I’d wanted Chad Louk on the show for a while. He owns Prodigy Pest Control out of Sarasota, Florida. We met at Pest World this year. I’d seen him online all the time and knew he’d bring it.
Chad is 28. He started his own company at 21 with 68 accounts and a truck. Now he covers most of Florida and runs a door to door marketing company on the side. The guy is the real deal.
Here’s what I took away.
Chad’s first three years were slow. Painfully slow. He left a partnership at a company called Infinite. He took 68 accounts with him and moved 90 miles north to start over. He told me he was lost.
He did everything himself. He did not hire someone to answer the phone until his second year. Before that, he woke up to customers calling him for reservices. He has serviced over 4,000 homes with his own two hands.
A lot of guys want to blow up fast. Chad makes the case for the other way. As he put it, “I’m glad that we grew slowly because I got to make those mistakes on a smaller scale.”
That hit me. Small mistakes early are cheap. The same mistake at scale can take you down. Chad got to learn his way up before the stakes got high.
Sell like the technician, not the salesman
Chad does not sell like a normal door to door guy. No Segway. No iPad. He dresses like a technician.
His pitch is built on that. He shows up as the guy who will do the work. “I am the truck on the street. I’m the technician,” he said. Then he tells them everything he says he will do, he will actually do, right after he knocks.
He gave me a great line on this. Think about an asphalt crew. They tell you they have extra tar mixed from the neighbor’s job and it will go bad if they leave. So they do your driveway for half off. Pest control works the same. The tank is already mixed. The chemical is ready. It is a pitch that just makes sense.
He also sells on knowledge, not price. He pulls up the customer’s old invoice. He shows them the chemical they paid for does not even treat their problem. He told me he would say something like, you live on two acres and they used two cups of granular on the whole property, so that is not doing anything for the playground over there. That is how you charge premium money. You are selling what you know.
Stop hiding from your competition
This was my favorite part. For years Chad kept everything close. He thought sharing his numbers would hand his rivals a weapon. As he told me, “I used to have this world’s out to get me mentality where if I shared anything about myself, my competition’s going to use it against me.”
This year he flipped it. He started talking. He started sharing. And good things came back.
Here is the wild part. His number one competitor once left him a voicemail telling him off. The guy said Chad was stealing his accounts and would not last past the first summer. Over time they started talking. They warned each other when sketchy national brands rolled into a neighborhood. Then Chad made him an offer he could not refuse. That competitor is now his CEO.
He did the same thing with a rep. A guy worked for him for two summers, then wanted his own shop. Chad helped him start a pest control company in his own market. He even signed off on the guy’s license. That same guy now sends Chad termite referrals he is too small to handle.
Chad does not chase people who leave with lawsuits either. He thinks the non solicit and non compete stuff in this industry is broken. His view is simple. This is America. If a rep wants to go somewhere new, let them go. The only line he draws is going after the exact customers you already sold.
Be careful who you pay to learn from
We went back and forth on coaching. Chad is skeptical of it. He thinks if you really were a business guru, you would not need to coach. I get that. I am not a coach either and I do not want to be one.
But we landed on the same spot on one thing. Paying to learn from people way bigger than you is worth every dollar.
I paid $100,000 for eight hours with one guy. People thought I was crazy. That one thing has already made me over a million. Chad has done it his own way. He shook hands with Jerry from Rollins, a company worth billions, and got 30 minutes of free advice. He met a guy from Europe whose company did half a billion in two years. The really wealthy ones never charge. They just want to help.
The math is easy. If you can pay to learn one skill that makes you a million, why would you not do it?
Door to door is a tool, not the whole plan
Chad fell into the marketing side by accident. A century old company called Rose Pest Solutions wanted to try door to door and had never done it. He threw out a number he thought was crazy. They said no problem. This year over 80 companies asked to hire him.
But he is honest about how broken most door to door is. Too many companies hire 50 rookies, give them a sales pitch and no real training, and send them out. Worse, some lean on cancellation fees to make money. He told me about one outfit where “35% of the revenue was from cancellation fees. That’s disgusting.” That is a company built to trap people, not serve them.
Here is the smart part. Chad sees door to door as a means to an end, not the whole game. He did not even knock his home market in Sarasota this year. He told me about a company spending $420 to get one customer online. Door to door can land ten accounts on the same street for a little more per account. But once you have those accounts, the real money is the upsell. Get your techs to add termite, mosquito, and rodent service. A $600 customer turns into $1,800. That is when it gets profitable.
If door to door is your only growth plan, he says it will not work. You have to find ways to grow on your own and phase it out.
Not every tech wants to sell
People always ask me why I do not just make my technicians sell. Chad gave the same answer I would. Most of them do not want to.
As he put it, “the majority of my technicians, probably 80% of them, don’t sell a single dollar an entire year.” And that is fine. Those guys are not chasing the next dollar. They want to do good work, take care of the customer, and know when their day is done. A lot of them are quiet by nature. They just want to be left alone to do the route.
He also hates the gross upsell. You know the feeling when an AC guy comes for a $400 fix and leaves quoting you $2,500. Chad does not want his techs doing that. The 10% to 20% who really do want to sell get moved out of the truck and into a sales role. That is where they belong.
Wear every shoe in the building
This one I want every owner to hear. Chad believes the owner should know every job. He has answered the phones. He has knocked the doors. He has serviced the homes. He even jumped back in a truck for two days this May when they got slammed.
So he holds his leaders to it too. He took every one of his executives out on the doors to knock with him. Now they cannot ask why the reps are not doing more. They know firsthand what it takes.
I run the same way. I would never make someone in my company do something I would not do myself. When I told Chad that, he turned to his CEO listening in and said he would be knocking tomorrow. That is the right attitude.
The thing that keeps him going
Chad has been offered enough to walk away. He could sell and retire right now. He is not even close to doing it. “I’m only 28 years old. I don’t know what else I would do,” he told me.
He needs the work. He needs the purpose. He loves watching an employee buy a first house or fix their teeth because the job gave them insurance. He loves giving a kid who barely finished high school a path to six figures.
That is the part that stuck with me most. Build something slow. Stay open. Treat people right. Then keep showing up because you love it, not because you have to.
Go give Chad and Prodigy Pest Control a follow. The guy is doing it the right way.
