Most pest control owners are stuck. They’re doing $300,000, maybe $500,000 a year, working 60 to 80 hours a week, and they can’t figure out how to break through to the next level without completely burning out.
They’re answering phones at 8 PM. They’re running routes during the day. They’re doing estimates on weekends. They’re posting on social media at midnight. They’re the technician, the salesperson, the scheduler, the marketer, and the billing department all rolled into one exhausted person.
Then they wonder why they can’t grow.
Here’s what nobody tells you about scaling a pest control business: You can’t scale yourself. You can only scale systems. And most people don’t have any systems. They have a job where they happen to be the boss.
I’ve built multiple pest control companies, cleaning companies, and moving companies. I’m a fractional CMO for service-based businesses across the country. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t when it comes to actually scaling, not just getting bigger but staying sane.
The companies that scale aren’t the ones working the hardest. They’re the ones who figured out how to get out of their own way. They’re the ones who learned to delegate, hire the right people, build partnerships, and create systems that run without them micromanaging every detail.
In this guide, I’m going to walk you through exactly how to scale your pest control business from wherever you are now to multiple six figures or seven figures without working yourself to death. We’re talking about virtual assistants, strategic partnerships, training systems, marketing delegation, and hiring A players who actually care about your business.
Let’s get into it.
Virtual Assistants: Your Secret Weapon for Scaling
A virtual assistant, or VA, is someone who works remotely to handle tasks for your business. They can be here in the US virtually, somewhere in Mexico, the Philippines, wherever.
A virtual assistant can do a multitude of tasks for you. As the name says, it’s all virtual. You want someone to answer your phones? You want someone to do routing, billing, scheduling, ordering your chemicals from Veseris, ordering your plane tickets? You can have a virtual assistant do that for you.
What Roles VAs Can Actually Handle
For me, my virtual assistants do virtually everything. One of the first roles I think you should have a virtual assistant do is some simple tasks at the start. Checking your emails for you. Taking your after-hour phone calls that you might be missing.
Then you can go into deeper tasks. This could be actually answering your day-to-day phone calls. This could be doing your scheduling, doing your routing. You could get even farther into it where they’re ordering chemicals from Veseris or Univar, whatever you’re doing.
The high-level tasks? Really anything you can have a virtual assistant do.
How about outbound sales? Yeah, they can do outbound sales, inbound sales. I have all my virtual assistants calling all my leads right now. The great thing about it is you can have them do multiple touches and their hourly rate is less. Their commissions and hourly rates, if you choose to go outside the United States, are going to be a lot less. You’re going to save a lot more money.
Mexico vs Philippines vs USA
Should you hire overseas or domestic? My personal opinion, I think the best place to get them is Mexico and the Philippines.
I’ve tried India, I’ve tried Pakistan, I’ve tried Honduras. There are great people in every single spot. There’s a time and place for different regions. However, I think for pest control specifically, the best place to hire is going to be the Philippines or Mexico.
I prefer Mexico if you’re going to have someone do lead calls, answer the phones, do inbound and outbound. They’re going to be the best. They also speak Spanish too, which is fantastic for most parts of the country. They’re going to sound the most American on the phone.
A huge advantage is in Mexico, they’re so close by to us, but the difference in wage is massive. You could find a CSR here for 25 bucks an hour. Mexico is going to be five to ten dollars an hour, that’s all.
You can get three virtual assistants in Mexico that are just as skilled as one person here in the US.
The Philippines are great as well. They can be even lower. Three to eight dollars an hour for people in the Philippines. You’re going to find some really high-quality people in the Philippines as well.
The Domestic Advantage
What would be an advantage hiring domestically here in the US? The advantage would be that they know our culture. Background checks are a lot easier. Higher-level positions I would definitely still stick to the US.
Any manager roles, large manager roles, anything that has to do with managing large teams or financials, I would stick to Americans. That’s pretty tough to get to a virtual system on that end of things.
Responding to the “Cheap Labor” Criticism
What about people who push back and say you’re just trying to get cheap labor?
Well, I am trying to be more profitable. But here’s what people don’t understand: the wages in Mexico or the Philippines are much different. The standard of living is so much different.
For example, if someone makes 20 bucks an hour here, they can have a decent lifestyle. They can survive. Well, over in Mexico, if I pay them eight dollars an hour, that’s like essentially making 80K there. They’re actually living a better lifestyle there even though the wage gap is so much different.
When I talk to people about this, it’s like, hey, if someone in Mexico right now is making three or four dollars an hour and they’re living their life, paying their bills, whatever it may be, and then I come in and say, “Hey, I’ll actually pay you nine dollars an hour,” I sure don’t feel like I’m taking advantage of anyone when I’m paying them double what they were already getting paid.
When I get the Christmas card at the end of the year that tells me, “Thank you so much for this opportunity, you changed me and my family’s life,” that is massive to me and makes a difference in the business too.
The Three-Step Vetting Process
How do you vet and train your VAs effectively? The vetting process can be complex depending on what position you’re hiring for.
If it’s a position where they’re doing something simple like just maybe answering your inbound phone calls, they don’t need to be as high-skilled as someone in a managerial position. You’re going to have more questions depending on how high-level that position is. The lower level, of course, the less you need to vet them.
What I do for my company is I put them through a three-stage interview process.
Interview one is just simply to know who they are, what their background is. We do a background check. We look at what their skills are and what their weaknesses are.
Interview two is actually a skill assessment test. We take them through an assessment of actual job-like things they’re going to be doing. We’ll ask them real-life questions that they might get on a call. We want them to be in real time and see if they can think on the spot.
The third final one is a skill assessment and a review on why they actually want the position and if they would be a good fit for our culture.
Some people may think that’s kind of intensive, but when you have a lot of candidates to choose from, you always want to pick the best one. That’s why we do that three-step process.
Tracking VA Performance
How do you track the VA’s performance? You’re not in the same country typically.
I use a system called Hubstaff. It actually allows me to track what they’re doing on a minute basis, hourly basis, wherever you want to do it. Some of you might think that’s a little bit of micromanager, but where they say when the cats are away, the mice will play, that’s what we want in pest control, right?
It’s just true even for virtual assistants. No matter how good the interview is, no matter how great the assistant is, if you’re not managing them and staying on top of the work, just naturally as humans we kind of fade down that rabbit hole of just letting stuff go by.
