In pest control, or in any home service business, one of the fastest ways I can tell whether a company is going to succeed or fail is just by looking at the service stack.
A good service stack maximizes revenue and minimizes cost. And unlike marketing or labor, it doesn’t really cost you anything to build. But a bad service stack will quietly crush your profits and stall the business.
I’m Jonas Olson, the founder of Pest Badger. I’ve been in the pest control industry for 17 years, and over the last five years we’ve grown from one location to 19 locations across seven states. I use this blog to document how I think about building service businesses and what’s actually working for us right now. I wish my mentors had documented their journey, so I’m documenting mine for you.
The biggest mistake I see small pest control companies make is building their business around one-time services. And honestly, I understand it, because when you’re first getting started, revenue is revenue. The phone rings, someone has wasps or ants or mosquitoes, you go take care of it. That’s how most companies start. To be honest, it’s how I started too.
Early on, we took almost everything that came in because we were just trying to put cash in the bank and grow. I was knocking doors, selling one-time jobs, and at first everything felt great. The schedule was full the next day. Money was in the account.
But after a while you realize every month, every quarter, you’re starting over from day one again. You constantly need more doors, more calls, more leads, more jobs. And once you start adding technicians, the problem gets bigger. Now you have trucks driving all over chasing random one-time work, and that adds up fast across multiple trucks per day.
Recurring revenue changes the structure of the business completely. Whether you sell monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, or tri-annual depends on your market and your service. I don’t care which one you choose. Just start steering away from one-times.
If I had to put a number on it: 80 to 90 percent of your revenue should be recurring. The other 10 to 20 percent can be specialty and one-time services.
Why Recurring Revenue Changes Everything
A few things shift the second recurring becomes your foundation.
Operations get consistent. You’re servicing the same neighborhoods on a monthly or quarterly basis instead of randomly bouncing across town chasing one-time jobs. That makes the business way more scalable once you start adding technicians. But fix the small nuances first before you open multiple locations.
Customer value goes way up. A one-time customer might spend a couple hundred dollars and then they’re gone. A recurring customer can stay with you 3, 5, 7 years and spend $600 to $1,200 with you, sometimes more if termite or something else is in the mix. That changes how you spend on marketing. It changes how you hire. It changes cash flow.
Cash flow gets predictable. One of the biggest problems I see inside the Pest Control Millionaires Facebook group is cash flow. Same comments every week. Operators stressed about payroll, marketing, fuel, products, truck payments, all while starting back at zero every 30 days. The problem isn’t them. The problem is the business model doesn’t create predictable cash flow, so they’re chasing the next sale just to keep moving. With recurring revenue, you can forecast. You can hire a month in advance for May because you can see what May actually looks like, instead of reacting at the end of every month.
Seasonality smooths out. Pest control, fertilization, weed control, whatever service you’re in, spring and summer get crazy and the slow months get scary. Recurring doesn’t make seasonality disappear, but it puts a floor underneath you. The slow months are way easier to ride out when recurring revenue is already coming in, instead of frantically trying to sell more jobs and burn marketing budget in a soft market.
Building the Stack Around the Core
Once recurring is the foundation, the next question is what else fits around it.
Most companies just start adding random services without thinking about how they actually fit operationally. For us, General Pest is the core. That’s the base. Then we built around it with services that naturally attach to that customer base. We offer mosquito. We offer rodent. We offer flea and tick. Services that can be sold together, performed together, and serviced on the same route together.
That’s where the numbers really start to make sense. The same customer has pest, mosquito, and rodent. Same stop, way more revenue. Stack that across the entire route and the truck economics change completely. Trucks that were doing $1,000 to $1,500 a day are doing $2,500 to $3,000 a day. Same truck. Same technician. Different stack.
That truck is more profitable. The technician makes more money. The whole business is more profitable, which gives you more cash to actually invest in growth. Most owners focus almost entirely on getting more customers. Meanwhile, the customers they already have are spending way less than they should be, because nobody built a stack around the core service.
You already paid to acquire those people. They already trust you. Selling a second service to an existing customer is much easier than acquiring a brand new one. That’s why attachment rate is one of the most important metrics in this industry.
Keep the Pricing Simple
Customers want simplicity. They don’t want ten service offerings confusing them out of buying anything. They get lost in the weeds, get overwhelmed, and just don’t sign up.
Three tiers at the most. Call them basic, mid, premium. Call them whatever you want. Just don’t bury people in options.
