview, you said you only saw the good crack. What are they salivating over?

Paul Giannamore: Let's face it, a lot of companies in the market suck. I would say probably half the market is crap. You've got guys who are doing crap services, not taking care of their people, not taking care of their customers. Let's get rid of all those guys. You got the other half of the market and now you've got to say, “What do these acquirers want?” I don't think that's changed. There's always a search for a platform with resources and capabilities.

Jared Borg brought the noise to The Buzz. He was high energy. We chatted for an hour. If you listen to Jared Borg, you will understand how a guy took a business from nothing and turned it into something that has unique resources and capabilities. That's the best exposé. Some other interviews are more fun. They’re storytelling and so on and so forth. We got down to brass tacks with Jared and we talked about it. He and Kyle did a phenomenal job. His brothers, Jacob and Gabe out on the West Coast, are doing similar things with that business.

These guys come from old school door-to-door. They don't do a whole lot of it anymore. Jared does none. This 2022, he's doing zero. They've used technology. They've also used their brains. It's not just bringing in technology but it's thinking about how we're going to organize this business. It's hard to do that when you run a $5 million business. You'll hear Jared’s story, a lot of it was trial and error. They were able to build it out over time. It takes years to do that.

If you've got a business now where you've built out some special sauce, that's valuable. You've got resources and capabilities. We've talked about this for years now on The Buzz. You've got scale. Is your business scaling? Is it profitable? Are you doing 20%-plus adjusted EBITDA? Are you 25%? Is your profitability there? Is your recurring revenue right? Are you priced right out in the market? You got the Walmarts of pest control and then you got the guys who are getting priced.

Those things haven't changed. The market is still extremely competitive. There are going to be companies in certain areas of the country that will find no buyers or one buyer. Whereas over the last couple of years, there have been a plethora of buyers. If Terminix isn't buying and Rentokil is too occupied and you've got Anticimex and Rollins, Rollins is not in a market or interested in it and Anticimex is not in the center of the country, you run out of buyers.

Also, only private equities or a small handful of them are willing to bid on it. That's the difference between selling it 15 times EBITDA than 10 times. It's five turns of EBITDA. That's a full turn on revenue. That takes you from maybe 3.5 times revenue down to 2.5 or 3 to 2. That's where we are right now seeing issues. For the first time in years, I am now starting to see issues with not getting sufficient bidders at the table in certain markets.

Project Black Bear, Mr. Baldwin. You and your partner, Bobby, we're fortunate. We woke up one day and you guys said, “If we can hit a number, let's do it.” Last April 2021 is when we started this. We updated your valuation and dusted that bad boy off from a decade ago. The numbers were dramatically different. We put that together and we got out in the market. You closed it on August 9th, 2021. As you recall, in that process, we had every strategic. We had some private equity firms. You ultimately sold to Terminix.

It was difficult for you to not sell to Rentokil because you and Bobby both loved Rentokil. When it ultimately came down to it, not only from a financial perspective but a fit and feel, you two liked Rentokil. It was a two-week agonizing process saying, “In this specific situation, Terminix made the right sense.” Think about it in light of what we're talking about right now, if we were in the market with Black Bear, it is likely that Rentokil would not be at the table. I can almost assure you that Terminix would not be at the table. Your two most important bidders would be gone.

The good news is we had other bidders in that process. You can see how being in Waco, you are in the right place at the right time at the most poignant and bullish pest control market that I've seen since I've been in the industry since 2003. Patrick, you and Bobby would be selling for millions of dollars less in 2022 than you did in 2021. Timing these things are important.

When we get done with this, I'm going to probably kick off a note to our clients, not to the market, updating our clients as to what's going on, a quick email. I’ll try to keep everyone in focus because 2022 will be a dramatically changing market. It doesn't have a whole lot to Ukraine and Russia. That's going to impact it. I'm talking about the economic fundamentals of this post-great financial crisis, the monetary disaster we've created. Our chickens are coming home to roost. Chickens are right down there.

Patrick Baldwin: As you were talking about valuations, I couldn't help but think about Black Bear in the timing when I was asking you to find a scarce asset. With Black Bear, I’ve checked these boxes. Geography was a big part of that. Everything you said, I'm like, “I don't know what it would look like.” It would have been a different outcome.

Paul Giannamore: The most important thing is, when you go into a process, you try to position the business. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I say. It matters what these acquirers want to do. When I look at your business, what did I like about it? Extremely high recurring revenue. You guys had a great profit. You guys were showing year-over-year growth in the double-digit range. You checked all those fundamental pest control boxes.

You were in Waco, Texas, now it's a double-edged sword. Here's what I don't like about Waco, it's in the middle of nowhere. It is South Central Texas. It is one of those things where I'm like, “Meh.” What the acquirers love about Waco is it's a tertiary market. It is growing. Waco is a net importer of people. You guys have all those stupid gas stations down there with old pumps and some people come in. Magnolia, I never heard of that until I went there and you got all these pilgrims coming in from all over the world.

I thought to myself, “Why the hell am I doing pest control M&A? I should have done some stupid TV show?” It's ridiculous. You got people coming in there and it's growing. You guys were the only game in town from a size perspective, let's be honest. You had a lot of competitors around there but your business was the biggest.

