Dave Bradford on What Makes a Pest Control Company Worth Millions

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey everyone and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. I'm your host Dan Leibrandt and today I'm with Dave Bradford, the CEO of Certus Pest. Certus has grown into a hundred million dollar pest control platform operating across the US through a multi-brand acquisition driven model. Dave brings a deep background in finance and M&A and operational leadership with experience across over a hundred acquisitions throughout his career. Today, we're going to break down the biggest lessons from those acquisitions, what actually makes a pest control company valuable, and the most common financial mistakes owners make as they try to scale or prepare for an exit. Now without further ado, Dave, welcome to the show.

00:41 Dave Bradford

Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

00:43 Dan Leibrandt

Of course, man. So I'd like to start out the show, well actually, for some context, and I was just mentioning this, that I saw you at PestWorld, that I made sure to pull you to the side, because I had some questions to ask, and me and you have kind of been in touch throughout the past few years, along with your CMO, Juan, which we were talking about, he's incredibly smart. Can you walk me back to when you first got into pest control? Was that Certus, or is that something before?

01:10 Dave Bradford

Yeah, this is, I think this is one of the most interesting responses that you ever get from people on how they get, got into a pest control. You can ask 20 people and you're going to get 20 different versions of how they got into it. So the way I got into it, I was, look, I'm a finance and accounting guy kind of came up through big publicly traded companies, particularly airlines, both passenger airlines and cargo airlines. And my very first gig dealing with a private equity owner was actually Spirit Airlines. And so it was really successful outcome. I was their controller and treasurer. We did an IPO with Spirit in 2010 [Spirit's IPO was in 2011]. After that, I went to another PE-backed dry bulk shipping entity. We exited that and sold that business to several strategic buyers. And I was looking for my next gig. A really good friend of mine here in Tampa owns a recruiting firm. He knew that I had private equity experience. But I think more importantly, he knew I had a lot of experience doing M&A and integrating businesses. And he called me about pest control. And he said that he had something for me to look at. I remember it. Clear as day. Was sitting at my desk in my office at home and I said, well, what do they do? And he said, there's a pest control company. And I was like, pest control? I was like, well, that doesn't sound very sexy. And he said, well, look, he says they're extremely acquisitive. They're really high growth. I think it'd be a great fit for you. It's here in Tampa. And I was like, all right, I'll take a look at it. Well. You know, being a finance guy and accounting guy, I do a lot of research. And so I started poking around, looking at Rollins, looking at Terminix, looking at Rentokil, because they're publicly traded and they have public available information.

03:17 Dan Leibrandt

All right, Dave, I know you got cut off there. Could you continue? I think you were at Rollins.

03:23 Dave Bradford

Yeah, so when the guy told me that it was pest control, my immediate reaction was a little lukewarm. But I'm a researcher, and I started researching myself on the industry, whether it was Dan Gordon and PCO Bookkeepers or Rollins or Rentokil and the Public Information. And I started looking at the fundamentals of the business. And when you start talking about 85 % recurring, high gross profit margins, high valuations, 20 to 30 % EBITDA margins, which is really high free cash flow, it starts to look a lot sexier than I thought it was going to look when you just talk about pest control in general. And it certainly is a lot better than airlines. And so I told them that I would talk to the guys. Concentric Equity Partners was the private equity firm out of Chicago that owned Environmental Pest. They had been in the acquisition arena for quite some time. They had made 70 acquisitions, but it just wasn't put together very well. They were lacking operational and financial insight into the performance of the business. And they hired me as their CFO in 2016 and off we went and we gained a lot of valuable insights. We did another 32. Acquisitions. So we did completed a total of 102 acquisitions. We grew the thing and we sold it to a strategic at the end of 2020. So that's how I got into pest control and I've been in it ever since.

04:55 Dan Leibrandt

Okay. Awesome. Then in 2020, what happened then you joined Certus?