I use Hubstaff to track actually what they’re doing. That way if it’s 3 PM and they said they were working on scheduling, I can actually go in there, look at their screen, and see if they were working on scheduling and not watching Netflix.
Communication Tools
What tools ensure smooth communication and task flow? We like to use a system called Slack. We have teams on Slack. Slack is a fantastic place to communicate with your teams, your virtual assistants, on there.
Then also WhatsApp is a very easy system to use. It’s just like texting, as you would on an iPhone, just on a different app. You can get notifications just like you would through a text. WhatsApp and Slack are fantastic ways to communicate with virtual assistants.
My VA Story
I own a few pest control companies. How I even got into the staffing world was I had a girl in Kansas City. She was awesome, but she got pregnant and she wasn’t coming back. She was like, “Hey, peace out, not coming back.”
I was kind of freaking out. I was like, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do without my staff here?” I had a buddy tell me, “Hey, you should consider looking at a virtual assistant.”
I said the same thing. I was like, “What the heck is a virtual assistant?” He told me just like what I’m telling you guys. I was like, “Ah, well, I’ll give it a shot.”
I tried a person in Pakistan, a person in India, a person in Honduras. I tried like eight different companies. Then I found a company in Mexico that was awesome. We got our first virtual assistant. She was great. I ended up getting another virtual assistant and another virtual assistant.
By this time I was like, “Wow, this is the way to go for my scheduling, my routing, my calls.” I was like, “Man, I have three virtual assistants now for the price of my last American girl.”
That was like an aha moment for me. I ended up buying the company with a buddy of mine. Now we have a staffing agency where we help a bunch of other business owners like myself find virtual assistants that can execute on these tasks.
Since we’ve done it before, we know exactly what to look for. We help people with the interview process, the hiring process, and putting together these communication channels.
The Biggest Mistakes
What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make? The biggest mistake I see people make, number one, is communication. They don’t communicate properly with their virtual assistant.
A lot of that has to do with systems. We talk about systems a lot. If you don’t have those systems set up, like your standard operating procedures or SOPs, you can’t really communicate with them effectively either.
One thing I always tell people before hiring: “Okay, so you’re going to hire this person that’s going to take calls for you and help you with your scheduling.”
They’re like, “Yep.”
I’m like, “Okay, awesome. What’s your script look like so I can check it out?”
They’re like, “I don’t have a script.”
I’m like, “All right, so we’re going to need a script for your general pest, your mosquito, your termite, whatever it may be. What do your CSRs usually say when people call in?”
They’re like, “Ah, I don’t know.”
These are huge mistakes I see people make when they bring on a virtual assistant. They don’t have any of those things set into place. You can’t expect the virtual assistant to go through a day or two or even a week of training and know exactly what to do if you don’t have those standard operating procedures in place.
It’s everything. It will fail. Your virtual assistant will not be able to succeed in your company if you don’t have that communication channel and all those standard operating procedures and scripts in place.
Where to Find VAs
Is there anything else about VAs that I didn’t ask? I would say if you don’t go through our company, that’s totally fine. If you don’t go through ours, there are some awesome places to look for VAs.
Number one is a very common one a lot of people know: Upwork. Another one is Fiverr. That’s a great place. Then there’s another one called Online PH or Online.PH. It’s all Philippines.
These are really good resources to find virtual assistants on a project basis. Just one thing I will say when looking into virtual assistants is make sure you do your due diligence on the vetting process. Make sure the virtual assistant can actually execute on the task and that they’re ready to do the task for you.
Another thing I cannot stress enough: make sure your communication standards are set in place and communicate with them on everything that you expect them to do.
I see that often where they’ll bring on a virtual assistant, they’re two weeks in, and they’re like, “Hey, they picked their kid up at three o’clock and they never told me,” or “I want them to do this task and this task and this task and they just didn’t do it.”
But there was no communication channel or standard set beforehand of what they wanted. I could talk for hours about these things, but those are the things I see happen a lot. Make sure those things are set into place.
Strategic Partnerships: The Fastest Path to Growth
Strategic partnerships are important for several reasons. Number one, it’s going to get you a lot of exposure very quickly. Number two, you can be very profitable quickly because you don’t have to do all these marketing channels instantaneously, which is going to take a little bit of time.
All the marketing stuff we talk about is going to take a little time. What I like about strategic partnerships is it’s very quick if you do it properly and you know what you’re doing.
It’s actually the first thing I do when I go into a brand new market. Okay, who can I partner with? Who is a company that we can send business back and forth with and win together?
That’s why they’re important. You get your brand out there quicker and it’s a win-win for both you and the strategic partner.
When Should You Start Partnering?
If you’re brand new to business ownership or brand new to being a pest control owner specifically, I would definitely get a few clients first. Get your systems down. Get your processes down.
The reason I say that is because strategic partnerships can bring you so much business that it can put you in a hole.
I can share a story on that. I reached out to a strategic partnership around 270 to 300 clients, roughly somewhere around that range. I reached out to them on LinkedIn. They happened to be a lawn care company. We’re good buddies now, but we partnered with them.
I realized very quickly that they had a lot more customers than we had. They had about 4,000 to be exact. I had 300. They had 4,100 customers.
Well, I was a dummy. Don’t do this. I sent out all the text messages within the first week. We got a lot of people who responded that wanted pest control because this was a lawn care company that didn’t do pest control and they had never told anyone about pest control, never had a strategic partnership on pest control.
As you can probably imagine, there were a lot of texts back. It got to the point where so many people texted back and so many people were interested in the service, it took me and my team too long to get back to people and we couldn’t service people in that amount of time.
It actually was a really bad scenario. Luckily we figured it out. We hired enough people. We got a loan for trucks. We had to go through some stuff to try to figure out how to service those people.
It was a little scary. However, it worked out. We ended up having a good relationship with that strategic partnership moving forward. But if you guys are brand new, you don’t have any systems, don’t have any processes, don’t make that stupid mistake that I did.
Make sure you have things set up before you do that. But if you feel like you’re ready for it and you have a good strategic partnership in town that you can build and you do it the right way, it’s like a cheat code. It really is. You can put on hundreds of accounts within 90 days. It’s that good.
