Brent Agee on building AXN Growth Partners and paying more for growth

Brent Agee, the CEO of AXN Growth Partners, grew up digging termite trenches for his dad. When he got kicked out of high school, though, his dad wouldn’t let him join the family company. He sent Brent to work for competitors instead, including companies that did nothing but apartment complexes. Brent called it miserable.

About 2 years later, his dad had enough termite work to need another strong back, and Brent came home. That family business is now the foundation of AXN, a private equity-backed platform with 14 acquisitions in just over 2 years.

Brent buys pest control companies now, and he was more open than I expected about what he’ll pay extra for.

Who is Brent Agee?

Brent Agee is a second-generation pest control operator. He rejoined his parents’ company around 2010 as a termite tech and moved into sales. In 2013, with his first child on the way, he started Master Tech Pest Solutions in Phoenix. In 2016 his dad, burned out and ready to step down, bought Brent’s company and put him in charge. His parents had only done termites, so the merged company became ACTION Termite and Pest Control. They doubled it, and private equity came calling.

ACTION became the platform company, backed by Shore Capital Partners, and AXN became the group’s name. It started as shorthand for ACTION on the consolidated financials, and Brent drew the logo on a napkin. AXN has made the Inc. 5000 3 years in a row, and 5 of its brands were named to PCT’s top 25 best places to work.

He’s also a jiu-jitsu black belt who still coaches and competes, and a competitive cowboy mounted shooter. Having something to prove, he says, feeds his hunger for growth.

Get out of the truck as soon as you can

Many of the owners I hear from are at $200,000 to $400,000 a year, so I asked how Brent got Master Tech past $1M in about 3 years. To do it fast, he said, you have to roll some dice.

He sold, serviced and answered every phone himself for about 3 months, then paid someone to run the office and hired a technician while making no money himself. He and his wife lived in a third-story apartment and she was bartending, so their expenses were low.

He didn’t knock doors to get there. The growth came from Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor leads, a great sales rep and relationships. In 2013, Arizona still had plenty of HUD and Fannie Mae homes from the recession, and each one that hit the market needed a termite inspection. Brent found the decision makers and took them to dinner.

Termite pays the bills

Brent thinks termite is the best way to fund your marketing. In his example, $10,000 of termite advertising in a month can bring in $50,000 or $60,000 that month. Spend the same on pest control, and the initial services might put $100 or so on the bottom line, about a tenth of the annual contract value, even though each customer costs about the same to get.

After the merger, ACTION advertised only termite control on Google and social media, and the salesperson added pest control to every contract. Fewer companies bid on termite, so back then those ads cost less, though Brent says times have changed. Our guide to Google Ads for pest control covers campaigns built around services like termite.

Termite does bring more paperwork and liability. Still, when AXN partners with a brand that doesn’t offer it, one of the first moves is buying a termite truck, and he says cash flow and EBITDA go up right away.

Judge a private equity firm by its people

Brent keeps his explanation of private equity simple.

“Think of it like restaurants. There’s good ones and bad ones. If you go to a bad one, you don’t stop going to restaurants.”

In his experience, the bad firms lack true operators. A lot of people in private equity come from investment banking and never ran a business. When a firm cares more about the financials than the people, it can turn a culture upside down right after buying. AXN’s formula is people, culture and results, and people come first for a reason.

He used me as his example. If he bought my pest control company and everyone was loyal to me, keeping me involved and happy would keep the employees and customers too. So AXN lets certain founders roll equity and stay on. Some now run brands with smaller acquisitions folded in, which can mean going from a $2.5M company to a $10M P&L, while AXN handles jobs they don’t want, like payroll. Burned-out founders can just do sales, or even inventory.

AXN merges brands too, based on what each brand is worth and what the founder wants. After 11 or 12 deals in Arizona, it expected about 4 standalone brands there by the end of 2026. Brent says 2 of the 5 companies that come up when you search for the best pest control company in Phoenix are AXN brands.

Growth is worth more than a little extra EBITDA

Most acquirers say the same things, Brent told me. Recurring revenue above 70% gets you a gold star, retention matters, and everyone uses the same industry benchmarks. He thinks organic growth doesn’t get talked about enough.

“I could pay more money for the same company that’s growing at 20% than if the same company was growing at 5% or 8%, even if it has a little less EBITDA.”

If a $1M company keeps growing 20% after the deal, it does $1.2M the next year, and the multiple he paid at closing shrinks fast. Growth is one line on a long scorecard, and Paul Giannamore weighs it too when he values a company.

Brent sees owners stop marketing to push EBITDA as high as possible, and he asks them not to. If the business needs new trucks, buy them, because a growing company is a more attractive asset.

