In this week’s commentary, we’ll be exploring:
- Driving Value: The Importance of Route Density
- Potomac Announces the Sale of Banks Pest Control to Rollins, Inc.
- Where to Stash Your Cash When You Sell (or Even if you Don’t Sell)
- Meetings in Singapore & Malaysia
- Western Governments are Totally and Completely Broke … and They Want Your Money
- A Highly Recommended Deal Attorney
Driving Value: The Importance of Route Density
Two of the most powerful levers you have to drive profitability in your business, and therefore value, is pricing and route density. We’ll save pricing for another day.
Where I see more than half of pest control companies not really thinking through things is on the density side. Sure, it feels good to cover an entire region. “I service from NYC to Baltimore, I’m YUUUGGGEEE!”
[Read more…]
Pest Control M&A Weekly Commentary – September 17, 2018 – M&A Season Has Begun and It’s Gonna Be a Hot One
Pest Control Meetings at Dusk in Singapore
In my last Weekly Commentary I said that I would be trying hard to write on a weekly basis… and then I disappeared for five weeks (my lame excuses to follow). I guess even I dramatically underestimated how busy it was going to be this M&A season.
Labor day (early September) officially marks the start of pest control M&A season in North America and it’s begun as the busiest one I’ve seen in my 15 years in the industry. Transaction multiples have continued to edge higher. Every time I think we hit a top…. well, we don’t.
Right out of the gate, three PCT Top 100 companies are already under LOI and this morning we closed a transaction with ServiceMaster that would have been in the 80’s on the PCT Top 100 had the company reported. That transaction will be announced next week and with it comes with some interesting learning opportunities for all of us, which I’ll discuss next week.
On Monday, we advised on the sale of Guaranty Pest Elimination to Modern Pest Services, which is Anticimex’s largest acquisition in New England since the acquisition of Modern. The target operates in four states and will help Modern accelerate growth in New England, more on that below. [Read more…]