Pest perspectives EP 16 - Andrew Sanefski, PCQI - Coast 2 Coast Pest Talk podcast!
Tonight's Episode
Pest perspectives EP 16 - Andrew Sanefski, PCQI -In Episode 16 of the Pest Perspectives Podcast, Shaun Muller is joined by Andrew Sanefski, co-owner of Perimetek Pest Management, co-host of the Coast to Coast Pest Talk podcast and a board member of the New York Pest Management Association.Andrew shares how he entered pest management in 1997 as an 18-year-old apprentice before progressing through New York’s licensing system and eventually building his own pest control company alongside his wife, Holly.
The conversation explores the major differences between pest management in the United States and the United Kingdom, including technician licensing, qualifications, continuing professional development, pesticide regulation and access to rodenticides.Andrew explains why increasingly restrictive pesticide regulations could ultimately benefit the pest control industry. As fewer quick and inexpensive chemical solutions become available, technicians will require greater knowledge, better investigation skills and a stronger understanding of integrated pest management.
Shaun and Andrew also discuss pricing commercial pest management correctly and why companies should not automatically reduce their standards to match a customer’s budget. Andrew shares practical advice on consultative selling, helping customers understand risk and allowing them to choose which elements of a proposed pest management programme they are prepared to remove.
The episode also covers Andrew’s decision to move Perimetek Pest Management away from routine residential work and towards high-value, recurring commercial pest management. He explains how the company gradually removed services that did not fit its long-term vision, even when doing so meant giving up significant revenue.
Andrew discusses the difference between building a company quickly and building one with a strong foundation. Rather than chasing rapid growth, he believes pest control businesses should be clear about their values, the type of work they want to deliver and the careers they want to create for their employees.The conversation also examines why pest management is not always respected in the same way as trades such as plumbing and electrical work, and whether stronger regulation, professional standards and industry oversight could help elevate the profession.
Andrew also shares how accurate financial information, careful planning and support from his wife have helped Perimetek Pest Management make major strategic decisions. He explains the importance of understanding profit, expenses, staffing requirements and recurring revenue before changing the direction of a business.This is an honest and thought-provoking conversation about pest control, commercial contracts, business growth, leadership, regulation, pricing and building a company that can remain strong for generations.
Topics covered include:
Starting a career in pest management
Pest control licensing in New York
UK and US pest management qualifications
Pesticide and rodenticide regulation
Integrated pest management
Commercial pest control
Moving from residential to commercial work
Recurring pest management
programmes Building a sustainable pest control company
Employee development and retention
Financial planning and business decisions
Raising professional standards in pest management
Creating a family business for the next generation
Hello and welcome to Pest Perspectives.
We are on episode episode. 16. So every guy episode 16, I
couldn't find it. I thought it'd run by the screen
then, but episode 16, which is impressive.
We've got to 16. But the general view is people
are liking the podcast, the learning, learning bits and
pieces. That's all I that's the goal of
the podcast. If you can come out of a podcast
and even if you didn't learn loads, it's just a tiny bit that
helps you. That's all that matters.
It's all about helping other people in the community and
people from around the world can learn a bit about how we do it.
Because I obviously have people on from around the world now I I
do. So it's quite a demand to come
on the podcast. I'm quite surprised.
I am. But yeah, this week we have
Andrew Cynifsky. No.
Is that right? Yeah, yeah, Syrupsky.
I was about to say for I'm going to butcher it.
So from Permatech Pest Management also if he's part of
the Coast to Coast Best Talk podcast, and he's also part of
the New York Pest Management Association.
That's why I've got that right. Yeah.
So hello, how are you? How are you doing?
Sean, I am super glad to be here.
This is awesome. Well, I tried to get Gabe on
Gabe. We can call them out from here.
Gabe. Come on, man.
You only got 10 kids. You got time.
Not wrong there. Two people are watching Hello
live viewers. Awesome.
Yeah, good to hear. Do you want to tell people?
I know I've mentioned it. You want to keep people quick
brief of what you do in the industry and what you do because
sure. Well, I said, won't mean much to
people. Sure.
Yeah. So, yeah, I am the owner along
with my wife of Permit Tech Pest Management in East Syracuse, NY
It's upstate New York. We're not near the Statue of
Liberty or the Empire State Building or anything like that.
We're in farm country. We're, yeah, we're in the near
the, the wineries and things in the central part of the state,
the Finger Lakes region here. It's all, it's all country up
here. Started in pest management in
1997 as a summer job while I went to college and have been on
with this pretty much ever since.
And yeah, it's just a, a way of life for us at at this point.
Currently I'm on the board of directors for the New York Pest
Management Association, which is the state affiliate of the
National Pest Management Association for the for the
whole United States. And yeah, so that's that's
pretty much where we're at here. So how many companies are part
of that one offshoot? Oh, my goodness.
Of the New York Pest Management Association, I think there's
something like 200, maybe something like that.
Yeah, the membership. Yeah, that's just one area of
America. Yeah, let's just you make us
look tiny. Well, yeah, yeah, New York's
about geographically the same size as the UK square, square
miles. Yeah, Yep, Yep.
A lot fewer people though in, in our state.
We have about 1/3 the number of people in in New York State than
you guys have. Yeah, yeah.
Has that covered it or did I interrupt you?
Sorry about. That no, no.
Well, and then yeah, on the podcast with Gabe Seymour and
he's out in Portland. He's on the other side of the
the continent for our coast to coast pest talk that we do,
talking about the everything under the sun related to pest
control. We do.
It's very informative. Oh, good.
Just want to shout out Jenny in chat.
Jenny Wilson, thanks for watching from the Pestigen
podcast. I don't know if you've heard of
that podcast. Yeah, actually, what was what
was today? You're too too pretty to be in
pest control, too cute to be in pest control.
That was their episode, I think it was.
It was dropped today or yesterday.
I haven't caught it yet. It was, it was good stuff.
It was. Yeah, it was spicy.
So. I can't wait to check it out.
Yeah. So, so you mentioned you got
into pest control in 97. Yeah.
So it was obviously that was working for like what was it
working for a big box company or was it working for a local
company? Yeah, it was a, it was a local
company. I was fortunate enough to find
my way into a family owned company, had about 20 ish, 25
people or so, something like that and worked there for 11
years until they were sold to a very large organisation.
And I really only lasted about six months under, you know, that
large organisation. And my wife and I at that point
said, you know, we never would have left the, the mom and pop
company that we were brought up through.
But with the changes that came in with the, you know, big box
pest control, I just couldn't, I just couldn't stomach it.
And she said, we're going to, we're going to go on our own.
And that was sort of the the auspicious beginnings of
parameters. That's fair enough.
I mean to anyone that is in the UK, when I say big box, I mean
your national big companies are the the big R and the big big
green tea is I hear. Sure.
The big green tea doesn't exist here anymore.
No, no, yeah, absorbed up for sure, yeah.
But I want to say hello to oh look, oh I can't.
Thanks for watching on LinkedIn. I can't read that name unless
Andrew can. If you just, you know, well, I,
I can. All I can really say is we're
glad to have you from Nairobi. Thanks for watching.
I appreciate that. So were you qualified?
Did you do your qualifications in this family family business?
So initially I started as a apprentice.
So I didn't know anything, you know, I was 18 years old, you
know, doing it as a summer job while I went to school for
fisheries and wildlife in the winters.
And started as an apprentice for a few seasons and then got
enough, you know, under my belt to take the state licencing exam
here to become a certified technician and then overtime
upgraded to be a certified applicator.
We have a sort of a multi tiered system in New York State with
apprentice certified technician and then or sorry licenced
technician, then certified applicator.
So it's not like qualification, is it a qualification?
So is this a call? Is this a licence?
Say, I hear a lot about to say you did something, you made a
big mess up and you did something.
Could you lose your licence and that you were over?
Could you they take it off you if you did something bad?
Yeah. So yeah, first of all, yeah, no,
I've never messed up anything before.
No, I've screwed up everything. But yes, that not bad enough to
lose your licence. But yeah, you're held to a
little bit higher standard. So something that say like a
homeowner buys product off the shelf and does something with it
and there really are going to be no real repercussions.
There's repercussions for a licenced individual because you
should know better. So you could lose your licence,
you could have gaol time and fines and you know all the, all
the power course of power of the the justice system.
It isn't, it isn't like that. Hey, you'd have to kill
somebody. Well, we found on killing people
here too, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, you'd have to.
I think to get to that level you'd have to kill.
You'd have to. What you did would have had to
have killed somebody, say you were doing a gassing job or
something. And there was, there was a case
where somebody, I don't know, they weren't pest controllers.
They got hold of aluminium phosphite.
Is it? Yeah, and.
It seeped through and killed this young girl on her birthday
through a vodka flats and they can't work out how they caught
it into the country was that? Was that the one where a flat
above another one was being treated?
I saw that. I heard it on the beasties as
well. I did.
That's why I heard it. No, no, I say, here's the thing.
So like saying that there is like a standard and if if you
screw something up, you can have repercussions, that's great.
But we don't really, there's not like a lot of enforcement of are
you doing a good job? Like nobody's going around and
checking on that. Our, our enforcement agencies
are really just looking for compliance of like, did you buy
the right stuff? Are you following the label or
you're storing it properly? Are you using it the way it's
supposed to be used and disposing of it properly?
But as far as like, are you doing a quality job with that?
That's kind of up to you to kind of figure out.
Nobody's coming behind you and saying you did this wrong.
It's just a very different way it is in, in America a lot to
ask these questions because it's so different to what we're used
to here. It's qualification based as you
probably know, but you obviously have seen probably all the UK's
feature framework system going through and being being sorted
out like they want to framework. So when you come out of school
or uni of college or whatever you want to do that you know the
actual framework to work to rather than currently it's just
you can either have, depending who you're working for,
obviously the basics in rodents and insects, which are just
basically a day course and you can actually buy bait with that.
That's fine. But as of next year, you've got
to have CPD. You have as well.
But for the first five years, you don't need it if you just
want to use your basics. And then you can go on to the
what I've got the RSPH level 2 in award in pest management, and
that's pretty much what the majority of people stick to.
And then you've got Level 3 and they're working on the whole
framework. They are, but it's to help
younger people try and get into pest control as well.
Because schools, schools don't recommend that as a profession
here. Do they recommend it in where
you where you are? Is that a thing?
Yeah, not, not really. We're, we're in the shadows a
little more in our industry specifically, but there is
definitely a movement in the United States towards trades,
like towards trades in general. One of the things that we've
been trying to, to do is get more involved with, like we're
involved with, like the Manufacturers Association here
in, in New York to get some of our apprenticeships in with sort
of like it's well known for manufacturing to have
apprenticeships and people work up through to become a Carpenter
or whatever they, they're going to be.
But get our, our name as not us as a company necessarily, but
our industry involved with that. Part of the trouble we, we end
up with it a little bit is that we don't need that many people.
So you're not looking for, you know, hey, we need to hire 1000
people to outfit a factory with manufacturers workers.
You know, our, our region here. You might need 100, you know,
like it. Like there's, there's just not
that many jobs, you know, that that we can really absorb as an
industry. Now if, if regulations change
and the risk that pests present are taken more seriously as we
as we move forward, all the sudden there's going to be more
money for this sort of service. And then there's going to be
able to be more pay. And we're going to need more
people to do a higher level of work.
And this all is going to be coming.
