These are three decisions that changed how I pay people, how I scale, and how I stopped capping our growth. If you’re running a service industry business, this one’s for you.
My name is Jonas Olson. I’m the founder of Pest Badger. I’ve been in the service industry for 17 years. Over the past five years, I’ve grown a pest control company from one location to 17 locations across five states. I use my YouTube channel to document how I think about scaling service businesses, what’s worked for us, and hopefully what works for you too.
This one took me longer to understand than it probably should have.
Before I was in pest control, I worked a union job. I worked with people who had been there five, 10, 15, 20, even 25 years. They made really good money. A lot of them were super skilled at what they did. But the pace was slow. Everything moved at the same speed no matter who I was working with. There was zero urgency. Not because people couldn’t work harder, but because there was no incentive to work harder.
Back then, around 2008 with the housing downturn, there just weren’t a lot of jobs going around. So guys would milk the job and hope the next one showed up so they didn’t get laid off.
At the same time, I’d started my lawn care business. I was working Monday through Thursday at the union job, getting done at noon on Thursday, traveling back home, and then working my lawn care business Thursday to Sunday. I did this for two years.
I quickly realized something. In my lawn care business, the faster I did my job, the more I got paid. If I wasted time, it cost me money. So I got super efficient. But at the union job, the faster I worked, the more I just stood around or they’d have me sweep the same room for the 15th time.
I noticed right then and there that incentives shape behavior. Period.
I remember thinking, if I ever have employees, I do not want to pay people just for showing up. I don’t care if you’ve been here one year, two years, five years, or ten. May the best man win. We live in America. It’s capitalism at its finest. If you want to go from lead technician to branch manager to partner, I don’t care how long it takes you. Five years, ten years, twenty years. Doesn’t matter to me. Hit your KPIs. Get your licenses. Get your reviews up. The faster you want to work and the more work you want to put in, the more you’ll get paid.
I knew all of this early on. The problem was I didn’t know how to build the model yet. I just knew hourly pay created bad habits I didn’t want.
A few years later, I finally had employees, and I’ll be honest, I started paying them hourly because I didn’t know any other way. Then I caught the same guy standing around on his phone while on the job. I remember it was the middle of a massive snowstorm. I’m out pushing snow, and I’m like, where in the hell is this guy? I look at his GPS, the truck hasn’t moved. I go plow another spot. Come back. Truck still hasn’t moved. I walk up to his door and he’s just sitting there watching a YouTube video in the middle of this massive storm.
It’s not because he was a bad person. The system literally allowed him to do it. Should he have done it? Obviously not. Should he have gotten fired? Yes. He was my first employee. And fast forward 17 years, he’s still here today.
But that’s seriously when it clicked. If your pay structure rewards time, you get time-based behavior. If your pay structure rewards output, you get output-based behavior.
When I switched to pay for performance, the clarity came fast. The people who wanted to produce leaned in. They produced revenue. They did good work. They made more money. The people who didn’t want to keep up made it obvious too. They couldn’t keep up with production, didn’t want to work hard, and wanted to milk the clock. They weaned themselves out.
A couple tips if you’re thinking about testing this: Pick a week where there’s no holidays. If you don’t, and their paycheck ends up smaller because of a day off that week, they’re going to blame the new system even if it had nothing to do with it. Learn from my mistake. I rolled it out on a holiday week and got a bunch of pushback right out of the gate. Also, test it for a week or two, maybe a month or two. Whichever way they get paid more, pay them that way. Show them side by side.
One thing I didn’t expect: payroll got way easier to manage. With the pay-for-performance model, you know what your direct labor is going to be almost all the time because it’s tied to production. Revenue goes up, payroll moves with it. Revenue slows down, payroll adjusts accordingly. It makes budgeting direct payroll way cleaner, especially when you’re growing.
And efficiency goes through the roof. Here’s a good example. I have a really good friend who runs a large fertilization and weed control company. I’d been talking to him about pay for performance for almost two years. The first year, he didn’t pull the trigger. The second year, we were looking at his routes and talking about efficiency, and I told him this was what really moved the needle for us.
