October 1, 2025 • 37 mins
In this episode of Pest Control Legends, Danny Leibrandt welcomes back Eric Bassett, co-owner of Natura Pest Control and an Associate Certified Entomologist with nearly two decades of experience. Eric explains how his company made the shift from being owner-operated to building a leadership team with a general manager at the helm, allowing him to step into an advisor role and focus on long-term strategy.
We dive into the systems and cadences that drive Natura’s growth, including weekly accountability meetings, call quality scorecards, and development plans that track both performance metrics and behaviors. Eric shares when and how to bring in managers, why promoting from within strengthens company culture, and what qualities he looks for in leaders.
The conversation also explores the rise of AI in pest control. Eric discusses how tools for lead handling, training, and quality assurance are reshaping operations while stressing the importance of keeping customer interactions human-first.
To wrap up, Eric offers a message to the industry: growth is a matter of consistent improvement, measuring the right things, and remembering that the real competition is always you versus you.
Eric Bassett, Co-Owner of Natura Pest Control:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-bassett-ace-1459b280/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eric.bassett.129
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamericbassett/
Danny Leibrandt, Founder of Pest Control SEO:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/DannyLeibrandt
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dannyleibrandt/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DannyLeibrandt
Website: https://dannyleibrandt.com
Pest Control SEO: https://pestcontrolseo.com/
Pest Control Legends Platforms:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PestControlLegends
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/46XRaco5nPWcqHWIoQ2eZ5
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pest-control-legends/id1768175212
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b060991d-e5d5-4683-b83f-8db469714ba7/pest-control-legends
Audible: https://www.audible.com/podcast/Pest-Control-Legends/B0DGWL3119?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
#pestcontrol #pestcontrolmarketing #pestcontroladvertising #pestcontrolleads #pestcontrolbusiness #pestcontrolads #pestcontrollegends #ericbassett #dannyleibrandt #naturapestcontrol #bugbux
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey there, my name is Danny Lebrandt and welcome back to
Pest control Legends. Today I'm with Eric Bassett
co-owner of Natura Pest Control.Eric has been in pest control
for over 18 years and is an associate certified entomologist
and specializes in sales, marketing, organizational
development and building systemsand processes.
He's been instrumental in growing Natura into one of the
(00:20):
most respected pest control companies in the Pacific
Northwest. And we actually had Eric on my
other show, Local Marketing Secrets about a year ago is
actually May 2024, which is pretty crazy to think about.
So I'm really excited to catch up with Eric, talk about what's
changed, what's working, and thelessons he's learned since then.
So, Eric, welcome to the show. Danny, thank you so much for
having me on the show. The intro that you made, very,
(00:42):
very nice, super flattering. So I, I appreciate that making
me sound awesome. It's great to be back on the
show with you as always. Absolutely immense.
I kind of want to ask you a general question here.
You can take this wherever you want.
Like I said, we did a show a little over a year ago.
What has changed? And you even told me before we
got on the call, you said, dude,I feel like so much has changed
in the past 12 to 18 months. So let's just like start to dive
(01:03):
into that where. Do we even begin?
I mean, you know, the turn in general, one of the big changes
that we made is that we took ourservice manager at the time and
we brought him into a general manager role.
And so I bug bucks con that we had back in March, 1 of the
things that I spoke on at that conference was making the
transition from being an owner operator to an owner advisor.
(01:24):
And we can jump into some of thespecifics of that because I I
still think that that's really applicable to the pest control
industry and to any ownership role for that matter.
But it was a big change for us, you know, putting somebody in
that role that kind of overseas all the departments, in which
case we can kind of take a step back into that advisor role and
help coach and develop him. And then we replaced our
(01:46):
customer service manager and we were we replaced about 75% of
our staff from the on the customer service side, on the
inbound sales team side. And then you know, we brought up
a new service manager. So it was kind of a change for
us to change for both departments and a change to have
a a new role in the company as ageneral manager.
Fortunately we have really good experience on the marketing side
(02:08):
of things. Matt and and his team at Lizard
are phenomenal. I know that you and Matt have
done content together which might be recommend.
I did share that video out when you guys came out with it.
Really, really good stuff. We've had a great year for that.
So credit to them. It's yeah, I, I think back, man,
what was I doing in, in, you know, may of 2024?
And so many things have have been different.
(02:29):
So those are just a few of the big ones.
Yeah, talk to me more about owner operator to owner advisor.
I don't think I've heard that term before.
Yeah, so I, I want to take credit for this, but I feel like
someone else has had to have come up with this idea before.
