Patrick Baldwin: Paul, it’s 2022. I know that last year we had a big Supernova event but the market has definitely changed so this year, we've got Bubble Trouble.
Paul Giannamore: Patrick, we are now in an era of Fed tightening, which is going to have a dramatic impact on asset prices and quite frankly, the value of your pest control business. Over the last couple of years, we've done Aftermath, Unhinged, and Supernova was by far my favorite event. If you haven't watched that yet, you should go to our Boardroom Buzz YouTube channel, which is Youtube.com/TheBoardroomBuzz. Type in Supernova and you'll find it.
It's a great way to get some historical context in preparation for bubble trouble, which we're going to be filming and releasing live in May 2022. It's going to be a live event. We're not going to record it. If you sign up, put your name and email in there, we’ll get out an invite, you'll get reminders, and you’ll know exactly when it's going to be and you’ll have an opportunity to ask us questions. It'll be the most important event that we've ever put on. There's any way that you can miss this if you're thinking about selling your business in the coming months.
Patrick Baldwin: Let’s do it.
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Paul Giannamore: Frank and Cindy Miller, welcome to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Frank Miller: Thank you for having us.
Paul Giannamore: It’s good to see you guys.
Patrick Baldwin: It's great to meet you all. Take us back. We've only been visiting here for a little bit but you've sold Impact Pest in Florida and had a few branches. How did you all get into pest control?
Frank Miller: It was a long story. We got backed into it. Nobody ever wants to go into the pest control business by design, quite frankly. However, due to some experience and learning through our experiences, we knew we liked people and pest control is a people business, be that with your customers or your employees. The long and short of it is that's how we got into pest control back in the mid-‘80s.
Cindy Miller: That was when we started the company. We started in pest control in the late ‘70s. The company Frank was with moved him so many times that I ended up applying for a job with them so they would know why I had different addresses.
Paul Giannamore: You're New Yorkers Trump's planet of Florida more than 35 years ago.
Cindy Miller: 1978. Frank called me and said, “We're moving to Florida so I can work for this company.” I said, “You want me to move to Florida so you can be a bad man. You don’t understand the Florida pest control industry,” and that was the beginning of it.
Patrick Baldwin: Were you in pest control in New York?
Cindy Miller: No.
Patrick Baldwin: You’re new to Florida and pest control. What was that phone call like? Why Florida? How'd that even happen?
Frank Miller: Florida was an open market at that point along the way. It was a different Florida than it is today. It’s not as congested and it was a land of opportunity. We came down and I had some experience. I've spent many years in the military. I was a fireman paramedic. I came down and took a job as a fireman and a paramedic and took a job as a pest control operator working for Arab Pest Control back in the day. One thing led to the next and it was, “Don't confuse roles. Do you want to be a bug guy or do you want to be a paramedic?” I was off and running.
Patrick Baldwin: How did you sucker Cindy into the business?
Cindy Miller: It wasn't Frank who suckered me in. For one thing, when we kept moving, they had a small startup branch in Port Charlotte, and the manager of that branch was desperate for help. He wanted his wife to work for him and she said, “I can't do it, Cindy.” He asked me to work for him. Frank and I never worked together when we worked at that company, but we both worked for the same company. That was with Arab Termite & Pest Control in Florida.
Patrick Baldwin: You decided not enough of that and do it on your own?
Paul Giannamore: It was ultimately acquired by waste management.
Frank Miller: Arab was ultimately acquired by Waste and then Terminix to get Waste and they're all where they are now. We had some great guidance and tutelage. Larry Davis was a great leader, Pam Jordan then, Pam Jordan Wolf now gave us the opportunity along with Larry. Randy, God bless his soul, passed. It was a great opportunity. There was a lot of camaraderie in the company.
We saw it grow. We saw how to make things happen. They had great values. With those values, we thought we could adopt and modify them to be better. That was pretty much any PCO getting started in the business. I see a better way and that's why we started the company. We were fortunate. It was the right place at the right time with a little luck and a little brains.
Paul Giannamore: What was the startup story like?
Cindy Miller: We had done a business plan because we were thinking about this. We didn't leave without knowing what we were doing.
Frank Miller: We probably spent 2, 3, 4 months on a business plan before we entered because when I left Arab I had a non-compete so I didn't want to compete in areas that I had it. I'm a man of my words with the way I operate. We did not. We executed a business plan. We went out the first day, knocked out a few doors and said, “Do you need a bug guy?” It's pretty simple and here we are now. We were blessed to have great people around us.
Paul Giannamore: Was it the two of you at the time?
Cindy Miller: Yes. I was a technician at the time. I did the pest control and Frank did the termite and lawn. I did the office work.
Frank Miller: We fumigated for a while but stopped because of too much liability and I was getting too old to teach you guys to fumigate. There's a point in life when you say, “We've had enough of this.” It was an interesting opportunity over the many years we've been doing it.
Paul Giannamore: You guys grew it to be a sizable business along the West Coast of Florida. Ultimately before extraditing to Anticimex, it was a family business. Both of your adult daughters were in there running for you with you and you had some great partners in that business as well. How did it develop over time? How did the daughters get involved?
Frank Miller: Our daughters grew up in the business. They ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the beginning. That’s how it is when you start any business.
Cindy Miller: They both ended up applying for jobs with us. They both thought they were going to do something different and then came in and applied for jobs. Kristine started doing Sentricon and Leanne started as a salesperson.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm wondering about the dynamic in picking this up. How did you two balance married life and your skills? How did you work together?
Frank Miller: It’s funny you should ask that because a lot of people have asked that. There were times it was difficult, to say the least. We have contrasting backgrounds to some extent. Cindy was in college while I was in the army in the ‘60s so you can figure that one out for yourself.
Cindy Miller: I was a hippie and he was in the military.