05:05 Dave Bradford

No, in 2020, so we sold the business. We grew Environmental Pest to 82 million top line. I think we were ranked, I want to say like 16th or 17th, something like that on the top 100. And I stuck around for a little bit to help the transition over to Rentokil. And I actually left and got hired as the chief operating officer. Uh, for a pool services roll up, uh, called Pool Troopers, uh, owned by a PE firm out of Jacksonville. So I was head down, kind of doing, starting to do the same things, integrating the business. And, uh, the guys at Imperial Capital out of Toronto, which is the owners of, uh, Certus, uh, kept coming at me. Kept telling them, no, and I finally relented and agreed to have a lunch. Or discussion with them and one thing led to the other and in September of 21 I joined, after a short time at Pool Troopers, in the fall of 21 I joined Certus as their CFO.

06:14 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Okay. And then you told me a little bit in person that you ended up becoming CEO. Can you tell that story?

06:22 Dave Bradford

Yeah. So I started in, and it's very, very similar to EPS. They had acquired, you know, 54 businesses in a two year time period. I refer to it as kind of a bowl of spaghetti, so to speak. Because that's a lot of businesses in a short time period and it needs to be integrated. You got to get everything into the same CRM or field service management platform. You got to start. Figuring out what brands you want to operate and figure out financial statements, payroll, all that stuff, right? When you integrate that many businesses. And we started doing that in the fall of 21. And by July of, well, first they may be president in February of 22. We just started realizing it'd be a lot easier when the span of control was more concentrated. And I had done it before. Had integrated a lot of businesses, you know, previously in multiple industries, even Pest Control. And by July of 22, they had made me CEO. And so I've been CEO ever since.

07:34 Dan Leibrandt

That's awesome. Well, it seems like you're one of the most authoritative and most experienced people in pest control M&A. I wanted to ask you first because I know a lot of my audience is pest control owners that might be just kind of early in their journey. I don't know, they might be under a million and looking to sell at some point. I want to ask you first, when you're looking to buy businesses, what are some red flags that you see? Like what are things that... You see in other pest control businesses where you're like, well, we're definitely not buying that one.

08:07 Dave Bradford

Yeah, so if it's OK, I'll probably give you a combination of what really looks good and what really looks bad. And as a red flag, I think we all know what looks good. The higher percentage of recurring of the revenue stream, the better. So generally, 85 % and above in recurring. One times are OK. You just don't want to do 60 to 70 % one times. Recurring's a lot more valuable. Let's see, good organic growth rate is positive. Pest termite is the most coveted parts of the business in pest control versus wildlife and something. Those things are great. It's just that pest and termite is the holy grail. Great gross profit margins, EBITDA margins, organic growth rates, great productivity in your technicians and your salespeople. Some red flags would be. Some of the opposites, right? It's not that we won't buy a home, a one-time business, a heavy one-time business. We bought wildlife businesses before. Just the valuations and the purchase prices aren't going to be as high as a high recurring business. High turnover in their technician base is a red flag. If you have a lot of attrition and turnover, low tenure technicians who haven't been with the company very long. Growth rates, it's really hard to have a good, healthy, organic growth rate when you can't keep your customers.

09:46 Dave Bradford

So good customer retention, bad customer retention, or high cancellation rates is a red flag. Turnover in people, everybody talks about how much this is a people business. Any time, and look, 60 % of our cost structure. Not just us, any pest control company, is people and labor. And so when you start churning over and having high attrition rates in your people, that's a red flag because there's a direct correlation with customer retention when you have people and employee, team member turnover. Those are some of the things. Then you get into some of the licensing and compliance stuff, especially if you're doing termite, you want to make sure that all the documentation is done. Correctly, you want to make sure they're adhering to the State Department of Ag regulations as it relates to graphing and some of that stuff. You start finding discrepancies in the numbers in the due diligence process. That just kind of makes you want to look harder and scrutinize harder when you see data not being consistent and lining up. So those are some of the red flags we see and some of the red flags we've experienced.

10:58 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, awesome. So you mentioned a big one there is retention. So let's say for like general pest, what are you looking for in terms of retention? Is it a few years or longer than that?

