Well, to be honest, I don't know what a "normal annealing process" means to the person you spoke to. I would think they would be referring to a process anneal, which takes hours to do properly, and is not the "best" starting structure to harden from. They may be referring to subcritical annealing, but I don't know for sure. The DET anneal is an excellent annealing procedure developed by Dr Verhoeven that really works well for hypereutectoid knife steels like 52100, W2, etc, and is relatively quick, just less than an hour total time.
I think most of the pro heat treat services out there "understand" the processes of normalizing/cycling/annealing/quench/cryo/temper, but I don't know if any would actually do all of it for you. I guess everything has a price, and time is very expensive. As you can see, that takes quite a bit of time to do. I don't have an argon purge oven, so I use ATP641 antiscale on every heat cycle (except for tempering), and applying that takes time. You factor in the hour long cryo quench and those 3 tempers (6 hours in the oven, plus the cool down time between), it takes 9 hours or so.
And to be perfectly honest, especially when it comes to the steels from AKS, in REAL WORLD use, I am not so sure that you would be able to notice a substantial improvement in doing that whole protocol, vs just hardening it as recevied (meaning skipping the normalizing/cycling/and DET anneal). I do it for peace of mind, as that way I know 100% certain what my starting condition is when I go to harden the blade, and it is the best possible HT I can give it.
