Most pest control companies don’t have a slow season problem. They have a business model problem. You’ve built your company around one-time jobs and summer calls, and every single winter you pay for it.
If your trucks stop rolling when the temperature drops, it’s not a weather problem. It’s your offer. So let’s fix that. I’m going to show you exactly how to build a pest control business that never slows down. Not in December, not in January, not in February, not ever.
I see it in the forums. It gets cold outside this time of year and all of a sudden my inbox lights up. The comments start rolling in. The same question over and over and over again: “How do I keep my techs busy in the winter?” “What do you guys do in the winter to keep things afloat?” “I’m always broke in the winter. What do I gotta do?”
And I already know what the problem is. They went all summer long selling one-time jobs, maybe some bi-annuals, maybe even some tri-annuals. I’ll be honest with you guys. When I first got into this industry, I did the same thing. I was selling one-time jobs and I just didn’t know any better. That’s exactly why I’m putting this out there for those of you who don’t know any better or are just starting out and need to hear this before you go out.
The Service Models That Leave You Broke
One-time jobs. Customer calls in, they have an issue, you go out and service it, take care of their problem, and you never see them for the rest of the year. Cool.
Bi-annuals. A lot of old-timers used to do this. Spring application and fall application, probably because the influx of bugs in spring when they’re coming out and in fall when they’re overwintering. You’re doing two visits a year.
Tri-annuals. I went from one-times to tri-annuals myself. It was way better than one-times and the revenue was better. But it still had the same issues. I was going out spring, summer, and fall. More revenue, which was great. But the problem was the same problem everyone watching this is dealing with right now. Four or five months in the off-season with no work, no techs, no money rolling in.
Now, if you’re in a cold, snowy market and you want to sell tri-annuals, I get it. Totally understand the concept. But I’ll say this: if your average contract value for quarterly is $1,000, I still want to see your tri-annuals at the same $1,000. Take that for what it’s worth. I want the contract value to be the same.
All of these models will make you money in the summer. But come January and February, you’re starving. You have no money. Your techs are laid off. You just don’t know what to do.
Recurring Revenue is Your Lifeline
You guys really, really need to start selling packages. Whether that’s monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly plans, that’s what keeps the trucks rolling all year round.
Monthly is pretty simple. You’re servicing every single month. Very common in southern markets. Bi-monthly is just coming out every other month. Quarterly is coming out every 90 days. However you want to build that is fine.
You want to bill monthly and service monthly, fine. You want to bill per service on a bi-monthly or quarterly schedule, fine. You want to run a subscription model where they’re paying monthly and you’re servicing on whatever cadence works for you, that’s fine too.
The nice thing about subscriptions is that it pulls the money forward. They’re basically prepaying for their winter visit. They’ve already paid two months and they’re going to pay the third month the day of the service. It evens out cash flow.
One reason I kind of like subscriptions but don’t necessarily love them: if they cancel, say you bundled mosquito and general pest control together, they’re most likely going to cancel both instead of just one. Pros and cons. Different topic for a different video.
Just remember that recurring revenue is your lifeline. It covers your payroll, covers rent, and keeps everything stable with cash flow year round.
Sell Pest Control Like House Insurance
The next question I always get is, “Well, how do I sell this? How do I position myself?” It’s very simple. You want to sell pest control like it’s house insurance.
Your customer’s home is typically the biggest asset they own. They want to make sure it’s protected. It’s our job as pest control professionals to make sure it’s covered year round. If you’re not doing services for five or six months out of the year, there’s that entire window where rodents could get in, pests are overwintering, and the house is unprotected.
Sell it as insurance for their home. That’s exactly what you want to do.
Take One-Time Services Off Your Website
Please, please, please take the one-time services off your website. I see it all the time and there is no reason for it. I’m not talking about specialty services like cockroaches, bed bugs, fleas, things like that. I’m talking about the general one-time pest treatment.
If someone has an issue with wasps or whatever, make sure you’re upselling them into a recurring package of some sort. Take one-time services off your website. Leave that space for your recurring plans.
And for those of you still selling one-time jobs, if your average contract value is $1,000, don’t sell one-times for less than $500. This will force people into your recurring revenue model. And if they’re willing to pay that $500 for a single visit, so be it. You just did a one-time for $500.