Which Businesses Make the Best Partners
What local businesses make the best referral partners? Number one, you’ve got to make sure you find someone reputable in town. Do not partner with people that have bad reputations. It’s an interview process. Make sure they’re reputable, they have good reviews.
Preferably they’ve been around for a few years or so. Most important, they have good reviews and they’re reputable, good people.
Another thing you want to look out for is someone who is willing to sign an agreement that you guys don’t take each other’s customers later on. I actually have an agreement that I have with my strategic partnerships. Everything is transparent. If we’re going to send business back and forth to each other or we’re going to share each other’s customer lists, which is a very sensitive piece of info, you have to have a legal agreement there.
If they’re not willing to sign anything, that’s a red flag. Don’t partner with them.
As far as industry-wise, if you’re a pest control company, great strategic partnerships are going to be lawn care companies that don’t do pest control. That’s a given.
Moving companies are actually fantastic because people will be like, “Yeah, I’m moving out of town. We need to cancel service.” Boom, you can send them to a moving company and you can get a really nice referral and help build that moving company.
Others are property managers, real estate agents, HVAC companies, plumbing, roofing. Pretty much any service-based business that is actually going to homes just like you are as a pest control owner are going to be great strategic partners.
The best ones I’ve seen for me personally are moving, lawn care companies, and pool cleaning companies. Those have been the best for us.
It’s the same target demographic. In the service industry, it’s pretty much the same across the board. Same buyer, same price point.
Commission or Trade Exposure?
Should you offer commission or just trade exposure? I would definitely offer commission.
The reason we don’t just trade exposure is I see with a lot of strategic partners, they’ll be like, “Hey, Jonas, I’m going to give you business.” “Hey, Jake, I’m going to give you business.” It’s like a handshake agreement.
I wouldn’t do that because you’re not going to get as much as you can out of that partnership.
What we actually do a little different than what most people do in strategic partnerships is we put it onto a software called Go High Level and we’ll put that customer list into the CRM.
Let’s say I have a pest control company and we get a lawn care company, ABC Lawn Care. We’ll put ABC Lawn Care into the CRM and we’ll actually text their customers on their behalf.
The guy’s name is John. “Hey, my name is John. I’m with ABC Lawn Care. We just partnered with Green Day Pest Control.” We’ll let everyone know if you’re interested in pest control, here’s a coupon or discount code that we’re doing.
That’s how we’re communicating. The reason that’s so important is because there’s transparency. Both you and the strategic partnership have access to the communication so they can’t screw you.
How to Track Partner Referrals
How do you track and follow up on partner referrals? Going back to the Go High Level side of things, you want that transparency tracking.
You need to have transparency in that pipeline. Your strategic partner is going to have a login and you are going to have a login. You’re going to send everyone out a text or an email, however you decide. I suggest a text.
Both of you are going to be able to see the text messages that are going through there. When you call or they call that client, those need to be recorded as well so you can actually see if they closed them or not. You’re not screwing each other.
Obviously I’m sending your customers a text, but you’re also going to send my customers a text. That way it’s a win-win.
In the beginning, let’s say you’re watching this and you’re kind of where I was when I first did this. You’ve got 300 clients, they’ve got 4,000. It’s not going to be as advantageous for them.
You must sell them on the dream. Almost like pitching to a door-knocking rep or someone you’re growing a company with.
What I literally said was, “Hey, I own a pest control company here. I’m looking to partner with someone in town. I’m going to grow by thousands of accounts here in the next few years. I’m looking for a reputable company that can partner with me that I can send my leads to. I don’t plan on doing lawn care. I want to do pest control. I want somewhere where I can send those clients. I’m looking for that partnership. Are you looking for something like that where I can send my business to if you’re willing to send your business to me?”
I had a lot of people say no, but you don’t need everyone to say yes. You just need one good one in town to say yes.
Email Lists vs Text Lists
Is it worth getting a strategic partner’s email list? Email list is okay. It’s not going to be as good as getting their texting list. People are more responsive to text. You’re going to get a lot more leads. You’re going to get a lot more sales with phone numbers.
Emails, if that’s the best they can do, emails are still fine. You’ll still get sales from that if their email list is large enough. But I would definitely stick to text messages if you want to get the optimal results.
What if you find a big company that doesn’t have a CRM? We just ran into that. Then you would just want to sell them on the CRM. You could do the same thing. You just get a list in like a spreadsheet, download to a CSV, and then put it into Go High Level.
Red Flags to Avoid
What red flags indicate a partnership isn’t worth going after? Number one, their reputation is bad. Number two, they won’t sign the agreement.
Look for someone who’s got four and a half stars on Google or more. If you’re trying to partner with a company and they only have like ten clients, you may want to find a little bit bigger of a company.
I had someone the other day like, “Hey, I got a strategic partnership.” I’m like, “Awesome, let’s connect them.” The first one we had had like 78 clients. If you got a thousand of those, you’d be in a good spot. A lot of partners.
Success Stories
Can you share a success story from strategic partnerships? We had one person in our class that ended up getting a list of 12,000 customers. 12,000.
I actually haven’t followed up with them in a few months, but I know that 12,000 customer list, they were willing to send out a text. Even if 1 percent converted, that’s 120 customers.
I’m guessing this company at the time was probably close to 800 to 1,000 customers. They got a massive list.
There’s one thing I will say: if you haven’t done this, you need to. Pretty much everyone that we know that has gone through our class, everyone ends up getting a strategic partnership.
Even if you’ve got four partnerships with a pool cleaning company, HVAC company, lawn care company, you’ve created your own mastermind group in your town. You create your own networking group, almost like your own referral group, like BNI but without the 8 AM meetings.
Me and my buddies in my city, we all go on vacations together. It’s the BNI group of your town but you just hang out.
Common Mistakes
What are the most common mistakes you see? No transparency. You need a software that has transparency and that you both can see it because you do need to trust each other.
Another common mistake is people are just doing handshake agreements. They’re like, “Well, I’ll send you business if you send me business.” Then you both are like, “Cool, awesome.” Then you may send like one referral or even 20, but you’re just trading business cards.
You don’t want to do that. To make this really go fast and make it effective, you need to send out text messages to their customers and you need them to send text messages to your customers.
It’s so much more effective. People are like, “Well, I don’t want to bother my customers. I don’t want that text to go out to them.”
I promise it’s worth it. Jonas and I contact our customers all the time. People do not care as much as you think.
