I recently sat down with Tateum O’Hanlon, founder of Summit Pest Control out of Guelph, Ontario, and his story might be the fastest start we’ve ever featured on this show. Tateum is 21 years old. He did his first pest control job in May 2025. Just over a year later, Summit is doing $70,000 a month with a four-person team, and he’s already out of the truck. He built most of it with social media, and he did it while finishing his degree. Here’s how it happened.
Tateum’s path into business started during COVID. The lockdowns in Canada were rough, so he started reading. A lot. Those books lit the fire, and he carried it through the University of Guelph, where he just graduated with a degree in economics and finance. Along the way he tried dropshipping, lead generation, and gutter cleaning. None of it stuck, mostly because he never stayed with one thing long enough.
Then, at the end of 2024, his parents’ neighbors got quoted somewhere around $900 to $1,000 for a summer of mosquito control. Tateum did the math in his head. He could get his license and all his equipment for less than that one job. And that was just one house on the street.
Before he even had his license, he went deep on pest control podcasts. That’s when he found Jonas’s show, Pest Control Millionaires. The more he learned about the industry, the more he liked it. Canadian licensing and insurance took four to five months of red tape, and in May 2025 he did his first job.
The First Few Months Were a Grind
Tateum started the way most owners do. He set up a Google Business Profile, which he taught himself online, and he knocked doors. Early on, he noticed a gap in his market. The big companies around Guelph focus on commercial work. Almost nobody was going hard after residential. So he niched there, and Summit is about 90 percent residential today.
Then in June or July, he went all in on social media. That’s when things took off.
The Social Media Engine Behind Half His Revenue
Here’s the number that made me want to have Tateum on the show. He credits 40 to 55 percent of his revenue to social media. That includes his ads, but the split is wild on its own. Around 30 to 35 percent of revenue comes from organic social alone. Another 20 percent comes from Meta ads. I can’t name another pest control company with a split like that.
His first videos were rough. No face on camera, no real point, just him spraying a wand. Then he committed to posting every single day and put his face in front of the camera. He was awkward and stuttering at first. The reps fixed that.
The strategy comes down to a few things. First, educational content beats entertainment. He sees companies chasing fancy edits and memes. Those get views, but views are not buying signals. Instead, he makes the videos a homeowner in Canada would actually search for. Before he films, he Googles the topic and pulls questions straight out of the People Also Ask box. Those questions become his headlines.
Second, he squeezes every winner. A video that pulled 100,000 or 200,000 views last fall can go back up every other month and pull the same numbers again. He’ll also check the insights, find the 15 seconds people engaged with most, and post that clip on its own. Sometimes it beats the original.
Third, he barely edits. Subtitles and a headline. That’s it. "The more authentic I am, even if I make a mistake or drop something or mispronounce something, those are the videos that actually get the most amount of views," he told me.
And fourth, volume. Tateum posts twice a day across five platforms, pushed out with one click through GoHighLevel. Facebook is his best performer by far, with over 6,000 followers and the most local audience.
The part most owners miss is the patience. "I was posting every day throughout the wintertime," he said. "As soon as spring rush hits, all those people have been watching you for like three, four months now." When the ants show up, he’s the first call.
When I first found Summit’s pages, I honestly thought he was boosting posts. Some videos had 20,000 views. Some were over 100,000. I asked him about it on a call earlier this year, and the answer was no. All organic.
Organic and Paid Are One Engine
Tateum runs Meta ads too, but he doesn’t treat them as a separate channel. He posts four organic videos for every one ad. Then he takes his best performing organic content, adds a call to action at the end, and runs it as an ad. He tests 20 to 50 ads at a time, shuts off the losers, and only runs video.
His offers follow the value stack model he picked up from Alex Hormozi. Instead of a plain $100 off, he breaks the service into pieces. Exterior spray, bait stations inside and out, granular treatment, dewebbing. He puts a price tag on each piece and stacks most of them in for free, so the offer reads like a thousand dollars of value.
