Kirk Slack spent 14 years building a lawn care and landscaping company in Austin. He took it from a single mower in the back of his truck to $3 million a year. Then he sold it, moved to East Texas, and started over from zero in pest control.
He is roughly a year into Dang Pest Control in Tyler, and he is not building it the way he built the first one.
We had Kirk on Pest Control Success Stories to talk about what he carried over, what he left behind, and the marketing channel that has become his second largest source of referrals in year one without a big ad budget.
Kirk spent the first half of his career in commercial real estate. When the market collapsed in 2008, he was also going through a divorce and losing both parents. He walked away from all of it, threw a lawnmower in the back of his truck, and started knocking doors.
When you go from one lifestyle to on your hands and knees spreading mulch in someone’s front yard, it is a humbling experience which I desperately needed at the time.
He grew it on pure guerrilla marketing. Cheap flyers, business cards everywhere, and constant asking for referrals. He calls the door knocking nine arounds, which most operators know as clover leafing: hit the five across the street and the two on each side of every job you land. Google was cheap enough back then that he could switch it on, get buried in calls, switch it off for two days, and switch it back on when he caught up.
That era is gone, which is a large part of why he joined a mastermind.
The lesson that got hammered into him
Kirk joined Jonathan Pototschnik’s Lawn Care Academy, the same group Jonas Olson came out of. Thirty five owners in the inner circle, meeting four times a year, touring each other’s facilities and giving each other feedback blunt enough that Kirk says you needed tough skin and no pride to get through it.
The thing they drilled hardest was knowing your numbers. Not revenue, not truck count, not how many stops a crew can run in a day.
You can have a million clients and you can mow fifty lawns a day, I don’t care. But if you’re not making money, you’re not doing well.
Kirk admits he did not know what cost of goods sold was when he started. It became the number he watched most closely, because it tells you instantly where the problem is. If COGS sits around 40 percent, things are healthy. If it climbs toward 60, you have a pricing problem, an efficiency problem, or a routing problem, and your job is to find out which. In his case it once turned out to be crews sleeping in their trucks, which the drive time data exposed and the crew lead could not argue with.
His take on KPIs is refreshingly unfashionable. You do not need twenty of them. He ran on five, and his rule was that if a metric is not easy to calculate and easy to track, you will quietly stop tracking it. Dollars per man hour, cost of goods sold, and drive time between stops did most of the work. When the numbers sat in range, he moved on. When they did not, he drilled down.
Why he left lawn care for pest control
The math is brutal once somebody lays it out.
Why in the world am I in something that takes multiple people and a hundred thousand dollars of equipment to generate a thousand dollars a day, when I can send one guy in one truck to generate fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a day?
Higher margins, a fraction of the equipment, and a far more valuable company at exit. Kirk says he has lost count of how many operators he watched make that jump.
He chose pest over fert and weed for one main reason. Leads come easier on the fert and weed side and pest is more competitive, but pest customers stay.
People can come home from work and put up with some weeds. They’re not gonna put up with scorpions and cockroaches, and certainly not bed bugs or termites.
His only regret is timing. He says he tries not to look backward, but it is hard not to wonder where he would be if he had picked pest control fifteen years ago.
The Facebook strategy putting him in front of 175,000 people
This is the part most owners will want to steal, and Kirk is direct about where it came from.
If y’all hadn’t have been just talking about that, I don’t think I would have pushed it so hard.
We push members to join every community group they can find. Neighborhood groups, mom groups, the everything-Tyler groups. Then post in them consistently.
Kirk turned it into a daily habit. He parks his truck in front of a local business, takes a photo with their sign in the shot, and writes a short genuine post about them. Great burgers, great guys, worth stopping in. Then he tags the business and cross posts it to every group Facebook lets him select.
He counted the reach one day. A single post was landing in front of an additional 175,000 people in Tyler, Texas.
The compounding is the real point. The businesses he tags start following him, liking his posts, and commenting. He returns it. He is also in two networking groups where members refer each other. By the time someone actually needs pest control, they have seen the name a dozen times without ever seeing an ad. Kirk says when a caller opens with the fact that everybody on Facebook is talking about him and his reviews are strong, he closes better than eight out of ten.