11:11 Dave Bradford

Well, there's two issues, right? The average tenure of the customer is one. The longer the average life of the customer, the better, right? That goes straight into the whole CAC LTV calculation, lifetime value of the customer. But even more than that is your turnover rate, your cancellation rate. And every, you know, the mix of the business is very different. You know, the good cancellation rate for termite and bait stations specifically is going to be something less than 1%. A good cancellation rate on pest control is going to be about 1.5%. And what I'm talking about is a percentage of the recurring base. So if you're a million dollar business with a million dollars of recurring services, 1.5 % of that a month is about $15,000. So if you cancel, if you're a million dollar business and you cancel $15,000 of annual contracts in a given month, that's a cancellation rate of one and a half. That's average, pretty good. It gets higher than that into the high, approaching two or even higher. You hear some door knockers that are at three and 4%. Those are big red flags, but that's the nature of door knocking. And door knocking, once it gets past that first year anniversary of the customer, it tends to normalize pretty quickly. When you get into lawn services, which we do, you're probably talking about 1.8%, 1.9%. So those are some of the numbers we see.

12:53 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. Yeah, what is the intersection with pest and lawn? Like, do you think pest control companies should offer lawn care services? Or does it not make sense?

13:03 Dave Bradford

We do. But it tends to be a more unique thing to the state of Florida. In the state of Florida, you see a lot more companies who provide pest control along with lawn services. And just to be clear, we're not talking about mowing and blowing, right? We're talking about weeds, fertilizer, spraying and taking care of palms. You'll do fire ants. Fire ants is a pest control product. You may have fire ants around the house. May have fire ants in the yard. Mosquito, do you put that in the lawn bucket or do you put it in the pest control bucket in the home? You know what mean? So there is some overlap there even outside the state of Florida. But even for us, we do weed control in the Southwest, know, Arizona, Southern California and Nevada. We do weed control up in the Northwest in Washington and Oregon, but we also spray fruit trees and palm trees and stuff. So... You got to figure out what makes sense for your business specifically. It is unique. You need the skill set. You need the expertise and knowing the chemicals are completely different. Some of the equipment and the trucks and the stuff you use to service, provide the services different. So you just got to figure out whether you want to do it. It's like exclusion in wildlife. Same thing.

14:22 Dave Bradford

Do you want to do it? It's kind of its own little animal and you just got to figure out what works for your business.

14:30 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, that makes sense. Something else I wanted to bring up was I just watched you on Wyatt Chambers podcast and I heard you say several times that your ultimate job and goal is to increase shareholder value and that should also be the same for any other owners out there, whether they're pest control owners, home service, really any business. So for people that don't know exactly what you mean or what that entails, can you explain that?

14:59 Dave Bradford

It's pretty simple. It's cash flow. I mean, at the end of the day, I can get into a lot of intricacies and capital structure and where your capital comes from and what money are you using to grow your business. Is it debt? Is it somebody who invested with you? Is it private equity? Is it the public markets like Rollins? We're all using capital and accessing capital from some source. But at the end of the day, what increases the value of these businesses? It doesn't matter whether you're a mom and pop, right? A million dollar sole proprietor in a single branch. Or us with 25 branches and 100 million, it's all about cash flow. And the better your cash flow and the more free cash flow you have, the more valuable your business is. Even for a single owner, if I own my own business, how much cash am I generating? Am I able to reinvest back in the business or put into my pocket?

16:00 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely. So let's say a company, you know, we've been using the example of a million dollar pest control company. Let's say you were to walk into a million dollar pest control company. How do you increase cash flow as fast and easy as possible?

16:16 Dave Bradford

Growth, top line growth. At the end of the day, you got to be careful and you got to be mindful about your cost structure. There are some costs that literally grow with top line growth. All the services we provide, the gas we burn, the wear and tear on the vehicles, the materials and chemicals we use, the bigger you are, the more you spend and the more you're going to use in those materials. Technicians. The bigger you are, the more you grow top line. Technicians are going to grow. That's why we have cost of services and gross profit margin. When you get below that into some of the fixed costs, you've got to be careful. It's in a decision of when you choose to invest. When do you choose to bite the bullet? If you're a million dollar business trying to get to $2 million, you probably have a bookkeeper or an accountant. Who's helping you do the books. Maybe you do it yourself. You get to two to five. Now it's time, oh, well, maybe I need an accountant to help me with my books. You go from five to 10. Maybe it's time to bring somebody in-house and have a bookkeeper in-house. And those step functions of when you choose to make those investments and add to your team and add to the functionality of your team. When do I invest in the next software solution? When do I get big enough to where I choose to open a second branch. Those are all just strategic decisions that you gotta figure out when to make that decision and bite that bullet.