Turn the dial up until something leaks

I asked what share of revenue should go to marketing. “As much as it takes,” Brent joked. Across AXN’s brand P&Ls, it’s 6% to 10%.

Brent cares more about whether you can close the leads. Sometimes AXN doubles a new partner’s budget from 5% to 10%, and within about a week it sees the leak, whether that’s response times, follow-up or the closing ratio at the door. They turn it down, train the team and turn it back up. Don’t spend 8% because someone told you to.

Among the KPIs Brent watches, close rates come right after year-over-year growth and results against budget. On termite proposals written on site, he expects at least 50% to close, and he thinks the platform runs closer to the high 60s or 70%.

Maybe 70% to 80% of the $5M to $50M owners I’ve interviewed run door-to-door. AXN doesn’t. At 20% growth it doesn’t need to, and Brent says those customers typically don’t stick as well as ones from traditional marketing.

Your CSRs shouldn’t be selling

Before we hit record, Brent told me AXN’s portfolio is growing about 20%, with some brands at 40%. One is Urban Desert Pest Control, a $5M company whose husband-and-wife founders, Brad and Trista, stayed on. Brent says it’s the #1 pest control company in Arizona on Yelp.

When AXN partnered with Urban Desert, it had no dedicated inside sales reps. Brent calls this a quick win for any owner. If the person doing billing and scheduling is also selling, stop, and put a dedicated salesperson in the office.

“I’m not going to be the best person to sell someone a new service if the call I just took was someone complaining that the technician left the gate open.”

CSRs hear about the fires all day. AXN keeps its sales reps in their own world of coaching, metrics and ringing the bell, and some close over $170,000 in a single month on the phone. My partner Jonas Olson wrote about the $3M leak Pest Badger had before it built an inside sales team.

A players want to see the score

Brent was a sales guy, so he’s allowed to say salespeople can be divas. The good ones want to win and want everyone to know it. He asked me to picture a basketball game with no scoreboard. He doesn’t think the players would try as hard if nobody knew the score.

Your C players won’t like a scoreboard, he admits. They’ll call it micromanaging or Big Brother.

“The A players are always going to want to know the score. The C players are not going to want to know the score.”

AXN even pits its brands against each other. The presidents share trucks and employees when someone’s in a bind, and the competitive talk still starts when the scoreboard goes up. PCM’s guide to pest control KPIs can help you pick what goes on yours.

Rolled equity can beat a bigger check

When I asked how AXN wins deals, Brent started with culture and fair valuations. He invites prospects to call every founder he’s done a deal with and ask what he was like during the process and after.

Then he explained rolled equity. These are Brent’s numbers, not promises. AXN is still at its founder share price, which he said will probably go up in early 2027. He says Shore Capital has returned about 6.5 times its money on average, and he believes over 70% of its portfolio companies have returned more than 5 times.

Say your highest bid is $5M. He might suggest rolling $1M into equity, which he says is tax deferred and could save you a couple hundred thousand dollars. If that $1M becomes $5M at the next sale, he figures you could end up with $9M to $12M instead of $5M. He says these platforms tend to sell every 4 to 7 years, so you could cash some out then and leave the rest in.

Once AXN gets big enough, Brent expects to buy with cash, so the window won’t stay open. Research every firm’s returns, he said, because a $4.8M offer might be a better opportunity than a $5M one.

My take

Brent pointed out that his warning about cutting marketing was useful for me to know, since I do marketing. I’d rather owners hear it from a buyer than from an agency. If you plan to sell in the next few years, your growth rate is part of what you’re selling.

On the show I compared AXN’s house of brands to whiskey, where a handful of distilleries make about a thousand brands. In search, that setup is an advantage. Separate brands keep their own names, reviews and Google Business Profiles, which is part of how one platform shows up twice in a Phoenix search. Merge them and you give up listings that took years to build.

Brent coaches jiu-jitsu for free, and he said there aren’t many secrets in jiu-jitsu or in scaling a business. It comes down to execution. None of what he described requires private equity, and his closing advice to owners who want to grow was to get a dedicated salesperson as soon as you can.

Where to find Brent

Brent is always happy to connect and give free advice. He thinks there’s an underscore somewhere in his Instagram handle, so use the link below. When we recorded, AXN was also planning an event in Scottsdale on January 22 with sessions on sales, marketing and P&L literacy.

• Website: AXN Growth Partners
• LinkedIn: Brent Agee on LinkedIn
• Instagram: Brent Agee on Instagram
• Facebook: Brent Agee on Facebook