Facebook is now his second largest source of referrals. His company page has fewer than 400 followers. The leads are not coming from the page. They are coming from being visible everywhere in the community.
Couri Leuschner runs the same play on the lawn and tree side and posts into about 100 groups every week, which tells you this is not a one market fluke.
He even gives work away. When someone posts that they have fleas and no money, he offers to walk them through the products and the steps for free and promises not to sell them anything. He has picked up five star reviews from people who never became customers.
The next move he is weighing is the one Jake keeps pushing on our calls: build his own community group, grow it to tens of thousands of members, and control the narrative inside it. When you own the group, you are the only pest control company in it.
He is already getting leads from AI search
Kirk credits our calls for pushing him on AI early, and it is already producing. His wife Claire got the website, ads, and postings optimized for it, and callers started saying they found Dang through an AI search.
The first time we got one, you would think we won the lottery.
Those calls are now routine. Kirk thinks this is the ground floor, and that in five years people will look back on AI search the way they look back on cheap Google clicks fifteen years ago.
What he says about Pest Control Millionaires
Kirk has been a member for about six months. He came in having already spent a decade in a serious paid mastermind, so he is comparing us to something rather than praising us cold.
His framing is that everyone gets out what they put in, that he has seen the material work in his own company, and that the volume is like drinking from a fire hose. He admits they have not implemented all of it yet.
But the thing he keeps circling back to is not the content. It is the room.
It’s just a really freaking big mastermind group.
He is blunt about where he thinks it goes. His prediction is that we outgrow the house at Pestworld and end up running our own event, hundreds of people to start and eventually thousands.
I’m not blowing smoke up your butt. You are revolutionizing the pest control industry, and I wanna be a part of that.
The practical version is simpler than the prediction. Kirk can message a member he has never met and get a call back the same day. When he travels, he checks whether a member is nearby so he can tour their operation or grab lunch. He is already talking to his son about staying involved as the son takes over the company. The value, in his words, is that you do not have to go invent everything yourself. You get to learn from other people’s mistakes as well as their wins.
The advice he did not expect to give
We ask every guest the same closing question. What is your message to pest control owners?
His first instinct was know your numbers. Then he went somewhere else.
Relax. Have fun. Be patient. We rarely kill people in this business. Nobody’s dying. Everybody’s gonna be okay.
That is not resignation. Kirk is impatient by his own admission, wants to grow fast, and is looking at door knocking to build density quicker. It is about where you spend your panic. A missed call on a Sunday morning is not an emergency. A one star review is not a crisis. Analyze it, fix what needs fixing, and go get ten more five star reviews to bury it.
Because customers are far more forgiving than owners assume, with one exception.
People are very forgiving. When they’re not forgiving is when they feel ghosted.
He backs that up with effort most owners will not match. He has an ant job right now where the customer already fired two companies. He told them he will come at ten at night if that is what it takes, five times a week for a month if that is what it takes, and if he cannot solve it himself he will get an entomologist from Texas A&M or his distributor rep out to the house. He has set game cameras for rodents at a restaurant, checked them at ten at night and again at five in the morning so he would not disturb service, and solved it. That turned into five star reviews and the customer’s other locations.
The thing worth taking from this
Kirk had every reason to coast. He built a company, sold it, and could have run the same playbook on autopilot. Instead he joined a room full of operators, took the parts that applied, and implemented fast enough that a one year old company is pulling leads from Facebook groups and AI search while his competitors are still bidding up the same Google auction.
That is the difference between owners who compound and owners who plateau. Not information. Implementation, plus a room that will tell you the truth.
Find Kirk and his team at Dang Pest Control in Tyler, Texas. He is most active on Facebook, and he is genuinely open to a call if you want to talk shop.
Want the room Kirk is talking about?
Our free Pest Control Millionaires Facebook group has over 4,600 owners in it. Search Pest Control Millionaires on Facebook and request to join.
If you want the full program, the training, the weekly coaching calls, and the members who pick up the phone, that is what Kirk joined six months ago. Reach out and we will tell you whether it is a fit.
