UK vs USA Pest Control: Licensing, IPM, Regulations & Commercial Pricing |

0:01 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.

0:42 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?

1:25 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.

1:41 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.

2:14 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.

2:52 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.

3:32 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.

3:59 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.

4:35 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.

5:19 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.

5:53 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.

6:37 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.

7:16 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.

7:29 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.

7:58 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?

8:32 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?

9:07 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.

9:47 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.

10:34 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.

11:25 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.

12:12 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.

12:46 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.

13:11 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?

13:46 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.

14:29 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.

15:06 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.

15:40 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.

16:20 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.

17:33 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.

18:05 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.

18:29 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.

19:02 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.

19:32 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.

20:06 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.

20:45 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.

21:11 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.

21:38 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.

22:11 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.

22:42 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.

23:08 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.

23:42 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.

24:13 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.

24:42 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.

25:17 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.

25:45 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.

26:29 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?

27:05 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.

27:41 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.

28:11 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.

28:48 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.

29:28 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.

29:58 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.

30:31 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.

31:10 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.

31:40 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.

32:06 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.

32:41 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.

33:16 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.

33:54 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.

34:30 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.

35:07 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.

35:40 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.

36:22 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.

37:04 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.

37:38 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.

38:09 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.

38:47 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.

39:20 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.

39:55 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?

40:32 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.

41:11 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.

41:47 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.

42:26 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.

42:57 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.

43:28 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.

44:01 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.

44:38 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.

45:17 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?

45:50 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.

46:27 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.

46:55 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?

47:28 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.

47:53 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.

48:24 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.

48:51 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.

49:28 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.

50:08 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.

50:38 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.

51:16 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.

52:06 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.

52:43 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.

53:16 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.

53:54 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.

54:23 You know, some good opinions.

54:28 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.

55:01 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.

55:35 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.

56:12 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.

56:47 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.

57:25 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.

57:52 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.

58:20 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.

58:57 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.

59:38 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.

1:00:18 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.

1:00:51 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.

1:01:33 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.

1:02:07 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?

1:02:34 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.

1:03:05 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.

1:03:41 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.

1:04:15 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.

1:04:46 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.

1:05:29 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.

1:06:00 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.

1:06:30 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.

1:07:06 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.

1:07:48 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.

1:08:30 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.

1:09:03 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.

1:09:35 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.

1:10:09 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.

1:10:39 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.

1:11:13 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.

1:11:56 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.

1:12:25 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.

1:12:57 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.

1:13:34 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.

1:14:07 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.

1:14:35 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.

1:15:10 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.

1:15:42 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.

1:16:14 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.

1:16:46 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.

1:17:22 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.

1:17:48 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?

1:18:21 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.

1:19:02 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.

1:19:33 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.

1:20:02 No, I already concede. I know we're going to lose. We'll have fun, but we will lose.

1:20:08 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.

1:20:47 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.

1:21:21 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.

1:22:03 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.

1:22:24 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.

1:23:02 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.

1:23:50 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.

1:24:28 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.

1:25:17 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.

1:25:49 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.

1:26:33 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.

1:27:10 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.

1:27:48 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.

1:28:19 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.

1:28:53 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.

1:29:30 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.

1:30:06 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.

1:30:38 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.

1:31:16 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.

1:31:58 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?

1:32:31 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.

1:33:16 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.

1:33:48 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.

1:34:25 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.

1:35:03 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.

1:35:41 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.

1:36:09 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.

1:36:46 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.

1:37:20 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.

1:38:03 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.

1:38:37 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.

1:39:07 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?

1:39:48 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.

1:40:30 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.

1:41:09 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.

1:41:44 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.

1:42:25 They weren't.

1:42:29 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.

1:43:05 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.

1:43:43 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.

1:44:27 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.

1:45:00 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.

1:45:32 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.

1:45:57 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.

1:46:31 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.

1:47:05 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.

1:47:43 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.

1:48:25 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?

1:49:02 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.

1:49:33 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.

1:50:03 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?

1:50:52 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.

1:51:26 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.

1:52:13 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.

1:52:48 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.

1:53:25 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.

1:54:01 '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.

1:54:41 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.

1:55:17 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.

1:55:52 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.

1:56:25 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.

1:57:05 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.