That year, he went out and purchased seven new trucks because he thought he’d need them to handle growth for the following year. His trucks were about 100 grand each. That’s $700,000. When he switched to pay for performance, even with all the new work he had lined up, I think he only used one of those trucks. His technicians went from doing 10 to 12 jobs a day to 18, 19, even 20-plus jobs a day. They doubled their routes. Revenue per technician went through the roof.
He lost some people. But the good ones stayed. He changed the culture in his company. And it ended up saving him that $700,000 in the long run because those trucks were already sitting there the following year when he actually needed them.
Same market. Same demand. Just a different incentive structure.
Pay for performance isn’t about squeezing people. It’s about aligning behavior with outcomes. Even our executive team, yes, they’re on a salary, but a good portion of their comp is performance-based. Even myself. I’m performance-based. The further I can get away from hourly pay, the better I sleep at night and the more it helps drive the business forward.
Lesson 2: Get a Mentor
For a long time, I was figuring out everything on my own. I had no one to talk to. I didn’t know anyone in business. I knew I would work hard. I was willing to outwork anyone. I had a lot of energy. I didn’t have a big ego. I just didn’t know. And you don’t know what you don’t know. I didn’t even realize mentors were an option back then. There wasn’t really YouTube. Not like there is now. That’s exactly why I’m making my channel.
My first mentor actually owned a fertilization and weed control company. I went to them and said, “Hey, this is my plan. Can I work with you guys? I’ll work here for free for two years.” And I did. I’d go in before work and after work, after I got done mowing lawns. I’d pull hose. I’d clean trucks. I’d fill trucks. On weekends, I’d go sit there and pull hose all day long. I got paid zero dollars.
People always say, “You worked for free for two summers?” Yeah. But the return on that time was so valuable going forward. I just didn’t know it yet. I wanted to learn, and they were the only company in town. I built a good relationship with them and I still have one today.
Fast forward, I actually went to buy that company. It was all approved by the bank. Then in the last two weeks, the deal fell through. But the next year, when I went to apply for my own business license, you had to have two years of experience. That company signed off that I’d worked for them for two years. That’s actually how I was able to get my own license.
But here’s the thing. I was still working in the business at that point. No employees. No CRM. Not hiring or firing anyone. Just keeping things moving. What I didn’t realize was how much time I was burning solving problems that people had already solved.
Once I started getting around people who were further ahead of me, my whole perspective changed. I got outside the small town. I looked at the big world and thought, this is doable in our industry. Mentors helped me understand what actually mattered next. What to focus on. What could wait. What didn’t need my attention yet. And everything led to bigger mindset shifts. Getting employees. Getting out of the truck. Working on the business instead of in the business.
Another big part was just being around people dealing with the same problems. I felt like I was the only one. I couldn’t talk to my family about it. When I did ask them questions, they’d give me answers that made zero sense because they had no clue what I was talking about. I didn’t have anyone in my local area running a service business who had done anything.
When my mentor put me in a group, a tribe, everyone was dealing with the same problems. Cash flow, marketing, whatever it was. I stopped feeling like I was so far behind. I stopped second-guessing everything. Everyone deals with these problems. I just didn’t know that yet.
Sometimes there’d be a problem that sounded enormous in my head. Then literally one phone call to someone who’d already been through it and it’s solved in five minutes. Not because I wasn’t capable, but because I just hadn’t experienced that part of my journey yet.
Mentors don’t replace the work. But they will shorten the distance between where you are and where you want to go. They remove the guesswork. They’ve already been through it.
I’ve always said you should have three mentors. The first is someone who’s been there and done it successfully, who can shorten that gap for you. The second is someone roughly the same size as you who’s going to push you every single day. And the third is that young kid who’s techy and up with the times, so you don’t fall behind on what’s coming next. In our industry, the tech gets away from you fast.