But we're talking 10 or 15 years down the road because I think
there's, I think there's, this is might be off topic a little
bit for you, but I think there's 2 two things that are going to
happen sort of in conjunction with each other.
One is as we reduce the number of materials we have available,
we're going to increase the level of skill that a technician
needs to be able to still do the, to achieve the same
results. With that, with that level of
skill, now you're going to be able to command a higher pay, a
higher pay for the company and then a higher pay for the
technician. Because now instead of being a,
hey, we can get you trained up in a week.
It's going to take a lot more to get people to where they need to
be because you're you're going to lose the cheap, effective
materials that we've sort of relied on as an industry.
And I say relied on, it's like a double edged short.
We relied on it, but it's also been hurting us and we don't
even realise it. Having cheap, effective
pesticides allows us to do a worse job and still get good
results. And so, so it's a crutch.
I wouldn't say the materials would buy cheap, would you?
Our materials are about 3 1/2% of our annual revenue as a
company. So as far as like an expense
goes, it's hardly anything right like I.
Suppose when you, when you put it that way, but if you pull it
to the IT compared to what? Well, I suppose people can buy
it off the shelf now in America. Can they buy what you can as in
the redenticides? Can they buy that off the shelf?
The same piece as you? Yes and no.
So they, the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency changed.
There's a risk mitigation decision a few years back and it
changed how we handle rodenticides in the United
States. And it was meant to mitigate
risk to non target organisms and having home owners, you know,
Chuck and bait everywhere, that kind of thing.
One of the things that they changed was you can't get the
like second generation anticoagulants in small single
use sort of sort of packaging. You can still buy it though as a
home owner if you go to the Tractor Supply store, the farm
supply store and you can buy, you know, 18 LB pals of it, but
you can't buy one ounce of it like.
I'll tell you what that makes complete sense.
That just Alex weights watching. Hello, Alex.
Now I got to watch what I say. But yeah, that that makes total
sense. You can't buy little bags or
identicide, but you can buy buckets and buckets in it if you
want to for the bomb shop. Sure.
Well, they, they tried to, they tried to have it so that second
generation antique waggons were still available for the, the
agricultural market. You know, you, you have the mom
and pop farms, even though a lot of our agriculture is going to
like industrial corporate farming now, but you have mom
and pop farms and they wanted to have them still be able to gain
access to rodenticide so they can, you know, Chuck them
haphazardly everywhere they want.
Yes, it's. Not here.
There's a change of the girls when it comes to farm, like farm
shops, etcetera. So as of next year, I bow, Alex
is watching me. I'm back at this right.
So, so it's all changing next year.
There used to be something called, there was an, if you
were a member of a big pharming organisation, say Red Tractor,
if you were a member and you could prove you're a member, you
could walk in and buy identicide without a qualification in the
farm shops as of next year. Then people have to go and do a
day course and then every five years retake it or they have to
join the CPD scheme and do free crew points to farmers.
But we have to do now as a pest controllers we have.
Yeah, no pressure. Yeah, there we go.
No pressure guys. Yeah, you're right there.
And then us pest controllers have to do free crew points per
year, which is courses that crew provide for that three points.
And then the rest of the points have to be made for the what?
I'm in the MPTA, National Better Technicians Association.
You have to do all your points, so 20, but it's got to include
three crew points, I believe. Oh, it's 20 + 3.
One of the two it is. So, so to circle back though on,
on the materials, though, I, I, I still think that, that, that
availability for us as an industry of those cheap
effective materials and cheap relative relatively, those cheap
effective materials are helping us provide a level of service
where we're controlling things, but definitely hurting us
because it's stunting our industry from maturing because
we're, we're not having to invest more into high level
training for really great technicians in general.
I mean, there are some, I'm not this is this talking really
general, But if you can, if you can fill up the back of a pickup
truck with 100 gallons of material and spray 30 houses in
a day and expect you get OK results and cash those cheques.
As long as you're that materials available that you can still do
that with, people are going to do that if you if you eliminate
the availability. So as those materials start to
become more restricted, you have to still achieve the ends
control, whatever the problem is.
And to do that, you're going to have to have more training,
you're going to have to have more skill level, you're going
to have to have more, you know, site time and that kind of
thing. And that's going to raise our
pricing and it's going to raise the pay we can pay for people
and that's going to track people into the industry.
So I, this is counter to a lot of opinion right now, but I'm
not, I'm not against like regular regulation on materials.
The materials are just one of the tools and they're going to
change over time. And, and honestly, if they if
they get more restrictive, we're going to be better off in the
longer run. But you can have to.
Obviously you're supposed to use integrated pest management
anyway, but I actually know lots of people don't, obviously, But
the problem also as well, sometimes the clients don't want
to pay what's needed to to do it properly.
Sure as well. You do get them, don't you?
They don't want to. They say it's a big gaping hole
or that somebody needs proofing. They don't want to.
Yeah, do it. OK, so I suppose you always get
that though, don't you? You do.
And and so I've heard this argument a lot of times.
So if somebody came to you and I don't know you're a doctor and
they came to you and said hey, I have a cold and I need a
prescription for for medication and I only want to pay you
whatever $10. You actually the prescription
you need to write for them is for two weeks worth of
antibiotics you take twice a day.
It's going to be however many pills is that I only have money
for for 2 pills. So just give me the 2 pills.
If the doctor did that, he'd be committing malpractice.
So if somebody comes to us and says, hey, I want to do this
thing and you know that it's not standard, it's way out of bounds
for what we should be doing. It's sort of malpractice for you
to say, OK, you'll only pay me this.
I'll go ahead and do it anyway. I'll do, I'll do my best, I'll
get give it my level best and give it a try.
So. That's a good analogy.
We, yeah, we it's it's almost a non argument to me because the
argument is really. If we reframe that argument,
they only want to pay this much is OK, How, how little am I
willing to do? Like, like, where's my floor of
how, how much can I cut down what I'm really supposed to win
our best practises? How, how, how close can I shave
those down until it's it's not not doing the right thing?
That's true because it's like, like when we get contracts, we
we get a lot of people. Well, can't you, why can't you
cut down this blokes, this company that right and I'll go.
Our price is our price. We're not going to drop it
because a lot of people will, weren't they?
They'll drop it to the floor just to get it well.
So here's, here's something I do because I'll get that same
question right as I'm coaching my sales, sales people out there
talking to commercial accounts and stuff, they'll, they'll run
into somebody and said, Hey, I got this price from whoever.
And most of the time that, that price is not based on anything.
There's like, it's just pretty much what the salesperson thinks
they can get that account for. So we'll see wild fluctuations
between accounts that are way overpriced or way underpriced.
And, and it's hard to predict what you're actually going to
pay. But if someone comes and we, we,
we do our, our best presentation.
Here's what, here's what we think you need.
If they want to get a better price, usually what I'll do is
I'll turn it back to them and say, OK, what would you like to
cut out? What, what part of this do you
want me to skimp on? Because it's up to them if they
want to assume risk for something.
And sometimes this actually, it's not a, it's not a facetious
argument. It's, hey, hey, if I'm
presenting the, the world's best IPM programme for your facility
and it includes, you know, bees and Wasps and roaches and
bedbugs and mice and rats. And then we say, OK, well,
that's too much money. I want it to be less, OK, what
do you want to cut? And then you find out, well, I'm
not really worried about bees and Wasps.
I'm not really OK do you want to do just rodent control only
because we can cut the price down to just that, you know, is
there parts of your your campus, let's say you have multiple
buildings. Do you are you not really
worried about that shed out there in the back?
It won't be part of the programme.
We'll cut that out. We're only going to cover this.
Do you want to have a guarantee coverage?
We could cut cut out a guarantee and just do your basic
maintenance and any other call outs are going to be an added
price, but put and these are just like random examples I'm
I'm thinking of at the. Moment, it's really good because
I'm not that good at sales. Sales.
I'm learning. I am.
But it but it turns it around on them and now the the decision of
where you cut and and you frame it that way.
Hey, you're asking me to cut corners.
OK, what corners would you like me to cut?
And at some point there's going to be a point where you go,
well, that's too many corners. I can't cut all those corners.
Now you don't have anything or, or, and, and a lot of times what
people will do is they'll start to think differently about their
programme. Sometimes they're just, they
just don't care and they're cheap and they'll say, Nah,
forget you, but you don't want those clients anyway.
Let somebody else deal with that with that headache.
But a lot of times they'll, it'll reframe how they're
looking at their, at their own programme and go, geez, I really
do need this. And I, you know, I'm worried
about these things. And then you're having a
conversation about risk and liability versus how many boxes
are are you going to put in here and how often are you going to
check them? Because that has no real
tangible emotional weight to anybody other than us.
We sometimes, sorry, did you sometimes offer say you do a
facility and then they don't want say the cockroaches and you
you say that's OK, if you ever need the cockroach, you should
just charge them per job. Is that do you do that as well?
Yeah, there's, there's a, there's a bunch of different
ways that this could, this could be done and it, it's all going
to be predicated on what their requirements might be.
So they might have regulatory requirements of their own.
If they're, you know, organic certified food processing, they
don't have a lot of choice in what they, they have to do
certain things. If they're any of the QSFI
auditing schemes, AIBSQF, all those alphabet soups of audited
plants, they're going to have certain things they have to do.
Now, if you're say, I don't know, an apartment complex, you
can decide to cover as much or as little as you really want.
So some of them they go, look, we want just basic rodent
control, you know, management going on.
And then if we need Ant control in an apartment, it's going to
be extra every time we call you out for these other things.
A lot of those can be still very profitable because you, you work
them out on a, on the rotation and say, look, we're here the
first and third Monday of every month.
That's when you're, you're on the route.
We're going to be there for your regular, you know, rodent
maintenance programme your to check on that and, and a batch
all your work orders that come in and then you charge them
whatever you charge them 100 bucks, 200 bucks per apartment
to treat for roaches for, you know, whatever the the case may
be. But you can get creative with
that to sort of sort of work it out how they understand their
risk and liability and, and how they want to handle it.
And then and then you're then you're it's the truest in the
truest sense is Foster from pest pasta.
You would say it's like it's consultative selling that at
that point, OK, you're not trying to push something on
them. You're consulting with them and
offering your expertise and then a solution based on what they're
looking to accomplish. So kind of got off.
We got off on a whole side. Well, I'll tell you what, I I
learned a lot that imagine a lot of people will because it's it's
not an Amy, it's not selling like for picking up new, we've
picked up a few new contracts recently, but it's not something
it's not a strong point. Let's just say it's it's we've
got quite a few we have, but it's not a strong point gaining
more. So it's helped.
It has. Thanks for that.
I'm sure it will help other people.
It will. Sure.
So we'll we'll jump to. Obviously you mentioned how
Permatex started. So do you want to go how that
transitioned from big box to actually thinking about starting
at your own company when it came about?
Yeah, I, I'll tell you, one of the things that I wasn't
anticipating when the company I worked for sold was the
emotional impact that that had. Like I, I don't know if you, we,
we realise in the day-to-day how attached we are and how, how
much our identity becomes intertwined with our work until
something gets pulled away from you like that and then all of a
sudden you go, oh, my goodness. It, it's, it's like a, it's like
a gut punch. And coming out of that, my
thought was, jeez, I, I loved what I was doing.
I thought this was a great industry.
I wanted to do this forever. Can I, can I rebuild that and,
and have the the same kind of job again for myself?