Training Team Members: Building the System That Scales
Why is training new team members so important? It sounds pretty basic, but training team members is super important so they actually can do their job effectively.
I see it a lot. It does sound silly to us right away, but I see a lot of times people will just throw a new team member into a job position. I was one of those guys. They just expect you to execute on it effectively. They’re like, “They’re not doing it right or they messed up here, messed up here.”
A lot of times it just has to do with how much training is actually happening.
My mentor told me a long time ago that you want to over-train people. Over-train them to where a third grader could do it. That’s how we set up all our standard operating procedures when going into training. If I look at this training in my SOP, could a third grader execute on it?
I’m not saying that in a demeaning way. It’s just how you want to set up all your training. Could a third grader execute on it?
The Ideal Onboarding Timeline
What’s the ideal onboarding timeline for new hires? I think this is probably different for every hire. Let’s keep it basic. Maybe talk about a CSR and maybe a technician.
In a CSR and even like an inside sales rep, we are hopping on Zoom calls with them every single day. We even go over their call recordings. That’s another thing: if you guys aren’t doing it, you should be recording everything.
We record all our call recordings, listen to those, and we do that every single day, usually for at least two months. It’s pretty typical. After that you can go to weekly and then biweekly, and then we always do monthly.
We have an onboarding process too. It’s a two to three-week process. I think it’s a week, maybe two weeks at this point, before they can get on phones. They’re obviously sitting with the CSRs and the sales team. They’re listening to past calls or they’re listening to new calls. They’re going through a lot of the handbook and just the online training that we have.
Common questions and answers that they’re going to have to know before they even feel comfortable on the phone. Then from there, they’re going to sit with one of our CSRs or office manager and they’re going to answer phones live in front of them for a while, for a few weeks.
For a few weeks before we send them off on their own, which happens a lot. People just toss them.
Same thing with the technician side. The technicians, of course, they’re going to do a ride-along. They’re not going to be sent out there right away. Even if they’ve been teching for 15 years, they still have to do the ride-along.
That depends too on how long they’ve been teching and if they came from another company or even if they’ve been in town. We want them to be able to navigate the city properly too. Usually we have a ride-along anywhere from three weeks to a month. It’s pretty typical.
For the first three to five days, you’re going to be in the office training, watching videos, really hitting on the culture, getting that from them, talking about the career path and what it’s going to look like. Obviously watching videos, a lot of the trainings that we have pre-recorded on our training platforms that they’re going to go through. We have some tests in there that they have to take, basic tests.
Obviously we’re going to go, if they don’t have their license at this time or certification depending on your state, you’ve got to get them certified, licensed, up to speed. Then from there, they’re going to do ride-alongs with the lead technician for a couple weeks. I think it’s two to three weeks, don’t quote me.
It depends exactly who it is, right around there. Then from there, they’re going to be off on their own, but then we’re going to have another manager ride along with them servicing. I think for the fifth week right around there, we finally let them go off on their own. But then our branch manager’s going to do spot checks for the first week.
After that first week of doing spot checks, the week after they’re kind of on their own. But we’re always doing spot checks with technicians, making sure they’re doing a good job, talking to their customers, making sure they’re checked in, things like that. We’re just trying to keep an eye on them.
Technical Skills vs Company Culture
How do you train for both technical skills and company culture? Technical skills are pretty simple. They’re going to do a lot of deep diving on the books and learning, and then they’re going to go with the master technician.
The technical side I think is somewhat of the easiest part to learn. They’re going to watch the lead technician or general manager for quite a while. I’m not going to send them off on their own. Mastering it takes a while. It takes 10,000 hours of mastering, so it does take some time. But if they’re around a good technician, they learn that skill pretty easy.
At the end of the day, we’re all kind of doing the same thing. It’s not rocket science. It’s pest control. There’s obviously some nuances to it. There are people that know way more about pest control than I know. There are entomologists out there that know way more about bugs than I ever will or ever want to.
But we have those people on staff that we can reach out to at all times. We don’t have them work for us 40 hours a week, but we have them on retainer that we can reach out to them. We have recordings of them.
We have that team on retainer teaching us in person. We’re having the entomologists come in, we’re watching them, we’re recording everything that they’re teaching us, servicing, watching them record everything. We put that into our training platforms. That’s how we do the technical side.
Company culture is taught. It’s talking about culture all the time too. Talking about your core values all the time, which sounds so dumb and cliche. It does. It’s overused. Like certain times it feels like it’s overused.
But I missed the culture boat. I’ve said this a million times too. Everyone just talking about culture, culture, culture, culture. I was like, “Yeah, sounds cool.” I don’t really understand it until you understand it.
It’s to the point now where I can walk into any one of my branches and I can tell the culture is different or off. It’s like this feeling of energy that’s there. You walk in and you can almost feel the tenseness. What’s going on here? Without anyone being around, you can just tell.
Yeah, it’s talking about core values, talking about culture, doing fun events with your team. Bonds aren’t made when everything’s good. You’re going to have bad days. The bonds, the teams are built on bad days and how you come together and work as a team. How you react to situations too.
It has a lot to do with that. Then just have your company meetings, whether they are daily or weekly with the technician meetings. Have the morning huddle every single morning with each branch, whether it’s sales or service. Having those morning huddles so everyone knows what’s going on inside the team, what’s going on for the day, what the routes look like.
One of my friends has a location where all his trucks are in one spot. They have someone meet at the gate. They have someone at the gate at all times. When they drive through, the person that’s exiting them out goes over the route, makes sure they have everything, checks out the trucks.
All of these things play a big role in culture. What do you guys do outside of work? Do you guys have events? Do you hang out? Do you take them to places? Do you give them cool swag? Do you incentivize them? Do you post them on social media? Do you recognize them internally and externally?
We talk about culture all day long, but these are things that it takes time to get someone bought into culture. Once they’re bought in, the employees will not care until they know that you care. Once they know that you care, they’ll run through a wall for you. You still got to take care of them.
Start Culture Early
Start culture early with your first hire. Make sure your first hire is exactly who you want. Hire people that are like you or who you would hang out with.
Let’s be honest, this is our home away from home. We spend more time there than we actually do at home. If you don’t like someone, if you don’t like going to work if someone’s there, there’s a problem. You own the company. You’ve got to fix the problem.