I have. It just kind of occurred to me
as I was trying to plan this speech that I had for Bug Bust
Con. And the idea is, is that when
(02:52):
you first build and start growing your business, you wear
a lot of hats, right? You're the finance guy, you're
the marketing guy, you're the sales guy, you're the
technician. You do all the things and
eventually you start to replace yourself and you're delegating
all those roles and tasks to other people.
But at the end of the day, thosepeople are still all
independently reporting to you, right?
So when the sales team has a problem, you're the end result
(03:13):
sales guy, right? When the technician team has a
problem, you're the guy that gets to answer all the questions
and it's really difficult to focus on the things that are
really important to growing and scaling the company, to really
focus on the continuance of thatvision.
I'm to hang out and like quadrant to the stuff that's
important but not necessarily urgent when you're still that
guy. And so the idea is, is when
(03:36):
you're an owner operator, the business relies on you.
It relies on your involvement. You pull your involvement out of
the business, things don't move forward, right?
In fact, things kind of come to a little bit of a halt at best.
They kind of have to navigate some bumpy pathways.
When you make the transition from owner operator to owner
advisor, you're now building a team around you of high level
(03:59):
managers who then act as the operators of the company.
And then you sit down with them at least once a week and you
have a high level meetings whereyou look at the performance of
each individual department. You have them talk to the
performance of that department. You have key metrics that are
performance based, right? So it's not just an open
conversation. You're actually looking at
something specific data that that's that's not biased, right?
(04:22):
And you provide feedback to themfrom your experience, right?
So you might say, hey, tell me what's going well today, right?
Like, tell me, tell me how the team's doing.
Tell me what you've accomplished.
What are our areas of opportunity, what could be
improved and what's the action plan?
What are the things you're goingto execute on in order to make
those improvements? And then how can I help as your
(04:42):
mentor, right? And then you're just kind of
giving them that feedback, but you're granting them the space
to go out and execute on that thing and you're not
micromanaging anymore, right? So if they say, Hey, I need you
to check in with me midweek justto make sure I got this task
done, OK, not a problem, man. I can do that, right?
But I'm certainly not going to be knocking on your door every
(05:03):
day and saying, hey, man, Are you sure you got that thing
done? That's, that's not the idea.
And then it frees up my time to go focus on other things like,
hey, should we look at other businesses to acquire?
I'm sure we look at investing inother arms of marketing.
Should we talk about going to these other industry events,
right. What else can we do to bring in
resources both intellectually and maybe in financially into
(05:25):
the business to grow the opportunities that we're
creating for our team? So that's a little bit of it in
a nutshell, but that's, that's the idea.
It's the transition from owner operator to owner advisor.
And that's what I'm trying to get the majority of the owners
that I'm connected with and the ones that I consult and coach to
understand and to eventually tryto get to.
OK, cool. So it's clear you guys are very
(05:47):
systems oriented. It, it seems like you guys have
like a weekly cadence. Everything is very systemized.
I was curious because I, I know a lot of owners that I talked to
are using something maybe like EOS or some, some kind of system
around their business regarding how they're working with their
team, how they're tracking and everything.
Or do you guys use EOS or anything similar?
(06:07):
Something similar, so we use the40X model.
Stands for four disciplines of execution, and I always
recommend that if people haven'tread that book that they do
also, you know, EOS or Traction would be a really great book to
read because any type of format or system or process designed
for building and growing your business is good to understand.
(06:28):
I would guess that of all the people who probably implement
some type of system in their business, 20% of those people
probably do it to exactly what the book says or to exactly what
that system is. Most of them end up adapting
that to their own unique nature within their company, right?
Ultimately, having a system, having a process and having that
cadence is probably what's most important.
But X is a pretty simple 1. You know, it just kind of helps
(06:52):
us make sure that we have thingskind of lined up.
So not that I've too far into the specifics, but we do have a
cadence surrounding that and it's a weekly cadence.
So we have a weekly cadence where we meet with our managers
and their managers meet with their people.
So our GM will meet with our service manager and office
manager and then the office manager, service manager on a
weekly basis meets with all their people.
(07:13):
Inside those meetings, we have our own format that I kind of
created, which is our development format.
Essentially. You sit down and yeah, some of
those same questions, right? Like, hey, how are you as a
person? How you doing?
I want to make sure that they understand I care more about
them or just as much about them as a person as I do an employee.
Then it's, hey, what are your wins, right?
What are your accomplishments? What's going well
(07:35):
professionally? We talked about that for a
minute. And then we dive into what their
areas of opportunity are, what could be improved.
And then we come up with an action plan.
And the importance of the actionplan #1 is that they have to
come up with it. They need to come up with the
specifics based on what they're trying to improve.
But #2 it has to be based on lead measures.