And then immediately I was thinking, I want to provide this
for other people. So like our our first, the
weirdly, the first thing that I did was took my old company's
employee handbook and rewrote it for our company.
I had one person. There was me and and slave
labour in my wife and you know, a one year old at home and I'm
here writing a employee handbook, rewriting it for our
company. My wife is like you are.
Nuts. It sounds just like you based
off your podcast. This is definitely you.
So, but I, I, I immediately was like, this is a great, great
career for people. I want to put together an
organisation that can provide jobs that are going to be
awesome jobs for people. And so like right out of the
gate, it took some things off the table for us.
So we weren't going to be doing 20 stops a day spraying houses
from a truck like that. That was to me, that's not
exciting or interesting work. Like it's not something that
engages the mind enough to attract people that are going to
want to dedicate themselves to it.
And that, and that's, that's, that's the big difference.
A lot of times when we have these conversations and you had
mentioned for how do we, how do we get people into this
industry? There has to be meaning and
direction and a path and a future.
And the more you can put that into the job you're offering,
the less turnover you're going to have.
The more longevity with these with, with employees, the more
they're going to enjoy their work, the more they're going to
do those little extra things, you know, go that little bit
extra mile. If you're just hiring kids that
are like college kids and people that just can't find jobs and
saying, here's a truck, here's a tonne of stuff, go spray these
houses and get them all done as fast as you can.
That is, that's a soul crushing job.
Like it really is. And, and right now it's a lot of
our, our industry and that's where we, I feel like we, we
tend to tend to struggle. That's fair because obviously
that's how you build your company up with because I have
heard of people actually in America spraying.
I've heard these, whether they're true or not.
Do people actually spray from their vans, their trucks, up to
the house? Is that made of?
So I don't know if I have, I know for sure that I've, I've
seen people that have done the barcode scans from their trucks,
didn't check stations or whatever.
As far as spraying. I, I mean, I have seen people
that didn't have done, you know, weed control around buildings
from the truck hanging, you know, hanging on arm out and
spraying as they drove around the building.
But but usually it's a it's, you know, truck mounted sprayer you
pull up and, and you spray down, you know, spray down the house
and and move to the next one. That's that's very common.
And when you said this is how you build up your business, I
want to challenge that. This is how you build up a lot
of revenue for a business. It's not how you build a big
strong business. So if you were building a house,
this is a house, it's sort of made of sticks, right?
And it's, it's rickety. You have people that are
quitting all the time, customers that are cancelling.
You're putting in programmes to prevent people from from from
cancelling, trying to put programmes to prevent people
from quitting. It's kind of a mess.
If you're building your business, it's going to take
longer, it's going to be slow. If you're building a strong one,
you're, you're, you're building a house with a, with a
foundation that's strong brick by brick.
And it takes a takes longer. And I think the biggest mistake
policy is people that are and, and this is not to say that
those fast growth, let's do as many jobs as we can in a day are
wrong. It's just a different set of
values. I don't value that, but they do.
And that's fine. You can do that job.
But if you're building a House of sticks, you can't complain
that it's not. It doesn't look like the brick
house that your neighbour built. That took a lot, a lot longer.
Good point. Because some people that have
these ideas and visions that I'm going to build this company, but
what they're actually looking to do is build a massive company to
exit for a high profit. Sure, it doesn't always work out
that way it. Doesn't it doesn't, you know,
and that's that's perfectly fine.
That's perfectly valid. There's, there's not like not
everyone is geared to work in this as a profession and a craft
something. I, I say there's a lot of people
that are in the industry and then there's a lot of people
that use the industry. If you're a professional and
you're, you're growing a craft like you have the time, you have
a lifetime to perfect this. I'm never going to learn
everything about this industry and about pest management.
I hope to, but I'm not, I know I'm not going to achieve that.
I'm just going to go as far as I can and learn everything I can
and pass it along and enjoy that that path the whole way other
people go. Hey, I want to just make a
payday. I want to make a business.
It's going to provide me with a great lifestyle.
I'm going to sell it eventually to one of the big companies,
cash a big check and, and isn't that great.
The the problem though, is if you confuse which one you are
and if you're the, if you're like, like me, it took it.
It literally took me probably 10 years to kind of come to terms
with this because I think you can feel like there's pressure
on your back to push you towards how come you're not growing fast
enough? How come you're not doing more?
How come you didn't hire more people?
How come you didn't add more routes and, and more customers
this year? If, if you're not geared in that
direction, don't, don't listen to that noise because it's, it's
just, it's pulling you in the wrong direction.
So like when I think of you, Sean, I think it's somebody that
wants to be a Craftsman, that wants to be in this for a long,
a long haul. I think you have the fortitude
to to do this as a, as a profession and a career.
So I would say don't get tied up and not that you have, I don't
know. I'm just saying like in general
and I'm just, I'm just shooting spaghetti at the wall.
It may maybe right or you can tell me I'm full of it.
Literally. I see you as being like that
long path. So if year over year you grow
modestly and take stepwise growth, that's totally fine.
That's that's working because when my dad started the company,
it was his, it was his side job. It literally was his part time
job on the side until he built it up enough to start doing it
full time. That's how he built it up and
over time. And then roll around 2020 and I
joined, he had, he had enough to that point.
I mean, I was scared when I first joined.
I was like, I'm not sure if this is going to work out, but it
did. It did.
I wasn't on social media or like I am now, but I was saying, but
yeah, it's growing year on year. We're not, we're, we're doing
well. We're doing good enough as you
say, steady, slow and steady. We're not like trying to grow
load of technicians, just me and my dad at the minute.
And maybe one day in the future, we might have what we want to
really do. It's to be like a business where
you like, you know, Gabe, I don't mean his level.
I just mean you can pass it on to your children, basically like
a son. He's only 10.
And he he wants to, he wants to be a pest controller.
He does. Yeah.
He came to pest tech last year with me.
He came round my apprentice on his, on his badge.
That's. Perfect.
Yeah, school didn't know. We just said he was ill and then
and then there was this hero day and she and he dressed up as me.
He's got a open pest control, you know, Jack Felice and I kept
him in the lanyard and like, she looked at it and then she
realised where he was that day. But I didn't do anything.
Yeah, I didn't. It was educational do.
You ever feel that? And this is actually something
that I've seen a difference between my experience talking to
you guys in the UK versus here. And it may, it may be something
that's very American, like the very capitalist individualist.
You've got to succeed, you've got to grow.
If you're not growing, you know, doubling every year your
revenue, you're a slacker. Is that something that you guys
have over there? Are you more OK with, hey, we're
tradesmen and we're professionals and we're going to
do this or do you have a lot of these fast growth types?
There is a lot the fast growth types obviously, but I think the
majority of people that are in trades are just happy if they're
growing year on year. But I hate to say it, pest
control, even though it is a trade, I don't know if other
people see it as a trade. You know how electricians and
plumbers and gas engineers like they wouldn't be questioned.
So you get them a price for this, but it wouldn't question
the price for this brand new boiler cost 10 grand or five
grand, but you get questioned then kind of trades like they
just pay it whereas. Alex Wade, you just put this up
on the screen. I'm guessing it's a quote from
something. It is in no man's power to have
whatever he wants, but he has it in his power not to wish for
what he hasn't got and cheerfully make the most of the
things that do come his way. It's a That's a good quote, that
is. I love it.
I think, I think in general though, people just just like to
be slow and slow and steady. But there is obviously companies
that grow fast. But it's sadly in Britain we
don't have seen in America there's a very much I want to be
big and successful. There is, this might be a
controversial opinion, but I believe schools here, they train
you how to work for someone else.
They don't, they don't give you that mindset that you can go out
there, build a company, work for yourself and do well.
They kind of train you to work for someone that get a safe job,
like, I don't know, lawyer, accountant, something like that
and work for someone. So that's kind of how I view it.
I'm a couple, a couple of people said that to me.
That's how I view it. I might be wrong.
Yeah, OK. So because I've thought about
that as well a lot and I feel like a lot of our education
system is a holdover from industrial revolution designed
training to get people ready to work in a factory, to be a nine
to five job person to be. I was that.
Employee. Yeah.
Sure, 1616 years to work for the crap factory.
What would? You hate it totally.
And then I went to work for my dad and it's the kind of thing
where you think we should got into this years ago.
So, but we track, we track a lot of people in that direction.
And I, for a long time, I, I like, recoiled like this.
I was like, oh, that our American education system is
garbage. And, you know, why are we
tracking everybody that how come we aren't learning
entrepreneurship and, you know, in school and, and, and these
kinds of things. Now I, I have kind of pulled
back from that in the last number of years.
And what I've seen is we've, you know, managed more people in our
business and, and, and I've had more experience is that I think
a lot of people are not emotionally capable of being an
entrepreneur. I think that it's a minority of
people that are have the leadership capabilities that
have the emotional control and intelligence that can be a good
boss and be a good entrepreneur. I think a lot of people that we
see even very successful as far as growing revenue people in
business are still not really great leaders or entrepreneurs.
They just happen to grow something big.
They're doing well. They did.
Yeah. It's you are right.
Not everyone wants to do it. And it's quite it's quite OK to
be See, I didn't get this mindset until I went to work for
my dad. You see, it wasn't for my dad.
I'd probably still be in a it's a normal job, but it was very
toxic. Let's say the old school
workplace is old mentalities. And when you round people like
that, you get like that. But when you get out of it, it's
much better. Thanks Jason have asked pest
control. He says a good Pesty has to
enjoy and be passionate about being in the industry.
Absolutely. That's true, but you are right,
not everyone can do it. Not everyone wants to do it.
No. Well, in the probably the vast
majority of you, you spread everybody you know on a bell
curve. Most people are going to be
capable emotionally of handling being an employee better than
being an entrepreneur. The stress that you have to take
on and and, you know, sort of emotional regulation that you
need, most people just aren't going to be capable of it.
So it's the responsibility really of our school system to
educate the most people for most how they're going to do their
life. Yeah.
So I can. Probably say why they do that.
Yeah. So I but they should have an
element where they do tell people this is available.
Yeah, sure. I don't know if they do.
Now, now you, you said something just a little bit back that I
think is, is needs some attention.
So you said they don't treat us like a, you know, electrician or
a plumber or you know what I mean?
Like the other trades, pest control isn't looked at as a
trade that's on level with other trades, right?
I don't believe it is. OK.
So there's, there's one big difference with almost all those
other trades and us and it's oversight, it's regulatory.
So we don't have regulatory. We, we, we complain about
regulations and we know we have regulations we have to live up
to. But to the end user, if you hire
an electrician, I don't know, I'm sure it's similar there.
But if you hire an electrician here and he is doing work that
isn't up to code, your building is not going to be OK.
You're going to have an inspector that comes out and
says this isn't done right, Pull all this wire out and redo it or
else you can't, you can't occupy this building.
It's not safe. So you're willing an engineer or
whatever making boilers or name any trade you got out there.
If you have oversight that holds the practitioners of that trade
to some standard, you're going to as the end user be willing to
pay more for that tradesman. And so as long as we as an
industry, I think in general are kind of a little happy to be
like the critters we chase and kind of hide in the shadows and
just kind of sneak around and, and not have anybody look at
what we're really doing and just kind of, you know, get by.
As long as we're OK with that, we're never going to elevate our
tradesman status to these other these other trades.
Yeah, it is true. That's probably why, you are
right. That's probably why it's not
seen as the site on the same level, but in it in America.