Paul Giannamore: You remember the ‘60s and she does not.
Frank Miller: It was difficult because there were times when you didn't want to bring the job home but being in PCO you brought the job home anyway. You can never give it up because it's one of those industries where families are involved. The main thrust of the industry, 75% or 80%, if I had a guess at a number, are small and medium-size. You've got the bigger companies like Anticimex, Rollins Corporation, and Terminix and they're a different model.
We would bring it home and the girls would hear that as they were younger so they learned through assimilation. They went away and went to college, got smarter than mom and dad, like most kids think they do, did something different, but came back to the company because they had that feel and that passion for customer service. That's what it's all about. People have asked over the years what makes a successful pest control company. Not losing sight of what you do and understanding that your customers are your most valued asset.
A lot of people would say that it’s your employees. Your customers give you the opportunity to have your employees. As long as your employees understand the value of that customer, the company is going to be successful. Bringing in people that can help you grow and understand have those same values and passion for what we do.
Cindy Miller: We're both customer-oriented.
Paul Giannamore: How did you guys put that philosophy into action? When you look at all the competitors you had there and up and down the west coast of Florida, what are some of the things that you guys did to differentiate yourself?
Cindy Miller: One of the first things we did was make sure that whenever a customer called, we knew who they were and we did that with the computer having a quick inquiry option even back in the day when it wasn't that popular. As soon as someone called, we could know who they were and talk to them as if we knew by their voice who they were.
Paul Giannamore: “Mrs. Smith here at 123 Main. Thanks for calling.”
Frank Miller: People like that. They still expect it, in my opinion. That's me maybe where I'm a little dated and my thinking. The way things are now, it gets rerouted to a call center. Instead of talking to someone that is your neighbor, it's routed to somewhere across the United States or outside the country. People want to talk to their neighbors. That's what this business is all about. They want to understand who they're talking to. They want to see them in the grocery store. They want to see your technicians at the shopping center, or whatever it may be. In my opinion, that's what makes a business successful.
Cindy Miller: There was a study done a long time ago. When they first came out with, “Press one for this. Pres two for that,” it was about pest control customers. It said, “They not only want a live person to answer the phone, but they also want to know who it is.” It's going to be the guy's wife. We always made it a point to say our name, “Thank you for calling Impact. This is Cindy,” or whoever it is that answered the phone so they could feel they knew who they were going to talk to you.
Patrick Baldwin: It’s those little things. I'm wondering what Paul asked about what made you different. I know you two are competitors. It probably goes back all the way to, “You were a tech and you were tech,” and you were competing on who could get more production. That's one picture in my head. On the West Coast of Florida, what drove you to be, not just different but better? You all are hard-wired like, “I'm going to one-up you.”
Frank Miller: At least that's where the different offices ran. What differentiates us from any other company was the fact that we were customer-centric. I know that it's easy to say, and it's hard to understand, but you’ve got to get that value and have people understand it. If you love your customers, take care of your customers and appreciate what they've done for you, taking a chance, especially on a new company, that's what made us different.
The big companies couldn't do that and we wanted to position ourselves between a one-man operator and the big corporations. We wanted to sit below and be somewhat of a nuisance. That's where we positioned ourselves because of our customer-centric service values. We told everybody, “Be concerned with the customer. Call them. If they call you, call back. Don't wait until tomorrow.” Too many companies do that where they are going to process a call and the technician comes five days later. It's interesting.
Paul Giannamore: Remind me. What year did you find the business or when the two of you stepped out?
Cindy Miller: 1985.
Paul Giannamore: We've got Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk. It was the end of the Cold War, but still crazy times. What were some of your aspirations? 1985 was Reagan's Good Morning in America. Inflation had died. Everyone's getting excited again. What were your aspirations? Did you say, “We're going to build a massive and valuable asset. We're going to sell it.” Was it a job for the two of you?
Cindy Miller: No. We thought we were going to have multiple branches. We had a picture of the area. Do you remember that?
Frank Miller: It was in the business plan. We laid it out on the business plan. We knew what we wanted to do.
Paul Giannamore: What did you want to do?
Frank Miller: We wanted to grow the company probably a little bigger than it is now but that was about finding the right people the way we structured our organization. We knew where we wanted to be and the market we wanted to be in. We didn't want to be too big or too small. We didn't want to grow outside back, meaning reach out to a market and then have to come back and fill the area in between. We wanted to be able to start in a heavily densely populated county and then work our way out. Going back to the fact that I had a non-compete that I had to live with. I didn't want to invalidate that non-compete. That was important to me. Paul, it was in a business plan. We still got it. It’s archived. Typewriter.
Cindy Miller: The mission statement was, “Protection of human health and the environment.” In the 40 or 50 pages, we spelled environment wrong in every single place. I didn't realize it.
Paul Giannamore: Your daughters came in and fixed it.
Cindy Miller: No. They were little then. We typed it up in the middle of the night. We were like, “We finally finished it. Let's type it up,” and we spelled it wrong in every place.
Frank Miller: There was no spell check. There was White-Out.
Patrick Baldwin: If you're saying you drew it out, was it with Mapsco? I imagined it was G4 and G5. H4 and H5, “Here's our service.”
Cindy Miller: We drew the picture that we did we wanted.
Frank Miller: We had an operations charter, the way we wanted things to look and what services we will offer. Also, when we would have each one of our services change and be offered incrementally, what markets we wanted to go to, how we were going to establish the business, and what would be lost leaders. We had a pretty extensive 200 to 300 paged business plan that we did.
Paul Giannamore: How closely did growth track to that extra plan?
Cindy Miller: In the beginning, it was close and it had to be because when you looked at the five-year budgets, we had to pay our salaries, the trucks that we bought, and send two kids to college.
Paul Giannamore: Did you take out loans to do this?
