Owning a pest control company

Owning a pest control company means you stop being paid for pest control and start being paid for running a business that does pest control. Most owners in this trade are small. Census data for 2022 counts 13,603 employer firms in exterminating and pest control services, and about 65 percent of them had fewer than five employees. At the other end, 21 firms with 500 or more employees employed about 36 percent of the industry's workers. People reach ownership two ways: a technician or manager who goes out on their own, or someone from outside the trade who buys or starts a company and hires the licensed people. The first knows the work and has to learn the business; the second is the reverse. This guide covers the path to owning, what owners actually do, and the money, with sourced numbers. The legal setup is covered elsewhere on this site: Starting a company for state licensing, and the Owners section for hiring, insurance, vehicles and hazmat, records, OSHA, and buying or selling a company.

In a one-truck company the owner is the technician, salesperson, scheduler, bookkeeper and customer service desk. Days are spent on the route, and evenings on quotes, invoices, callbacks and paperwork. BLS lists bookkeeping as a key skill for pest control workers and notes that self-employed workers in particular need it to run their business.

Once there are employees, the owner's day moves off the truck. Hiring and keeping technicians, routing, pricing, collections, marketing, and handling the customers who want to speak to the owner take most of the time. Payroll, workers' compensation, vehicle insurance and licence renewals all have deadlines. The owner pages on this site cover hiring your first technician, the insurance a pest company carries, and the record-keeping rules for pesticide applications.

Compliance never goes away. The company needs its own state business licence and a named certified person responsible for the pest control work, often the owner. Florida, for example, requires the certified operator in charge to be a full-time employee who personally supervises chemical selection, safe use, concentrations, training and control measures. Texas requires each commercial business licence to designate a responsible certified applicator who cannot serve two businesses at once. Once the company has more than 10 employees, it also has to keep OSHA injury and illness records, because the industry is not on OSHA's partially exempt list.

Money is the constant background. SBA tells new businesses to calculate start-up costs in two groups, one-time costs such as permits and equipment and monthly costs such as salaries, and to work out a break-even point before launching. In a route business, owners watch cash flow closely, because payroll and fuel are due whether or not customers have paid yet.

Later in an owner's career the question becomes what happens to the company: grow it, hand it on, or sell it. The industry includes very large national companies that buy smaller ones, and the buying and selling page in the Owners section covers how those deals work.