I believe that, correct me if I'm wrong, is, you know, like
with people's residential homes, pest control is seen as a good,
great thing, isn't it? Oh, am I wrong?
I've got this perception that is.
Yeah. With people, it's value more,
its value more in people's homes in certain areas of America.
Yes, yeah. So it's, it's hard to speak on
for everybody. There's 300 million people
across a wide variety of environments and living
situations. So for us, if we had to say,
like, for example, you know, the Southeast of the United States,
Florida and Georgia and those, you know, southern warm climates
there, in a lot of those places, pest control is like pretty much
mandatory. Like everyone is going to want
to have a pest control programme at their house.
I mean, some of those, you get into Florida, you're tropical.
I mean, it's, it's a, it's a jungle.
Like you have got to do pest control or you're going to have
all kinds of problems. As you move into the like the
Northeast, we're kind of middle of the road.
We don't have quite as much pressure.
Some areas you'll have populations of people that don't
really want to see pest control at all.
They have sort of a a moral opposition to pesticides in
general. So I would say possibly from
what I've seen, we may be a little more pest control
friendly on the residential side.
There's a lot more, you know, quarterly recurring maintenance
programmes that happen at people's homes here in the
United. States that we've got a few, but
it's rare. Like if you've got a knock on
people's door on the road in certain areas, you might get a
thump because they'll think, oh, you said I'm dirty.
How austerity. It's a different if you knock
doors in Britain, you're not businesses.
That's completely different. But you need to go around door
knocking in pest control. You'd you'd find yourself
getting into a lot of problems. You would.
Yep, you would. So I, I totally see what you're
saying. Thanks for that comparison.
I do. But yeah, it's been fun so far.
It has. I'm trying to, I'm trying to get
you in trouble as much as I can. That's that's the goal today.
You haven't yet. You haven't SBB environmental
services off LinkedIn. You're right, Sean.
We seem to be an industry that customers ask for bait here and
that and then and then we do and they will tell telling an
electrician what wire to use or a plumber and what they that's,
that is actually true. Sometimes they actually tried to
tell you how to do jobs, but they also, some people tell the
plumbers what to do and I know my job, you don't need to tell
me. Yeah.
But yeah, so we've we've permatech.
I get the impression that your business is more focused on
commercial, but a work new website it does say you do
domestic which I didn't think you did.
Yeah. So that website is about five
years past a redesign need. So we've, we've been whittling
all that off of there and we have a a full website redesign
happened this fall. We're we're I think we're right
now 86% commercial. So we do some residential, a lot
of it is, is you know residential homes of commercial
clients and that sort of thing and then some holdover
residential work that we've we've held on to.
But yeah, we are almost all commercial and like 94%
recurring. So it's all maintenance
programmes as opposed to one time call at work?
That's good. So what was your decision to
move just straight into, well, make that decision that you
really just want to do commercial work?
Is that where your company prides itself?
Is that where you enjoy it the most?
Yeah, so it was something that, you know, a long time ago I
noticed that I, I was drawn towards the commercial work in
general. And, and for a long time I
didn't know. I didn't know why until, you
know, I've been doing it 15 or 20 years and I started to go,
oh, I know why. It's because homeowners don't
give a whit about IPM for the most part.
They don't care about like actually figuring out problems
and, and doing the stuff that's really engaging for me.
And the commercial side does because the risk profile is
greater in those commercial settings.
If you have a plant that shuts down a, you know, a food
processing plant that shuts down, you could be talking
millions of dollars in losses. And as that risk mounts, their
willingness to pay for somebody to, hey, do this really cool,
you know, data collection project and, you know, come up
with designs of, you know, changing your SO PS and things
like that to, to mitigate those risks.
That stuff's fun. That's where they're going to
pay for that. I also noticed just by, you
know, by happenstance, I guess we sort of hired people that
were geared similarly. You know, we are, we are hiring
people that were more engaged in that sort of process.
And so the work where it would be residential and it, it would
end up being fairly routine started to be less appealing.
So at one point we, we actually sort of put a, like a decision
matrix together to say, you know, what does the customer
think of this? What is the technician think of
this? And is this good for the company
and the brand? And it doesn't move us forward.
And we would rate every single job on those three, those 3
metrics and anything where we said, hey, the customer isn't
like thrilled. We're not doing like crazy
differentiated services. So they're just like, they could
get this from somebody else. The technician is not
enthusiastic about it and the companies doesn't really matter
at that point if those those other two aren't aren't into it,
we weren't going to do it. So we started slowly figuring
out which were the least, I guess IPM friendly and started
eliminating those service lines each year.
So we'd pick, you know, a couple of them and say, OK, we're not
doing mole trapping anymore. We're not doing full control,
we're not doing, you know, monthly spider services.
These are, you know, as we went along, we just divested of each
one of those service lines till we're down to almost no
residential at this point. And we, we've and it, I don't
want to say it's just on the residential side because we've
done the same thing on the commercial side.
There's certain commercial accounts, you know, notoriously
like restaurants, a lot of times they, they, they aren't really
interested in doing a good high level service.
They kind of want a receipt that they can show the health
department that they have pest control a lot of times and they,
they don't want to pay anything. So I was just like, this is not
a, it's not a sandbox that I want to play in.
Let's just get out of this and you know, I was crazy.
Everybody, everybody I talked to was like this is nuts.
You're giving away, you know, $100,000 at a clip of, you know,
of revenue of work. But to me the stability moving
forward and the vision we are trying to build were more
important than just that revenue.
So. That's good to hear because
obviously you've got a vision and you've got something where
you obviously built your company up to have enough work to be
able to make it profitable just to do focus on commercial
because I don't now had you not had enough commercial, I would
agree and said yes, you are crazy.
Yeah, that's why it took, it took it took a while, right.
You have to, you have to build up that, that commercial
portfolio at, you know, alongside the residential
because at at some point there's a tipping point where larger
commercial accounts want to see that you are stable enough and
have redundancy in, in your service.
So that like if, if it was just me, you could do a certain
amount of commercial work and you'll get a certain amount of
commercial contracts. That's cool.
But if you're going for really premium, top notch commercial
work, large stuff, they are, they see you, even though your
service would be the best, if you get hit by a bus, they're
left with nothing. So they they have to mitigate
those risks with, with redundancy.
So they you need to have a couple technicians, you need to
have, you know, show some stability and track record so
that they don't feel like their rear end is hanging out in the
breeze if something happened. Yep.
And that and that's how you can you can wrestle those away from
the big giant, you know, service providers out there.
Is that that stability. So once you get to that tipping
point, that's where we got we got to this tipping point of
scale where we're like, OK, we're we're really pretty solid
and formidable. We can start going after those
really high dollar accounts and then divest of the residential
at that same time. And so I don't know if you ever
watched like Indiana Jones, you know, the beginning of Indiana
Jones, the Temple of or no, not Temple of Raiders of the Lost
Ark, and he's in this. A long time.
He's in a tunnel, right? And he's, and he's got this,
this, there's like this gold idol on this booby trap.
And it's, it's, it's all this beautiful, you know, gold Head.
He's somewhere in South America and he has a bag of sand and he
feels the weight of the bag of sand and he takes the, he takes
the bag of sand and switches it with the idol as he takes up.
And it's supposed to be the exact same weight.
So I've, I've said a bunch of times, this is what we are
trying to do. We're trying to take that
residential and get rid of it at the exact same time we put the
commercial in its place. And so, so we don't, you know,
take a big step back or put ourselves in a, in a dangerous
spot. Yeah, you want to do that.
You're very you were very calculated and analytical guy.
I know this from your post from your from your podcast most
definitely because you go into it on your podcast about what
you do, you do your spreadsheets and all your breakdowns and you
quite enjoy that, that kind I do is, is that how you is that
obviously when you were grow, when you were growing to more
commercial, I imagine that a lot of your growth charts and that
what you make helped you make their decisions, I imagine.
Oh absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And I, I have to give a shout
out to my wife Holly, who is the, you know, Co founder owner.
I don't know whatever you call it because it is impossible to
make some of these decisions and for me and still sleep at night
without having somebody like her on the back end doing the books
and keeping the books 100% up to date.
Like literally we can run AP and L at almost any day, anytime and
it'll be 100% up to date. She'll have those as a hobby.
She reconciles our accounts like it'll be like every week.
She'll she'll have every account reconciled, like all the, you
know, savings accounts and bank accounts checking and you know,
the AR the whole thing. And to be able to have that
clarity on what your numbers actually are all the time, it,
it provides you with security, with making decisions that
otherwise could be risky. You don't know, right?
You're kind of taking a step and you don't know how far down that
Cliff might fall. And, and, and having that
clarity, we were able to go, OK, there's a there's a very good
expectation we're going to make this much.
Here's how our expense framework looks.
Here's the number of employees and the payroll we need to have,
You know, so everything we did, while it sounds like, wow, you
just like got rid of, I don't know what it was, $250,000 worth
of residential work. That's insane.
Well, yeah, but we totally mapped out like every dollar to
make sure we are good. Oh, no, she should be the boss.
Yeah, no, sometimes she lets me be the boss in my own mind and
on podcasts, that's where I'm the most boss.
I'll tell you what I've got to give her the way she took over
the podcast, it was good. That was.
She's great. It's funny because Holly will
give me a lot of crap when I get home and she'll have a lot of
opinions and I'll say, hey, why don't you come on and say some
of these things? No, no, no, no, no.
I don't want to. I don't want to.
I don't want to. Come on.
But then I'm like, but then you're going to talk to me all
night about, well, you should have said this.
You should have said that. Holly, you need to go on the
podcast. There you go.
Come on. There you go.
Do it. I'll, I'll click this need to go
and pass coast to coast more. You know, some good opinions.
So I've left. I've left Alex long enough.
I was going to ask this question anyway, but he says Sean asked
Andy about his lamps. Oh my goodness.
Yeah. So this is a funny thing.
So I have pictures that go back to like the first day that we
started this. This was one of the coolest
things that I always liked about the old company I worked for is
we had like this little insect lab and you know, you had the
Cornell drawers with specimens in it and that kind of thing.
And I've always been science driven.
So like right from day one, I wanted to, I knew that I wanted
to have that be part of what we did.
It's grown and evolved over the years.
And I have pictures every couple years of how we've added and
added and, and grown capabilities and, and what not.
And, and so we, we, we just finished an expansion.
We, we added on to our, our office here, so we have a much
bigger lab space. So Alex, next time you're in the
US, I'll have to show you our new lab space because it's
pretty, pretty awesome. So there you go.
So we want to add capabilities and, and one of the things we
really wanted to do was to, I think that there's a, there's a
hole between, you know, the label says what to do and
academic research has told us these things about whatever the,
the topic may be. But then there's this big gap
right there. What do we do and, and how does
it work and what really works and what is just hearsay?
What's, what's stuff that was handed down as industry
knowledge that never was tested. So a lot of these things are the
things we want to work on. We want to, we want to figure
out like, OK, you know, how many, how many?
What's the, I'm just thinking what's the like efficacy ratio
of a tin cat? Like how many mice should I
expect to catch on that or how many would I need to use?
What's the dosage rate for snap traps?
Like how many do you need? These are just things rolling
around in my head just right now.
This isn't stuff we're actually working on this minute, but and
I I thought that we're if we wait for a university to fund
research to do this stuff, it it'll never.
Happen you might be retired or your grandchilds will not be
about. It will never happen, yes.
