There’s a moment in pest control when the business looks super successful but feels way harder than it should. And that moment usually shows up right around that million-dollar mark. If you miss what’s happening there, you can get stuck for years.
I’m Jonas Olson, the founder of Pest Badger. I’ve been in the service industry for 17 years, and over the last five years, I’ve grown a pest control company from one location to 17 locations across five states. I’m using this platform to document how I think about building service businesses and what’s actually working for us. I wish my mentors would have documented their journey, so I’m documenting mine for you.
Once you get close to that million dollars, the business just starts to feel different. You’re not really worried about survival anymore. You’re not in the truck every single day. You’re not scrambling the way you once did early on. The business runs well enough that nothing really feels urgent anymore. And that’s typically when the momentum starts to slow down.
Without really noticing it, your behavior starts to change. You stop doing the guerrilla-style marketing that got your business moving in the first place. You stop networking the way you used to. You stop putting yourself in rooms where a lot of those early opportunities came from. Instead, most people turn the Google Ads on because it’s easier and let Google do the heavy lifting because work’s still coming in. It feels fine. And that’s why the ceiling is so hard to see coming.
Even though things feel fine, the foundation of your business really hasn’t changed that much. Hitting that million dollars feels like you finally made it. You’ve been working at this for three, five, 10 years, and it’s this big thing you’ve been trying to hit. And I agree, you should go celebrate it. But let’s be honest, the business is still super vulnerable. One technician leaving puts you back in the truck. One CSR putting in her two weeks gets you back in the office. That’s just how tight things still are.
A lot of owners at this stage haven’t raised prices since the day they started. Not even one time. They know they probably should. They just don’t want to deal with it or they’re afraid of the pushback from the customer. So old customers stay on old pricing. New costs get absorbed by the business. The business gets busier but technically not more profitable. And this leads straight into the first bottleneck.
The Owner Is the Bottleneck
I typically talk to companies that are between $700K and $1.5 million in revenue. At that stage, they all look super similar. They have three to five technicians. They have one CSR. The owner is still deeply involved, maybe not every day in the truck, but he’s still handling all the sales calls, scheduling, helping with the schedule, customer issues, hiring, training, and anything compliance-related. And when anything’s super important, it also lands on the owner.
That’s just the ceiling. You can only do so much. There’s just not enough hours in the day.
And almost all owners try to solve this the same exact way. They go out and hire another technician because it feels like progress since they’re doing less physical work, servicing less. But the work just kind of shifts. Now you’re building out schedules, fixing routes, handling callbacks, covering gaps when the CSR or a technician calls in sick.
You didn’t really move up the org chart. You just moved sideways. Your capacity increased, but the dependency on you in the business didn’t change.
The Financial Squeeze
This is where I see a lot of the financial pressure actually come from. Let’s put some numbers to it. Say you’re right at that million dollars in revenue. You’re doing about 15% profit, which gives you about $150,000.
Now at this level, your company needs things that don’t actually generate revenue. They just come out of your profit. You have to start thinking about hiring an operations manager or an office manager or maybe even both. And someone good is going to cost you between $60,000 and $90,000 a year. That’s half of your profit, if not all of your profit.
So the owner keeps the responsibility. Wears more hats. Makes more decisions. Takes more of the mental load. And that one choice usually costs them an entire other person’s salary. Because nobody’s tightening up routes, nobody’s fixing the schedule to make sure it’s super tight, nobody’s owning the day-to-day problems. The owner just keeps stepping back in again and again and again.
The Visibility Problem
At this stage, there’s typically only one person watching the business, and that’s the owner. And even that’s super inconsistent, because most of us are pretty ADD. We have a lot of things going on and the last thing we want to do is watch numbers.
Most owners at this stage don’t even have an up-to-date P&L. Sometimes it’s a few weeks behind. Let’s be honest, most of the time it’s months behind. There’s no shared scoreboard. No one owns the numbers like revenue per technician, labor costs, overhead, or cost of goods sold.
Numbers aren’t being reviewed consistently, so decisions aren’t being made from them. They’re getting made off of a gut feeling and how good your bank account looks that week.
The Marketing Blind Spot
If the marketing company is doing a good job, it typically hides all of this longer than it should. At this stage, most owners don’t know a whole lot about marketing themselves. It’s typically handled by an agency. And let me be clear, I’ve worked with a lot of agencies in the past. Some agencies are solid. Some aren’t so great. But the owner is far enough removed that they don’t really understand what’s driving the results.
When I ask questions like, “What are you paying per lead? What does it cost to acquire a customer? How long does that customer usually stay?” The answer typically isn’t very clear or they just don’t know the answer at all. Even when the owner is close to the numbers, they typically don’t even know what those numbers actually mean.
Marketing becomes something they trust by default. Spend goes up when things feel slow. Spend gets pulled back when things feel tight. It’s not based on any math.
Very few owners can confidently say, “This is our customer acquisition cost. This is our lifetime value of our client. And this is how much we can spend and still grow profitably.” Without that, marketing isn’t a growth lever. It’s more of a gamble and a gut feeling.
The Real Problem: You Need to Evolve
All of this points to the same thing. Effort isn’t what’s holding you back. The job just changes. You have to stop thinking like the best technician and start thinking like the owner who’s responsible for growing this business.
What I see a lot of owners do is add more complexity. They add more services, more offers, new ideas, more equipment. The business changes so much that it never gets a chance to just grow organically. And that’s where people stall out.
If you’re stuck around the million dollars, it’s probably not because you don’t know pest control. And it’s probably not because you don’t work hard. Most owners don’t really fail here. They just stop recreating themselves.
The business grows past the version of you that built it. Getting to the next level means becoming a different version of yourself. Not by doing more. Not by adding more hours. It’s whether you’re willing to recreate yourself to match what the business actually needs next.
This Should Hit Close to Home
If this hit close to home, that’s not a bad thing. Most owners don’t get stuck at a million dollars because they’re bad at business. They get stuck because no one ever showed them what actually changes at this level.
I didn’t figure this out from just books and listening to podcasts. I figured it out by making the mistakes, fixing them, and then scaling through them. That’s exactly what I’m here for, documenting what’s actually working while we’re building it. And through my journey, I hope you get to learn too.
