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Truly David Nolen, with the unusual first name and even quirkier sense of humor, has two major life accomplishments that belie his joke-around, prankster persona.
For one, in 1951 at 23 years old he survived polio — well past the age most people got the disease. He was encased in an iron lung for a year. Doctors told him he would never walk again. He persevered, and later not only regained full health but was able to check off another success: launching and growing a pest control business, Truly Nolen, into a $114.7 million global operation with more than 320 locations in 63 countries.
Nolen died April 18 at his home in Naples. He was 89 years old.
“He was a great salesman and a great businessman,” says Michelle Nolen Senner, his daughter and one of eight children. “He had a great work ethic.”
Senner, now director of marketing and advertising for the company, describes a father who had two contradictory sides that somehow meshed perfectly together. On one side, he was the funniest guy in the room, with a humor shaped by Mel Brooks movies and his all time favorite, “Airplane!” He named one kid Really Philip Nolen — really. He named another kid Sincere Leigh Nolen. Nothing was off limits. “Anything that would embarrass people,” says Senner, “he was a fan of it.”
Nolen used humor to get through polio. “I actually started reading Reader's Digest for the jokes,” Nolen said in a 2007 Business Observer interview after he was awarded the Humanitarian of the Year Award from International College, now Hodges University. “The humor section really made each day better. I just see things through those eyes. Everything's funny.”
That perspective was an ally in 1955 when Nolen launched a pest control business in Tucson, Ariz. His father, Truly Wheatfield Nolen, founded a pest control business in 1938 in Miami Beach, but this company was separate. Nolen led the company on a growth spurt, to California, Texas and New Mexico. Nolen relocated to Naples in the 1990s, and he ran the business from a home office while it maintained its official headquarters out west.
It was also out west where the company developed its now ubiquitous yellow Mousecar: “Our cars were originally red, so we made them look like an ant,” Nolen says in a post on the company's website. “From there, we added big ears, I mean really big ears, and a thin tail and made it into a mouse. Over the years, we added eyebrows and the other features you see today. It really was an evolution.”
Senner, who got paid in Barbie dolls when she worked for the family business when she was a kid, says the business lessons she learned from her father were nearly endless. Nolen's rules to live by included: “Find humor in everything, even adversity. Stay positive and persistent to the extreme. Work hard, play hard. Do what you want to, not just to make money. Don't be afraid to be different — take a chance.”
Above all else, says Senner, there was Nolen's problem-solving philosophy. “'Don't tell me it can't be done,' he would say,” Senner says. “You have to find a way to yes.”
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