I met Jared Lajaunie a week before we recorded. A friend told me we had to talk. He was right. Jared runs Lajaunie’s Pest Control in Southeast Louisiana. He has 65 employees and a big goal to hit $25 million. He started his own shop in 2008 with a used truck and some magnets.
We talked for an hour. Here’s what stood out.
A lot of guys see Jared now and think he had it figured out. He didn’t. The early years were brutal.
“It took us nine years to make our first million dollars,” he told me. “And that was the hardest thing I ever done. Going from zero to one million took nine years.”
He had no coach back then. He was young and full of ego and thought he knew it all. That mix made it harder than it had to be. If you are stuck under a million, you are not broken. You are early.
Running a small company taught him more than the big one
Jared started at Orkin as a termite tech for $10 an hour. He worked his way up to branch manager. He learned a ton. But he says the real lessons came later, when he left to run a small local company for a big pay cut.
At Orkin he had a budget, a regional manager, and a whole team behind him. At the small company he had nothing. No software. No contracts. No KPIs. No P&L. Just paper. He had to build all of it himself.
“I learned more in two years about how to run a business from that other small company,” he said, “even though it was a huge pay cut.” That hands-on pain is what made him ready to start his own.
Your first hire makes it harder, not easier
This one made me laugh because it is so true.
“Hiring your first technician don’t do nothing but make it harder,” Jared said. “That’s when your problems start.”
It is actually easier to run things when you are by yourself. The day you hire people, it gets messy. You also make less money for a while. But if you want to grow, you have to push through that part.
What I liked is who he hired first. Not a tech. An office manager. The office was his weak spot, so that is where he started. Hire for the hole, not the easy part.
You scale with leaders, not just techs
Your techs are your culture and your business. But Jared says the hires that really moved the needle were on his leadership team.
He now has a director of operations, an HR guy, a sales manager, and an inside sales manager. His wife runs as the acting CEO and the integrator. He is the visionary. About six people total. They took their time to get the right people in those seats. That team is what let him pull back from the day-to-day.
He also runs EOS. He admits he hated it at first. It felt slow and it forced structure on him. It took him a couple of years to buy in. Now he wishes he started earlier.
They are a customer service company that kills bugs
Jared put it plain. “We are a customer service company that just happens to be really good at killing bugs.” I have been saying the same thing for years.
Everybody says they are the best bug killer. Fine. You have to be good at that or you are out of business. But that is not where you win. You win on the experience.
Here is the one tactic that stood out to me. After every outside stop, his techs record a quick video on their phone. They stand in front of the house and say, “Hey Miss Jones, thank you for your business. We knocked down your wasp nest today. Have a nice day.” Then they text it to the customer. Every single stop. They hold the techs accountable to it.
They also send swag, socks, and cookies at different points. And they guarantee same-day service on both initials and callbacks.
Card on file kills the skip problem
I asked how he handles skips. His answer was my favorite part of the talk.
He quoted Charlie Munger. Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the result. So he bonuses techs on completion rate. But the real fix is simple. No card on file, no service.
“Even if they do skip, I’m still paid anyway,” Jared said. “I wish everybody skipped. I’m still getting paid.”
If you still collect after the service, skips will haunt you. Put the card on file up front and the problem mostly goes away. And not everybody has to be your customer.
Run toward the scary stuff
Jared has had to make a lot of scary changes. Going monthly to quarterly. Asking for a card on file. Each one felt risky at the time.
“Fear is a liar,” he said. “I run towards what scares me. My blessings are on the other side of running towards the scary stuff.”
I work the same way. When that little voice says don’t do it, that is usually the thing to lean into. The wins are on the other side of the fear.
Marketing has no silver bullet
People always want the one thing. The magic move. Jared says it does not exist.
He uses Google LSAs, Google Ads, and social media for the bulk of his leads. But that runs next to billboards, TV, wrapped trucks, customer referral programs, employee referral programs, and salesmen who hunt. It all has to work together. There is no shortcut.
The Therapure story
This one is wild. Six months before the pandemic hit, Jared started a side company doing electrostatic disinfecting. His whole leadership team laughed at him. He had maybe ten customers. He says he had a dream about it and just went for it.
Then COVID hit. He had the equipment, the product, the marketing, and the website already in place. Nobody else was doing commercial disinfecting yet. He got to work with companies he never could have dreamed of reaching. He called it being the only pest control company in your town for a year.
The business has died down since. But the lesson holds. Being ready before the moment beats reacting to it.
On buying companies
Jared wants to expand into two new markets in the next five years. He would love to grow by acquisition, but he is honest that small deals are hard to put together. He has tried several and never closed one.
His mentor told him something he lives by. It takes just as much energy and time to do a small deal as a big one. So Jared looks in the one to five million range. “Any less than a million I just wouldn’t entertain it,” he said. A tiny shop usually has no leadership team and no systems, so the work to fix it is just as heavy.
One more thing he said up front matters here. You grow a company one way to keep it and another way to sell it. You have to decide which from day one. Jared is growing to keep.
My takeaway
Jared is a stud. None of this came fast for him. Nine years to the first million. A lot of mistakes as a young owner. The thing that changed his trajectory was getting around smarter people in a mastermind and being humble enough to actually do what they said.
If you are early and grinding, that is the move. Drop the ego. Find the room. Run toward the scary stuff.
