“Have your house in order, if you will. Make sure the legalities of your business are in order and up to date. Have copies of everything. You want easy access to this. You don’t want to put all this stuff together as you’re going. (The buyers) are going to want to look at everything.” —Richard Monastero

After more than 30 years in business, Richard Monastero, president of Amtech Personalized Pest Management, decided in spring 2021 that it was time to explore the sale of his business.

Although he intended to work for a few more years, a combination of factors — primarily his age, 63, and a potential change in tax laws — prompted him to call Dan Gordon, managing member or PCO M&A Specialists, a division of PCO Bookkeepers. Richard had been a PCO Bookkeepers accounting client for a dozen years.

The Decision to Sell

“It was just time,” Richard says, noting that a conversation with a peer in the pest control industry led him to reach out to Dan. He wanted to assess the potential repercussions of waiting a few years to exit his business in the event that President Biden’s capital gains tax proposals are enacted.

Another reason to sell his company was to provide more growth opportunities for his two dozen employees. “We didn’t have a lot of room for growth,” he says. “I only needed one or maybe two of the technicians to be a service manager or something higher up, but I had more than two guys who were looking for upward mobility.”

With those things in mind, Richard decided to move forward with a sale this year. His goals for the deal were to be acquired by a firm big enough to provide his employees opportunities, but not so big it was impersonal.

“It had to be a good fit,” he says. “I didn’t want my company to get absorbed by a very large company where the employees would be lost and not be treated the way I hoped they would be treated.”

The Experience

Selling a business is a rather involved process, Richard knows now. The steps include gathering and preparing all the data sellers need, going to market with that information, evaluating offers, negotiating, doing due diligence, and more.

“It’s not something you want to do on your own, for sure,” he says.

Luckily, the information-gathering stage was easier than it might have been because PCO M&A Specialists had access to Amtech’s financial information and understood the company well.

“It wasn’t as if I had a business broker that had to get numbers from me, which I would have to get from my accountant,” Richard says. “Dan and his M&A department already had access to them.”

On top of that, Richard trusted Dan and was confident in his deep knowledge of the pest control industry.

“He knows all the players and the people in their M&A departments,” he says. “And they have a working knowledge of the business and the numbers. They’re just the perfect combination of accountants and brokers.”

The Sale

After many hours of Zoom meetings and a lot of back and forth, Richard opted to sell Amtech to JP McHale Pest Management, an Anticimex company.

“The bottom line is it’s a regional company where you can speak to the president of the company,” he says. “It is big, but it small enough. It is more personal. It was the best of both worlds.”

Choosing a buyer and evaluating the terms of the deal were particularly challenging, Richard says, adding PCO M&A Specialists ensured the entire process ran smoothly.

“They made a difficult process a little easier,” he says. “They hold your hand.”