If you don’t like your company, you can fix it. If you don’t like something, the way it runs, only you can fix it. You don’t have to deal with it. I think people forget this. You’re in charge. You built this business to serve you, not the other way around.
If you don’t like something in your company, fix it.
I had this conversation two weeks ago. A friend called and he was bitching about something that he didn’t like. I’m like, “Man, well then fix it.”
He didn’t talk. He’s like, “Well, Jonas, I’ve never actually heard that before.”
I go, “It’s that simple. If you don’t like something, fix it. You own the company.”
He’s like, “I love that piece of advice.”
You don’t know until you don’t know. If you’re listening to this and you don’t like something, fix it.
Pre-Recorded Training Videos
One huge piece of advice I got: make sure that you hire on culture right away, someone you like, and make sure with the training, it’s all consistent across your platforms, whether it’s Trainual or whatever it may be.
Make sure everyone watches the same training, gets the same info, gets all the same systems, processes, scripts. Everything dialed in exactly the same.
I would just second that. Make sure you’re training the trainers. Make sure they’re on top of their game too. Even all my executive team, they all have coaches still. If I have coaches, they need coaches. I pay for every single one of them to have coaches too if they need it. We all have to get better together.
Here’s what I will say from my experience: I did all the jobs. I was a good technician, good sales guy, all this. But the further the service got away from me, the worse it got.
I trained the manager. That manager trained the next manager. Not everything was exactly the same. He forgot a few things and didn’t teach the next person exactly the right way like I did. Then they taught the next person. The further and further it got from me, I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “How? I couldn’t believe it got that far away.”
If I could circle back a few years earlier on, I would have stayed a little bit closer to service a little bit longer. But then having the platform, having the standard for how I service or how we should be serviced.
So that it’s across the board everywhere. If you were to go from one location to the next, every technician should be saying the same things, talking the same language, starting at the same spot in the house, servicing the exact same way.
Think of this like a franchise model, like McDonald’s. You go from one McDonald’s to the next, all the recipes are the same. It’s quality control.
Chick-fil-A is a good example. Their training is superb. They’re all saying the same things. They’re using the same equipment. They’re using the same machines. You just know what you’re going to get.
It’s the same thing with us. No matter which technician goes out there and services, they should all be talking the same language, saying the same things, having a pest-free day with them, all the simple things that we teach. We’re in the same pants and everything.
The further the service got away from me, the worse it got. Make sure you stay on top of that.
The Biggest Mistakes
What are the biggest mistakes people make with training? The biggest mistake is simply not training enough or not training at all.
I’m not sitting here saying that we’re perfect. There’s always room to get better. If you guys think I’m sitting here because I run a big company and everything’s perfect and not messy, that’s not true. I constantly get reminded of things all the time that I know I should be doing and we’re not doing.
We’ve definitely gotten better in the training aspect, but I had to learn the hard way. Circling back to what I said earlier, I walked into a couple offices and I watched them service. I’m like, “What about this, this, and this?”
“Well, yeah, we don’t do that here.”
I’m like, “Well, we really need to.”
“You know, let’s go back and fix it.”
Then you tell them why. “Oh, well, I didn’t really even know that because no one showed them.”
The further the service got away from me, if you’re an owner listening, here’s the thing: there’s a lot to do to get to a million dollars in revenue. A lot of people are almost absent from their business. They’re like, “Yeah, I haven’t been to the office in four months.”
That’s cool, but make sure you sit with the CSRs for a week. Sit with the marketing team for a week. Sit with the retention department for a week. Do ride-alongs for a week with the technicians. You’ll really see what’s going on and really see where you can improve.
Standard Operating Procedures
One final piece I would add: make sure you have standard operating procedures written out and everyone knows them. That’s going to be really important because I see a lot of companies, especially smaller ones, don’t have any of those standard operating procedures.
Just like anything else, it doesn’t get any easier as you get bigger. With ChatGPT these days, you can pretty much put it in there and it’ll spit out everything that you need.
I hired a consultant company, brought them in a few years ago that created all our SOPs across the board. It was expensive. I’m still to this day thankful that I did it. It was great.
But it doesn’t get any easier as you get bigger. So just do it when you’re small. Don’t overdo them. Don’t spend too much time on them because they constantly evolve. What works at $300,000 won’t work the same at $800,000. What works at $800,000 won’t work at $2 million. All the systems break and you kind of got to redo them.
Delegating Marketing: Getting Out of the Weeds
Why is delegation so important for marketing? A lot of pest control owners or service-based owners in general are already busy people. You’re already doing a bunch of tasks. You’re doing the servicing, sometimes answering the phones. You’re wearing all the hats in the business.
The last thing a lot of people want to do is marketing. Some of the marketing can be technical. You want to start delegating these things if you’re already doing a bunch of tasks.
Which Marketing Tasks to Delegate First
Which marketing tasks should you delegate first? Definitely do your postings. Your social postings is the first thing you can delegate. That’s really easy. You can get a virtual assistant to delegate that task very fast.
Next thing that I wouldn’t suggest an owner do is editing your videos. I don’t edit my videos. Jonas doesn’t edit his videos. That’s a task that someone else with more experience can do a lot quicker and you’re going to spend a lot of time.
Third thing I would suggest is having someone do your SEO, your search engine optimization. You can learn that if you do have the time. If you’ve already delegated some of the things in your business and you have more time to do SEO, you can learn it and do it yourself.
But some of the tasks for SEO, like your off-page SEO, can get difficult and technical. There are some things like your Google My Business profile stuff you can do, but SEO can get a little technical.
As far as ads, Facebook ads, most owners can do this themselves. It’s a pretty simple setup. You can learn it in a couple hours. That’s pretty simple to set up. Of course, depending on the size of your company and what you can afford, you can delegate that to a virtual assistant to do that for you.
I actually still do the ads even in my business where I’m at. When you have a large company, you can kind of mess around with the ads a little bit. Ads you can do. It doesn’t take a lot of extra time to do the ads. I’m good at them, so I haven’t delegated that yet.
Local service ads are really easy to set up as well. That’s something you don’t necessarily have to delegate. You can learn that. Your CPC ads or Google Ads, you could delegate those to a virtual assistant quite easily, someone who’s efficient at those. Upwork, Fiverr, anything like that, you can find some pretty effective people at that.