17:54 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, the hiring one's really a tough one, because same way with the Pest and Lawn or Pest and Wildlife, it depends on your circumstances and what you need and your skill sets and who's already on your team. What I want to ask you, and I'm glad we kind of segued into this, especially given your background in finance. So across all the companies that you see, either the ones that you're prospecting or buying or have already bought, what are you seeing these companies wasting money on?

18:31 Dave Bradford

The two, I spoke at a conference last week. The question was a little bit different. The question was, what do you see as media opportunities when you buy a business? But it's similar. The two that came to the top of my head, even when you asked the question, is marketing and credit card fees. Credit card fees and merchant services fees tend to be kind of complex. Have a little bit of a black box. Not everybody knows all of the details and the intricacies of how it works. You know, we're a business that has not us, but the industry is moving to a lot more credit card on file and auto bill, you know, versus, especially for residential versus, you know, providing and trying to mail an invoice and collect after the fact. And if you're still doing that, I highly recommend that you move to credit card on file. Your life will be a lot easier.

19:31 Dave Bradford

It is a cost though. And the bigger you get, the more you are putting on credit cards, the more leverage you have in negotiating what your credit card merchant services fees are. It's just like us and our personal credit cards, right? Every day we get opportunities and get presented with credit cards that have lower interest rates. Well, merchant service fees are exactly the same. You just got to know that you have the ability to negotiate it. And the better you understand it, the better rates you can get. So that's one area. The other one's marketing. I mean, you guys do a lot of marketing. Marketing these days is really complex. Is it SEO? Is it SEM? Well, what are your SEO strategies? Well, how much are you paying? Well, what are your LSA strategies? And now with AI, I think Google was it chat? It was OpenAI. OpenAI last week just announced. That they're going to start doing advertising within their platform.

20:32 Dave Bradford

Google Gemini is already doing it. So you've got to have strategies on how to show up in a chat bot when you're chatting with AI. So those are the two that come immediately to my mind, where there tends to be opportunity. But it's not because they're overspending or because they're doing something they shouldn't. It's complex. And you need people who really understand it, who don't. Who can maximize the money that you're using to spend on.

21:01 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, yeah. Marketing's a tough one because I'm a marketing guy. I've talked to a lot of the top people in home service owners or marketers in home services. And kind of the consensus that I'm pulling is you kind of have to be doing everything. It's really tough to just narrow down on one strategy at this point. And like you're mentioning, there's also new things coming out all the time, like advertising on ChatGPT. That is completely new and that is gonna be a huge. Strategy or a huge new thing. I guess kind of in general to talk about marketing, is there anything that is working best for you guys or that you're pushing the most? Like, do you do LSAs for every single company you have? Or is there any staples throughout your businesses?

21:50 Dave Bradford

I mean, yeah, LSAs are a staple. When we hired Juan in 23, we were using an outside firm. And we were not doing with LSAs that we should have been doing. And so it was a huge opportunity that he immediately came in and made a huge impact on. But I think you have to be dynamic. I'll give you a great example. Last year, we bought a phenomenal business in Las Vegas. And they were having huge success on Yelp. Well, we weren't really doing much on Yelp. It really hadn't, you know, we knew of it. I think it had kind of Yelp had kind of gone up and down in ways. But we buy this business and they're knocking out of the park on Yelp. Well, so we launched and started doing Yelp and other places. Now it doesn't work everywhere. But it's proven to be pretty successful in the places that we've chosen to deploy it. And so I think, you know, next year, Yelp might decline. Angie's List, I'm not pushing Angie's List. I'm just making an example. I hope this thing takes off. All right, well, let's move over there. Let's spend some money over there, and let's do it over there, because that seems to be the hot thing. So I think you just have to be really open to being dynamic and switching and choosing the platform or the avenue or the channel that you're getting your leads from.