And that's another thing that the 40X model really hits on is
(07:57):
that you've got the lag measures, which is what you use
to measure performance, like closing rate is a lag measure,
and you have the lead measures, which is the behaviors that you
influence in order to impact thelag measure.
So, you know, asking enough questions on a sales call or
asking the right questions on a sales call is the behavior that
you're trying to hit on. So everybody has the same kind
(08:17):
of format, right? They've got commitments that
they have from the previous week, whether or not that
commitment actually had an impact, what they're trying to
improve, what their action plansare.
And then of course, as leaders within the business, we're
always asking what can I do to help to make sure that this
action plan of yours happens. So that's kind of our our system
that we operate within. And then the cadence of
(08:38):
accountability is making sure that that system is discussed
every single week. That's a very important part
because if if it's not discussedat, the whole thing kind of
falls apart. Yeah, yeah.
Gotcha. I've got kind of a nuanced
question, but I understand that you've worked with a lot of
managers and that that's something that you're
continually bringing up that we talked to the managers, then the
the managers are are talking to our staff.
(08:58):
What are you looking for in a manager?
What? What does an ideal manager look
like? You know, an ideal manager,
number one is organized, you know, I don't know if you ever
looked at kind of the, you know,the, that quadrant of time
management, right? So you've got obviously the, the
important and urgent stuff and quadrant run, you know, like
that's the things that are always trying to steal all your
time. Then you got the important but
not necessarily urgent and quadrant 2 and and so on and so
(09:21):
forth. And your manager needs to make
sure that they are putting the right things in the right boxes,
right? So they need to understand how
to manage their time properly separately, because I'm relying
on them to operate the business.And if they don't prioritize the
right things in the right way, then we're going to have a
breakdown of what ends up being at the mercy of the other.
And so time management organization, that's a huge one.
(09:45):
The other one is just interpersonal skills.
I think you've, you probably figured this out.
I'm just from talking to people.People have different
personalities, they have different learning styles, they
have different working styles. I, I used to talk to my team
about like the love languages ofwork, you know, like, how do you
want your boss to recognize you?Because some people like gifts,
(10:05):
they like the prizes, they like that kind of thing.
They, they want a little raise or whatever.
Some people like the acknowledgement.
Some people want to have a free time to do other things or they
want more responsibility, believe it or not.
So they want different things based on different
personalities. So it's important as a manager,
you have to be able to identify the learning style that the type
(10:29):
that they want to be appreciatedby.
And you have to understand that they all handle conflict in a
little bit of a different way. And you have to be calm and cool
and collected and know that justbecause one person handles
conflict one way, another personhandles it a different way.
If you try to manage them all the exact same way, it's not
(10:50):
going to be effective. And if you ask any parent out
there like, hey, like, do you parent all your kids the same
way? No, the answer's no, right?
Because they're all unique personalities in different ways.
And I don't, I don't mean to saythat you should create separate
policies for all your employees.That's not what I mean.
I just mean that as a manager, there's a grey area that you
have to be able to operate in that requires hacked and it
(11:13):
requires interpersonal skills. And also going off that, when do
you hire your first manager then?
You know, as soon as you can. And this, that's such a really
weird way to put it, but when you're trying to build and scale
a company, you're constantly trying to get in enough, enough
revenue, enough of a customer base to replace yourself in some
format. Every time you replace yourself,
(11:34):
it's an investment. And that investment's going to
cost money and it's going to cost time.
And so you see a lot of solo operators who build a book of
business, right? And they have a full route, you
know, and there's a point when they ask themselves, OK, do I
want to build this thing so thatit's bigger than what I have
now? And they start looking into the
numbers and they're like, OK, cool.
(11:54):
I'm going to have to hire a technician.
I have to buy a truck. I'm going to have to do this.
Maybe I hire an admin. And they go, well, all this
money is coming right out of my profit, you know, at first
before I actually get the accounts to do it, because you
have to have the people 1st. And you realize, well, I could
just stay as a solo operator andmake good money If if I'm the
only guy, like in fact, profit margins as a solo operator are
(12:17):
awesome, really, really good. And so you can load yourself up
and you can do a phenomenal job and have and make really good
money. But when you go to scale the
company, it's going to cost those profits.
So that's kind of first thing you need to understand is that
scaling a company is expensive and it cuts into your
profitability. But if that's your drive, if
that's your goal, then you're now trying to replace yourself
(12:39):
in as many ways as possible. And typically, I'd say that the
biggest load on your time is youas a technician, right?
If you're the guy that's sellingand servicing the accounts and
that's a full time gig right there, get a technician and get
him trained U get him U to speedon the processes.
Get him building relationships with your customers right?
Next thing that might end up taking UA significant amount of
your time is the admin side of it.