So we wanted to independently verify efficacy of of things and
service protocols and have a way to sort of ferret out what works
and what doesn't and what what should we be doing.
And it's, it's been a it's been an awesome thing.
We have some newer, newer staff members that are taking it,
taking it in other directions too, so there's a bunch of stuff
we want to do. You have stuff actually for the
lab. So we have a couple staff
members that part, they're part time for the lab and, and in the
field. So part of their job.
We don't, I mean, we don't have enough work, lab work to be like
they be sitting there doing nothing half the day or more.
But they'll be like, you know, 2 hours in the morning as they
come in. They, they're working in the lab
on whatever their project is. And then they're out in the
field doing, doing field work. And I'll tell you what, this
also puts a, a lot of meaning and abuse what they're doing
every day with a lot of meaning and it makes them that much more
interested. So if you're, if you're
researching something like one of the things we've been working
on is Roach survival study, we're, and I'm ashamed to say
we're still not done with it. We're probably a year and a half
into, into studying it. We wanted to know how long does
a Roach on average based on age and gender survive attached to
an insect monitor? And it seems like a simple
question to answer, but we've run into Roblox or whatever, but
the person running that project now going out into the field
that day. If they find a Roach on a on an
insect monitor, it's a, it has a whole different meaning than
others. A Roach on an insect minor,
I'll, I guess I'll squash it and throw it in the garbage.
They, they look at it, they go, OK, well, how long is this?
But I'm not sure the ones in the lab have lived this long and,
you know, whatever. So you're, you're doing
something important. And all this to me was about
industry advancement, not about perimeter advancement.
Like my whole thought is that like my pie in the sky dream is
that we're going to end up with actual research papers, peer
reviewed, you know, research that can be published that will
help everybody. That's pretty nice.
That is that's, that's the goal, so.
You've just had massive praise from Alex.
Here it, here it comes. Oh no.
Was super impressed with the labs.
Having the in house capacity to verify what use patterns and
strategies which conform to your own ways of working is a
powerful tool which not only gives the technician confidences
in the programme but also it gives the technicians the
ability to talk with the knowledge on these subjects with
the client. That is very true.
It's do you, it's really good stuff.
You do it, so do you. So you don't actually you're not
into this product doing independent trials for any
companies on products? Yeah.
So we, we have done some, we've done some independent stuff for
manufacturers. We haven't done anything that
was public that we are releasing, releasing results of.
One of the things and this is this goes with our with the,
with the podcast and with what we do in the lab is, is I, I
want as much as possible to privately fund these activities
so that we don't have sponsors. So we don't have, you know.
Whatever someone saying, hey, here's this thing and here's,
you know, a big bunch of money and tell us how great this thing
is. Like I, yeah, I feel like that's
that you have conflict of interest right off the right off
the jump. And so we kind of wanted to to
avoid that. No, you will want to, you will
want it for. I just think it's super
impressive. So some of your projects you've
done you have because obviously you, I do know you, you end up
in pest control magazines as well, don't you and.
On it a little bit, a little bit.
Has any of your lab studies ended up in magazines or any
publications? I don't mean, I don't mean I
don't mean like papers, I just mean like in the magazine.
Has it any of them ended up in? Yeah, I think, I think we had
1-2 years ago on Carpenter Ant, Carpenter Ant activity and it's
tie in with rainfall with average rainfall that we did.
We did over a three-year period on Ant activity levels within
structures and average rainfall each season so that we found a
positive correlation between higher average rainfall and more
carbon activity inside a structure.
And that that got got not published legitimately, but like
was in one of the trade magazines and that was that was
pretty cool. We haven't had other ones that
we felt good enough yet to put out there into the world.
We have a lot of things we've worked on, but we have a, a high
standard that we're trying to uphold.
And it it one of the, one of the, it's funny, one of the
things we've learned is to have an unbelievable amount of
respect for our research entomologist, man.
They are doing a lot of stuff that seems easy when we look at
it. It's like, Oh yeah, there's
nothing to that. And then you get into and you're
like, this is, this is, it's difficult.
This takes a lot of we've, we've ruined several studies, you
know, with contaminating, you know, our, our Roach, a Roach
colony with an IGR and do it like just stupid stuff.
And I'm sure it's stuff that you like, you're a, you know, grad
student, you know, in biology and you'd be like, Oh yeah, no,
you should do this that and the other.
But we're pest control people really, right?
We didn't, we don't have that background.
I mean, I would love to, you know, in the next 5 to 10 years
have someone that we can bring on that's sort of a full time
staff member with some research background that could be sort of
staff entomologist or run, you know, these research projects.
But again, we'll see if we get there, but we all do what we
can. Watch Adam Hope might be
watching this. If I can get him to move from
Hawaii, I don't think I wouldn't do Hawaii.
No to upstate New York, No way. Yeah, that's true.
That is. But no, I think it's really,
really good with what you're doing.
You've got your own lab for it's at least at least you know now
what, what these actually the process they go through and how
difficult they are. Because that's, that's what it
sounds like. But it sounds very good because
it would make your, your technicians more feel more
dedicated to the Pacific project you're doing.
If they're in the field doing it, they're researching as well.
It's it's a really good, really good process that is.
Yeah, it's. Well, and, and all this ties
into creating that culture for people.
And I, I something I've realised and, and I think it goes
undiscussed too much is that if you aren't super passionate
about a topic as the head of the company, if you're the owner
and, and you don't live and breathe and love that topic, the
people underneath you are only going to like it less than you
like the if they like it more than you, they're going to go
out on their own or they're going to do their own thing.
Right. So I've started to call it like,
you need to have like a cultural headroom for people.
You need to have a high ceiling that that they're striving
towards. And if and, and a lot of people
don't they, they want to be like, oh, I want to be hands
off. I want to be out of the out of
the field and, and out of the business.
And the day-to-day just does its own thing.
Sometimes if you don't have a personality in that business
that's providing this like a beacon, this sort of headroom of
like, you can do this too. It can be a mistake.
If, if I was, you know, taking every day off and going fishing
and hanging out and doing whatever and not really caring
that much, no one in my company is going to care.
They're they're, they're just going to do their job as well as
they want to and then go home and probably quit eventually,
eventually, right. So I think I think that that's,
that's one area where like that dedication from the top is
really got to be solid. Yeah.
It's good. It's good advice because if
anyone listens to Coast to Coast, you'll learn a lot on
that podcast about how to make policies, how to come up with
company vision, and a lot more. It's quite a valuable broadcast,
It is. So have you, have you itemised
out? I, I was thinking about this
because we, as I knew we were going to talk about podcasts a
little bit and stuff. Have you grouped up the the big
pest control podcasts in the industry?
Because I I have, I I I have I have sorted them out and put
them in categories. Oh, I knew you would.
Are you going to do a league or something?
But I'll start doing them every night.
I've been like dropping podcasts and me just talking.
Oh my God. A point for podcast.
Sorry, are you are you referencing the the BC bracket?
Yes. Oh my God, that thing got out of
hand. Oh my God.
So for anyone who doesn't know, we we do in the United States,
we have a tournament in the spring, NCAA basketball
tournament for all the colleges. And they do a bracket tournament
style bracket and people, you know, pick, pick the teams they
think are going to win and put this bracket together and they
put money out of it in these pools, you know, betting pools
in their company, whatever. So we did the same thing for
board certified entomologist. So we took 16, we had 16 board
certified entomologist nominated.
And then we pitted them, you know, a bracket style tournament
against each other and it got it got crazy.
We've done it two years in a row now and, and it's getting bigger
every time and, and more unwieldly.
But yeah, but anyway, so I, I ranked the, I didn't rank, but
I, I grouped up. I was thinking about the, the
pest control podcast out there and I started to, to actually
kind of think and look at these in, in groupings and I'm going
to name a bunch of them. If you don't, is that OK?
If we get, they're all ones that I, I, I listen to basically
every pest control podcast that exists.
I, if it's out there, I'm trying to listen to it.
OK, so, OK, so I, when I, when I look at these, I see the guys
from Pest Posse, the I don't know if you've listened to the
PMP industry insiders, that's Dan Gordon and Donnie Shelton.
No. Is it worth Worth.
Or Yep, Yep, Yep, I'll. Check that out then.
And then beauties and beasties with Alex and Sean.
And then I think yourself Sean Pest perspectives in one group,
I group those all four of those up in one group.
And for these ones, I see these as being tactical and
technology. They tend to be, you guys tend
to be towards talking about things that are in the industry,
that are things affecting us, that are tactics, that are new
technologies, that are materials that are you know how to run a
pest control company, that kind of thing as one group.
The other group is the guys from Bug Box, Jake Klaus and Eric
Bassett. Listen to.
That yeah, pest control millionaire Jonas Olson and the
boardroom buzz, Paul Giannamore and Patrick Baldwin, even though
the two of them aren't really on that anymore.
But I look at these ones that they're looking at discussing
revenue and profit growth. Largely those shows are geared
towards sales and profit and growing your company and
efficiency and making money. Like that's that's I mean with
the name like pest control millionaires, you know you're
bug bucks, right? You can't.
Really learn anything about pest control on them.
It's about revenue and things. Like that.
And again, this isn't I listen to all these.
This isn't this isn't saying it's bad.
It's just saying their core. You can see by their product.
You can see like they're they're about that.
And then I couldn't put Gabe and I, when I, when I start thinking
about our little podcast, I don't feel like I'm drawn to
have a technical conversation over and over again about a
product I'm not drawn about to do, Hey, how do I get the most
profitability out of our thing? How do I convert my leads to
best for the most part? And This is why Gabe and I, when
we first started talking about starting, this felt like there
was this hole to discuss. And it's something that it, it's
funny because I, I've heard, I think I might have heard Alex
and Sean talk this way. And I think Donnie and and Dan
from PMP industry insiders, when you start talking about like
we've talked about here tonight a bunch, the emotional weight of
something, the how you felt about doing something, how your
staff feels about something, your culture, all these quote
unquote soft skill things, people tend to recoil from them.
We tend to pull back and go, well, that's, you know, that's
kind of kind of woo woo out there.
You know, that's, that's kind of stuff that it's not really
important and impactful and we should really talk about.
Let's talk about hard facts and dollars and, and those areas I
think are some of the most important.
Not the dollars, but the the culture and the emotional
intelligence and having the right mindset and, and frame of
mind to run your business and not have it run you over.
That's what Gabe and I usually want to talk about the most.
Like when we're discussing things and I feel like we end up
being this third round. That was the whole reason we
started that is to have, oh, there's a there's a third,
there's a third category. I forgot, and I don't want to
forget them. Oh my gosh.
OK, so I just jumped talking about ourselves.
Sorry about that. No, there's the tales from the
calls crawl space guys. OK, the licence to kill with
Marcus Scruggs. So they don't have a podcast per
SE. They kind of do, but it's a
discord server. I don't know if you've you've
been on there with them and Pestrogen Jenny Yep.
And and Candace. Those are geared towards the
technician experience. I think that those those
podcasts and those, those networking groups, I guess you
could say are really geared towards camaraderie, sharing
stories, sharing what works out in the field, the technician,
the employee experience. It's not a conversation about
owning a business and advancing the business or anything like
that. And this isn't, I'm not saying
that it's less than in describing it this way.