23:20 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah. Now like that you're cautious to diagnose because you're right, it does depend on the size of your company and the area you're at. I know, like you were just mentioning Angie, I know some people that have done really well on Angie and maybe they did well before, but now it sucks or maybe some other people are doing really well on it now and other people are like, how could you even say the name Angie? I hate it so much and I only get bad reviews there and everything. So it does just kind of depend. You really just have to test and read. Test everything and see what works. Cool. Another question I wanna make sure to ask you, Dave, was, you've seen so many acquisitions through, again, you're really one of the top authorities on acquisitions, especially in pest control. What are some of the top lessons you've learned across all these acquisitions? I mean, even starting back at Spirits and then through these other companies and now with pest control, what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned?

24:16 Dave Bradford

Cultural fit, think, is the biggest one. I don't know. I think sometimes private equity gets a bad rap, so to speak, in this industry, especially with the mom and pops. But at this point, for example, Certus, I really don't view as private equity. Yes, we're owned by private equity. Yes, that's our source of capital. But at this point, at our size, we are a single business that operates multiple brands. Exactly like Rollins, right? We're exactly the same. We're not as big as Rollins. But we are a strategic buyer at this point. We're fully integrated. If you looked up the definition of strategic, Certus meets the definition of strategic. And I think that I think that, I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought. Can you ask me the question again real quick,...

25:16 Dan Leibrandt

Well, yeah, so uncultured fit. Like, can you go more in depth on that?

25:20 Dave Bradford

Yeah, culture fit. Yeah, I just think that where I was going with it is that I think a lot of times, look, at the end of the day, private equity owners, private equity is about the efficiency of capital, the use of capital, all the numbers. And we could go buy every business we come across because the purchase price makes sense, or the multiple, or what it means economically. But I think what we've realized now doing this for close to 10 years, not every company is a good fit. The purchase price may be great. The fundamental economics of the business may be great. The organic growth rate may be great. But how that seller was managing and running the business, the expectations that owner sets with their people may be completely different than how we run our business. And remember what I said earlier? The customer attrition rates is tied to the people.

26:22 Dave Bradford

So I'll give you a great example. We looked at a business in Georgia. Didn't use mobile devices, didn't use cell phones, didn't use iPads. None of their technicians ran their routes or serviced the customers using a mobile device. And so we knew, we knew, we run our entire business on a software platform. And the technician does everything on this little device, right? They know what stops to go to, they serve all through this. We knew that if we bought that business, to transition all of those technicians over to using a mobile device, which they had not been using, was going to be a bit of a lift. And there'll be some of those technicians who just aren't used to doing it or aren't really open to doing it. That inherently creates risk in the way that that owner was running their company versus how we run our company. So there's qualitative aspects of the business that you should reconcile and understand to make sure that there's a good cultural fit when you put these businesses together. Because the implications of post-close and the performance of the business can be impacted by some of those things.

27:42 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. Yeah, and the culture fit you can mainly see by, guess, like you were saying, when people are leaving, what is the retention of the actual employees? And also, I mean, are there traits you're looking for in the owner? Are you looking to have them stay on or leave?

28:02 Dave Bradford

It depends on the owner. It depends on every owner's different. It depends on, why are they even talking to us? Our approach is to be really flexible. A lot of times, people go into deal structures. Other buyers have a very kind of strict template of what the deal structure is. My goal and our goal at Certus is to understand what the seller wants. Why are they considering selling? Are they an older founder who doesn't have children who want to be in the business? And so we're providing them an exit on this cool business that they built so that they can go retire and enjoy their retirement. Is it a young person, a younger person who's built a good business and wants to take chips off the table and go do something else? Are they a young person who wants to take, maybe they're looking for a partner. I'm talking to a guy in Texas right now. He's grown this business to about $2 million. He feels like he's kind of hit an inflection point. He really doesn't have the, he wants to make it bigger. He's not exactly sure how to make it bigger. So he's looking for a partner to maybe have some extra expertise that he doesn't have. Some capital access to capital to maybe do some acquisitions to get bigger faster. So it really depends on the seller at what they want. And we try to create deal structures that match up with what the seller is trying to achieve. And then we bought a business in November in San Jose, California. The owner has an expertise that we were lacking. And so he stuck around, he's running it. He's working with us, for us in California. And we've actually expanded some of his span and control so that he can put some of the positive things that he did in his business.

29:58 Dave Bradford

Take some of those things and implement them in our business in California. So it really depends.