Ensuring Quality After Delegation
How do you ensure quality and consistency after delegation? Having checks and balances. Making sure you’re checking in with your actual numbers, your KPIs.
That’s one of the big things: just making sure your numbers look good. I use a system called Hubstaff to check all my virtual assistants to make sure they’re actually doing their work effectively and that they’re not just sitting there on Netflix all day.
What’s great about that software is you can go on the platform and you can actually see what they were doing throughout the day. On our training platform, we can actually see where they’ve made it in the videos.
Let’s say they’re like, “Yeah, hey boss, I watched module three training, good to go.” I can actually go in there and see if they’ve actually watched module three training.
That’s part of delegation too: making sure you’re tracking your KPIs, making sure you’re tracking your assistants through a thing like Trainual or Hubstaff or anything like that. At the end of the day, did they execute on the task properly and get you good results?
Agency vs In-House
Should you outsource to an agency or keep everything in-house? I think there’s a time and place for everything.
Just like what we talked about, a lot of things can be brought in-house and that can save you quite literally tens of thousands of dollars. If you learn these things yourself as the owner, I think every owner should know a little bit about everything.
Number one, just that way you know you’re not getting screwed by a company. Number two, just so you have a general knowledge of everything that’s going on in your business.
However, I do think there’s a time and place for everything, specifically with SEO probably, search engine optimization, because that can get pretty technical and it can be difficult to find someone in-house to do that.
The Advantage of Hiring an Agency
The advantage of hiring an agency is someone who’s specific in that field who’s done a lot of it. That would be, in my opinion, the only advantage if you found a company that’s like, “We only do SEO for pest control companies. That’s it.”
That would be the only time. Not the only time, I should say. There’s a time and place for everything, but someone who’s specific, who has experience working with multiple people in that realm.
Let me push back a little bit. Let’s just say it’s just an owner and two technicians. They just don’t have a lot of time. What do I recommend that guy do?
Number one, figure out how to delegate some of your tasks. Get to the point where you have a little bit more time to do high-leverage activities like we always talk about.
Some people actually may not want to learn any of this stuff. For them, getting an agency to do Google ads or Facebook ads actually might be a better use of their time.
I think it’s just all dependent on the individual and where they’re at in business. This is my personal opinion: I think everyone should at least learn a little bit about the basics so that when they are hiring an agency, you know what they’re talking about.
They’re talking about click-through rate, they’re talking to you about customer acquisition costs, dollar per lead, impressions, organic versus paid, backlinks. Whatever. I’m just making a list of a million things, but at least you have an idea of what they’re talking about.
The Downsides of Agencies
What’s the negative thing around hiring an agency? Negative things around agencies would be, number one, they might not be specific to the industry and bringing up the results.
I hear a lot of the times where people say, “Man, Jake, I had this agency and they said they were going to bring me this XYZ result and it was just a crap shoot. They didn’t bring them anything.”
Before you hire an agency, make sure number one they have a lot of client results, testimonials. Number two, they have maybe not necessarily a guarantee clause because guarantees can be scary sometimes, but at least some sort of insurance policy.
Because they could charge you $2,500 a month for Google Ads, but you don’t know if you’re going to get any leads from it. With agencies, it can be a little nerve-wracking if you’re not hiring a reputable company that has results in your specific industry. Just be careful hiring agencies.
There are some really good ones out there that do a great job, but there are also a lot of ones that burn people. You want to be careful.
It’s not all the blame is on agencies too. A lot of times it could be like we talked to a guy the other day about his sales funnel. Maybe the agency was getting them a ton of leads and they didn’t have a good sales funnel to follow up fast enough or at all.
You go through their sales cycle, their process. “Well, this is the majority of the reason that you’re not getting results. I mean, you haven’t called your customers back in the last 48 hours. Let’s start with that.” You’re sending off quotes before you’re talking to them on the phone.
When I ran my agency, we would run into some instances where the client would be like, “Your leads suck. I’m not getting any results.”
It’s like, “Okay, well, let’s go back and look at it.” Just like I said, we’ll go look at their sales process. “Hey, John, looks like you haven’t called your leads in four days.”
“Oh yeah, well, it’s because they suck.”
“Well, how do you know if they suck if you haven’t called them?”
I know that sounds silly to a lot of people listening to this, but that happens. People literally think leads suck even if they don’t call them. I’m like, “You just said they suck without calling them.”
They tried calling them one time, didn’t answer, they never called them back again. That’s why we go over follow-up. They call them maybe once or twice and they think that’s optimal or that’s okay. Then they’ll blame it on the agency. It’s the agency’s fault the leads didn’t close.
How SOPs Help Scale Marketing
How do SOPs help in scaling your marketing team? You need SOPs. Standard operating procedures. You need standard operating procedures in place before you can scale or there’s no congruency as you grow.
As you bring on more team members, just like we talked about in a previous section, it starts to get away from you if you don’t have the standard operating procedure in place.
I’ll give you a perfect example. Say you have a CSR that comes on and you’re like, “All right, so we sell this pest control service, this mosquito control service, and this termite service. Okay, great. This is how you’re going to sell it.”
That sounds great. Hopefully they figured it out. Hopefully they know how to say your script after you maybe told them a few times, but they don’t have a script for it.
Now let’s say you bring on a second person and then you tell them to train them. They ask, “So how do you sell this?”
Well, now it’s like the telephone game. How do we know if we don’t have standard operating procedures in place? If there’s no standard, you want a standard in your company. You want everyone to do the same thing the same way, pitch everything the same way too.
When you’re specifically building an agency, how effective and how important are SOPs? Oh my gosh, everything. It’s literally everything.
Especially with our agency, if we’re going to build Facebook ads for a client, you want the Facebook ad to essentially be copy-paste because we knew it worked. It’s going to be the same. You’re going to build that the same way, the targeting the same way, the copy, the headline. Everything has to be the same.
When the SOPs are broken or systems are broken, everything else falls apart and there are fires that you have to put out, as we call them. Building standard operating procedures for every position was everything.
If you don’t have systems in place for every position, you’re running around with your head cut off because you have to do all ten different things all in the same day. You can’t focus your energy on growth when you’re focusing on the day-to-day tasks.
I’ll say that again: you can’t focus on growth if you’re focused on the day-to-day tasks. That’s why SOPs are so important.