I'm saying it's important. It's like technicians need a
place to to be and talk and listen and hear other hear other
technicians say, Oh my God, I found this gross thing and it
was horrible. And you know when you when you
lift up a mattress at a hotel room and you find completely
unmentionable horrible things, you sometimes you need to talk
about that right? Like, and that's the place you
go to the tales from crawl space and the passage in and, and
licence to kill. But that's that's why I see the
landscape sort of break out where you have a number of these
shows that are sort of geared toward technician experience, a
number that are geared towards business and profitability and
and growth at all costs and a number that are technical and
tactical in your. Business in your groupings.
You've got that perfect. Yeah, it was.
What kind of so that they did on pestogen and that was very
educational. It was about the limes and tick.
That was quite eye opening, that was.
Yeah, yeah. I learned.
I learned something on that one. If I did for.
That Yep. So that that that was my
breakdown on on podcast. I was I was just, I've been
thinking that this way for a while.
Like, jeez, everybody sort of falls down in one of these
categories or, you know, yeah. You are.
This is analytics man. Definitely.
It's a, it's a good group in it's it's, it's very good that
is. Are you are you, are you happy
with your your placement? Should I leave you to do a
different category or you're good?
I'm. Happy I am.
It's it's yeah, it's it's perfect.
It is. Are we going to do a league
points? And yeah, Oh my God.
Social posts You like you, you like what?
You have to keep up with me, I. Do that.
Money. I would never keep up with you
man. Adam Holt is hard to keep up
with though, to be fair. Yeah, he's been, he's been
kicking it out. Yeah, for sure.
I, I, I'm usually like, I'm like a two or three a week.
I try to try to make something, you know, that's going to be
meaningful, you know, have, have a, a message and a voice, you
know, to say something. And other than that, I, I kind
of stay off there. That's fair.
And I'm sure Mooney caught me out today.
He said it was one of your posts written by AI and I, I put a
laughing face. Maybe I've been playing with AI.
I'm trying to get it to sound like me that that obviously
didn't. Not all my posts are written by
AI, but I do use it to clean up my punctuations.
I'm not very good at that bit and spelling a lot of it, so I
ask it to try and make it look a little bit better.
OK, so you said sound like you. I, I have to, I'm going to take
a big, big risk here. Hopefully I don't offend you.
I mean, you had the tales from crawl space guys on I can't
offend you. So when you say sounds like me,
when I, this is the first time we've talked like in person,
we've chatted, you know, on messenger or whatever.
First time we've talked. I can't hear your accent and not
hear Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins.
I need to look that up all day. Oh my gosh.
So yeah, I, I guess that's a, that's an old, that's an old
movie. But yes, there's a chimney sweep
in in Mary Poppins, played by Dick Dick Van Dyke in the 60s.
See it but I can't hear it. I need to go and have a look at
this show. OK.
I'm not. I won't be offended because I've
been called all sorts because I've got such a bold head people
have caught. I can't remember what people
have called me, but but yeah, that's fair.
I'll go and I'll go and I'll go and look up the voice.
Then I've also got listened to a recording of myself of a clip
just to remember what I sound like to other people.
Yeah. Because I hate it.
Oh, you sound fine. You sound fine.
Don't worry about it. Now you're saying, do you?
Don't listen back when you guys when you publish a a podcast or
something. Don't listen to back to my
podcast. No, I listen back to the clip.
Wow. Make the clips then.
Bits and skip. I, I, I yeah, I don't like, I
don't like it. You must be a podcast that likes
your sound of your own voice then.
I, I mean, I don't, I don't know if I do.
I I think that I largely want to hear what the heck, what the
heck did I say? And did I communicate in a way
that got my message across the way I was intending to.
So a lot of times I'll review our I'm the one that ends up
editing the podcast. So I listened through it that
that way. And then how do you not know who
Victoria Dick Van Dyke. Yeah, well, I mean, Alex, we're
not all in our 60s. So I mean, that movie came out
62. Yeah, I'm older.
I'll be honest, I'm older than Alex.
I think I'm the. Old.
I'm 40, so I would say that Alex would have probably would have
been in my year at school if we were at the same school.
Oh my God. So yeah.
So I, I edit it, I'll listen to it that way and then we'll
publish it. I'll listen to it again on
YouTube. I'll listen to it once it gets
published on Apple. I'll listen to it in the in the
truck. I'll go back and re listen to
old ones from two years ago. I'm always trying to refine what
I'm trying to communicate because I think that there's,
well, no, I don't think I know that there's a big loss in the
message from your mouth to someone else's ears like
they're, they're hearing it differently.
So I'm always trying to listen back to refine how I'm
delivering that message. Is there a better analogy?
Can I reframe this in a way that more people will understand what
I'm trying to say? Because I think, I think a lot
of times I'm, I'm usually trying to present an idea that might be
foreign sometimes or challenging.
And a lot of times you have to say something like that two or
three times in two or three different ways for for other
people to start to start to get it.
And that's not because they're dense.
It's any of us. I have to hear something two or
three times before I start to internalise it.
And then it becomes my own thought versus just something
I'm told. Yeah.
You've got a good idea there. I might have to try and get used
to it to listen back to what I've said.
So yeah, that could be a good idea to to refine it it.
Could be here's, here's something else, here's something
else to, to, to think about. I came up, I, I played, you
know, music in high school and college and stuff.
And if you were a musician, if you put ear plugs in and you
play your guitar, you are going to sound bad if you never listen
to what you're generating. And I do actually, I, I'm kind
of happy now with the microphone and mic pre and compressor that
I have. I kind I kind of.
Think How come you haven't got How come you haven't got a pop
philtre on your microphone? This RE20 has an internal
internal pop philtre. Here you can get get one I've.
Got a I've got a What's it called?
I've got a blue. I've got a blue Yeti.
There you go. There you go.
Yep. Yep.
So yeah. It's popping up slightly there
in the in the screen screen. So now on the podcast and having
a having a competition, we could do we we should do like a quiz,
quiz show challenge of different podcast hosts going against each
other. That would be.
Amazing. I would get destroyed.
I would. I can tell you now.
I'd lose. I would lose.
I'm telling you. Well, and it's funny because if
you look at a lot of these, they're it's a lot of duos.
There's a lot of two people, Foster and Kali, Dan Gordon and
Donnie Shelton, Alex and Sean, Eric Bassett and Jake Klaus.
I mean, like there's a lot of duos.
So we could do you know, we could have a challenge.
If any other podcast host want to challenge Gabe and I, we will
fail. You will win and look good.
Yeah, you got Alex. Alex could do it himself for the
beauties and beasties. Yeah, I want to see him at it
like a like a trivia night at a pub or something.
He could be my partner at a trivia night.
Like Quiz was really good. The 100 episodes won.
I won a consolation prize. There you go.
Do you see my picture today? I did.
I did I. Didn't know that.
I didn't know that was coming at all.
I didn't. Oh yeah, it's bring it on, Alex
says. Bring it on.
No, I already concede. I know we're going to lose.
We'll have fun, but we will lose.
With the Coast to Coast podcast, yeah, they seem to be getting
longer because my complaint is a lot of timers.
They're quite often half an hour and you do this thing where
you're talking at the end and you fade it out at the end.
Is that on purpose? Yeah, some, some, sometimes, a
lot of times. There is a lot more conversation
that goes on. Honestly, Gabe and I, you know,
this isn't going to be surprising to anyone.
We don't really script, script out.
You know our discussion. Yeah.
Yeah, you can believe that because it's rambling in a bunch
of nonsense and. Gave on in the 1st place is
difficult enough that's. Right.
That's right. Yeah.
But we end up going wherever the conversation seems to, seems to
take us. And a lot of it is and we're
talking through things that we're thinking about because
it's stuff that's going on in our businesses.
And then we've had a lot of episodes where we take a left
turn to, you know, an hour in. And then we're talking about,
you know, employee issues and things that can't go out into
the world, right? That are we're talking about
things that are going on that are, that are best kept private
in our businesses, but are still super important.
And I don't want to not have that conversation.
So like we had Marcus Scruggs on twice because the first time we
spent an hour and a half just talking about things he's
dealing with and what he wants to do and like ideas and stuff
that he'd rather, you know, I, I wouldn't feel good about putting
that out into the, into the world on his behalf, right?
People would be interested to hear it, but it might not be in
his best interest. So that's our first, our first
priority. So yeah.
And, and also sometimes we will edit things where, you know, we
finish off what we're talking about and then 20 minutes later
we circle back around and have this other great idea and we'll
pull that from the back end, pull it into the, you know,
actual session. So we get, you know, the best
little tidbits of what we're talking about.
So. OK, so that's why then.
Yeah, yeah. That's fair, That's fair.
I'm trying to. I've got so many questions but I
don't want to keep you all night obviously for the are you OK for
the time being? Yeah, yeah, man.
I've noticed that you're Have you been trying or using digital
pest control management like monitors?
Yeah, yeah. We've been, we've been working
on a bunch of them. We've had a bunch of different,
you know, trials that we've been doing and honestly, they all,
they all work right? Like, like I, I haven't had any
that were failures, right? Like, like they, pretty much
every single one of them does what they say they're going to
do. I think the bigger problem that
I have with most of them is I don't know what I want them to
do. Like like I, I'm not sure that
we understand how we're going to be integrating these into our
systems, right? Like, like I think that it being
a bolt on where you're just like, hey, I have a box and now
I have a box with stuff in it isn't the best application of
this technology. It like if your goal is to set
out equipment and then never have to go check it again, you
might be OK. Yeah, right.
You can, you can do that. And the, the problem is, is we
see a lot of accounts that that's been the case in the name
of efficiency for the, for a company, they'll put out a bunch
of stations and tell the technician, hey, you don't have
to check all these boxes. They'll check themselves.
They'll tell you if something happens, OK, great.
Well, there's going to be 1000 emails that are generated or
notifications or whatever stuff's happening in these
things. If no one is there managing it,
the zombie pest control programme just keeps marching
forward and the problem can persist.
And we've had a lot of accounts that we've, we've discovered
this in where we take over the account and go, Oh my gosh, this
hasn't been being looked at. So if it's just a tool to
decrease your amount of payroll, your service time, it's, it's
really not a great application in, in my book, right.
And like what I'm trying to do, I think that the programmes
where we're starting to see the best use case for these are ones
where we're purpose building a programme around what that
technology is and does best and what that need or problem
solving situation is going to require.
So we have one that's starting this week where we're using a
sort of hodgepodge of different types of digital remote
monitoring and recording type of equipment because it serves the
purposes that we need in that facility to, to get to, I almost
say it's like, it's like every, every one of these is its own
little experiment that we're running.
And you're going to need different tools to run that
experiment. If you want to know, hey, how
many rodents might be in this place or are there still rodents
in this place or, or whatever the case may be, you're going to
need to pick the right tools to do that and then run that, that
system. As far as it being like just a
bolt on, I just, I don't think it's, I don't think it works.
It's going to work that way. I think we're going to see or
need to see bigger changes in how we're designing IPM
programmes like it's, it's sort of clean slate from the ground
up. Yeah, because obviously, you
know, I'm doing a trial from virtually MPTA and Syngenta.
I'm obviously using Syngent, Syngenta's first site, Syngenta
Secure Choice. Yeah, and so far I'm liking it.
But what I will tell people is when you've got activations, you
people think you'll go less, but you, because because I'm doing a
trial, I've been going a lot more.
Yeah. Take photographs of the box and
then the box when I've replenished it.
