In pest control and business as a whole, hiring is one of the single most important steps for growth. Knowing when to hire and how to make the right hire can 10x your company or stop you in your tracks. This is literally the number one question I get on a daily basis.
My name is Jonas Olson. I’m the owner of Pest Badger, an 8-figure pest control company. At this point in my career, I’ve literally hired hundreds of technicians. I didn’t always hire technicians the right way, but I’ve done it a lot of times, and I’ve learned and refined my system with each one. In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how to do it.
Hiring isn’t about a gut feeling, but you’ll probably start feeling the signs when you’re really busy and overbooked. There are some specific markers you need to make sure you’re hitting before making that first hire. Here’s what you should look for:
You’re constantly booked out two weeks. You’re starting to turn down work or lose clients because you just can’t get there fast enough to solve the customer’s problems.
You’re doing admin work at night and on the weekends. I made an entire video just on this one concept, so if you haven’t seen that, go check it out.
Your customer service is starting to slip.
You’ve already built out and optimized your systems. You have routes, treatment plans, and a CRM in place.
You may be tempted to make your first hire before reaching these points to avoid disappointing or losing customers. But as tempting as it may be, I’d suggest you hold off until you’re actually seeing these signs. Especially when it’s just your first or second tech, you’re taking a big risk paying these new employees. You want to be as certain as possible that you have enough work to keep them busy.
Because the other side of this is if you hire too early without being fully prepared or having enough of a client base to support a new employee, you’re going to be stressing to make sure they’re staying busy and getting paid on time. And that’s going to leave your whole business vulnerable to any kind of uncertainty that comes up.
Basically, you want to reach your absolute maximum capacity as a solo operator before taking the dive into hiring your first technician.
How Much Revenue Do You Need Before Hiring?
So here’s the big question. How much revenue do I need to be doing before I hire my first technician safely?
I’m going to give you some average numbers here because every market is a little bit different. I don’t want to give you hyper-specific data because you could be in a traditional market like Florida, Texas, or California versus somewhere Midwestern where your prices are a little bit higher.
The average technician across the United States does about $108,000 of service revenue per year. You want to stay within those limits so you have enough work to keep that technician busy. I personally want to see the higher side of that, so I’d be shooting for closer to $200,000 before hiring my first technician.
Why that number? Your direct labor cost on average is going to be around 20%. I’d say the average across America is 15 to 30%. So if the technician is doing $10,000 to $15,000 per month, he’s going to gross himself $3,500 to about $4,000 per month. Now you have to add in taxes and insurance, so you’re all in at about $4,500 per month in total cost for that one technician.
A trained technician should generate about $10,000 to $13,000 per month on average. I like to see a little bit higher than that depending on route density and how much you’re charging. That leaves you with a little bit of profit. You’re obviously going to have to pay some overhead, but it’ll give you some breathing room and you’ll know your business is safe.
If you’re under those metrics, your number one job is to keep pushing revenue and systemizing your operations.
How to Hire the Right Way
Now that your revenue is in place, here’s how you actually hire right.
Document everything. From the treatment steps to equipment use to safety. Literally everything from start to finish. Use ChatGPT. It’s your best friend these days. Put in exactly what you want and it’ll type out an entire SOP for you so you have everything documented. Your new hire probably isn’t going to have the perfect understanding of how to do the job, much less how your specific business operates. You need to be prepared to get them up to speed on every individual part of the job as fast as possible.
Know your numbers. Budget that $4,500 per month for a technician all-in, plus fuel cost and product cost. Set up systems to keep track of efficiency, payroll, and employee needs. Everyone says you don’t want to micromanage, but I’m telling you to make sure you micromanage until you can trust them. Once you trust them, you won’t have to micromanage anymore. A good CRM and a simple GPS will definitely help you keep track of your employees.
Start with a trial period. Give them 30 to 60 days with clear expectations. Make sure to have an employee handbook that sets the expectations from day one.
Onboard properly. Start with ride-alongs for the first couple weeks. Create checklists. There’s a great book called The Checklist Manifesto. Check that out. Literally have a checklist for every single thing you do, from shutting the gates to talking to the customers. Every single thing you do, make sure you have a protocol for. In my experience, it takes about a month to get a new technician out on the road by himself doing jobs.
Do regular inspections. After that first month, make sure you’re constantly doing daily inspections. If not daily, every couple days or once a week. Just stop in, check out his work, make sure he’s doing a good job, talking to the clients, things like that.
Get the legal side right. Make sure everything is documented. They have workman’s comp, insurance, and make sure you’re following all the labor laws for your state. If you don’t know where to go to find this, most local CPAs will help you with it, or any online payment platform will help you get every single one of your employees set up correctly from day one.
Learn to Lead
Let me tell you about the experience of my first hire as a technician. Luckily, he’s actually still here today. When I sold the first company, he actually came with the second company. So that worked out pretty well.
But I will say that early on, 12 or 13 years ago, I didn’t know all this information that I know now. I think for the first year, I didn’t pay any payroll taxes. So at the end of that year, I had a massive hit in payroll tax that I had to pay back that I was not prepared for. So just make sure you set up all these systems in place.
That first hire gave me the opportunity to work on the business, not in the business, and really helped me start building out the second route.
I also know that one of the biggest fears and one of the biggest pushbacks I get is letting go of control. Nobody does it like you. You’ve literally built every inch of this business and your reputation by yourself. And to be honest, there’s never a perfect time to hire. But the truth is, holding on too long can kill your business. You’ll cap your growth, miss bigger clients, and weigh yourself down.
Hiring isn’t about giving up control. It’s learning how to lead.
Make the Most of Your New Hire
Now you have your new technician hired and out in the field working. You have all this extra free time. What are you going to do with it?
The point of hiring is to free up your time so you can grow, not just relax. Your number one priority should be revenue-generating activities.
Sales and marketing. Make sure you’re following up with leads, building referral partnerships, and getting a ton of Google reviews. If you don’t have any, get to 50 as fast as possible. Look in your local market, see where the heavy hitters are, and shoot for a minimum of 100 as soon as you possibly can.
Build out your systems. Automate as much as possible. From admin work to text campaigns, email campaigns, route optimization, every single workflow you can think of. Automate as much as possible.
Leadership. Train, coach, and meet daily with your technicians.
Know your numbers. Job costing, margins, pricing, strategy, just like we talked about.
Strategy. Map out the next 12 months. Break it down into smaller goals: quarterly, then monthly, then weekly, then daily. Know exactly what goals you have to hit starting today to get where you want to be in the next 12 months.
Final Thoughts
Hiring my first tech was scary, not going to lie, but it changed my business forever. It gave me back my time and it allowed me to grow personally. It made me a leader and not just a worker.
Nothing’s ever going to be perfect, but as long as you have some systems in place, they’re kind of solid, and your revenue is there, definitely take the plunge. Train them right, lead them well, and build your future.
