I audited five pest control companies. I found five different issues that all led to the same outcome: growth stalling once things started to get bigger.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Jonas Olson, the founder of Pest Badger. I’ve been in the service industry for 17 years. Over the last 5 years, we’ve grown a pest control company from one location to 17 locations across five states. I use this channel to document how I think about building service businesses and what actually works for us. I wish my mentors would have documented their journey, so I’m documenting mine for you.
As you guys know, I end up having a lot of conversations with pest control owners and service business owners in general. Most of the time, it starts pretty normal. We just talk about things that are going on and what’s feeling heavier than it should. A lot of those conversations honestly just start with what’s keeping them up at night. They’re busy, revenue is coming in usually, but something just feels off.
At some point, we pull up their CRM, we pull up the numbers, and that’s usually when the conversation starts to change. Things slow down. People stop talking as much. It kind of just gets a little quiet. That’s normally where the real issues start to reveal themselves.
What surprised me over time wasn’t really bad decisions. It was just how often completely different companies ended up in very similar situations. I want to walk you through five companies I’ve looked at closely. These are all anonymous. They’re all run by people who love their business and love what they’re doing. None of these businesses are disasters by any means. They’re just built in ways that make growth harder than it needs to be.
This company was staying super busy. Phones ringing most of the day, calendar booked out a few weeks. But when I broke down the revenue, almost everything was a one-time job. They had around 700 customers and 500 of them were one-time jobs.
They were already paying for the ads. The leads were already coming in. But once we stepped back and looked at the math, the real issue started to show up. They were spending the same amount of money to acquire customers as everyone else, but choosing the lowest possible outcome for each single one of them.
A customer would call, they’d book in for a one-time job, pay $200 to $300. Job would get done, the customer is super happy, and that’s kind of where the relationship would end. Now compare that to converting that same customer into a recurring revenue plan. Say they’re paying $40 to $50 a month, and that customer stays 3 to 5, even 7 years. That same customer is now worth $1,500 to $3,000 or more. Same ad spend. Same leads. Same initial visit. Completely different outcomes.
The issue really wasn’t that one-time work was bad, because it was generating really good revenue. It was that there was no way to predict any future revenue. Every single month depended almost entirely on how many new customers they could bring in. That leaves a lot of money on the table once you want stable, predictable growth.
So what we had to do was fix the intake process to convert more of those jobs into recurring revenue instead of one-time work. A lot of their customers were coming back twice a year or three times a year for seasonal treatments, but they weren’t on an actual recurring plan. We wanted predictable revenue. You put them on a monthly program, quarterly, bimonthly, whatever you sell. It’s way easier to predict revenue. You don’t have to worry about the leads shutting off or spending more money. You can just get really predictable because you already have the client base.
We had that person start calling all those old customers he’d already sold and try to upsell them into the recurring plan.
Company 2: Everything Goes Through the Owner
The second company looked fine on the surface. They had a few technicians, consistent work, and when we looked at the CRM, nothing really jumped out as broken. But I started asking some questions, and that’s where the issue showed up.
“When a person calls in about pricing, who answers that?” The owner. “If there’s a schedule change?” That kind of went to the owner. “What happens when a customer complains?” Yeah, that goes to the owner too.
It wasn’t because the team was bad. That’s just how the company had grown over time. Every single time an important decision came up, it ended up going to the same exact place.
That didn’t matter much early on. But as the volume started to increase, it started to matter a lot. Jobs didn’t stop coming in, but the business just took longer to respond. Small issues waited a little longer to get resolved. Pricing became inconsistent. Customers were depending on when the owner was available to do inspections or handle anything at all.
As volume increased, the decision speed and quality dropped. Not because anyone was doing a bad job, but because everything still ran through one person. I see this happen a lot. It just creates a ceiling once the business wants to grow past that person.
We had to teach this owner to start delegating and start creating some SOPs for his CSRs and employees so they could take some of the load off him. I see this a lot in the early stages of business. The owner doesn’t want to give up any responsibility, but he has to learn to start delegating.
Company 3: Great Service, Terrible Pricing
Company number three was run super well. Really good technicians. Clean trucks. Solid reputation online. Tons of reviews. Everything looked really good. But once I pulled up how many active customers they had against their annual revenue, it was obvious right out of the gate that the average contract value was just super low.