(13:00):
Be prepared to bring in probablya part time admin in the
beginning or a virtual assistantor some kind of person who can
handle the important and urgent stuff because the phone ringing
falls into that category one, right?
That that first box, it's going to take up your time.
You got to pick up the phone. If you don't pick up the phone,
customers aren't happy. You misleads all those other
things, right? Once you start scaling and you
(13:21):
start adding technicians becausenow you've got enough customers,
right? Maybe you have a sales guy that
comes in, which is great, and maybe you're trained your admin
or your office persons, you've expanded their hours, they're
now taking sales calls too. That's great.
Eventually you're going to find people within those departments
as they kind of separate out. People in those departments need
like more leadership and more involvement.
(13:43):
Then you're going to have time to give.
And this is kind of a tough stepfor most owners to make because
one, they don't want to give up that involvement usually is it.
My business partner Jake likes to say it owners like to keep
things within arm's reach, right?
As long as I can touch, you know, the customer service team
over here and I can touch what'sgoing on and the field service
team over here, you know, at least I know what's always going
(14:07):
on, right? Because as soon as you hire a
manager to manage those things, you have to check in with them
to know what's going on. And that's your business, that's
your baby, right? And it feels awkward and forward
and to let that go and to give over that responsibility to
somebody else. But the business will not move
forward unless you take the leapand do it.
(14:28):
So once those teams get big enough, and typically you could
see anything from like 4:00 to 6:00 or seven members per team.
So for example, on the technician team, once that team
gets like 5 plus, I might consider identifying a lead
technician, right? Some guy who I think has really
good managerial skills, he has really good potential.
(14:50):
Maybe he's not exactly 100% there yet, but he shows that he
he wants that, he has a desire to and he has good skills for
it, or at least preliminary skills that can be trained and
developed. And over time, I'm going to
start delegating those skills over to them until they're ready
to really take on that position.I'm also going to see how they
respond in certain key leadership areas with their
(15:12):
team. Can they provide good news?
Can they provide bad news? Can they hold the standards
despite things being popular or unpopular or liked or disliked
by the team, Right. Can they handle all those
things? And that's the kind of person
that I'm looking for. So once I've identified that
person, I put them in that role,I start to delegate and
(15:35):
eventually we'll have a formal promotion where I say, hey team,
you know, it pleases me to announce that we're going to
have so and so as our tech manager or service manager,
right? Same thing happens on the
customer service side, although the customer service side from
scalability standpoint and pest control, you're going to usually
have far more technicians in thefield then you're going to have
customer service and office staff in the office, right?
(15:59):
But same thing kind of tracks. As soon as I have three or four
people in there or more, I'm going to start looking for that
person, right? Hey, who's the responsible
person who can I put into that role and who's going to end up
taking over for me? You know, we, we didn't have,
I'm trying to think of probably 6 or 7 office staff and about 15
(16:20):
technicians before we decided toput a general manager in place.
Somebody who was going to be, you know, looking after,
obviously the manager, service manager for the technicians and
the office manager for that teamwhere we could kind of take a
step back and join that owner advisor role that we were
talking about before. So that's kind of the loose
timeline on that. It really kind of depends on
(16:40):
your goals and how you're scaling, but for us that's how
it worked. So regarding all of the higher
level positions in a pest control company, are you
typically looking to hire internally or are you trying to
find these people externally or is it a mix of both?
I think internally is the best place to start.
Ultimately, I think you should always have your eyes out for
people who are hungry for those types of roles.
(17:03):
One of the things that I like todo in interviews when they first
come into the business is I say,hey, you know, it sounds like
obviously you're interviewing for a technician kind of role.
What other roles in the businessare you interested in, right?
Where could you see your pathwaygoing?
And sometimes people will say, I'm not really interested in
anything else, I just need this as a side job while I'm going
through school because this is really my career path.
(17:25):
And that's totally fine, right? But other times you might see
people that go, well, actually, I would really love to be a
manager or a VP, or I really love marketing, even though I'm
a technician. Like I would love to be a
director of marketing one day. OK, great.
Right. And I'm silently taking notes or
probably even physically taking notes about what these
aspirations are. Because as the business grows, I
(17:48):
want to look at our internal resources and promote from
within. I think that that shows that you
have a lot of care and consideration for the talent
that you already have. And these people are putting in
a lot of time and effort trying to build and scale and grow that
business, which means that they likely have a vested interest in
its success if they're able to get to these other positions.
(18:08):
So I prefer to do it internally.And when we are hiring, the
first thing that we actually do is we look internally first for
promotion. In fact, I'm trying to think of
if we've ever actually hired outfor a leadership position.
