I just had Antoni Hoshino on the show. He runs Pest AI. We first met on a group call a couple months back, and I knew right away I had to get him on the podcast.
Antoni lives in the tech world, and he builds sales systems and AI tools for pest control companies. We talked for over an hour about marketing, automation, and where this industry is headed. Here are the takeaways that stuck with me.
Speed to lead wins or loses the sale
This one matters most in our world, because pest control has a short sales cycle. Someone has ants in the kitchen and they want them gone today or tomorrow. They are not going to sit and think about it.
So if you are slow, you lose. Antoni said it plain. As he told me, "if you take longer than five minutes to get back to somebody they’re probably already talking to someone else."
The numbers back it up, because after about three to five minutes your odds of closing drop by around 80%. You paid for the ad, they clicked, and they called. Then you missed it, and now they are talking to the next guy on Google.
Stop pouring ads into a leaky bucket
A lot of companies run good ads, but the leads come in all over the place. A form goes to one inbox, a Thumbtack request stays in Thumbtack, and Angie is its own thing, so nothing talks to each other.
Antoni asks every owner the same question. Do you know where each lead is in your sales cycle right now? Most of the time the answer is no.
That is the real problem, because you cannot manage what you cannot measure. He calls it running ads into a leaky bucket. You lose leads because someone made a mistake or did not call back fast enough, and that is wasted money.
The $100k lesson
Early on, Antoni ran a marketing agency, and one client paid 90% of his income. He sold them so much business that they could not pay what they owed, and just like that he was out a pile of money.
"As a new business owner all of a sudden you’re out $100,000 and you’re like what do I do now," he told me. He had just bought a house and he was getting married in a couple months, so it all hit at once.
He could have quit and gone back to a job, but he did not. Here is how he framed it. As Antoni put it, "My biggest advice to people starting or in business is just you have to trust the process and this was just part of the process."
The lesson is simple. Never let one client carry 90% of your bills. He got too comfortable, and he does not make that mistake now.
AI is already replacing your answering service
Antoni is all in on AI, but he is not saying replace your whole team. Humans sell better and they have empathy. His point is different. If you are going to miss the call anyway, why not use the tools?
His voice AI handles nights, Sundays, and after hours, and it sounds like a real person. He saw a new platform recently that blew his mind. It used a cloned human voice, and he said you could not tell it was AI. It even paused and breathed like a real person.
I liked how he thinks about AI agents too. "It’s an employee that never sleeps never calls in sick right doesn’t talk back," he said. It does just what you train it to do the first time.
He made a smart point about seasons, since our business swings hard from winter to summer. If he can take your five winter people and let them work at summer capacity with AI help, that saves you money. You do not have to hire and fire all the time.
The generation gap is real
Here is the part that stuck with me. The older crowd hates the AI phone system, and since Antoni records the calls, he says people will swear at it.
But the younger crowd buys from it, because they do not want to talk to anyone. They want to tell a screen to send someone over. Those young folks are about to be homeowners and they are our future clients, so this is only going one way.
SEO is turning into AI search
This was a wake up call for me. Google is moving its search over to AI results, so the game is changing fast.
Antoni says we are shifting from search engine optimization to AI search optimization. Websites need to be built for how AI reads them, not just how Google’s old algorithm reads them.
His warning was blunt. "If you’re not doing that you’re just paying some random person to do standard SEO for you I would reassess your strategy." He says the companies jumping on this early are already seeing big results.
Build the system before you need it
Antoni has started a few businesses now, and his advice is to build a scalable system from day one. Set up your SOPs early, and do not wait and rebuild it later.
He sees owners with 50 different plans, and then they hire someone new and training is a mess. Keep your plans simple and built to grow as you add people.
And know your numbers, so track every ad source. You should be able to say you spent this much here and closed at this rate there, then put your money where it converts. When you are starting out you do not have endless cash, so make every dollar count.
Build a business that runs without you
One story I loved. Antoni’s mentor used to pull the team out of the company during the busiest week of the year, and they would go to a mastermind instead.
It was stressful, but it taught a big lesson. The goal, as Antoni put it, is "being able to build out your business… so that you can step away because otherwise you’re just creating your own job."
That is the whole point. You work hard so the business can run without you, not so you can build yourself another job.
Final thoughts
What I took from Antoni is that these tools are here right now. Speed to lead, clean lead tracking, AI for the calls you would miss, and websites built for AI search. None of this is five years out.
He was honest about the future too, since he does not even know what the next three years look like, because the tech moves too fast. So do not sleep on it, and get your systems in place now.
Thanks to Antoni Hoshino for coming on. Go see what he is building at Pest AI.
