Hawx Services partners with private equity firm

LOGO: HAWX SERVICES

Ogden, Utah-based Hawx Services has partnered with private equity firm PCM Growth. The transaction closed in March, with LR Tullius acting as exclusive financial advisor to Hawx. The management team of Hawx, led by Matt Mehr, Scott Wilson and J.K. Gleave, remain with the company and continue to hold significant equity positions. Terms were not disclosed.

PCM Growth was founded and is led by Mike Paulus, a financial investor whose startup successes include Assurance IQ, a Seattle, Wash.-based tech company he founded in 2016 and sold to Prudential Financial in 2019.

Founded in 2013 by President Matt Mehr and CEO Scott Wilson, Hawx started with one branch and has since grown to 16 branches throughout the United States. The company provides general pest control, mosquito and termite services.

“Hawx has grown rapidly by focusing on providing opportunities for our employees to grow, to nurture our customer base and focus in on the customer experience, from sales all the way down through the entire service plan with us,” Mehr said in a news release from LR Tullius.

Mehr reports that Hawx plans to expand into new geographies in the coming year, and capture additional market space.

In the news release, Hawx’s Gleave said pest control is a platform that makes sense for Paulus and PCM Growth because of their past successes in the insurance industry.

“I think there’s a lot of correlation between the two spaces, and with the amount of success Paulus had previously, we believe that together we’ll have the same success here in pest control,” Gleave said.

Scott Wilson said, “We want to be the biggest and best pest control company we can be, and to do that, you have to have a great following of customers, and you have to be able to prove that what you do works. Our goals are quite lofty. We want to continue to grow our current footprint — our four major territories — and continue to open up new branches.”

PCM’s Paulus said of Hawx, “It is a company that has been around long enough to have really learned the model and executed it across a number of locations, but it also has a very entrepreneurial management team that’s incredibly ambitious.”