What to Do When Winter Hits
Let’s say you went all summer long selling a bunch of one-time jobs and now you need work in the winter. Next year you’re not going to make that mistake because you’re going to hit the ground running in the spring selling quarterly, bi-monthly, or monthly services. But right now, here’s what you can do.
Rodent Bait Stations and Exclusions
It’s getting cold. Rodents are looking for food, warmth, and shelter. They want to come inside too. Same thing with bugs trying to overwinter. You can upsell rodent bait boxes and exclusions. This is a huge opportunity.
One of the other reasons you want to sell bait stations is because you have to service them every month or every other month or every quarter to make sure there’s bait in there. Once you get the rodents under control, you’re still checking those bait stations as the first line of defense for the house. That means customers want you showing up at their house to service those stations year round. A lot of people miss this one initially.
Crawl Space Encapsulations
For those of you with crawl spaces in your markets, encapsulations are a huge home run. It’s high ticket, it’s weatherproofing the house, and it’s easy to sell, especially after a rodent job.
We have a kid in our class who we talked through what he should do and how to sell it. He went out, started selling encapsulations, and his biggest problem used to be keeping his guys busy. He sold $120,000 in the last week and a half to two weeks. Now his biggest problem is he can’t find enough people. He’s hiring everyone he can to run sales and service just to do these jobs. Massive win.
If you’re already there doing a rodent inspection and you’re going to give them a quote for a foundation exclusion, there’s no reason not to jump down in the crawl space and give them a free quote for an encapsulation while you’re at it.
Attic Remediation and Insulation Replacement
A lot of places have rodents getting into the attic, whether that’s rats or mice. They tear apart insulation, there’s tunnels everywhere, droppings everywhere, urine everywhere. It’s an absolute mess. You can literally smell it when you go up there.
Pulling out all the old insulation and blowing new insulation back in is another huge win. We’re talking $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, even $30,000 jobs that you can do all winter long. Works in warmer markets too, but cold markets especially.
Wildlife Trapping
If you’re licensed, wildlife trapping is another great option. Raccoons, squirrels, bats. Bats are a big one and you can do a lot of exclusion work with them (though not in the winter, obviously). All of it is super profitable, high ticket, and great margins. It’s also fantastic for social media content.
Commercial Contracts
Go after restaurants, apartments, warehouses, hotels, any commercial building that needs services year round. Commercial accounts don’t stop needing pest control ever. They have to have it in most cases.
Cold call. Walk into the office. Ask who’s handling their pest control. Ask what they’ve got going on. You never know. They might be frustrated with their current provider, or maybe someone just got bought out and you walked in at the perfect time. Leave them a free estimate. Get them to sit down and talk about pest control.
Winter is when you go after these accounts. If you think it’s going to be slow and you want it to be slow, it can be. But the winter isn’t dead. It’s go time. Either you want the jobs or you don’t. There’s always something to do. Go knock on doors. Yes, it’s hard. But anything that’s hard is worth doing.
How to Fill Your Slow Season Before It Even Starts
I learned this coming from the lawn care space and it was really cool to bring into pest control. In lawn care, spring rush is crazy. Phones light up. Everyone’s calling in for landscaping quotes and lawn service. Pest control, same thing.
So what we started doing in lawn care was giving customers two options when they called in for a big job. Option A: Pay for it now and get it done now at a higher rate. It’s supply and demand. Everyone else is busy in the spring too. There’s more demand than supply, so if they want it done right away, they’re going to pay a premium. Option B: Book it for later in the year at a small discount. They can put a deposit down, pay a holding fee, prepay the whole thing, whatever works. Give them the discount for locking in the spot, but push these jobs to your slow times.
We did the same thing in landscaping. We’d get super busy in the summer doing spring cleanups and just didn’t have time for the big jobs. We knew things would slow down in fall, so we’d push those big jobs to late summer and late fall.
You can do the exact same thing in pest control for your big jobs. You’d be surprised how many people, if you give them a percentage off, would say, “Yeah, no problem. We love working with you guys, we understand you’re busy, we’d love to schedule it.” You save them a little money, lock in dates, and you can build out half your schedule for the rest of the year just during the springtime. You don’t even have to worry about slow season when it gets there because you filled it before it started.
