Gotham Exterminating

One Van. One Apartment. One Family. Thirty Years.

The father started with one work van and ran his first jobs from a kitchen table in a Queens apartment. He was Polish, Catholic, and possessed of a work ethic that did not recognise the concept of a day off. His wife ran the phones. His brothers joined the crews. His sons grew up watching their father build something out of nothing — and then, when they were old enough, they joined the trucks too. By the time we met the family, Gotham Exterminating had eleven work vehicles, a warehouse in Ridgewood, Queens, nineteen people on the payroll, and a client book that any professional pest control operator in New York City would have recognised immediately as exceptional. It was, in every meaningful sense, a multi-million dollar business built from an apartment and a van through nothing more than reliability, word of mouth, and thirty years of showing up.

And the father and mother who had built it were ready — finally, painfully, necessarily — to step back. Not because they wanted to. Because the business had grown beyond what any two people could continue to carry alone.

A 19-Person Family Operation That Outgrew the People Who Built It

At its peak, Gotham Exterminating was a genuinely impressive operation by any measure. Eleven work trucks serving the five boroughs and the tristate area. A warehouse in Ridgewood, Queens — owned outright — that served as the operational hub: vehicle storage, equipment, supplies, and the nerve centre of a business that ran entirely on the father's knowledge of where everything was and what everyone was doing. The mother managed the office from inside that warehouse, handling scheduling, client relations, and the endless administrative complexity of keeping nineteen people coordinated across hundreds of weekly appointments. Brothers and uncles ran the road crews. The younger generation had grown up in the business and had stayed — because it was their father's business, and because the accounts were good, and because leaving felt like abandonment.

The business operated the way Polish immigrant businesses of that generation always operated: on trust, on handshakes, on cash and cheques only — no credit cards, no digital payments — with paper receipts that were filed in physical folders and retrieved from memory when needed. It had no website that functioned. No Google Business Profile. No presence on any directory that a potential customer searching online would ever find. Every single new client had come from a referral. Every single invoice had been written by hand. The business existed, commercially, as if the internet had never been invented — and it had thrived anyway, because the work was that good and the relationships were that deep.

But the private equity firms had started circling the neighbourhood. One by one, the family's competitors — companies with similar histories, similar client books, similar reputations — were being absorbed into national rollups. The new owners cut the longtime employees, replaced the family-business culture with corporate management structures, raised prices, and delivered the kind of service that comes from technicians who have never met the building superintendent and never will. The clients noticed. The family noticed. And the father — watching this happen to people he had known for decades — made a decision: if he was going to sell, it would not be to someone like that.

A Polish Catholic Fund That Understood How They Think

The father did not want to sell to private equity. He had watched what private equity did to businesses like his. He wanted buyers who would retain the employees — particularly the younger family members who had staked their working lives on the business their father had built. He wanted buyers who would build on the reputation rather than replace it. He wanted buyers who understood the culture of a Polish family business: the loyalty, the informality, the sense that the people who work alongside you are not human resources but something closer to an extended family.

When we were introduced — through the kind of personal connection that is the only way these conversations ever happen — the conversation moved quickly. We are Polish. We are Catholic. We run our investment fund on the explicit principle that the dignity of the worker and the continuity of community are not obstacles to financial performance but its foundations. The father understood this immediately, in a way that required very little explanation, because it was the same set of values on which he had built his own business. We were not a foreign entity making an acquisition. We were people who thought and functioned the way he did — and who happened to have the capital and the operational expertise to take his business where he could no longer take it alone.

Eleven Trucks. One Warehouse. Nineteen People. And a Balance Sheet Nobody Had Ever Actually Read.

The due diligence on Gotham Exterminating produced a picture that was simultaneously inspiring and clarifying. The client book was exceptional — exactly the kind of long-tenure, low-churn, relationship-driven account base that takes decades to build and cannot be manufactured. The revenue was real and consistent. The reputation was genuine and widely held. And the assets were more substantial than the business's informal operating style suggested: eleven work trucks, a full inventory of professional equipment, and — most significantly — a warehouse in Ridgewood, Queens, owned outright, that the business used as its operational headquarters.

That warehouse changed the nature of the acquisition. Rather than a pure business purchase, we were acquiring a business with embedded real estate — and that real estate, properly managed, could generate independent income that would permanently reduce the cost structure of the operation. The business did not need the entire warehouse. It needed storage and equipment access. Everything else was unused square footage costing nothing but potential.

The warehouse was added to our real estate holdings and subdivided. Industrial tenants now occupy the partitioned spaces, each paying rent that flows directly into the holding structure. The business retains the storage and equipment access it needs — at no cost, as a sitting tenant within its own former headquarters. The warehouse has gone from a single-use operational cost centre to a multi-tenant income-generating asset. It is now on the balance sheet in two places simultaneously: as operational infrastructure and as investment real estate.