We have not. So we've always hired from
within, but even when it comes to hiring entry level positions,
we always check with our internal team first and we say,
(18:31):
hey, if you guys have any friends or family members or
people that you know of that would be a really good fit for
this position, let's talk to those people first.
Get them in the door, give them an opportunity before we go
trying to put a bunch of effort into Indeed, Monster and all
these other places that that hire people.
We used to have like a 90% of our workforce was hired via
(18:52):
referral of another employee. Wild as we as we built and grown
that number has changed a littlebit as it naturally would, but
we also incentivize our employees do that.
We actually pay a referral bonuses when they give us the
candidate that ends up getting hired later on down the road.
At six months and 12 months, we give referral bonuses to those
employees. So another thing I wanted to
(19:13):
cover was I know you talked to so many other pest control
owners and you're even working with a lot of them that might be
previously with the bug bugs program or you have your own
consulting clients. Maybe that's just one time basis
or recurring basis. I, I just want to ask you again,
generally you can take this wherever you want.
What has been one of the biggestthings you've learned recently
from all these kind of high level people you're working with
(19:34):
just in the pest control space? What what's something you've
learned that's kind of been a game changer?
You know, the, the biggest thingthat I've learned is that not a
lot of business owners have that, that set cadence of
accountability. Like the 40X calls it.
You know, some of them they havelike meetings, right?
They'll say, hey, yeah, like we're going to, we're going to,
we have a management meeting every single Monday or whatever
(19:56):
the situation is. Or Oh yeah, we have meetings
when we need to have meetings. And, and you kind of see people
on like both two sides of it where it's like, well, we don't
want to have meetings just to have them because then they're,
you know, not productive. And it's like, OK, well, maybe
maybe not. They just don't have a formal
process for that. And maybe even more importantly
is that they don't have a. Formal process for employee
development. So for example, you know, you
(20:19):
could have an employee that's there and you're not actually
tracking performance because they don't have any performance
metrics that they track, right? So the only time you know,
whether or not they're doing a good job or a bad job is either
on other employees feedback or customer feedback, which can be
a real big problem. If you wait until an employee
comes to you and says, hey, likeI think that they're not doing a
(20:42):
good job, Aldar, they haven't been doing a good job for a long
time. Same thing for a customer,
right? If you wait until there's a bad
review that comes in or it's like, hey, yeah, I talked to
John on the phone and he was super rude and, you know, cut me
off and whatever. Or a technician in the field,
right? We have issues.
OK, so #1 if you don't have an evaluation process based on your
employees performance, we reallyneed to implement one.
(21:03):
There's a lot of ways that you can do that on the phones for
customer service staff and salesstaff, you know, closing rate
and handle time and all these other things.
There's a whole laundry list of stuff that you can look at to
look at the health of how they're doing.
But more importantly, we have a call quality evaluation
scorecard. So our managers in those
departments will actually listento phone calls.
(21:24):
An we have a sales process that I teach all my sales staff and
we reverse engineered that to create this call quality
scorecard. And that scorecard is what we
use to listen to calls and then score the calls.
There's 100 points. It's like a test, right?
There's 4 categories, 5 subcategories.
Each one is worth 1:00 to 5:00. So you have 2025 points per four
category and 100 points total. If you're doing everything
(21:45):
you're supposed to, right? That is within your control on
that call. You'll score 100 usually if you
score 100, that's a fantastic customer experience, right?
Anything below that is the same thing, right?
You probably score an A or AB ormaybe AC, right?
And just like in a passing grade, typically what you see is
people who are scoring C's and lower, like that's where the
(22:07):
customer experience really starts to struggle where like AC
and higher, OK, maybe you were able to skate by and we'll be
OK, but you got to make improvements D's and lower.
It's like, oh, you're having a negative impact on the customer
experience here. Not not only are you, you're not
going to hit performance metrics, but you're actually
going in the opposite direction.We also have service quality
(22:28):
scorecards, which is for the service team based on the
service that they provide. And that's a combination of the
service manager that's actually there with the technician on
site and a combination of a talking to the customer that
they were servicing and doing anaudit on previous services of
that technician has actually done.
So the evaluation side of it is really important.
(22:49):
Not only do you need to have metrics that you're evaluating
for their performance, but you have to have metrics that
evaluate their behaviors. It's that lead measure versus
lag measure kind of aspects to it.
I like to help a lot of businessowners implement that part of it
because that gives them so much more clarity about what's
happening in their company. A lot of times, you know, they
(23:09):
might reach out to you and be like, hey, we're struggling with
XY and Z, we're struggling with retention or I think we have a
lot of cancellations. They don't even know what the
retention is or, you know, we'renot getting a lot of reviews or
we bad reviews or you know, we get a lot of reservices and
we're going to implement a lot of those metrics and evaluations
so that we can see clearly what's really happening.