So over the weekend, bank holiday weekend, one of the
boxes got hit 19 times. Yep.
It wasn't empty, though. It wasn't empty yet.
Yeah, it wasn't so, so that, but but that brings up exactly what
what I'm saying is. So we've found that in anywhere
where we've deployed these in any kind of kind of larger
numbers, there has to be a calibration period for that
system. So if you and what I mean is, if
you install a bunch of digital, digital monitors, you're now
getting a flood of data you have never gotten before.
OK, that's, that's cool. But data without a purpose or
like any analytics behind it is just noise.
It's just saying this is happening.
And now we've we've done it where we've had controlled
situations where we've had, you know, stations in a place for a
long time. We kind of understand the
rhythms of what goes on pest wise at this site.
You put in the digital stations and now you're hearing quote
unquote, all this data that's that's telling you different
things. And now you got to sort of
calibrate. OK, well, what does this mean?
If I have 80 hits on this station and I know that the
station's been here for three years, you know, this one next
to it and we've had this sort of level, OK, then 80 hits kind of
correlates to this level of activity.
You know what I mean? Like so you you've got to start
to understand how it's working and what it's telling you for in
order for that data to be important.
Otherwise, it doesn't mean any doesn't mean anything to you.
I'm. Starting to learn that I am
because it's like we you think after 19 hits you'd think that
there would be nothing left, but there was.
Yeah. Well, and is it, is it in a
location that's going to be prone?
We have somewhere, you know, there's station on either side
of a dumpster and we'll get 240 hits in a month and then the
other ones we don't get any. Do we have to go back there
every time we get a hit or squirrels running through there,
you know, and, and getting setting off emotion activation
right? So hard to say.
Yes, you've got to learn how many activations roughly would
be worth a visit. But we're doing it frequently
because it is a trial and I've got to give my honest opinion I
have on what it's like for a small business to use this
digital solution going forward. I've not made my mind up, but
I'll tell you what, I like it. I want to try and get other
companies to have it, but it's not.
Obviously you have to talk about money and it's.
It's yeah. And that's, that's the hurdle
too is, is there is a cost. And, and honestly, the cost
doesn't matter to us like to like you and I because that's
going to get passed along to the client.
So that means if the client sees value in what you're providing
enough, then you, you can charge anything you want.
And like Alex is, is fond of saying you're selling data then
at that point, and we aren't good at selling data.
We don't even know what to do with this data once we, we get
it right. As I'm speaking at like as an
industry. So we don't know how to imbue
that data with meaning that to the client tells them, hey, your
risk is protected, your your liability is mitigated.
This data is telling us what we need to know and yadda, yadda.
And, and until we know how to sell that, until we know how to
use data to secure a site and provide value to the customer,
we're never going to get the money for it.
We're never going to get $100 a station to put in a digital
station versus they go, well, you can put a 30 dollar $20
station in that same place. Isn't it going to do the same?
It's going to kill the mouse, right?
Yeah, OK, Well, yeah. Now if if in.
And This is why I think in highly regulated sites, audited
facilities and things like that, they have a higher risk profile.
So they're the first ones that are going to be early adopters.
A lot of, a lot of, I think that there's a lot of opportunity to,
to have this technology trickle throughout the industry.
But like I'm saying, it's there's going to be a learning
phase, there's going to be a process.
There is because I'm learning, because one thing I have learned
so far is a lot of technicians will think these are going to
replace our jobs that I've learned so far.
That's not the case. No, because although the box has
gone off and half the bait nearly gone that you have to
work at, how many acts are you still going to have to go out?
You are have a look at what's going on in the box.
And yeah, I like, I personally like it, but I'm obviously going
to give the whole trial a going forward.
But I like it so far. Yeah, I can get more companies
under under it. I imagine a lot of people
waiting to see what I think at the end.
Yeah, sure. Well, and so do you have a
protocol now for like action thresholds, like how many, how
many notifications do you get? Does that mean you should do
something or do you just start to ignore them?
Does 1 qualify as crossing an action threshold to say, oh, I
got a notification, I have to go out to Mrs Smith's house and
look at that trap or oh, I got 20 notifications.
That means now I have to like and, and at some point, if you
had a thousand of these out there, you know, 200 of them,
that's. True, you'd have to make a
protocol. What?
What do you do? Yeah, you.
You. Because.
Obviously this is local and very local to me.
So it's, it's in the same town living right.
So it's really not a problem. But obviously I'll try and give
it a bit longer because I've understand that when it's gone
off once or twice there wasn't really any point in looking so I
didn't know that, but I still do.
But. In a given day and you go out
and you do whatever jobs you have and you go back to an
account, how often are you finding some sort of rodent
activity? Is it like 50% of the time?
Depends where it is, but yes. But obviously some of these
sites are around buildings and they're in the middle of nowhere
sometimes and. OK.
It depends where it is, but no, not also not every box.
Some of the boxes ain't touched. It could just be 1 box on the
site. Right.
So if you had, if every one of those was a digital station and,
and you got a notification every single time a rodent or
something got in there, like how do you manage that?
Would you, I mean, you get all these notifications on your
phone, you're like, I don't know, I got 200 customers and I
got, you know, 140 notifications today.
They're like, Oh my God, what do I do?
What, how do I, how do I manage this?
What, what happens now? It's just noise.
And I, I think in the large organisations that adopted some
of these, I think that's exactly what happened.
I think those, those notifications went to nowhere
because they they're like, Oh yeah, we have 100 of these
stations out now, the service managers getting 1000 emails a
week and we don't know what to do with that.
From what I was talking to Gary from Syngenta and he said
obviously he couldn't say which. Certain companies do different
deals where they only service them when certain certain amount
of activations have happened. Then they go out, they charge
them for the call out. And.
Kind of like that, but there's all different ways you can do
it, he said. It can be you only go when
there's activations or you can still go and do your monthly
services as normal. But there's all different ways.
But it's a learning. It's going to be a learning, a
learning curve because it has been for for me, but I'm
enjoying it. But I just thought I'd ask you
because I see you using digital boxes all the time.
I do, yeah. That's the only box I've ever
used, by the way, just just so you know, because I opened my
mouth on LinkedIn and I said digital doesn't work for small
businesses. The next thing you know, MPTA is
asking if I want to do a trial without knowing.
I didn't know, I just said it. Yeah, yeah.
For, for us, the most successful stuff that has been integrated
into our day-to-day operations are digital systems that were
deploying on a case by case basis to solve or understand
something. We're, we're applying.
We have like a, a stable of different types of digital
devices and we go, OK, this, this account needs, you know, us
to bring the cavalry and we come in, we set up digital boom,
boom, boom. We set up this whole thing.
Usually it's some sort of like weekly service visit that we're
doing in conjunction with this. We go, you know, say 4 weeks, we
collect the data, we analyse what's happening, we come up
with what's our control or mitigation strategy or
recommendations that's been the most successful as opposed to
them being static installations in an ongoing programme.
And that's just for us. And and like with what's
available right now, that's, that's kind of where, where
we're at. The ones, the ones that we, we,
we're trying. You can actually.
We haven't done it though, But if you've got a void, yeah, you
don't actually have to put the box in.
You can put the sensor in on a on a little tray.
Oh, sure. So if there's any vibrations or
if it go past it in the void, Yep, You know that what you've
got and you don't have to put the whole box in.
Yeah, but that was pointed out as well.
Yeah, we, we, we've been using the, the pest sense ones for a
while now and they've been, they've been really interested.
Yeah. They, they work as advertised.
I mean, they have the, you know, multiple motion sensors, they
got the bait weighing capabilities.
They, you know, the whole, the whole thing.
Yeah. And we, we've subjected, yeah,
we've subjected them to just horrific, you know -40° weather
buried under 20 foot of snow and.
And they still working. And they and they still work.
So so I mean on that sense, they're they're pretty durable.
I don't know if they're selling them in the UK still, I know I'd
heard they they might not be in the US right now because of the
tariffs. I don't know what's going on,
who knows, but I'm hoping for the best for all for all those
guys. So.
That's fair enough. That is, it is.
So, yeah, I wanted to get on to you all part of the New York
Pest Management Association. I was reading that off your
back. Oh, yeah.
Wait for the back there. So how did that come about?
How did, why did you want get into?
They're a trade. They're a trade, yeah.
Yeah, trade, trade organisation, Yeah, it's, it's a each state
under, under the national pest. Actually, I, I have that one
right here. The National Pest Management
Association is the is the big one over the whole country.
And then the New York State one is just for our state.
Each state has a, you know, actually I think some states
don't, but most states have a their own state association.
Yeah, I got involved with that. She's probably 6-7 years ago.
I just as a, as a 2O four industry advancement like like
that's our one of our core values is for advancing the
industry, the future of pest management, like make a make a
mark on the on the industry in any way we can.
And that's a that's a great way to reach a lot of companies to
help things happen. We also had a bit of an anaemic
state association presence in upstate New York.
So New York State's divided in upstate and downstate.
Upstate is 90% of the land and 100% of the cows, and downstate
is New York City. You know, is is New York City,
Long Island. You know what people think of
when they think of New York, You know, the Empire State Building,
the Statue of Liberty, that kind of thing.
We're six hours away from that. But like us up in the country,
we didn't have a lot of programming.
There weren't a lot of association events.
There wasn't a lot of outreach that was happening up this way.
And so I said, well, you know, what if, if somebody needs to do
it some point, you got to put your hand up and say, I'm that,
I'm that guy. So volunteer to, to start
helping out with that. And that's been a great
experience. I've met a tonne of people.
You know, I do twice a year trips down to the big city for
board meetings and stuff. So that's that's cool.
Don't you do board meetings as well by teams and that?
We do, we do. There's, there's a spring and a
fall like conference that happens in New York City.
And honestly, I mean, you can, you can cover a lot more ground
in person with people, you know, like you go to one thing, you
spend a day and it's like 1000, it's worth 1000 Zoom meetings,
right? So.
What a mate. Sorry, I should rephrase that.
Yeah, you just with the board, do you like obviously that's a
smaller meeting. Do you do that on Zoom like just
the board? No.
Well, yeah, we do some of the board meetings each year are
virtual and then we do 2 in person meetings every year and
they're, they coincide with the spring conference, which as you
know, training and a trade show and the whole big thing and then
a fall conference. Yep.
So you'll have, you know, member companies coming in and doing
credits and, you know, vendors there, that kind of thing.
And then we'll also do a in person, the board meeting down
in the city, so. OK, that's awesome.
Yeah, Also optional, you can go in person which I have been or
you can join online because obviously a lot of our board
directors are around the country, some of them have 6
plus hours or more to come. So, but it was nice going going
going there. I should have took photographs
when I went. I never did have missed that.
So is it for you, is it just the board meeting or do you have
like a an event happening as well or?
Oh, we just, well, we do a yearly Pestech event, the
National pest National Pest Technicians Association and it's
in Milton Keynes and it is EU KS biggest one day Pest Control
Expo. And I'm on the, I'm on the
committee. Oh my.
Goodness, I'm helping organise it, but.
Yeah. All I'll say is so far it's been
learning, learning, learning. It is, yeah.
What goes where and how it all works and how everything ties
together. It's all new to make, that is.
Yeah, we we we planned a upstate conference for the first time
last year last fall. How Holly and I, you know, with
some other help from from folks that you know, playing that and
man putting together and I think it was like, I don't know,
hundred 150 person, you know, event with dinner and you know,
or lunch and vendors and you know the whole thing.