Tracking Marketing Performance
What metrics help assess team members’ effectiveness on marketing tasks? I would just say mainly looking at the numbers, performance. Your ad performance and ultimately your cost per acquisition is really what I’m looking for on that end of things.
Pretty simple there. Your return on ad spend. As an owner, that’s what I care about most. Making sure that my clients all get a return on their ad spend. If they’re not, then we’re doing something wrong.
There’s a million different ways and KPIs that you can look at and all the platforms are going to be different.
The Biggest Mistake
What’s the biggest mistake when delegating? The biggest mistake when delegating is not having standard operating procedures. With anything.
Make sure you have those standard operating procedures in place. One thing I’ll say about that is make sure they’re at a third-grade level. I don’t say that in a demeaning way. You just want things stupid simple with everything you build out.
If you’re going to have a CSR that comes on, you want to have that CSR know exactly what they’re going to be doing. If you’re going to bring on a sales rep, have them have all the scripts on everything. You want everything to be so simple and so laid out when delegating anything that if you were to leave tomorrow and go to Italy, they know exactly how the position is run and exactly what to say in any scenario.
Hiring A Players: Building Your Dream Team
Why is hiring A players so important? I’m going to quote a really smart guy. His name is Jonas Olson. He said this tonight and he’s said it many times before: when you have A players, it brings other A players to you. More A players bring more A players.
The A players do not like to work with B and C players. That’s just how it is. They want them off the team as fast as possible.
Not every single person’s always going to be an A player all the time, but we’re optimizing for A players. We’re trying to find the closest thing to A players.
It’s kind of funny because every time I started a company, you kind of think the same thing. Your first employee is like, “God, this guy’s going to be with me forever. He’s an A player and he’s going to be a partner someday.”
That person can only take you so far typically. Not saying all the time, but you get so excited for that first hire, you’re giving away half your company. I see it and hear it all the time.
It’s great to always have that first employee, making sure you have someone there that’s got your back at first. But don’t put on the whole family robe. That first hire is important. It’s super important.
The Traits of A Players
What specific traits and mindsets separate an A player from average hires in pest control? Having a relentless mindset is super important. Having the same mindset as what we have. Someone who’s like an entrepreneurial mindset, or maybe not necessarily entrepreneurial, but an A player is someone who just doesn’t give up, always has a good attitude.
That’s really big for our culture. We don’t want complainers. We don’t want whiners. We’ll ask questions in the interview process.
There’s a sticker on the front door of my office. It says, “No negativity beyond this door.” That is super important to look for.
You can train people on the technical skills, but you can’t train people on their attitude. They choose the attitude. If you can find people with a good attitude and they come in, they want to do big things, they have big goals, you have a clear path for them to get there. You show them how to get there. Paint the vision.
Incentivize them to be A players. It’s hiring on culture. Hiring on, we talked about this before too, you’ve got to hang out with people all day long. Make sure you like hanging out with them. Just make sure they’re just a good fit culturally.
You Have to Be an A Player First
One thing I do want to mention: if you’re looking for an A player, you have to be an A player yourself. You have to be the example first.
If you’re showing up to work and you’re the owner and you have a bad attitude and you’re not going the extra mile for the customer and you’re not knocking that extra door or you’re not showing positivity, you’re not leading from the front, you’re not going to attract A players either. You’re going to attract the B or C people because you’re not acting like an A player yourself.
It’s like the law of the lid, John Maxwell. If you’re a six or seven in leadership, you’re only going to be able to lead a five. You always have to be working on yourself and growing yourself.
Traits that I look for: someone who’s putting in the work outside of work. Someone who wants to do more, learn more, constantly goes to events or wants to go to conferences, wants to get more certifications, wants to read books on their own.
Those are the people that I see who are putting the work outside of work that I want to develop into real leaders and put my energy into those people. Those are some of the character traits I’m looking for. Those are the people who are almost going to be the ones who will become our managers.
They’re constantly trying to improve.
Where to Find A Players
Where do you find high-performing candidates and how do you stand out to them as an employer? Jonas talks about this a lot. He taught me a lot on this: building the right culture and they’ll come to you.
You can of course build the right ads on Indeed and ZipRecruiter, but the best employees that I’ve ever gotten have been people who have come to us or are referred by other employees. Those are the best people.
They want to work with their friends. They want to work with who they like. They only want to bring in A players, so they’re going to attract A players. Birds of a feather flock together. If you have one or two A players, they’re going to have a couple of friends who are most likely A players too. They may want to bring those people into our culture because they’re having fun and making good money inside your company too.
The Three-Interview Process
What interview techniques reveal true work ethic, adaptability, and culture fit? One of our core values is actually one of those words.
Another thing I would mention with finding A players is we do a three-interview process. We like to go through, I guess you could call it, a rigorous hiring process. We do a skills assessment test and then we do a culture fit test basically. Just checking if they’re the right kind of person and then checking the skills too.
Depending on the position of course, but if they can’t think on the spot, then they might not be a good fit.
I like to find out what one of the hardest things they’ve done was, the biggest obstacle they’ve had, and see where they’re at. What are their goals?
I always find athletes do really well. That doesn’t have to be athletes, but they’re competitive in some sort of fashion. It doesn’t matter if male or female. We have a lot of female techs that maybe weren’t even athletes, but they have a competitive bone and they’re awesome. I love girl technicians.
The qualities I’m looking for: people who want to learn, who want to get better, who see the vision, who are good team members also, who like to help others. Have empathy for your customers, have empathy for employees. Those are the main ones.
Compensation and Growth Opportunities
How do you structure compensation and growth opportunities to retain A players long-term? I kind of already hit on it. We like to compensate everyone through pretty much anything. Reviews, sales of course, referrals, anything of that nature.
We pay our technicians, we do it a little bit different. We have salary and commission basis. We didn’t do any commission basis before. We switched it when I talked to Jonas about a year and a half ago, which has, by the way, been awesome.
Obviously you want to attract the best A players. The competitive ones. The ones who are going to be lazy, the ones who want to sit on their phone, the ones who want to drag their tail around, they’re not going to like working for us.
One, our guys won’t let that happen. Two, they’re never going to hit the pay-for-performance model, so they’re just going to weed themselves out.
If you implement a performance plan and you’re losing half your guys, those are the guys that you don’t want anyway. You’re going to have new guys. The guys that do like the new model are going to be like, “Dang, I’m making so much money. I love it here.”