Go find a mentor. Reach out to people. Find groups, Facebook groups, whatever it takes to get around like-minded people who have already been through the problems you’re dealing with. That’s literally paying the dumb tax if you don’t.
Lesson 3: The Market Is the Ceiling
In our industry, the biggest factor in how big you can build your company is the area you live in. I’m a young kid at this point, and this one took me a long time to understand.
Early on, I thought effort was the main variable. And a lot of it is effort. But most of it is the market and the market cap you’re working with.
I always thought if I just worked harder, I’d grow faster. What I didn’t understand was that the market I was in and the service I chose were the ceiling before I ever even showed up to work.
Early on, I was doing lawn care. In my area, you can only do lawn care for about seven months out of the year. Then you switch to snow removal. On paper, that made sense. That’s what everyone else was doing. But in reality, it didn’t really work. There wasn’t enough snow work to go around. Everyone already had a plow. Prices got pushed down fast. Guys were plowing parking lots at 3 a.m. for 35 bucks an hour. Just what we did back then.
The same thing was happening in lawn care. Everyone had a mower. Everyone was competing on price. The margins were super thin. On top of that, you had one set of equipment for summer and a completely different set for winter. Different equipment, different maintenance, different problems. It’s like running two separate businesses. And in a small town, there just weren’t enough contracts to support it.
In our population, what percentage of people can actually afford weekly lawn maintenance? Pretty slim. I could only grow my business so big.
At the same time, I’m in a group watching my friends grow their service businesses in much larger metro areas. They weren’t doing anything different. They weren’t doing anything magical. They just had more people to serve, more density, and more year-round demand. I couldn’t keep up.
Instead of stepping back and really thinking about it, I tried to make up for it by adding more services. Landscaping. Hydroseeding. Christmas lights. The revenue went up on paper. It looked good. But the business got more complicated. More equipment, more seasonality, more things to manage. I wasn’t building one strong business. I was stacking three smaller businesses on top of each other in the same small market just so I could try to keep up with my friends.
Around that time, I told my mentor my plan. I wanted to take over these four small towns around me, all within 45 minutes to an hour, and then eventually get into a bigger market in Wisconsin. He said, “Why Wisconsin last?” I told him it was the biggest market close enough that I could drive back and forth and not miss out on my kids. He said, “Why don’t you just skip all those small towns and go straight to the bigger one?”
I didn’t have a good answer.
Then COVID hit and Michigan literally shut down. Everything stopped. It forced my hand. I started driving to Green Bay and got myself into a bigger market.
What surprised me was that my strategy didn’t change. Same playbook. Same marketing. Same execution. Within two years, that office grew to double the size of my original office, doing only one to two services total.
I remember my mentor being up on stage, and he said something that stuck with me. He said, “I see a lot of good operators in this room who are just serving the wrong market. They blame themselves and ask, what am I doing wrong? when it’s actually the market doing exactly what it’s designed to do.”
He never said it directly to me. But I felt like he was looking at me the entire time. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe I’ll never know. But I remember thinking, he’s looking at me. I’m in the wrong market.
Around that same time, I found pest control. What stood out immediately was that the season wasn’t the same as lawn care. I could service pest control 12 months out of the year. After a full year of doing it, I knew that was the vehicle to get me where I needed to go. The next year, I sold my company and went all in on pest control.
When It All Comes Together
Once those three things lined up, the business started to make sense.
Pay for performance gave us a way to grow without losing control of payroll and efficiency. Everyone was making more money and the momentum started going in our favor.
Mentors helped remove blind spots that I couldn’t see on my own. I made decisions faster and avoided learning everything the hard way.
Choosing the right service and the right market removed the friction I’d been fighting for years.
When those three pieces came together, growth stopped feeling forced and started feeling replicable. I knew how to run two businesses side by side in two different markets. And I thought, I can do this.
That’s what’s allowed us to take what we’ve learned and apply it across multiple markets. It’s how we went from one location to 17, and how we plan to add more in the years ahead.
I’m going to keep documenting the decisions I make along the way. If you have any questions or thoughts, drop them in the comments.