The organic content is doing heavy lifting underneath the ads. Tateum figures his cost per lead would at least double without it. "Seventy percent of those people who convert have seen my organic reels before they clicked on the ad," he told me. He’ll even go this far: if you’re not posting organic content, you shouldn’t be running Meta ads at all.
Then there’s the follow up. Facebook leads die fast, so his closer is on every new lead within five minutes and keeps calling twice a day until they answer. He also set up his CRM to send blue iMessage texts instead of green SMS, which lifted his response rate around 50 percent. If someone goes quiet, his guy texts them a video asking if they’re ghosting him. It works.
Charging Double and Collecting the Year Up Front
Here’s the other half of the growth formula. Tateum charges close to double what some competitors in his area charge. He can do that because by the time someone calls, they’ve watched 20 of his videos. The trust is already built. "We could charge them whatever and they’re gonna say yes," he said.
And he doesn’t bill monthly. His default is the full year up front. He quotes the yearly price first, and only brings out the per visit price if someone pushes back. The per visit option actually costs more. He borrowed the idea from how marketing programs sell. Nobody quotes you a monthly price on a course. They sell the whole thing.
That cash is the fuel. He covers what he needs to service the jobs and puts the rest straight into marketing. "Everything I bring in, I want to be able to take that and get five or six customers with that one customer," he told me. If he billed monthly, he said, he would have grown a lot slower.
Getting Out of the Truck at 21
Tateum got out of the truck just a month or two ago, and he called it one of the biggest decisions he’s had to make. The trigger was hiring a technician before the schedule fully justified it. You have to pull that trigger early, he told me, because once you hire, you’re training them in the truck all day and still running the business at night.
That’s exactly what happened. He underestimated how long Canadian licensing would take for a new hire. So for weeks, he was in the truck training for ten or eleven hours, then home doing five or six more hours of marketing. Eighteen hour days, while finishing school.
His hiring filter was personality first. Anyone can learn the technical side, he told me. Personality is what drives how customers feel about your company.
The delegation part was the mental battle every owner knows. "No one does the job better than me. This is what you think in your own head," Tateum said. Then he let go of the leash, and the opposite turned out to be true. His tech does a better job than he did, because the tech’s only job is the customer. Tateum was out there thinking about which reel to film and calling his sales rep between stops.
He also gave the best answer I’ve heard for owners who say they can’t afford to hire yet. Take yourself out of the equation. If your only job was generating leads, could you keep that truck full? The answer is almost always yes, even if it means knocking doors until 9 PM.
Today Summit runs on a four-person team. Two technicians. A commission-only closer whose whole job is jumping on calls and new leads. And a virtual assistant in the Philippines handling scheduling and fast customer responses. The closer came before any tech, because a lead that doesn’t get a call back in five minutes is gone.
Pulling AI Off the Front Lines
This part of the conversation surprised me. Tateum was one of the earliest guys I knew running AI in his business. He had ManyChat automatically messaging every new follower and commenter, and it was converting. He shut it off anyway.
His reasoning: everyone is putting AI in front of customers now. AI answering phones, AI reminders, AI calls. He sees backlash coming, and he wants distance from it. His whole brand is built on it actually being him. "When they message me, they expect me to be the one talking to them, not an AI chat bot," he said. So a real person, his VA, sends those messages now.
The back end is a different story. He runs his numbers through Notion, with OpenClaw and a few other tools feeding it live data. His favorite use is an agent that scans X around the clock for local pest news and pings his phone. When Cambridge, one city over, launched an investigation into a rat problem, he had a video up almost immediately. It sits at over 30,000 views on Instagram, almost all local. He also called the Claude extension for Chrome the biggest lever most operators could pull today, and I’ve been telling people the same thing.
How Pest Control Millionaires Changed the Math
Tateum found the program before he even had a business. He talked to Jake while he was still getting licensed, launched Summit, and joined shortly after his first jobs. So the program has been under this story from the start, and he was specific about what it changed.