What's at the beginning of this process that eventually causes
(23:32):
the end result that you're not liking, right?
And then it's a matter of implementing those regular
meetings. So the developments we talked
about, hey, what's going well? What can we improve?
What's your action plan? Implementing that helps a ton
because then you can actually use that data.
You can use those tools, right? We sit down with an inside sales
person and we say, hey, what's going well you're closing really
well that's great Hey, what are your areas of opportunity?
(23:55):
Hey, you're you're struggling onupsells, right?
Or you're struggling on your callback list and hey, what's
the action plan Oh, you're goingto make sure that you call back
all of your leads at the end of every single day before you
leave perfect. This sounds great, you know, let
me know how it goes. Let me know how I can help,
right? Having that in place on a
regular basis means that your employees are always working on
(24:15):
improving something every singleweek.
And when you're doing that, yourbusiness as a whole is improving
every single week. But if you don't have those
processes in place, best case scenario, your business is
maintaining every single week. But typically what's going on is
that there's a little bit of moving backwards every single
week and you don't, you don't catch it until it reaches A
(24:36):
threshold that alarms you by thetime there's probably been a lot
of stuff that's going wrong. And just to kind of wrap that up
nicely, what would be the resultof doing something like that,
let's say a company has no scorecards, not really meeting,
not really keeping their people accountable.
I mean what happens after and what?
What are like the direct resultsthat turn decreases, you get
(24:58):
more reviews. What happens?
I mean, you name it, right? Anything that you want to
accomplish that can be a good step forward for your business
can be accomplished with a good system and a good process.
So for example, you get somebodywho's like, hey, I, I really
want to have more reviews from amarketing standpoint.
You're like, I would like to have, you know, 500 reviews by
(25:18):
the end of the year or whatever your number is, right?
Well, number one, you need to process for that #2 you have to
be able to gauge the performanceof the technicians.
How many reviews are they getting right from the people
who are struggling with the performance metric?
You have to have a an evaluationon what they're saying.
So you have to go out and spend time with him and see what
they're doing. And then on those regular
developments, it's so, you know,I'm noticing that you aren't
(25:41):
getting a lot of reviews. What do you think the area of
opportunity there is? And they might say, well, I
just, you know, not a lot of my customers are home so I don't
ever ask. And you say, OK, well, how about
we send them a text after the service and say, hey, John,
finish up with your service. Do you feel like I was able to
deliver a five star service today?
Would love your feedback. Here's a link for a review.
Right, boom. Or however, when you do it, but
you have to have some kind of system in place and that's how
(26:02):
you make improvements, whether that's closing rate reviews, you
know, you want to have a better revenue per lead, which has to
do with closing conversion, average contract value and other
things, lower reservice rate. We have to evaluate how
effective our service and the products that we're using, the
processes that we have, anything.
If you're trying to improve something in your business from
profitability all the way over to mitigating churn, employee
(26:24):
turnover, having those in place will do that.
Nothing drives me maybe more crazy than when we have a
problem in our business and I ask a question like, why is this
happening? And the answer is I don't know,
right? Or for example, like that, like
that employee quit. And I'm like, why?
Like, why would they do that? And they're like, I don't know,
(26:44):
right? And this doesn't happen often
because they know how much they don't like it.
But it's like, for example, you know, something happens like,
hey, so and so I think might endup quitting.
And I'm like, what's going on? And then they have a whole
history to tell me. They're like, well, from the
last couple of developments, we've talked about this issue,
we've talked about this problem,we've had the strategy in place.
They've not been able to make a difference.
(27:05):
I think that this is a won't situation, like it's a
personality conflict instead of like a can't skill versus issue.
Like they have a whole thing that they can tell me about
what's going on, right? The context is there.
And it's because they have a system in place, right?
They have a system in order to get the information and make
sure that we're either coaching people up or coaching people
(27:26):
out, right? And it's that element that if
you, if you don't have that in place, you have no information.
And when you don't have any information, you have no
direction. Yeah, definitely no.
OK, so the systems tied to everything, it's not just like
one or two stats, but especiallyhow you're treating your people
and how you're managing them. It's just, I mean, that's the
business. It affects every single stat is
(27:47):
basically what you're saying. Awesome.
Probably the last topic I wantedto cover here, which is kind of
a fun one. I'm curious to hear your
thoughts, especially with all the recent developments is AI.
So I feel like everyone's talking about AI.
I'm kind of getting sick of all the the AI talk, even though
that's kind of supposed to be mything.