Cindy Miller: We did. We were lucky that we got a signature from a bank that we had to pay off in three years. It helped us to get the initial inventory, trucks, and everything. We managed to pay it off in the three years. In the bank, they were dancing around. They said, “Nobody ever thought you'd pay this. Most businesses fail. There is a 95% chance you're never going to pay this loan.”
Patrick Baldwin: What was the hardest thing for you all?
Frank Miller: In business?
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah.
Frank Miller: Then or now?
Patrick Baldwin: Before you sold. When you still owned it. We’re only a few months removed from selling the business.
Frank Miller: For me, the hardest thing was keeping up with technology. We came from the ‘60s so it was keeping up with the technology because it was changing so quickly. Even when Sentricon was introduced. It was like, “You're going to tell me that we're going to put these little green things in the ground and they’re going to kill termites? When I quit laughing, I'll get back to you.”
I came from the days of chlorinated hydrocarbons back in the day. If you didn't do it perfectly, it wouldn't work. We went through this metamorphosis in termite control and then legislation changed. There were so many things to keep up with. I can't say there was one thing that was hardest and the most difficult. It was keeping up with change. Change evolves and in the past couple of years, there's been a big evolution change in this industry.
Cindy Miller: The hardest part was whenever you would have an employee turnover. Employees don't realize how much of yourself you put into it, “This guy's going to be great.” You train them and you put all these high hopes into them and then something happens.
Frank Miller: One of the challenges that they're going to see now is that it's hard to do pest control remotely.
Paul Giannamore: A lot of these large companies now have remote call centers and employees. Do you feel like they need to be in a physical office? Is that what you're saying?
Frank Miller: Administrative folks can work remotely. Service techs can’t but we're in this time of great resignation and we found that unless someone is committed to wanting to work in the service industry, they rather work from home. Be that as a result of COVID or a result of changing culturally, people don't want to work. It's a shame. We've seen people be hired even with the acquirer after we left. They'd be hired, onboarded, and wouldn't show up. That's difficult because COVID changed things like people's attitudes about work.
Paul Giannamore: You guys have been at this for decades. If we push COVID aside, let's talk about some of the cultural demographic shifts that you've seen in frontline technicians from more than 25 years ago to today. We're looking at Millennials. Do you notice a work ethic difference?
Cindy Miller: To some extent, yes. Some of the young guys that we hired didn't want to go through the training. It’s 90 days before you feel comfortable as a pest control technician. Would you agree, Patrick?
Patrick Baldwin: Yes.
Cindy Miller: They thought, “You're making me do too much work.” We’re like, “We're not asking you for a four-year degree. We're giving you this training and it's only 90 days.” They would quit because they thought it was too much. We did see some of that which we didn't have in the past. People were pleased to get training in pest control. It was one of the few areas where you could end up with the same certificate as someone with a four-year college degree. It's one of the few careers where that is still possible.
Paul Giannamore: You two are a rare breed of a husband and wife that has a family business and that has children involved in the business and were successful. I used to write to Cindy about SOBs, Sons of Businessmen. A lot of these kids, unfortunately, turned into spoiled brats and some of them are morons but you have two daughters in this business that are extremely active. They're active in the industry and in your business. When we were at the closing dinner, both of them were ecstatic for the two of you and your partners. What was that like in the home? How did you create that environment where these two women were successful in their own right in the family business?
Cindy Miller: Work is work. It wasn't like you went into work thinking you’re related. You go to work to do your job whether you're working with your husband or your parents or someone you don't know. They knew that going in. They knew they weren't going to get any special treatment. They started from the bottom and worked their way up.
Paul Giannamore: Were they both technicians?
Cindy Miller: Kristine was and Leanne started in sales. Both of them knew office work from when they were younger. That had a lot to do with it. They went in knowing that this was their job and this is how they had to do it. When we decide they should start running the business, we can have a multi-year plan of how we were going to teach them everything and turn it over.
Paul Giannamore: They had to go up the ranks like any other employee to prove their mettle.
Cindy Miller: If anything, we were more tough on them so nobody would say they were getting special treatment.
Paul Giannamore: At any point in time, did you ever say, “Leanne, Kristine, why are you doing this? Go off and do something else. Why do you want to be involved in this?”
Frank Miller: They had their opportunity to do that. After they finished college, they had the opportunity to do whatever they wanted. Neither majored in entomology or agronomy or anything like that but they filtered back because they knew it was a family business. I suspect they saw the opportunity and they liked dealing with people. That's the whole essence of the pest control business.
Customers and employees, you're dealing with people. It's a people business. That's why they came back and that's why they stayed on. That's why we're so proud to let them run the company. We sat back for the past couple of years and haven't done anything. We're proud of that and proud of them. You don't see a lot of that.
Patrick Baldwin: How far back was it when you told them you thought about selling before you got into the process?
Frank Miller: We didn't tell them? They told us. They’re like, “Mom, dad, multiples are pretty strong right now, we'd like to run the business.” That was the original plan. We weren't going to sell it to them on our demise, we were going to give it to them. It’s pretty simple. They came into the multiples and they’re like, “You guys need to take a look at this.”
We did and we asked, “What do you want to do?” They said, “We'd love to stay with the acquirer if it goes that way but we'll figure something out. Don't worry about us.” We were like, “In that case…” I picked up the phone called Paul who I'd spoken to years prior and chose not to do anything at that point and said, “We need to get the show on the road.” It was their decision, not ours.
Patrick Baldwin: You have a different business model if I understand. You had four branches and you had your partners. How did you go from one branch to the next?
Frank Miller: Our business model was unique. We thought it was somewhat unique. Some of the better things that we learned from Arab Pest Control, quite frankly. They had a model that they use, and we repeated that model to a certain extent with a little twist. Rather than having multiple branches, we felt that the best way to bring somebody into this business is to give them a little “skin in the game.” You're going to do some sweat equity and we're going to give you some ownership in this. That's how we opened the second office and we wound up with Tom, a renowned entomologist in Florida.