I literally had a guy tell me this two days ago: “I want every one of my friends to come work here.”
I want to make sure that all my technicians have a way to make six figures. For long-term growth, you have to have bonus structures for every single person in your company. They get a piece of the pie.
Also having a roadmap from day one that they start to where they can get to. For us, when they come in from day one as a technician or sales guy, we have key metrics and numbers that you have to hit in order to be a branch manager, team lead, regional manager, district manager, and then eventually become a partner with us.
There’s a model for them to grow. They know that if they really wanted to put in the work, they could have it here. If they want to own a company one day, they start here as a technician, grow up to be a branch manager someday, run multiple offices across the region, or eventually be a partner with us someday.
Painting the Vision
How do you actually paint a vision for your employees if you don’t have that? When we do the interview process, we actually have a sheet that we put down in front of them and we let them sit there with it for a couple of minutes.
That has our vision of what it’s going to look like. The offices, the trucks all together. We paint the picture for them. They have to sit there in front of it and they have to read it for a minute or two before they can come in and do the actual sit-down interview.
They’re already projecting where they can see themselves fit.
The Biggest Mistakes
What are the most common mistakes when hiring A players? Hiring C players. Needing someone.
It’s like putting a square peg into a round hole. People typically don’t hire until they absolutely need someone. They’re hiring anyone and everyone because they just need someone. Someone didn’t show up, they quit, and they don’t have anyone to fall back on.
Always be recruiting. ABR. Always, always, always. Always be thinking about recruiting. Start building your bench. Keep interviewing even if you’re not hiring. Just talk to people. See if they’re interested.
If you run into people that are a server or waiter or bartender that are killer, give them a business card, exchange phone numbers. Maybe in the future something could change. Maybe they’re not happy where they’re at now, but you really like them. Maybe they took good care of you. They’re good with people. They’ve got good people skills.
Always be recruiting everywhere you go. I have a guy that works for me. Everywhere that kid goes, whether it’s on a Zoom training, he’s recruiting the friends walking by in the background. He’s always recruiting. That’s where you’ve got to get to. Always be recruiting.
The Top Grading Strategy
They call it top grading. Let’s just say you’re recruiting, you’re walking around, you’re meeting people, and you find this absolute A player killer. You’ve got a C person on your team. Hire that A person and get rid of the C person on the team.
Constantly top grade your team.
Just to give you a perfect example of finding A players: I was at a place called Pieology. It’s like this little pizza place. The two people taking our order were studs. They were like six-foot-three, jacked athletes. We start talking. They were very good with customer communication.
I was like, “Hey, you guys in college?”
They were both like, “Oh yeah, we’re in college.”
“Do you like working here?”
“No, hate it dude. Hate it.”
“Have you ever thought about sales?”
“Yeah, sales is interesting.”
“Hey man, we’ve got to exchange numbers. You can make a lot more with my company knocking some doors. You ever thought of knocking doors?”
They started telling us this story about one of their buddies who does it. We exchanged numbers and now they’re going to come knock doors for us.
You can literally find A players anywhere and everywhere, so always be looking out for those opportunities. If you’re not looking for them, they can just bypass you.
The Hundreds List
It’s not something I made up. It’s something I learned a long time ago. It’s called the hundreds list.
Usually A players have a pretty big network. Everyone has a hundred people in their Facebook, Instagram contacts in their phone, Snapchat. Make an Excel spreadsheet. Take the top hundred people from each platform. If not from each platform, 20 from here, 20 from there. A hundred people.
Then of those hundred people, take the top ten people you think would be great at this job and reach out to them. It’s the easiest way to find people.
When you bring in those people, have them do a hundreds list. Bring in that person. Pretty soon you have a list. Do that with all five people on the team. You have a list of 550 people to go after right away.
People are like, “Let’s just post on Indeed because it seems easy.” You have these tools around you that are free. Start there with those resources.
The System That Ties It All Together
Here’s what most pest control owners don’t understand about scaling. It’s not about working harder. It’s not about putting in more hours. It’s not about doing more yourself.
Scaling is about building systems that work without you. It’s about getting the right people in the right seats doing the right things. It’s about leveraging technology, partnerships, and processes to multiply your efforts without multiplying your workload.
Virtual assistants get you out of the phone answering, scheduling, and routing grind for a fraction of what you’d pay locally. Strategic partnerships give you instant access to thousands of potential customers without spending a dime on ads. Training systems ensure quality stays consistent as you grow. Marketing delegation frees you up to work on the business instead of in it. And A players? They’re the ones who actually execute all of this at a level that lets you sleep at night.
But here’s the catch: you can’t do any of this without systems. You can’t delegate without SOPs. You can’t scale without processes. You can’t hire A players if you don’t have a vision and a path for them to grow.
Most people try to scale by just doing more of what got them to where they are. More routes. More hours. More hustling. That’s not scaling. That’s just getting bigger and more tired.
Real scaling is when you can take a two-week vacation and come back to a business that grew while you were gone. Real scaling is when you’re not the bottleneck anymore. Real scaling is when your business serves you instead of you serving your business.
If you’re ready to actually scale your pest control business, join our free Facebook group, Pest Control Millionaires. We’ve got over two thousand active members sharing what’s working in their businesses.
And if you want the complete blueprint for building a scalable pest control business from the ground up, check out our book Zip Code Kings. It covers everything we just talked about and a whole lot more.
Now go build systems, hire A players, and scale your business the right way.
Related Articles
- Hiring A Players for Pest Control: Why Top Talent Attracts More Top Talent (And the Hundreds List That Changed My Recruiting Forever) – Jake Sheldon
- How to Delegate Marketing Tasks for Pest Control: The First Things to Hand Off (And Why Most Agencies Burn Their Clients) – Jake Sheldon
- Training New Team Members for Pest Control: Why You Should Over Train Like You’re Teaching a Third Grader (And the Mistakes That Cost Me Thousands) – Jake Sheldon
- Strategic Partnerships for Pest Control: How I Added 300+ Customers in 90 Days (And Nearly Destroyed My Business Doing It) – Jake Sheldon
- Pest Control Virtual Assistant: How I Replaced My $25/Hour CSR With Three VAs for the Same Price (And Scaled Multiple Companies) – Jake Sheldon