I'm supposed to be the young guyand everyone's asking me about
AI stuff, but I'm curious, from your perspective, what's going
(28:09):
on with AI? Are you guys using new tools?
Are you trying new stuff out? Is anything working?
Tell me all about it. You know, I man, if I had a
dollar for every time somebody asked me about AI in my
business, I have, I have enough money to not have to worry about
business anymore. Me too.
AI is really, really cool. I, I like the tools, I like the
ideas, I like the potential and the vision.
(28:31):
You know, I, I've obviously spent a lot of time interviewing
different AI platforms, some that are specific to pest
control, some that are not specific to pest control.
And some of the things that I like a lot are lead management
and being able to kind of capture incoming leads and
cultivate that relationship. Whether it's from point A all
(28:51):
the way to the sale, like closing and converting and
scheduling and everything else. If the AI can pull that off,
whether it's via text or voice, which we'll talk about in here
in just a second, or if it's, hey, we're just hanging on to
that until somebody can can hop on the phone or until a real
person can pick up the conversation, that's fine too.
But putting that into your system allows you to avoid a
(29:13):
scenario where if things get really busy, people can't get a
hold of you, right? People can't connect, you know,
and existing customer type scenarios, that's not as bad
because I don't think an existing customer minds leaving
a message. But if it's a potential customer
scenario, they're not leaving a message.
It's not going to be like, oh, hey, I'm really interested in
your company. I want to get a price from you.
(29:34):
If you could please call me back.
You know, that sounds great. Dude.
They're not leaving a message. They're hanging out the phone.
They're calling someone else, right, who probably has AI
that's going to take care of theproblem.
So that element's cool. The voice related element of it
kind of depends on how you want to package it.
The text version, I think is a little bit more ahead of the
game than voice, just in my personal opinion.
And as we've talked about before, I have really high
(29:55):
standards for those phone calls,but I want to make sure that the
AI is able to hit on all those same quality metrics that are
regular people are going to be able to head on, right?
I mean, it's all designed aroundcreating a really good customer
experience. But there are very good voice
platforms like AI voice platforms for sales and customer
service and everything that you should definitely test and try
(30:17):
out. Same thing with text.
So a lot of these companies are are making big strides in that.
The other thing is creating training material is really
cool. So you can take a bunch of
information and #1 you can summarize meetings and create
quizzes with AI, which is reallycool.
So if you just had a long meeting about information, you
plug that information in, you say, hey, create a quiz, and
(30:40):
then you can have that for that team and the next team and the
next team, right? I know that there's AI now that
is kind of handling or starting to handle the evaluation side of
that phone call. Can we talk about that before
where I have a manager that sitsdown and he's grading all the
stuff takes him about 30 minutes, right?
Having an AI listen to it in real time and provide that
feedback. There are opportunities for that
(31:00):
now too. And then you, you and Matt
talked about this on the marketing side of things.
AI is making a big impact. So I would probably just make a
recommendation that if, if you're not going to do anything
else, you're not using AI on your sales calls, you're not
using AI for your for your team or whatever.
At least to make sure that you have a marketing partner who is
U to speed on the impact that AIis going to have on your
(31:22):
marketing. Because just like anything else,
you don't want to be behind the ball when it comes to marketing
efforts. I remember when I was lucky
enough that right before LSA came out, the marketing company
that I had and really the account manager I had in that
marketing company, I reached outto me and she was like, Eric,
this new thing is coming out. Google is doing this new local
(31:44):
service ads, Google guaranteed thing and I want want to get us
signed up for it early. So I need this information from
you. And I was like, you got to do a
background check and all this stuff like is this even worth
the worth the trouble? You know?
And she's like, I, we just got to try it and we were really
early in and we got to benefit from a high volume of high
quality, low cost leads for a while until everybody got on
(32:07):
board and then it was whatever. So it's it's trying to make sure
that you're up to speed on what the next new thing is in
marketing and having a marketingpartner, having marketing
resources that understand what those those impacts are can make
or break your business as far asthe advantage you have in your
market. So that's a big thing that I
would hit on. No, that was a really good
answer regarding all the AI stuff.
(32:27):
I feel like you hit on basicallyeverything in like a few
minutes. That was awesome.
I didn't lie when I say people hit me up about it all the time
and I'm like, OK, here we go. Yeah.
No, I can tell you've answered this question before.
Yeah, One thing I'll mention there, which might be the most
important is the call answering like you mentioned.
And I would agree with you, I don't think it's quite there.
It feels like we're almost there.
(32:47):
It'll give great responses, but it'll be just slightly delayed
where it's like, all right, thisis a robot.
You know, some people are OK with talking with a robot.
And like you said, that's betterthan talking to nobody.