30:02 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Okay, okay, got it. Something else I want to ask you before we wrap up here is you mentioned, and I won't go into too much detail, however much detail you want to go into, but recently you guys acquired a $60 million home service business. Now I just, I mean, that is like so hard for me to even wrap my mind around. Can you just walk me through how that even happens? How do you acquire that big of a company and what is the process there?

30:32 Dave Bradford

Well, look, I bought, mean, in the airline industry, we bought, you know, even bigger businesses than that. That's a, that's a little bit of a different animal, but for us, I think with the team that I have in the expertise that we have, look, part of the reason why we're in Tampa, Florida is this is where Environmental Pest Service was headquartered. And I was a CFO at that business. But my chief operating officer, my VP of ops, my head of M&A, my head of strategy, my head of HR, my head of integration, we were all together doing it at EPS and we were really successful. So when I joined Certus, I wanted to put our headquarters in Tampa because I felt like I could have access to a team who all is really familiar working with each other, knows the playbook. And frankly, think Environmental Pest, given that they started in 2010 and exited in 2020, we are one of the few teams who've literally taken a business all the way through to an exit. That was private equity back. That was a roll up integration strategy. And so we're really, really good at it. My point is I would put my team up against any team in the industry. Imperial. Had another home services business in the pool side, service and repair. And they're very, very similar businesses. Lead generation is very similar. The routing for cleaning is very similar. And so I strategized with Imperial to basically let us have their pool business because we felt like the cross-selling opportunities were huge.

32:28 Dave Bradford

And so we've, compared customer bases. There was very little overlap, but there was a lot of geographical overlap. They operate in Arizona, Florida, and Texas. We operate in Arizona and Florida, but not Texas, but Texas is a market that we're really interested in. And we just felt like there was a lot of opportunity to kind of pivot Certus into this home services. Company with multiple verticals. Yeah, well, I don't know. It's a little early to use Empire. Yeah, I thought there was a lot of opportunities. So that's why we did...

32:58 Dan Leibrandt

Empire.

33:09 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. Follow up question there. So when you do have like a massive pest control company and a massive, you know, any other home service company in this instance, it's Poole. You mentioned cross selling between the two. I know that's a huge opportunity. How do you go about cross selling between the two properly?

33:29 Dave Bradford

I'm not sure we've quite figured that out. We just closed the sale in the business January 2nd. So we're working on that. Think it's just cross-pollination. We feel like the pool business didn't have an outside sales force. We do. We felt like the more opportunity. Salespeople love making a lot of money, and they love selling. So if I can give my salespeople more products to sell, more services to sell, they love it. And we have a really, really good sales team. They do really, really well. I mean, we've had significant year-over-year sales increases for the last three to four years in a row at more than 35 % to 40 % increases year-over-year. And this year, we increased sales over 41 % year-over-year. So we've done that now three years in a row, so we have a great sales function. If I can get those guys trained on generating pull leads, whether it's repair or cleaning, along with the pest control services we provide, we just felt like it was going to be a big opportunity for us. Have we figured out all the nooks and crannies and exactly how it's going to work? No. But we are working on another. CRM solution that we think is really interesting. It's AI driven and we think that will be key to the success of making this happen.

35:02 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, got it. I also did want to ask more broadly just about integration between all the companies. So all the different companies you guys acquire, are they all going on the same CRM or how do you manage all that?

35:16 Dave Bradford

Yeah, they all go on the same payroll. We synergize all the back office parts of it. Everybody goes into the same field service management. We're a PestPac. We use PestPac. They go into the same payroll system, our HRIS system, same finance and accounting system. We use Power BI for all of our KPIs and operating metrics. That's driven behind the scenes by PestPac. So yeah, the quicker we can get systems, credit card tokens moved over CRM, FSM, payroll, financial, all that stuff, the quicker we can do it, the better. Because our belief is that the more insight that we have into the business, the better we can manage it and the better the performance of the business increases. We are agnostic to brands. So just because, and some places, for example, we own Las Vegas Pest Control in Las Vegas. Well, we're never giving up that name. The lead generation, by owning that name in Vegas, is extremely powerful. But for example, the business that we bought in November, we're keeping their brand. So we can synergize and do all the systems and the back office stuff to streamline back office operations without messing with the brand. That piece we operate multiple brands across the entire business. So that's how we think about...

