[View Point] The timeless lure of entrepreneurism

Like many readers, I was surprised to learn that three prominent members of TruGreen — a key business unit of ServiceMaster — recently left the company to venture out on their own. I shouldn’t have been. The lure of be-coming an entrepreneur is a powerful force in American business, the most direct path to achieving financial independence, not to mention self-determination.

It’s one of the primary reasons that despite hundreds of mergers and acquisitions in the past decade, the pest management industry remains as dynamic and vital today as it was in the post-World War II era when thousands of veterans returned home singing the praises of DDT, eventually opening the doors to pest control businesses throughout the U.S. Although DDT is nothing but a distant memory, replaced by less environmentally persistent pesticides, the desire to own and operate one’s own business is as strong today as it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, even if it’s part of a business unit of a publicly traded company.

What else could explain why Don Karnes, Dave Slott and John Hayes — three highly regarded TruGreen executives — decided to leave the relative comfort of ServiceMaster to join Sunair Electronics, a company specializing in high-frequency radio equipment with no real experience in the service sector?
The triumvirate spent a large portion of their professional lives building an organization (TruGreen) that ultimately would dominate the lawn care industry, contributing significantly to ServiceMaster’s bottom line and generating nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenues. Yet despite their impressive track record of success; despite the corporate accolades and generous executive compensation packages; despite the status that comes with being a “player” in an emerging market, they gave it all up to build a Pest Control Services Division at Sunair Electronics from the ground up. (For the complete story, turn to page 36.)

Hayes said the opportunity to venture out on their own “came along at the right time” for the three longtime business associates. “We were at the right point in our careers and we felt this was a good time to work on our own.” Slott, who grew up in the TruGreen organization, starting out on a lawn care route at 22, said he was feeling “one dimensional” after overseeing a single category of business for ServiceMaster, which serves 10.5 million homes and businesses each year through a variety of brands. “I’m 46, the next five or 10 years seemed like an appropriate time for me to do something different on my own,” he said. “We were all at a point in our careers where we were sitting in a ‘sub’ of a major company as opposed to running our own business.” Karnes, the senior member of the group, put it even more succinctly: “I’m an owner now and that’s very important to me.”

It remains to be seen if Karnes, Slott or Hayes will be successful as entrepreneurs, but they can already claim one small victory: overcoming the fear of failure. It’s the defining quality of an entrepreneur and the difference between simply talking about one’s dreams and actually doing something about it. It’s also the difference between looking back on one’s life and wondering “what if” rather than knowing — regardless of the outcome — that you lived life to the fullest.

The author is publisher of PCT magazine.