As a matter of fact, Tom was my boss back in the days at Arab. I worked for him. We brought him on. He started the Hillsborough operation. Shortly after my non-compete expired, I set up the non-compete for many years. I had spoken to Gary because he was a prior president of the FPMA and I had gotten to know Gary. Borates were coming in and Gary and I would exchange a lot of conversations on the phone about, “How is this borate thing going to work? Do you think it'll work? Can we not fumigate it? Along the way, Gary decided to come along and that was the Sarasota office.
They were different. Rather than branches, they were separate corporations and each office being a separate corporation flew the name of Impact Pest Elimination, which we had trademarked and registered throughout the United States. The original Impact was a C corp. Sarasota and Tampa were C corps. Our office in Pasco was an S corp run by Donnie Karcher who was an employee of the company. He was a young man who had a great opportunity. He was the right guy. He had the heart and passion so we brought him. Each of the offices was a different company, which was a variant of the way Arab did thanks. We were the major shareholders. They were partial shareholders, but they had a fair amount of stock in one of them.
Cindy Miller: Many years ago, Arab had a similar model. They called the 50/50 branches or something and then they bought them all back. It wasn't like we invented this idea. It hadn't been done before but it worked well.
Patrick Baldwin: How was it different from Arab? How'd you adapt it?
Frank Miller: Arab was 50/50. The company owns 50% and whoever their chosen person owns 50%. That’s difficult. When I spoke to an attorney about that he said. “You didn't want to go there. You want to have a 51/49. Somebody's got to be a decision-maker. Otherwise, you could have a hung jury forever.” That's the way we set it with 51% and 49%. It worked well for us. I'm not a micromanager. We put them out and let them run.
Cindy Miller: We didn't tell Tommy and Gary what to do with the companies unless they were going to do something that was totally a bad idea.
Frank Miller: If it was detrimental, we’d stop them but we all use the same contracts and logos.
Paul Giannamore: This was uniform. The only way that you could tell that they were different businesses is by looking at the organization chart of entities. Other than that, everything was consistent.
Frank Miller: Everything was exactly the same. There were little differences in the way they approached bringing in new business and each one of the officers. Gary's is a little different. He pursued more of a new builder concept. Tom worked more with realtors in Tampa. Donnie was working more with new construction in Pasco County.
They were all a little different but when you looked at the big picture, it looked the same. If you dug a little deeper, it was a little confusing, which made the transaction complicated because it was times four. It wasn't one big transaction. It was a stock transaction rather than an asset transaction, which was overwhelming for us. I'm sure, for your end, it was too.
Paul Giannamore: For more than fifteen years, we didn't see any share deals in the industry and it's been the last couple of years that we're seeing that. 2022 might be the last year we'll probably see that for a while. That's going to start going the other way soon.
Patrick Baldwin: These are four transactions. Congratulations.
Cindy Miller: With Frank, we mush them all into one so that they can get it done but it was four.
Patrick Baldwin: Between the four branches. Did their service areas ever get into each other?
Frank Miller: Is the Pope Catholic?
Patrick Baldwin: I see there's a competition like, “Get out.”
Frank Miller: We have a lot of that. We had a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations.
Patrick Baldwin: Tell us about that.
Frank Miller: It was easy when you got a referral to go to another county and pretty much our dividing lines or counties. It was easy when you got a referral to move in and say, “I'll go do it. Who's going to know?” Little did they know that when you go into PestPac, we’ll see everything.
Cindy Miller: One time, Tom stopped by our office for coffee. It was like, “Why are you in Tarpon Springs?”
Frank Miller: I saw a truck and it didn't have that number 101. Our fleet number is 205, which is a different fleet number for the other branch. Why was that way south in our county?
Paul Giannamore: Did it end up in the ditch on the side of the road?
Frank Miller: That happens. For any office that has multiple operations, that's going to happen. You sneak in, grab it and go.
Patrick Baldwin: Did you police it or did they police each other?
Frank Miller: They policed each other. I policed to a certain percent but it goes back to that competitive edge and I didn't want to be overbearing. Put the right man or woman in a position and let them run. Hand them the ball and say, “It's your time. Do it. Show me what you’ve got. I'll stop if you're going to do the wrong thing but if you're not, go with it.” There was a certain amount. We let him get away with it here and there. There wasn't an overabundance. It wasn't detrimental.
Paul Giannamore: 10% of the time, you'll have these firms out there that use an ownership structure you do and it is way more common in the LDS community in the door-knocking type businesses. They'll have a majority partner in one office and then minority partners. In traditional business, it’s much more rare. Do you believe that setting the model up that way where you had partners that came in at a significant stake in the outcome? Do you believe that that allows you to grow that business more rapidly and more robustly than had the two of you stayed at the helm yourselves?
Cindy Miller: Absolutely. Because each one of our offices started with customer number one. It wasn't like there was a base to start with. You are working your tail off in a situation like that. It was only because they had invested interest in growing each one of those companies that they would put that effort into it. I remember the first time Gary called me and said, “I want a raise,” I'm like, “You have to create the revenue to pay for the raise, Gary. Go ahead.”
Paul Giannamore: Did he make it happen?
Cindy Miller: Absolutely.
Paul Giannamore: You guys got fortunate. You were fortunate that you had great partners. These two, Tom and Gary are great guys. If we take a stroll down memory lane, with Tom and Gary, what years roughly did those guys come in and established those offices?
Cindy Miller: ’99 for Tom and the end of December 2001 for Gary.
Frank Miller: It’s to get big tax benefits at the sale. They get extra write-offs.