That’s when pricing became the sole focus of that trip. The service itself was super strong. In a lot of ways, it was probably better than what their competitors were offering.
When I asked how they landed on their pricing, the answer was what I hear all the time: there wasn’t really any strategy behind it. They just called around to see what everyone else was charging. But maybe those other companies didn’t know what they were doing either.
The cost to acquire a customer wasn’t lower than anyone else’s. Labor isn’t any cheaper. Fuel isn’t any cheaper. Insurance definitely isn’t any cheaper. Nothing was wrong operationally. The math just literally stopped mathing.
The margins were super thin to start with, and any increase in cost from anywhere came straight out of their profit, which they already didn’t have much of. Anytime technicians or CSRs wanted a raise, it squeezed everything out of the entire company. When ad costs increased, there was no room to absorb it. Growth to them just meant doing more volume instead of improving the economics of what they already had.
We focused on raising prices on their current customers and walked them through the process of how to do that. A lot of early young entrepreneurs, or even people who have been in business a while, don’t like raising prices. Especially the first time. But once you do it a few times, you get comfortable with it. That’s exactly where I’d start with a company like that.
Company 4: Nobody Owns the Numbers
This company had grown to the point where the day-to-day operations were covered. Phones were getting answered, routes were scheduled, jobs were getting completed. But the issue started to show up once I dug a little deeper into their service metrics, because a few of their KPIs had started to creep in the wrong direction.
I started asking follow-up questions. “Who is doing the ghost inspections? Is a manager going out? What happened once callbacks started to increase?” The answers weren’t really “no.” They all knew what they needed to do. They were just inconsistent about it. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t.
No one really owned retention. No one really owned callbacks. No one owned service quality once the job was done. The work was getting done, but nobody was responsible for improving the outcome over time as the business grew.
Retention started to slip. Callbacks started to increase. When callbacks increased, labor costs crept up. More activity, but the P&L didn’t improve with it. The issues were showing up in the reports. They were talking about them in meetings. They just weren’t consistently getting acted on.
Again, it’s not that the team didn’t care or wasn’t competent. It’s that leadership behaviors weren’t clearly assigned to specific KPIs. The fix was pretty simple. Put KPIs under direct reports and have them report on them every single meeting. Make sure those tasks are actually getting done. Pretty simple, but if you just don’t know, you don’t know. As you scale, you start to watch these things a lot closer.
Company 5: Marketing Without a Feedback Loop
The fifth company was growing really well. Spending money on ads. Leads coming in. Phones ringing like crazy. When we looked at the P&L, nothing was really an issue. But when I started asking questions about their marketing, things got interesting.
“Which ads were driving the most recurring revenue? Which ones brought in those cheaper one-time jobs that didn’t convert or come back? Which campaigns produced customers that stayed a really long time?” There wasn’t a clear answer. Marketing was just getting measured by how many leads they were getting.
Lots of leads looked really good. But they weren’t measuring the outcomes of those leads. Some customers signed up super easy. Others hesitated. Some were just super cheap. Some canceled really quickly.
Their marketing wasn’t broken, because leads were coming in. It just wasn’t connected to lifetime value, retention, or margin. Increasing ad spend didn’t improve any predictability. It just increased the volume of leads. Without clear feedback, scaling marketing just gets you expensive leads.
This one was pretty easy to fix. I had them break out their campaigns and start tracking per ad and per campaign so they could really dial in what they were looking at and see which ads were producing the best customers. Then double down on those.
The Common Thread
When I look back at all five companies, the problems on paper looked different. One had the one-time work problem. One had the owner bottleneck. One was underpriced. One had nobody owning the KPIs. One had marketing running without any clear feedback.
But underneath it all, it was the same issue every single time. None of these businesses were built intentionally for scale. They were just growing by reacting to what was in front of them, not by designing how the business needed to work as it got bigger.
That’s why growth tends to get harder for a while instead of getting easier.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yeah, we have a little bit of all of that,” you’re probably right. That’s the mistake most owners make. They try to fix the symptoms instead of the constraints.
If I were you, I wouldn’t try to fix all of these things at once. I’d just pick one. Look at the numbers. Ask one question: what is the one thing in my business that, if I fix it, would make everything else easier? What is the one big lever I can pull to fix everything else?
Once you get that one thing figured out, move on to the second one, then the third, then the fourth, then the fifth.