The eleven trucks were sold. The proceeds were applied as a down payment on a fresh fleet of newer, more reliable work vehicles — each assigned to a specific technician who now takes the truck home on weekends. This was not a small decision. In the pest control industry, a technician who takes the truck home is a technician who arrives at the first job of the day already at the wheel, rather than spending forty minutes in morning traffic getting from their apartment to a depot. It reduces the working day's dead time, reduces fuel costs, reduces wear on the vehicles from depot runs, and — most importantly — signals something to the technician: this vehicle is yours to care for, your professional instrument, your responsibility. Ownership of the tool changes the relationship with the work.

Paper Receipts to Digital Systems. Check-Only to Full Payment Infrastructure. Zero Online Presence to a Fully Indexed Digital Operation. Nobody Noticed the Transition.

The business had no digital footprint. No functioning website. No Google Business Profile. No presence on Yelp, Angi, HomeAdvisor, or any directory that a property manager or building superintendent searching for pest control services would ever find. Every client the business had ever gained had come from a personal referral. Every invoice had been written on paper. Every payment had been received by cheque. Credit cards did not exist in this business's operating vocabulary.

This was not negligence. It was a generational operating style that had worked — until it stopped working, because the market had moved on and the competitors who were adopting digital infrastructure were capturing the clients who would otherwise have become referrals. We rebuilt the digital presence from scratch: a professional website optimised for every borough the business serves, a claimed and fully completed Google Business Profile with photography and regular posts, accurate listings across every major directory platform, and a payment system that accepted credit cards, digital transfers, and automated recurring billing for contract clients. The paper receipts became digital invoices. The cheque-only policy became a full payment suite. The invisible business became findable.

The woman who had run the office from inside the Ridgewood warehouse — the mother, the person who had held the administrative side of this business together for decades through sheer personal organisation — was moved to a work-from-home arrangement. She kept her role. She kept her income. She lost the brutal morning commute from her home in Queens into a commercial warehouse district. She gained the ability to be present when her children came home from school. This was not a cost-saving measure dressed up as a benefit. It was the right thing to do — and it was possible only because we had closed the warehouse office and moved the operational administration to digital systems that required no physical location to function.

+140% Revenue. −47% Operating Costs. And the Father and Mother Building Their Next Chapter in the Country They Started From.

In the nine months following acquisition, revenue grew 140% and operating costs fell 47%. The numbers are real and they are the product of changes that, individually, each seemed obvious — and collectively produced a transformation that no single party inside the business had the time, the capital, or the operational distance to execute while simultaneously running nineteen people across eleven trucks every single day.

The younger family members stayed. This was not guaranteed and it was not taken for granted. They stayed because the business their father built was still recognisably the business their father built — with the same clients, the same reputation, the same commitment to quality — and because the new infrastructure made their own working lives materially better rather than worse. The accounts are growing. The team is growing. The digital presence that did not exist eighteen months ago is now generating inbound enquiries from property managers and building owners who found the business through a Google search — clients who would never have been reached through the referral network alone.

And the father and mother? They are in the process of a partial retirement that has taken them, for extended periods, back to Poland — the country from which the father emigrated, in which the family still has roots, and in which Fides Polonia Capital Management is headquartered. We meet with them in Kraków to discuss operations. The conversation happens in Polish, over coffee, between people who share a common frame of reference about what a business is for and what it owes to the people who built it. The father checks in on the accounts. He talks to the team. He is not gone — he is freed, finally, from the daily administrative burden that was consuming him, able to engage with the business he built on his own terms, at his own pace, from a place of pride rather than exhaustion.

One Happy Owner Tells Another. The Second Acquisition Is Already in Progress.

The most reliable signal that an acquisition has been handled correctly is what the seller does afterwards. The father did not retreat into silence. He talked about the experience — at family gatherings, in the Polish community, and in conversations with other business owners he had known for decades. One of those conversations reached his cousin, who also owns a pest control company in New York City, and who is also at the point where the business has grown beyond what one person can carry alone without sacrificing the rest of their life to carry it.

We are now in the process of acquiring that second company through exactly the same approach: direct conversation, no intermediary, full transparency about what we will do and how we will do it. The second owner knows what the first owner's experience was like because the first owner told him. That referral — one Polish family business owner recommending us to another — is the only pipeline we want. It is slower than a broker-led process. It produces better outcomes for everyone involved.

This report is prepared exclusively for qualified and professional investors as defined under MiFID II. Nothing contained herein constitutes investment advice or an offer to sell securities. All financial figures represent internal management accounts and have not been independently audited. Fides Polonia Capital Management — KNF registration pending. Rynek Główny, Kraków, Poland.