Cindy Miller: They did because they were lean enough to get the special tax treatment.
Paul Giannamore: They’re a qualified small business.
Frank Miller: Unless they could say they hit the jackpot.
Patrick Baldwin: Was this the C corp?
Cindy Miller: Yes.
Paul Giannamore: There was legislation where that was related to the C corp thing. They were in at the right time those two.
Frank Miller: They were and we were not.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm curious, between the branches, did you help encourage the competitive nature of the business? Were they ribbing each other like, “Paul, I've made $10,000 more than you last month. Sucker.”
Frank Miller: Absolutely. We posted weekly, monthly, and the end-of-month performance review of which branch was achieving the highest growth, who achieved their numbers, who surpassed their revenue numbers, and sales numbers. It was competitive. We come from a competitive generation. We couldn't help it. It's the way we were.
Cindy Miller: To some extent, we were competitive before we all worked together. Even when we were with separate companies, we’d rub each other or ribbed each other and stuff. It was natural to do once we were all together. When you're struggling with customer number one, you have to stay motivated. Who's going to keep you motivated? We would egg each other on in order to stay motivated and keep going. Otherwise, it gets hard and not fun.
Patrick Baldwin: Did that help keep everyone motivated on the same page and moving forward in the same direction? Wasn't ever divisive?
Frank Miller: We never found any type of divisiveness with that. It pulled people together because it pulled the whole team together. It pulled a whole branch together, “We’ve got to do better than they do. We have to be number one.” We learned that way back at Arab. It’s those lessons from the days in Arab and one of the things they did right. The top office would be the top office and they would get jackets and patches. The bottom office had to live with a goat for a month that you'd have to take back and bring a goat back to your branch. Nobody ever wanted to be the goat branch. We had that competitive spirit built-in and it was fun. We enjoyed it.
Patrick Baldwin: What about collaboration? You said that one of the partners was an entomologist so you could lean on his technical strengths. Did they work well together? I know there's a competitive nature but did they also work well and help each other?
Cindy Miller: We all worked well together and helped each other with everything. Even though we were competitive, we were competitive in a good way. Whenever we needed an entomologist to help, Tom was always ready to step in. Sometimes Gary needed some extra help because his area was going so fast. We would step in and do whatever we could to help in that area. It's always a case of each other.
Frank Miller: We had Mike Barrick who's a graduate of entomology over at Tampa. We have two entomologists on staff so it gave us the flexibility to move them around and give us some enlightenment on what we didn't understand or didn't know.
Paul Giannamore: What I'm interested in is what are some of the biggest challenges that you guys faced over the decades as you grew that business? How did you overcome them?
Frank Miller: Government. The government needs to get out of the way of small businessman's way and let them excel. It’s that simple. The government constraints have a place. When they become overly abundant, it's detrimental to small businesses. It hurts your pocketbook and your bottom line, which in turn hurts your employees. Somebody's got to pay for this stuff.
Paul Giannamore: For the younger business guys out there who were born in the ‘80s, what's business like now versus 1985 from a government regulatory, pain in the butt filings perspective, and everything else that goes wrong with it?
Cindy Miller: First, I would say that we decided from the beginning when we first started our company that if we saw some new law coming, we would get ahead of it rather than trying to fight it and being dragged in at the last minute. That helped us. Even though we didn't like all the government regulations, we would jump on it and figure out how to make it work.
Paul Giannamore: Frank, when you talk about government, you're not just talking about regulatory agencies involved in pest control but you're talking about HR laws, drugs, the whole nine yards.
Frank Miller: The laws like EPA and DACS in Florida are all easy to work with because they made sense. It was the legislation that was brought in like HR. Tax laws changed. It was difficult to keep up with them. There were changes in the internet and what you could say and not say on the internet. You have to be careful with this and that. It’s difficult to deal with and expensive to handle.
The big companies have specialists in each one of those areas. In the HR department, they get somebody who comes in and does vehicles. They'll have another individual that may have another specialty. We had to do it all and deal with it all. Our resources were attorneys. We had one HR attorney, “Joan, can you look at our handbook and make sure everything's right?” Annually, they had to pay her to update the handbook.
Cindy Miller: Some of the forms they make you fill out even the health laws, they want you to have someone who's paid to do that. We're in the business of killing bugs. We are not sit-at-a-desk people. We’re out there in the field, talking to customers, killing their bugs, or whatever. We don't want to sit at a desk and fill out a million forms. I don't know why they don't think about these things when they make these laws. Not everybody sits at desks and fills out forms.
Frank Miller: Heaven help you, you got to call IRS and sit on the phone for eight hours to talk to somebody that would inadvertently disconnect the call.
Patrick Baldwin: That sounds like what you'll miss the most or at least about the business. What will you miss the most?
Frank Miller: Getting up every day with a purpose.
Cindy Miller: People contact.
Frank Miller: I enjoy going to my office every day. I was always the first one there for many years until the girls took over. I wound out being a coffee person. They had another name for me but I would go and buy them coffee every day. It's that contact with the people. We are people first. In my military service, I was lonely in what I did. It was a quiet environment. As a paramedic and firefighter, I was a people person. In the pest control industry, you're a people person. The bugs are means to an end. Let's put it that way if you like people. That's what I'll miss the most. I looked for a job because I don't want to sit at home and do nothing.
Cindy Miller: That's what I always said. It's not killing the bugs, it's the raving fans. The lady's like, “Thank goodness, you're here. I saw ants in my kitchen.” That's what keeps people involved and not killing the actual bugs.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm curious, what's next for you?
Frank Miller: We're searching.
Cindy Miller: We're asking for jobs.
Patrick Baldwin: The resumes are running.