36:46 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. And then to wrap up here, Dave, I wanted to ask you, what is your message to the pest control owners out there? Or maybe it's even technicians that want to start their business eventually, is an owner or wants to be an owner. What do you want to tell them? What do think they need to know?

37:07 Dave Bradford

Keep the end in mind. Where are you going? What are you wanting to achieve? What is your goal? Is your goal to grow a business and hand it off to your children? Is your goal to grow a business and flip it and sell it? What is your goal? So for example, if your goal is to build something, then ultimately exit it and sell it, well, make sure you know what's highly valued. What are the attributes of a business that somebody is willing to pay top dollar for? And then migrate your business into that template so that when you go to exit, you're going to get top dollar for it. So just be, I say this all the time. I'm not a builder. These founders who start a business from nothing and grow it, is kudos to you. I think they're phenomenal. I'm not good at it. Starting from scratch, building a, you know. Getting in a truck and building a business from one guy in a single truck to something really big and interesting, that's not me. The huge amount of respect for me to guys who can do that. But I would tell you, just make sure you have a goal and a vision of what you're trying to achieve. And just take every step you take, every person you hire, every system you implement. Every partner, whether it's in-house marketing or outsourced marketing, make sure it lines up to whatever your goal is and what you're trying to achieve.

38:37 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. I love that message. Keep the end in mind because especially a lot of owners that I talked to are just so stuck in the day to day there they're stuck in the truck or they're stuck doing operations or they're they're stuck doing something and if you can just you maybe spend an hour a day of thinking bigger and Thinking of what you actually want to turn this into rather than almost being a slave to your own business It could be super powerful. So I totally agree. I think that's a great and yeah...

39:01 Dave Bradford

We all do it, right? We're all firefighting. We constantly get in the, I do it. We spend our time firefighting. You got to step back and give yourself time to think. Just take a holistic view. You hear firefighting, you hear people saying, you lose the forest for the trees, all that stuff. You're exactly right. Take a step back every once in a while and just say, OK, remind yourself, this is the end. Am I migrating and moving towards my goal?

39:36 Dan Leibrandt

Well, so real quick, you with you with this massive company and all the responsibilities you have, how do you step back?

39:49 Dave Bradford

I have a really strong team that allows me to step back. One, I'm not a micromanager. Don't, not everything has to go through me. We're too big. If everything has to go through me, we're never going to be successful. So have really, really good people on your team who you trust so that you don't have to be involved in it. That's the thing that is hard for founders is you start getting so big. That you're trying to figure out, man, can't manage all the technicians and do the accounting. I need somebody. So which one? You want somebody to manage the tax, or do you want somebody to do the books and the records? And just make sure you add people to your team that you know you can trust so that you don't have to be involved. You can just look over there. They can update you. But you don't have to be the one who has to get everything done. As you grow and get bigger. And that allows you to take the time to then maybe step away and assess.

40:54 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome, okay, so you need some good people in place so that you can think bigger and not be a slave to your business like I was saying. Well, cool, I think that's a great place to end the show. Thanks so much for coming on, Dave. I know your time is super valuable. Where can people connect with you and Certus?

41:12 Dave Bradford

Yeah, so we have a website, certuspest.com, www.certuspest.com. That's the Holdings company. That's where they can connect. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm really accessible. Shoot, I'll give you my email, [email address removed], but we're pretty accessible.

41:37 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome, cool. So you can find Dave on LinkedIn, make sure to contact him. And is there any size of company or any industry if people are interested in selling?

41:51 Dave Bradford

We'll talk to anybody. And I'm really open. I love helping sellers. I've met a couple Thursday and Friday at Seth Garber's deal. And it may not even lead to a transaction. But I believe in collaboration. If you talk to me, I'm pretty open about what I think is valuable or not valuable. I've talked to owners who weren't doing bait station. And I said, look, man, you've to do bait stations. Highly profitable, great business. It's going to do your business really well. So I'm open to talking to anybody at any size.

42:27 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome, cool. Well, if you guys are interested, make sure to reach out to Dave and thanks again for coming on the show, Dave. This has been awesome.

42:34 Dave Bradford

No, I really appreciate you having me, Dan. Been enjoyable.

42:36 Dan Leibrandt

Of yeah.