The first thing was recurring services. In his part of Canada, almost nobody runs recurring residential plans, and Tateum didn’t know the model existed. Then he got into the group and went through the training. "There’s no such thing as one times," he said. "You gotta be doing recurring or you’re not doing anything." Recurring was the first thing he implemented, and it’s why his revenue compounded instead of resetting every month. In his own words: "If I didn’t join the program I’d probably still be doing one time services to this day."
The second was Meta ads. "You open up the meta ads platform and it’s like a spaceship. You don’t know what to hit," he said. Jake’s fundamentals got his first campaigns live, and he’s gone down the rabbit hole since. That’s the 20 percent of revenue we covered earlier.
The third is the community. Tateum joins the Thursday group calls and can message operators doing the numbers he’s chasing, including guys like John Speed at $15 million a year. He told me there’s almost nobody his age around him in Ontario building anything. Seeing other people build every week keeps his ceiling high.
I asked him straight up where he’d be without the program. He didn’t dodge it. Probably half, he figured. Maybe $30,000 or $40,000 a month, because without recurring, nothing would have compounded. He was quick to add that he would have found a way regardless, and I believe him. That’s exactly who the program works best for. We hand over the playbook, and guys like Tateum run it harder than anyone.
The Biggest Residential Company in Canada
I asked Tateum where this is all going. He didn’t hesitate. "I wanna be the biggest residential pest control company in Canada."
Right now, he says that title probably belongs to Insight Pest Control, which grows mostly through door to door. Tateum sees the gap clearly. The top of the Canadian residential market grows through door knocking, not digital marketing, and digital is the exact machine he’s already built. His premium pricing gives him more profit per customer, and more profit means more gas on the engine.
His message for other owners is the same one his whole story proves. Get uncomfortable and get on camera. "If you’re not heavily into social media in the next zero to five years, your business is gonna go irrelevant," he told me. Unless you’re doing door to door, he added. For everyone else, the window to build a local audience is open right now.
Key Takeaways
Tateum’s story is packed with lessons for owners at any stage. First, consistency beats secrets. He posted every day through a dead Canadian winter, and the spring rush paid it all back with interest. There’s no magic trick behind his views. There’s volume, reps, and time.
Second, educational content converts. Memes and fancy edits get views. Answering the exact questions homeowners are already Googling gets customers.
Third, collect the year up front. Charging annually instead of monthly turned every new customer into marketing budget, and that’s how a one year old company outspends companies ten times its age.
Fourth, recurring is the whole model. The single biggest shift the program gave Tateum was killing one-time services. Without it, he figures he’d be at half the revenue.
And fifth, hire before you feel ready. The truck is a trap. Tateum ate a month of 18 hour days to escape it at 21, and the business got better the moment he let go.
From a neighbor’s mosquito quote to $70,000 months in one year, while finishing a degree. Tateum is proof that this industry still rewards whoever wants it most, no matter how young they are.
Want to connect with Tateum? You can find him on Instagram at @tateum.ohanlon, or email him directly at tateum@summitpestcontrol.ca. Summit Pest Control is on Facebook as Summit Pest Control and on Instagram at @summitpestco, and both pages are worth a follow just to study how he does it. And if you want the same playbook Tateum used to build recurring revenue and dial in his ads, that’s exactly what we teach inside Pest Control Millionaires.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Summit Pest Control grow so fast?
Summit combined a heavy organic social media presence with Meta ads, premium pricing, and annual upfront billing. That gave Tateum cash to reinvest in marketing right away, while recurring service plans compounded revenue month after month.
How does Summit Pest Control use social media to get customers?
Tateum posts educational pest control videos twice a day across five platforms, using the questions homeowners actually Google as his headlines. Around 30 to 35 percent of Summit’s revenue comes from organic social, and that same content cuts his Meta ads cost per lead roughly in half.
What role did Pest Control Millionaires play in Summit’s growth?
The program introduced Tateum to recurring service plans, which almost nobody offers in his part of Canada, and taught him the fundamentals of Meta ads. He estimates he would be at about half his current revenue without it.