Frank Miller: My cardiologist told me I can recertify my paramedic license and go to work for him. They'll take blood pressure and put the thing on your finger, “Your oxygen is good.” It’s good part-time work. BMW offered me a job, “Do you want to sell cars?” We’re searching. I’m telling the truth.
Cindy Miller: Maybe it’s soon for us to know.
Patrick Baldwin: Has it sunk in yet? Are you relaxed at all? What's next?
Cindy Miller: It is sinking in. It's not done sinking in.
Paul Giannamore: You guys have watched a lot of M&A take place. For decades, you've seen it. What concerns did you have about your team going into the process? What constraints might you have for them for that?
Cindy Miller: The biggest concern was that if we would be acquired by a company where everything would be redundant and they'd be letting people go, combining routes, combining offices, and all that kind of stuff, our people wouldn't have their jobs. Not only that, if their customers are all getting new people answering the phones and new technicians and all, then the customers will be unhappy.
Frank Miller: You'll hear me on replay and on a continuous loop, it’s the people. Our concerns are in the protection of our employees and the protection of our customers. I never wanted to hide from any of our customers because we sold the company to somebody that did a bad job. If they're walking down the aisle in a grocery store, I want to say, “How are you doing? Paul, good to see you.” I don't want to have to go run and hide somewhere because the customer came in, “What did you do to me?”
Cindy Miller: We did tell them that. We said that we don't want to hide behind the cereal boxes when we are in the grocery store because of customers coming.
Paul Giannamore: On that topic, Frank, one of the things that I see over and over is that it's impossible for these acquirers to get the financial returns they need by running the business in the same manner that you guys ran that business. There's no way they can have that high touch. This is a question and I'm wondering if you agree with me or disagree with me on this. One of the most important competitive advantages smaller private firms could have against the bigger players is high touch with the customer, the local folks dealing with local customers.
Cindy Miller: To some extent, I don't agree. To some extent, it's possible to create high touch even with something like a call center. It depends on the training that you give them. If you have people that are there longer and are more experienced and are used to the customers, you can develop that same rapport with the customers that you can at a branch level. Maybe it's not enough that you know where everybody's neighborhood is but you could still use the same techniques of knowing who they are when they call by bringing it up on the computer, “Hi, Mrs. Jones. How are you?”
You can see everything about them right in front of you. “I heard you were having problems with ants. Do you need us back out there?” Make that same feeling of high touch no matter how big your company is. After all, a branch is still a branch. Within that entity, you still have that family feel. You can create that with the rest of the company or at least we've seen it done with bigger companies before.
Paul Giannamore: In Florida, the demographics have changed over the decades. It used to be largely native Floridians. Now, up and down the West Coast, you’ve got people from all over the place. Has the cultural identity, so to speak, of the customers changed the way that you guys have had to run that business?
Frank Miller: To some extent, yes. Customers want to have their cake and eat it too, which is understandable. I get it, the younger demographics of folks moving in want more texting and more ability to say, “Don’t call me or remind me. You can text me and remind me.” You've got the other demographic that says, “What's the personal touch? You need to call me and remind me.” You’re spread 50/50.
We saw the same thing happening with marketing. Newspaper and TV were great for a while and now it’s all internet advertising. I want to check out your background and how many stores you have. There's been somewhat of a change and that's where the girls came into play. They had a better understanding of that. I was old-school and continue to be.
Paul Giannamore: Do you still use a paper copy of the Yellow Pages, Frank?
Frank Miller: It’s small. One of the things that the industry does is you open the Yellow Pages and everyone has a full page. It's throwing good money after bad in my opinion.
Cindy Miller: The customers are younger, for sure. They're more the age of Kristine and Leanne than our age. They want to deal with the younger generation. The younger generation at Impact makes fun of us to a certain extent.
Paul Giannamore: I’m sure they do.
Patrick Baldwin: I'd still want to know what they call the coffee guy over here. What was your nickname? Until they made fun of you or not. Barista?
Frank Miller: The coffee bitch. It’s okay. I respected them for it. I didn't hold it against them. I knew my place.
Patrick Baldwin: How did you work towards the model that allowed you to step out of the business before selling it? You were a distant 4 or 5 years before 2021.
Paul Giannamore: Cindy, you didn't get out as much as he did though.
Cindy Miller: No. Towards the end, I had to do a lot of work. When we both turned 60, we thought we needed a ten-year plan if we were going to turn it over to the girls. We need ten years for them to experience the things they need to experience and learn what they need to learn. It didn't quite last ten years, part of it had to do with COVID. When COVID hit, they were like, “You guys are too old. You're high risk. Stay home. Let us do it.”
They would call us or talk to us if they had questions but they didn't want us hanging around. That accelerated the plan by a couple of years. Towards the end, with the acquisition and everything. That was my job. I did the business end of the business. I ended up going back to it quite a lot for that process but it wasn't ever the job of Frank, Tom, or Gary to do those things.
Patrick Baldwin: I’m trying to picture the org chart. With your two daughters, do the four branches report to them?
Frank Miller: Correct.
Patrick Baldwin: Did you keep tabs on your two girls?
Frank Miller: We would talk to Gary and Tom repetitively because it's the way we operated. It’s that competitive nature as well as Donnie. The girls would communicate with them as well quite a bit. We had a separate operation that was called administrative services, which cleared all the paperwork from each one of the offices through administrative services. Each office would bring in their daily work. We uploaded payments processed by administrative services. We kept in touch with everybody.
Cindy Miller: We interacted with everybody. A good day for me was when I walked into the office and they said, “Cindy, we have a question.” I was like, “Great. I have a reason to be here today.”
Frank Miller: Tom and Gary, how do you tell people with that experience what to do? They can figure it out easily. That’s why it was all about the people. Back to that circle of people. The right people, the right place, and the right time.
