I just got off the mic with Chris Moreschi, the founder and CEO of GorillaDesk, and he's been on the show before, way back in the early days. Chris has been building GorillaDesk for about 15 years, and the software has been out for 13. They now have close to 20% of the pest market and onboard 50 companies a week.
This was one of those talks where I kept wanting to stop and take notes, so I did. Here are the lessons that stuck with me after we hung up.
This is the one I keep thinking about. Chris has watched a lot of software companies get bought and rolled up, and the pattern is always the same. Prices go up and support gets cut. You call in and nobody picks up for days.
Chris does the opposite on purpose. One of GorillaDesk's core values is being "remarkable," and as he put it, that means "having people positively remark about you in the marketplace." You can't do that if your support falls apart while you scale.
So that is what he has been working on lately. He watches the wait times for a chat reply, a callback, and training a new company. His training calendar had been booked six days out, which he called a problem, so they opened up more slots.
The lesson for me is simple. Growth is easy to brag about. But if customers feel friction when they need help, they feel it fast, and they tell you.
AI won't replace your people. It promotes them.
GorillaDesk rolled out an AI chat rep for the customer portal and text messages, and you feed it your own info. Your hours, your zip codes, how you do each service, your pricing. It runs on OpenAI, and you can even tell it what tone to use, friendly or funny or whatever fits your brand.
The smart part is that it ties into the CRM, so it knows who it is talking to. Is this a brand new lead or a customer of five years? Chris was big on this. Don't treat a longtime customer like a stranger, because people want to be known.
But here is the part that changed how I think. Chris does not see AI taking jobs, he sees it moving people up. As he told me, "Everyone's job is not about being replaced. It's about dealing with a higher level of communication." The AI handles the boring stuff like changing a card, checking an appointment, or rescheduling. Your real team handles the hard stuff and manages the AI on top of it.
So a support rep is not just a support rep anymore. They check the AI's answers each morning, keep the knowledge base fresh, and jump in when someone needs a real person. Chris thinks that makes the job bigger, not smaller.
The five-year vision: prompt everything
I asked Chris where this goes in five years, and his answer got my head spinning.
He thinks everything inside a CRM becomes prompt based, where you just tell it what you want. Reroute all the jobs next month across these techs. Write this email campaign and send it to customers who got these services. No more digging through menus.
Then he took it further. Connect your data to a model and you can ask it to think like a CEO. And he shared a trick for getting real answers. "The secret is you've got to go three layers deep, four, five layers deep." Build me a model to win. Now beat that model. Now come dominate both. Each layer gives you a sharper plan.
The far end of it sounds wild. Chris described a future where you become the manager of an AI CEO, one that can do in seconds what would take a person hours. It plans the campaign, makes the creative, and buys the ads on its own.
When I asked how operators win right now, he kept it real. The tools already give you great answers, but you still have to go execute. If you are good at execution, you are already ahead. He also pointed me to OpenArt.ai for brand mascots, where you feed it three to five poses and it can put your mascot anywhere you want.
The money you're already leaving on the table
This might be the most useful lever in the whole talk. Everyone obsesses over new sales. New, new, new. Chris says the real miss is expansion revenue, which means selling more to the customers you already have.
He sees it in his own business, where revenue spikes whenever GorillaDesk sends out messages about what is new. The same thing works in pest control. Chris ran timely expansion campaigns for his brother's company last year, and his brother broke a goal he would not have hit otherwise.
As Chris put it, "expansion revenue should be occurring every single day in the business." Mosquito in summer, attic and crawl space dustings, and there is a right time to pitch each one. Most owners just are not running it. So when people ask Chris how to break a million dollars, he points them right back here.
Reviews and video are the easy wins right now
When I asked what levers operators can pull today, Chris did not hesitate. "Review generation is the number one for everyone," he said. Get reviews flowing to your Google profile. He was almost surprised more people are not using it.
Then he flagged something newer. ChatGPT has started showing YouTube video results in its answers, and people are using it for local search now. So Chris says put video content on YouTube around your local keywords. It is a cheap way to show up where buyers are looking next.
Hire slow, but the right one shows up day one
Chris had one book for me, and only one. It is called Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, and he said it covers hiring, interviews, scoring people, and leadership. He warned me not to let the size scare me off.
His take on hiring rang true. A great hire makes an impact almost right away, and if you are two or three months in and still wondering, that is your answer. As Chris said, "It's probably not the right person." He admitted he dragged one out too long last year and learned the hard way.
He does give grace in the spots where someone is weak, since those are the areas you knew you would have to train. But the core skills you hired them for should show up fast.
One more thing on sales hires, which Chris takes slow on purpose. His top pest control closer, Chrissy, ran her own pest control company, passed a million, and sold it. She has instant rapport because she has lived it. Chris said close rates go up when the buyer talks to someone really from the industry, not just someone who says they are.
Lead by example
We opened on health, and it turned into a leadership lesson. Chris has worked out with the same trainer for seven years, and he still benches 405. But the part that stuck was the ripple effect.
When Chris quit drinking, the people around him quit too, and he did not ask them to. Even some of the smokers stopped, which he said he never expected. I have seen the same thing on my team. My number two dropped 50 pounds, and then guys started showing up to the gym at 5 a.m.
You don't have to give a speech. You just show up and do it, and people follow.
My takeaway
Chris is not trying to sell GorillaDesk for a big payday. He told me he has built his life and his days the way he wants them. He keeps his calendar open so he can stay creative, and he guards time for family because he knows he gave too much of it away before.
That is the thread under all of it. Build the thing well, take care of the people, and keep showing up. The growth follows.
