Dean Roberts wasn’t looking to sell his 29-year-old, family-operated pest control business when he was approached by a strategic buyer who made an offer for his company. Thinking his company was worth more but not knowing how to get more, he reached out to Dan Gordon at PCO M&A Specialists in the summer of 2021 to see if exiting at the price he wanted was feasible. Dean had been reading quite a few of Dan’s articles and had heard Dan speak about M&A on one of his weekly podcasts and was sufficiently impressed. Rather than working on that one offer, Dan and Steve Linskey at PCO M&A Specialists put Pegasus Pest Control out to market to many different potential buyers and improved the bid significantly.

The Decision to Sell

“When you start a company, you always look at, ‘How long am I going to have this? What would I sell it for?’ So selling is something we thought about periodically, but we really never got serious about selling until recently,” Dean says. “We enjoyed the work. Our employees are fabulous and made it so easy that we never really looked to exit.”

The plan was to set up a succession plan that allowed Dean’s son to own the company without being directly involved in the operations. But with valuations for pest control companies at historic highs, he opted to sell instead. “We had set up management and were going to continue to let it run,” Dean says. “Our son would be the owner and wouldn’t be involved. But selling was a better way.”

The Experience

From initial contact to closing, the acquisition process took about 10 months. Originally, the sale was supposed to wrap up before the end of 2021, but when that didn’t happen the PCO M&A Specialists team renegotiated a higher price. Looking back on the experience, Dean acknowledges it was “a ton of work” to gather the data and information the buyer required. He was grateful to have the PCO M&A Specialists team in his corner. “Dan and Steve took care of everything,” he says. “They had access to QuickBooks and PestPac to pull all the reports. As far as the numbers and putting the whole package together, Steve made it so easy. The guy is fantastic.” Pegasus was not an accounting or bookkeeping client of PCO M&A Specialists’ sister firm PCO Bookkeepers prior to engaging with them for the sale, although Dean says he wished he hired them much earlier. “They did my taxes in 2021, business and personal, and it was a giant mistake to not use those guys in the past,” he says. “If I had gotten ahold of these guys a few years earlier and had them do my books, who knows what I would have sold it for.”

The Sale

Ultimately, when PCO M&A Specialists went to market there were three buyers interested in purchasing Pegasus, but only two could move forward due to the timeline. In addition to his financial goals for the sale, which were achieved, Dean says his priority centered around how the buyer would treat his employees, most of whom had worked for Pegasus Pest Control for five years or more. “It was important that they kept their jobs and went to a company that would take care of them,” he says. “Anticimex seemed to be a better fit than anyone else. They wanted the employees; they wanted the cohesiveness of the company, which runs by itself and doesn’t need me.”