Patrick Baldwin: Let’s flip it on its head for a second. When you said that field employees or technicians are better at being centralized or working together in an admin or office, workers can work from home, to me, it's backward. My head is still thinking. I’m trying to wrap my head around it. What purpose does that serve?
Cindy Miller: In a way, I can explain. Talking about the younger generation, I don't know how relevant this is but your business has a population that's around it. The people that work for the company are the closest. Your customers are in between. They're loyal to your company but they don't work there and there's the rest of the general public that is not. Your technicians are swimming around in that middle ground being affected by the outside population. Maybe they don't know you or you're too expensive. The customers need to touch base with the inner circle, the ones that work there.
Coming into the office, especially if sometimes they had a bad day or they had an especially good sale or something like that, they would come into the office to talk to the admin, to brag. You may have seen that at your company, Patrick, “You wouldn't believe the job I had today.” You have to tell someone. If the supervisor wasn't there, it was the people in the office. They had to be able to touch base and not always be affected by the outside circles who don't bring them into the company. The general population and customers don't pull them in. Maybe not every day that they need to be there but they need to be there frequently enough to touch base, to come home so to speak.
Frank Miller: Even if somebody handed them a bottle of Gatorade, it was devastatingly hot out. Those little touches, that family feel between all the different service areas, all the different services make a big difference. One of the features that, quite frankly, Kristine and Leanne brought to the company is more of a family touch between all the employees bringing everybody together. It worked well for us. Did it work for everybody? I don't know. It worked great for us and for our business model. That was the important thing.
Patrick Baldwin: Did the technicians come and go? Was it scheduled, like, “The first Tuesday of the month, we're going to come to have breakfast.”
Frank Miller: We did annual meetings. Until COVID, our technicians were annually trained for CPR, which we thought was a little unusual for most companies. With the older demographic in Florida, you never know when your pest control guy might be there.
Paul Giannamore: He might be the last resort.
Frank Miller: “Call the bug guy. I need CPR.” It was one of those little things. We had them there every day. It worked for us.
Cindy Miller: We did training every Monday.
Paul Giannamore: You weren't the bigger companies that have meetings to plan for the next meeting.
Cindy Miller: No reports unless somebody read that report and used it for something. We didn't have reports to be reports. We didn't have meetings unless there was a purpose for it. Mostly, we had training meetings.
Paul Giannamore: It's spectacular that anytime somebody sells a family business, I don't care if it's Anticimex, Rentokil, or Terminix, it doesn't matter, they are shocked and astounded by how many meetings these companies have. Post-COVID error, it's all Zoom and team meetings. Three-quarters of your day is on some Zoom meeting rehashing, planning for the next meeting, touching base, and whatever the hell else they do. What was your meeting structure like? You have the annual meeting. Your technicians would come into the office every morning.
Frank Miller: The technicians would come every morning and have a little coffee. They would exchange information with each other, “I had this job yesterday. I had that.” they would learn from each other. It was the opportunity that they had. We would do training for one hour every Monday and that was a feature that we liked because we could teach them more than they’d learn at a CEU program, which God bless them all. People have become too dependent on the distributors to do their training for them. With an entomologist on staff, it gave us a good opportunity to do training, be it sales training, service training, customer training, or telephone training.
Cindy Miller: Safety.
Frank Miller: There are many different things that you can cover on 52 Mondays. It's amazing. Let the technicians touch each other and get close together, “I had this problem.” “How did you solve it?” “This way.” Back to your comment on meetings, I understand meetings and I understand that new companies know what their ROI is projected to be. They know where they want to go with it. They got to do a lot of meetings to understand the company and have the company that they acquired understand them. The caveat to that is they need to have meetings about customers, too. They talk about themselves a lot is what I see.
Cindy Miller: Because of the transition, there are extra meetings because of that. I could be wrong. The problem is it's all too easy to fall into that trap as the company gets bigger. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of hiring judgmental management. You're making too many reports. You have people who are writing reports for people to read reports and no one's talking to a customer. You have a zillion meetings. If you're not careful, you're going to fall into that trap because that's what happens.
When you have a meeting, there's no end result, “Here's what we're going to do.” Because I know my daughters have all these meetings, I told them, “Every meeting, you will have three things that you want to accomplish in that meeting. No matter what they are, three things. I don't care if you have eight meetings in two days. In each one of them, you're going to have three things.” Otherwise, they'll be in the same trap as everybody else, having these meetings and then setting up another meeting to discuss them again.
Paul Giannamore: These 52 weekly meetings are a good opportunity for technicians to touch themselves or touch each other. Were there ever instances of too much touching? Did that ever happen? I'm sure, in 40 years, there has to be touching. I want this to be a pest control reality.
Cindy Miller: Yes, there were times when they would be chasing but it was all fun and not bad.
Paul Giannamore: It should be fun.
Cindy Miller: They’re chasing each other outside and tackling each other and things like that.
Frank Miller: If you bring HR into the game, you can't do that. That's not politically correct. You can't say this to that person or that. Competition is important in my opinion. People thrive on it. We were in a male dominated business for many years. That's only starting to change now. Even the girls that worked for the company were competitive as well because they got right into that competitive spirit along with everybody else. It made it enjoyable. It was a good exchange of information instead of touching, let's put it that way.
Paul Giannamore: We have a lot of chats about females out in the front line. I'm not talking about sales. I'm talking about surface technicians. You were involved in that many years ago. Let’s start with you, Frank. What are your thoughts on women as technicians?
Frank Miller: It's brilliant. The industry should find a way to bring more women as technicians. It's pretty simple. If you're a woman and you have a male tech coming into the house and you want her to do your hair or put on your makeup, you've got to do it before the male gets there. The gals work together better with women, “Come on in. I'm going to be in the shower. Do what you have to do and leave.”