It's always a crapshoot because you don't know what these guys think when we go into this. You don't know who's looking at what geography. I got a sense because these guys say, “I'm looking in Texas. I'm looking here. I'm looking there.” The worst thing I can do is go into a process with preconceived notions. The best thing that I can do is go into a process, take Project Black Bear and say, “I don't know what the hell is going to happen and I don't care. I am going to get the materials done. I am going to set the right process. I'm going to kick that thing out into the market. I'm going to make it as competitive as I can. I'm going to see what's going to happen.” That’s all I can do. I struggle with the Mexican and the rest of the team. People moan and call me egghead but I got the deal done.

Patrick Baldwin: Let me go back. I don't know how much you can say about this. I remember an early conversation with Jared. He listened to the podcast. We got to talk about Microsoft BI. I was like, “What is that?” I don't know how much of that Thompson Street Capital owns as far as IP now. Can you talk about going through that? You talked about technology and how he stepped it up. I don't know anyone else that had that integrated into their system.

Paul Giannamore: It's rare running into those types of businesses. I sat down with Jay Keating, who is the CEO of PestCo. Jared was here. We talked a little bit about why PestCo and Thompson Street liked Jared’s business and that was Project Haymarket. We'll hear a little bit about that. Unfortunately, we were running short because we had a dozen people down here, dinner meetings, and so forth. For Jared, he never thought for a second he was going to be running a $20-plus million pest control business from where they started.

They took that to where they thought they could take that and then it was time to bring in additional resources. Partnering with somebody like Thompson Street put them in an ecosystem of other mid-market businesses. Jared talked about in one of the discussions that Linda Plummer is good at media buying. There are a lot of things that he could potentially learn from the other portfolio companies

For Jared, at the end of the day, these are always financial transactions no matter what anyone says, “Show me the money.” It had to make sense. He had to take the proverbial chips off the table. He mitigated his risk. If everything goes out in a handbasket, his family is safe. He wrote some equity and he's preparing for growth. It's a great story. There's no doubt in my mind that we're going to talk to Jared again. I'd love to get out there into his domain and have a chit-chat with him. We're going to certainly sit down with Kyle Woodbury, his partner. He’s a fantastic guy. He was instrumental in helping them build that business. Hopefully, Kyle will be down here and PR here. We'll sit down with him as well.

Patrick Baldwin: I dodged questions. Can you tell me what Microsoft BI did for them? Are you guys in KPIs?

Paul Giannamore: Yeah. They experimented with a variety of different BI platforms and they were using Microsoft BI. I don't even know if that's what they're using today. What it does is allows them to determine precisely the KPIs that they want to measure, net promoter score, and all those different things and put them on a dashboard. They can break it down by individual, group, office, region. It allows for a lot of granularity. I remember Jared was on that thing all the time and they spent a lot of money building that out. Patrick, I'm not qualified to go into the details of what they did. We talked to Jared. If he's willing to share a little bit more of that, it'd be a great session.

Patrick Baldwin: Speaking of Events, you mentioned Unhinged, Aftermath, Supernova, Bubble Trouble.

Paul Giannamore: In 2021, we did Supernova. If you have not watched it, you should watch it before you come to an event that we're probably going to be doing sometime in early May 2022, give or take. We're not sure exactly how this is all going to work. We want to do it. It's going to be live. We want to film it and broadcast it from Puerto Rico. We're still sorting out some of the logistics. More to come on that.

If you haven't watched Supernova, you should go on to YouTube. We've got a Boardroom Buzz page. instead of putting it on Potomac stuff, we're tossing this thing on The Boardroom Buzz. Type in Supernova on YouTube. Take a look at that because it will give you some context of where we were, historically, for over twenty years. We're going to look acutely at this dynamic period between January 1st of 2020 and the present.

We're then going to think through where we're going to be at the end of 2022. It's impossible to go any further than that. That'll be an early May 2022 event. If you have the opportunity, watch Supernova first because I want everyone to have that context. I'm not going to talk about it for the fifteenth time, we're going to gloss right over that and get into some important things. That'll be coming up. If you want to be on the distribution list, you should go to PotomacPest.com. There are all sorts of annoying signup boxes that they have put on the website to sign up for the commentary. Put your email address in there and you'll get an invitation when we send that out.

Patrick, in closing, we've got another 24 hours of meetings, dinners, and some recording sessions. I would love for you to sign up on YouTube. No one wants to see Patrick and I sit here, let's be honest. If I could replace him with a beautiful blonde, I would do it immediately but I'm stuck with him. For some of the other stuff, we've got some super cool guests.

I have tried to entice our guests, who tend to be male, to bring their beautiful wives on the show because they were down here. All the wives are like, “My hair is not ready. I'm going out to the beach. I got sand on my face.” The prerequisite going forward is like, “If you’re coming down to PR, your wife gets on the show.” That's what we're going to do. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. What I'm going to tell Dylan is I want to go out first with videos. I want to release videos a week or a couple of weeks before we release the audio.

Patrick Baldwin: Sounds like a deal. Sorry, I'll grow out my hair.

Paul Giannamore: With that, until next time, we'll see you here live in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Thompson Street Capital Partners