But man, putting something together like that is a task.
14,000 to 1400 people could come to this event.
Oh my goodness. It's not a thing where the
recent is after, but that they're not actually part of the
actual main event. It's like an Expo where there's
seminars. Sure.
People are showing off their products and whatnot and that's
and people giving away freebies. Everyone looks good freebie.
And that's kind of the sort of thing that happens at these
shows. But a lot of people go for CPD.
CPD for going because it's educational, but I went with
struggle if the whole thousand tried to cram up there for the
seminars. They weren't.
But yeah, it's exciting. It is to be involved.
It was I was surprised when they said yes, they wanted me.
So I'm not traditional like I'm not from the corporate speak
world, you see. And it's, it's good that MPTA
has done a lot of good things and they're raising the profile
and we're becoming a lot more, a lot more in the spotlight that
now we are, They've even created some committees, committees now,
like we've got an, an Ireland committee now, UK committee,
women in pest control committee. There you go.
UK and I think next generation committee loads of committees so
people get their voice in there and have an opportunity as well.
It's it's all good moving forward.
It is, but we've Do you ever do speeches at these events?
I haven't, yeah, I, I haven't done one at the New York Pest
Management Association event itself.
Sometimes I'm up there introducing people, you know,
speakers or whatever. I'll do presentations for some
of the like Manufacturers Association last couple of weeks
ago. That's the one I've seen.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. So yeah, I'll do, I'll do
presentations to the community or, you know, training things
for different groups and organisations for sure.
Yep. That's, that's, that's really
cool. It's it's just that just that
get you any work or leverage in your commercial industry, I
presume. Some.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it it's.
I don't approach it with the express intent of gaining
clients. I usually come at it to provide
some kind of value to whoever the audience will be.
Craft a message geared towards the audience you're speaking to
to provide them with some value in that they'll typically see,
hey, you know what this was, this is pretty good.
This guy seems to know what he's talking about.
Let's let's call them up if it's towards, you know, towards
clients. But honestly, it's for me, it's
just AI. Get a kick out of industry
advancement, you know, telling our story.
We, we did something at the, there's a Museum of Science and
technology here in Syracuse and they have this STEM thing for,
you know, kids, middle school aged girls.
And we did this whole thing in the museum and, and set up
stations for the kids that try on, you know, bee suits and how
rodent control works and insect identification with microscopes.
And the, and it was a whole, a whole weekend thing we did that
kind of stuff is just like half my staff came there on a weekend
to, to help with that just because it was, it's just such a
cool thing to, to get involved with.
But that's, that's the kind of thing where if that's the, the
people will do more for a purpose greater than themselves
than they will even for themselves usually.
So, so if you can give them that sort of purpose, like, hey, this
is great that we're, you know, doing pest control and we're
making money and whatever. But we're also going to help
these kids that are they want to learn about STEM.
And, and some little girls going to go to this thing, some middle
schooler and she's going to look through a microscope and see a
world she's she didn't know existed and then go into science
and become a doctor, like that sort of thing.
You tell that story and that that mission people sign on for
that and they space, that's really nice.
They get energised. Yep.
It's like Elon wants to colonise Mars.
You say The vision he's got is unreal.
Is is that what he's trying to do now?
I don't know what he's doing. I don't.
Know that that's what SpaceX is about.
He wants to colonise Mars. I hadn't Oh my God, didn't you
know that? I So I funny thing, halfway
through 2020, I gave up on news. I don't, I don't listen.
I don't listen to the to the news or or.
I try not to, yeah, but but I do know he's missing.
Yeah, I, I got completely out of that.
I ended up reading about 100 books in a year at right after
that and it changed everything for me.
Right. Like the the amount I, I didn't
realise the amount of like brain capacity that's sucked up with
anxiety and thinking and what if this happens in politics for
that? Yeah, it's.
Depression. Yeah.
And, and what kills me is 90% of that is stuff you have no
control over. I, I have no control over what
our Congress or our government does.
I mean, you have one vote and good luck.
We're in a, we're in a state that it doesn't matter which way
you vote anyway. It's going to, you know, it goes
to one, one party. So why should I then also give
all my time and mental capacity to something I can't change?
So just redirect all that? Don't, don't.
I don't even. Yeah, I don't.
I don't play in that. So with the with the trade body
past your trade body or the national trade body, ever say a
regulation comes in and the opinions of the trade body with
all the data attached being been able to persuade the regulators
for not doing something they were about to do, Have they ever
been able to do that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So, so a lot of our work is in lobbying, you know, outreach to
the for our state associated our our National Association does it
federally obviously for like Congress and Senate and and
stuff. We do it in our state
legislature and we will lobby for or against different bills
that are presented based on how, you know, our opinion is what we
think is going to be good or bad or whatever.
We had a recent one, I think the last legislative session where
we they were, they were, I think the bill was to ban
neonicotinoids use in New York State.
So we weren't going to be able to use like Fipranil and that
that sort of thing. Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
So our argument as a as a state association was, and this bill
did pass, but we got it modified.
Our argument was, hey, and it was for for this, it was in the
name of pollinator protect protection.
They wanted to ban, ban these neonics.
So we got a carve out for structural use.
So our argument always was, hey, if you're using a neonicotinoid
that is applied inside of a kitchen underneath the sink into
a crack, how many honey bees are we going to likely kill with
that application? The answer is probably 0.
So if we can make, we made that argument.
And so we rescued a bunch of these materials from being taken
out of our toolbox specifically because a lot of these, I think
if you can present to a lawmaker, hey, there's a
labelling change that we can do. They're not even aware that
that's a possibility. Let's let's change the use case
for this material, not just ban it.
None of our materials are inherently good or inherently
bad. You can do bad things with good
stuff and you can do good stuff with bad things or whatever.
So like we need to look at how are we using these and then make
regulations on that. So we've been able to sort of
stave off, even though we're in a a state that's very unfriendly
to our industry, we've we have been able to lobby enough and
get get enough of the right people to listen to get some of
these carve outs and sort of protect some of the interests of
the industry in regulation. That is really good.
That is, that is what trade bodies, it's not the sole
purpose, but they are, they are there to try and protect the
toolkit. Yep, they are.
So that's that's quite good. That is so is that why is that
why you got into it to try and help, but you've always said
help push this industry forward? Yeah.
To me, the regulatory side I wasn't really scared about like
I think I think a lot of the trade association is.
I feel like there's a tonne of small one man operations and
couple people operations that really could benefit from those
connections, that networking. I mean, we've met people through
the association that are just absolutely super valuable for us
that we trade, you know, work back and forth and you have you
have run into a problem and you can call somebody up and say,
hey, I have this, have you ever seen this before?
You know, that kind of that kind of connection.
We're in a sort of unique situation that for most of our
even direct editors right in our market, because we are only
marketing towards commercial work, we just aren't a threat to
most of the other small operators.
We're not playing in the same. We're not directly competing
like most of them are people we gave our residential work to.
And we'll just be like, hey, here you go.
And and we can kind of go back and forth and have a really good
relationship like that. That's really good.
Because it's the small, I think like in the pest control
industry in the UK there's more one man 2.
I remember that one man 2 man bands in terms of companies than
there is big companies. There's more little companies
that's a medium size and there is big, big nationals.
And that's the majority of what makes up pest control, small to
medium size as Alex Wade likes say, micro sized businesses.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, I, I wish that the UK had a better
handle on how many pest control companies there were and how
much revenue total was being done in the in, in the year in
pest control. Because I, I've been doing a
bunch of analysis for our industry in the United States
and there have been some really telling changes over the last 10
or 15 years. And even, and this last year
we've had some, some of the first time ever occurrences in
our industry. And with that data of what's
actually happening. Because my assumption for a long
time and we've all said, oh, the backbone of our industry is, you
know, small companies, little, little, you know, the little
companies. And right now, I can pretty
confidently say that is absolutely not the case anymore.
In 20, 22,020 2002, small companies like little mom and
pop companies had roughly 40% of the market share in the United
States. Today they have roughly 0.
Is that is that because the big nationals have been buying up
the mall? Yeah, so, yes, exactly.
So the consolidation and there's there's some stuff we're going
to Gabe and I are going to have our annual industry update.
It won't be that interesting deep for you guys because it's
just you know in the United States specific we don't have
numbers that's OK. But but yeah, it has and, and
literally from 2020 to today, the profile of the industry has
basically shut out the small companies.
Like if you look at the estimated size of the industry
that our National Pest Management Association comes out
with every year and the total revenue of the top 100
companies, they're almost exactly the same, which means
there's no, there's no real significant revenue outside of
that until this year. And that's something we're going
to be talking about next week. So I'm pretty excited about some
of the changes and what this means for us that.
'D be fun. But yeah, it's not tracked very
well in the UK and a lot of that will be companies not wanting to
divulge how much they make. I would say as well, it's not
they say it's about 10,000 pest controllers in the UKI don't
know if that's true. I don't know.
There's no I'm going off what Alex has stood ground and found.
I don't know if that's a that's actually, I don't know how many
pest control companies there are in the UKI I know that I know
that how many the NPTA has on their books, but there's
obviously different trade bodies as well.
So I don't know what the whole figure is, but right.
Right. But yeah, maybe one day, I don't
know, I don't know. It would be nice to find out how
much the UK industry is worth, but if they do it now, it's
probably just made-up by all the big companies.
It is sure. Well and the and the big ones
would be probably public public record, right.
They're, they're publicly traded companies that you can get their
quarterly reports and you'd know how.
If they are doing it, it's probably that.
Yeah, yeah. You've got the likes of, you
know, Brent to curricular Virgo people like that.
Sure loads big companies you have.
Yep. But yeah, but thanks for your
thanks for your time. Oh, Sean.
This was. Great. 5 minutes of the minute,
yes. Oh my God.
Oh my God. OK, well, we will have to either
con or trick Gabe to come on with you or we'll go the other
way. We'll get you on and get you on
coast to Coast with us and you can talk to Gabe then.
Well, yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to.
Come on. We can see You can see Gabe.
Hello. Gabe, my mate.
Yeah, that's right. I I joke, but I really would
love to get him on at some point.
I was. I know he's trying to build a
very quite a big company and say one million £1,000,000 a dollar
revenue. Yep, he's trying.
He's doing. He's doing well, I think.
He is, he is, he is for sure, awesome.
So thanks for coming on. Yeah.
Thanks, Sean. I will come on and help you out
anytime you need man. Yeah, no problem.
I'll probably have to get you back on about.
I'm sure we could come up with something at some point.
We could. For sure.
For something else, Have you got anyone on the show?
I know what you're going to say. Have you got anyone you'd like
to see on this podcast? Yeah, Yeah.
We can call out Gabe, right? Is that we're just going to keep
calling them out. There we go.
You come on it one day will. Yeah.
But yeah, thanks everyone for watching.
If you were the British pass register, you'd be able to apply
for the well it need 2 hours. It'll be two point CPD for them
for this. I will work out the learnings
later and thanks. And also if you with the BPCA,
you can self register the CPD in the CPD diary.
But there we go. You're, you're helping towards
people's educational points for the year and I love it.
All right, thanks everyone. We're seeing actually Adam Holtz
back on next week. We're going to talk about AOA
and pest control. That's awesome.
I'll be there for that. But I will end the stream and
just just stay on for a minute. But see everyone, everyone next
week, right? Thanks.
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