Women relate better together than guys do. Even in a selling situation, the pest control decision was made by the woman and the termite control decision was always made by the man. You'd like to pull them and get together to agree but that's the way it works. One made one decision and one made another. Women in the industry will be in the future of this industry.
Paul Giannamore: Personally, 100%, I want a woman technician at my house. I don't want a dude. I want a woman. We've had these chats before and people say, “We put out ads for technicians and 100 applications come in and there's 1 woman out of 99 men.” Have you guys figured anything out as far as how to recruit women into those positions?
Cindy Miller: No. It's not some glamorous job that women wish they could do. They fall into it by accident. I enjoyed it while I was doing it. My customers appreciated it. What Frank’s saying is right. Talk to me when I put my makeup on, that kind of stuff. They were always comfortable when I was there. When I first started, there were hardly any women in the business. There are a couple of other women techs that I can think of.
Paul Giannamore: Shelby.
Cindy Miller: Even in our area, there were a couple of women techs. There were quite a few for a while there and then it died down. It went back to where I was the only one to continue education and all that. Now, it's picking up again. I don't know how we could have gotten more in. I don't even know why it died down after it started getting better. There were times when I'd be sitting in a room full of people to continue my education and be the only girl there.
Frank Miller: Part of the problem with getting women to come to the business is picture your average pest control guy, you got some guy that shoved twelve McDonald's sandwiches in his face, got ketchup all over the shirt, walks in with keys hanging off his back, sweaty, and nasty. That doesn't appeal to women. I don't know if I want to do that job. As the technology changes and the industry becomes better, it will attract more women over the years. We'll probably see more of a change in the future.
Cindy Miller: Some of the guys in the pest control industry didn't welcome having women at the beginning. It's different now. Back in the day, they would flat out say, “Women have no business being in this industry.” They weren't exactly welcoming.
Patrick Baldwin: It sounds like that happened to you.
Cindy Miller: For sure. They didn't say it to me. They said it about somebody else. I don't want to name names here. I was sitting there when they said it. The customers were mostly nice but with the vendors, it was difficult for me to buy a truck. One time I sent them a text and said, “Go buy a truck and call me when it's time to sign the papers.” They were talking to the techs and not me. It was difficult all the way around for girls to break into this industry. How long are you going to put up with that? I've been doing it for over 40 years so I'm used to it. They've been times when I go to industry meetings and they say, “Why are you here? You work for the company?”
Paul Giannamore: What you're saying is it's not the customers or whatsoever, it's the actual industry itself. It's been the folks within our industry over the years.
Cindy Miller: I can tell you that there's no good reason for it. There’s a project I did, the history of women pest control. The earliest companies in the United States were guys and their wives working together. If women have been in this industry since 1852, what is the deal? Why is it still difficult?
Patrick Baldwin: This project is news to me. Did you know this?
Paul Giannamore: No.
Patrick Baldwin: You did a project on women in pest control.
Cindy Miller: We had an in-office day of seminars. They asked me to do something. I did a presentation on the history of women in pest control. It forced me to have to research it. All the way back to 1852, a guy and his wife had a pest control company in New York City. Within a few years, he passed away but she kept the company going. The customers needed her. Everybody was moving to the city and bed bugs and rats were a problem. It was a serious problem.
Without those pest control companies, they were maybe two at the time, I don't know what the customers would have done. She could have walked away but she didn't. She kept that company going under his name for a few years later. I discovered more over the years that were involved. Why is this such a hard thing for people to understand when women had been involved from the beginning?
Paul Giannamore: Cindy and Frank, having done this for decades, being rare, being an actual married couple who stayed together, who has raised wonderful children, and great partners, what's some advice you can give to younger couples and families that are beginning to embark on the same path?
Frank Miller: Listen to your wife because she's always going to be right. Even when you think you're right, you're going to be wrong.
Paul Giannamore: Did you do that though? That's the question.
Cindy Miller: Perseverance and working together as a team. You're never going to be successful in the first five years. It’s going to be hard. You need to have that goal in mind and be on the same page. Whether you're married or not married, you're still working. You both have to be committed to that and whatever else that goes along with it. We're committed to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the first five years.
Frank Miller: On toast. That’s a hot meal.
Paul Giannamore: You're saying to get ready to make the sacrifice together.
Cindy Miller: Yes. Most of the successful businesses I have looked at were husband and wife or family businesses.
Paul Giannamore: As you look back at your long and successful career in pest control, what's something you're most grateful for?
Frank Miller: I'd have to say it was the education we got. Back in the day at Arab, I worked with Larry Davis, Jerry Cole, Pam, and the whole team there. We learned so much about the basics of the industry and what it was like to work for a good-sized family company. They gave us a picture of where we wanted to go. It taught us a little bit about values. If they were still here today, we probably wouldn't be.
That combined with some of the advice from our attorneys, our accountants, and the whole team helped us and guided us through the difficult tasks that it was at the back end to transact this deal because it was complex. It’s what you don't expect. You've heard me say before that it's easier to start a pest control company than it is to sell one. There are a lot of people to thank over the years, our customers, and every one of our valued employees. My daughters, Tom, Gary, and Donnie are people who did a lot to help us be where we are today.
Cindy Miller: I would also like to take the opportunity to thank the people at Arab Termite and Pest Control in Florida. We learned a lot from them and they mentored us. Even after we left, sometimes when we had questions, we would call and ask for advice from them. If it was just the two of us, we’d get an F. Beyond that, our employees, and our partners, Tom, Gary, and Donnie. We couldn't have done it without everybody. Also, the wonderful customers that we’ve had. Right down to customer number one, she still knows who she is. She called up and said something one day, “I was customer number one.” We've been blessed with nice customers and great employees.
Paul Giannamore: Frank and Cindy, thank you so much for joining us in the Boardroom down here in Puerto Rico.
Cindy Miller: Thank you for having us.
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