And most homeowners aren’t looking for the cheapest option. Most customers want the problem taken care of and are willing to pay more for it, especially if they already have an active pest issue and want it gone.
I believe pretty strongly that you should lead with your best package first. A lot of companies start with the cheapest service and try to upsell later. In theory it sounds reasonable, but in practice the customer has already anchored to the low option. They think they’re good with what they bought. Present the best option first so the customer understands what full protection looks like from day one. If they want to scale down from there, fine. But at least they saw the complete option first.
What Not to Add
Here’s where I see a lot of small companies make life much harder on themselves.
Every year, they add another unrelated service. Pest control plus pressure washing plus window cleaning plus Christmas lights plus junk removal. I made a Facebook post about this once, basically saying “don’t do this.” A guy commented back, laughing at it, and said something like “Hey, if you want to sell me your lawn care company, I’ll buy it from you.”
That was literally the point of the post. Learn from my mistakes.
If you’ve followed our journey, Pest Badger was originally called Turf Badger. Lawn care was in our DNA. Our first five locations all did lawn care. The next 14 did not.
When we really started scaling pest control, we realized lawn care added a lot more operational complexity than people think. Different equipment. Different scheduling. Different products. Different seasonality. Different hiring profile. When you’re trying to grow a startup, that becomes a massive distraction, especially when the core business still has so much room left to run.
The pushback I got was “Well, I have friends doing $20 to $40 million a year and they do both.” I’m not saying never do both. I’m saying if you’re a small company trying to scale faster, stop making the business more complex. The more complexity you add, the slower you’ll grow.
If you’ve grown your pest control company in a market until you’ve hit real saturation and there’s nowhere left to go, then adding a second service to your existing database makes sense. That’s a real reason. Starting out, keep it simple. Even up to a couple million dollars in revenue, keep it simple. Push to market saturation first. Then add a second service.
The Acquisition Test
Another lens I think about: if you ever want to sell the business, who’s actually going to buy it?
The big strategic acquirers in pest control or lawn care are not going to want to buy a company that’s also doing plumbing and HVAC and pressure washing and window washing. It just isn’t reality. Maybe a specialized PE firm will, but you’ve put yourself in a smaller box.
Most small operators don’t realize how much complexity each additional service actually adds. Different training. Different equipment. Sometimes different insurance. Different systems. Once you’re scaling locations, that complexity gets expensive fast.
When you get to scale, then you can hire a real professional who’s actually great at lawn care or whatever the second service is. At that point, adding services is a real strategic move. Before then, it’s mostly a distraction in disguise.
Five Questions Before Adding Any Service
Before we add anything to the stack now, I run it through a few questions:
- Does it fit our current customer base?
- Can our current technicians actually perform it?
- Does it increase route density?
- Does it increase customer value?
- Does it fit naturally with the business we’ve already built?
A lot of services sound exciting when you first think about them because, hey, more revenue. Six months later your operations team is dealing with headaches every single day trying to manage it.
There’s a reason some companies stay the same size for years. They keep adding complexity instead of optimizing the core business.
Train Your Team to Downgrade, Not Lose the Account
One more thing that matters when you’re running a service stack.
When a customer calls to cancel, they usually don’t say “I want to cancel my mosquito service.” They say they want to cancel the entire account. Especially when everything is bundled into one monthly payment.
That means your CSRs and your retention team have to be very good at downgrading instead of losing the whole account. Maybe they drop rodent. Maybe they move to a smaller package. Maybe they pause mosquito for a season. I don’t care what they do, but your team has to be trained to save the account, not just process the cancellation.
The other thing we’ve seen is that customers on larger packages stay longer. They’re using more of the company, they’re more emotionally invested in the relationship, and retention naturally goes up. So a deeper stack isn’t just more revenue today. It’s longer customer lives.
Simple Scales Better
The thing I keep coming back to with Pest Badger is this: simple scales better.
When we stopped doing lawn care and went all in on pest control, we went from zero to 19 locations across five years, and most of those came in the last three. Once we got super focused on pest control and stopped trying to be everything, growth got way easier.
Most of the growth actually came from improving things inside the company before we ever added complexity on top. Better routing. Higher LTV. Better retention. More revenue per stop per technician. Those are the things that made scaling work as we opened more locations.
If you’re a smaller operator, the time is well spent looking closely at your service stack and asking honestly whether it supports the kind of business you actually want to be running three to five years from now.