Work Your Lists
You have all the time in the world in the off-season. So what are you doing with it? Think about all the canceled customers you’ve had. When’s the last time those were touched? When’s the last time you called a customer who canceled the year before?
Maybe they switched for financial reasons but got a new job. Maybe they’re not happy with the provider they switched to because that company promised they’d never see a bug again. Touch base with those canceled customers.
Go through those open quotes. You could do this every single day the entire off-season and land two, three, four hundred jobs depending on how big your list is. There’s always something to do, but you cannot be waiting for work. You always gotta be planning and going after it.
Pull Cash Flow Forward with Prepaid Letters
This is super common in lawn care but not very common in pest control. You can send prepaid letters where customers get a discount to prepay for the entire year. That way you’re not tracking down money all year round. You’re not paying your CSR to chase invoices. The money’s already in. You can do the same thing for mosquito, for general pest control, for anything.
Give them a small discount. Something like “pay by February 3rd and get 3% off” or “pay by May 1st” with a different offer. Whatever makes sense. This one thing could pay for your entire spring marketing budget.
If half your customers prepay for the year, think about how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars that brings in. At one of our locations, 60% of our clients prepay for the entire year. That money pays for all our products up front, all our marketing up front. Obviously you’re going to have to budget it correctly, but think about how much cash you pull forward.
If you don’t want to give a discount, you can throw in something for free instead. If they prepay for their pest control, give them a free mosquito treatment or a free flea and tick treatment. Something that adds a little more value and makes them want to prepay.
This will literally generate hundreds of thousands of dollars before spring even starts. It funds your marketing. It funds your growth. Follow up with a text and email campaign too. Back in the day we always did it via snail mail and it worked really well. Text and email work just as well.
Build Your Marketing Strategy Now
In our class, we teach how to build a marketing strategy from December to January. You want to have everything done: all your emails, texts, call campaigns, sales promotions, ads, everything laid out for the entire year. That way you’re not going into spring season and all of a sudden forgetting to create a campaign because it gets busy and you’re rushing at the last minute.
Build all of this out during the entire off-season so it’s already laid out. It’s all automated. The day comes, it’s preset, it launches, and it generates $10,000, $20,000, $100,000, $200,000. All things you should be doing in the off-season.
A lot of people shut off their marketing in the winter, but I’d say maybe don’t. Ad costs drop. Competition almost disappears. Your attention gets really cheap. Run reactivation campaigns for your canceled customers. Get your referral campaigns set and ready to roll. And post consistent content.
If you’re top of mind in January, February, and March, you’ll own the market by April, May, and June when spring is hot and heavy. Winter marketing builds momentum that lasts for the rest of the year.
Systems, Team, and Recruiting
There’s always things to do when it gets cold and slow. Don’t waste your time standing around doing nothing. Use that time to build. Train your techs. Tighten up your scripts. And recruit, recruit, recruit.
Here’s one I hear all the time: “Oh yeah, we have a hard time finding people.” Whether that’s salespeople or technicians. And I ask, “What have you been doing about it?” They say, “We post an ad on Indeed” or “We post on Facebook.” So it’s their number one problem, their biggest bottleneck, and the only thing they’re doing about it takes one minute of their time over two weeks.
If this is your number one problem, you should be recruiting all off-season so you don’t have these issues in the spring. Build out your bench. Have backups for your backups. Classify your candidates as A, B, C, D players. When summer comes and you’re growing like crazy, you can call those A players. If someone quits, you’ve got the bench ready. Always be recruiting.
This is also a good time to clean up your CRM. Go through and adjust notes, dial in your routes, make sure canceled subscriptions aren’t still showing. It’s just a good time to clean everything up so when spring hits, everything runs smooth.
The Bottom Line
Slow season is a choice. You can either wait for the business to come back in the spring, or you can build a company that never slows down. That’s up to you. It’s about how bad you want it. Most of you know what to do. The question is, why aren’t you doing it?
Go out there and hustle. That’s what it takes. Use this winter to train, to market, to retain, and to prep for the year. There’s always something to do, because the companies that win in April are the ones putting in the work in January, February, and March. Put in the work.