And it ends up going to a competitor because, you know,
the market is so competitive nowin most places.
But what I've been recommending,what I've, I'm hearing from all
the top people in the space is human first.
(33:08):
Still, that might change. And you know, maybe humans can
do some higher level tasks, but for now, human first.
If you really can't have a humananswer, then you can have a
robot answer. Yeah.
And the one thing that I always recommend to people too is
don't, don't try to pull a fast 1 and convince somebody that
they're talking to a real personwhen they're actually talking to
AI. So yeah, yeah, you can have an
(33:28):
AI that mimics my voice, right? So if I wanted to, I could
create an AI that can manage allmy phone volume, that mimics
exactly how I sound. But one thing I'm going to do
for sure is say hi, you know, this is James, an AI assistant.
I can handle most things, but ifyou'd like to talk to a real
person, press one. Yeah.
And that's fine, right? Then you get people who are
(33:49):
like, I don't mind talking to James's AI.
I'm going to go ahead and ask him my question, you know, but
if I really don't want to talk to James, this AI, I'm going to
press 1. So you, you give the customer
the opportunity to have the bestexperience in that format
without making them feel like what is going on with this
person? Is this person fake?
Like, is this person not real? Like, oh, if they're not real,
(34:10):
like, is this this company local?
They go down a rabbit hole of places you don't want them to go
down. Yeah, no, definitely.
I agree. So we'll wrap up the show here.
Eric. Eric, I've got one last question
for you that I'd like to ask allmy guests, and that is what is
your message for the pest control community?
What do you want to tell the pest control owners out there?
What do they need to know? What do you want to tell them?
(34:30):
You know, I think the most important thing that I could
probably share right now is to just do what you can with what
you have, where you're at. You know, the network that I've
built, it's has a lot of really good supportive people in it.
And those people have pest control companies that range
(34:51):
from people that are starting tomorrow.
They have 0 revenue all the way to people who started 20-30
years ago. And some people have, you know,
10/20/30, forty, $50 million worth of recurring revenue.
I have buddies and friends that still work and some of the
biggest pest control companies in the world.
And the cool thing is, is that you in a race with you, it's
(35:14):
always going to be UVU, right? And the source of improvement is
looking at how can I make myselfbetter based on what I was doing
the day before. It's always nice to kind of look
at other people to see what's possible.
That's not a bad thing, especially if you ask you know
someone for their advice. Hey man, like what are you doing
for your marketing? Or how'd you guys get more leads
or how'd you break into the 1,000,000 dollar, $5,000,000
(35:34):
milestone or whatever that is? Getting that information is fine
as long as you don't forget. It's always you versus you,
right? You are your own main
competitor. And the other thing is I'd say
that there's plenty of pie to goaround for everybody.
So don't be afraid to network. Don't be afraid to to talk about
some trade secrets every once ina while.
I promise it's probably not a trade secret, but it's one of
(35:58):
those things that it's, it has the ability to improve the
industry as a whole. I believe it should be shared,
right? And the industry I think is
better when we come together andwe network and we talk to each
other about what works best. I think it makes things better
for us, for our customers and for the industry as a whole all.
Right, Eric? Well, I think it's been a great
show. Thank you so much for coming on.
(36:19):
Where can people find you on social media and learn more
about you? If you are on Instagram, my
handle is at I am Eric Bassett, and then I'm on Facebook.
If you're in the pest control industry, I'm sure you'll
probably see me in one of the Facebook groups somewhere.
If you want to reach out to me, feel free to shoot me a message
on Messenger. It usually responds pretty quick
and I'm always happy to answer questions.
(36:39):
Awesome. Yeah, guys, make sure to go
follow Eric. He's a stud, so all those links
will be in the description and anything else you'd like to plug
or promote. You know, hope to see you guys
at Pest World this year. Absolutely.
Yeah, I'll be there. I hope to see you there, Eric.
And also I'll plug this for you.You mentioned that you do some
consulting on the side, you do some one time stuff, some
recurring stuff. So if you guys want potentially
(36:59):
consulting, especially around the stuff we were talking about
in the show today, maybe around systems, around team building,
all that stuff, Eric's the guys to make sure to reach out to him
for that. Thanks, Danny.
Of course. All right.
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on, Eric.
It's been a pleasure and I hope to see you soon.
We'll see you soon. Pleasure to be on.
Cool, see ya.
Hey there, my name is Danny Lebrandt and welcome back to
Pest control Legends. Today I'm with Eric Bassett
co-owner of Natura Pest Control.Eric has been in pest control
for over 18 years and is an associate certified entomologist
and specializes in sales, marketing, organizational
development and building systemsand processes.
He's been instrumental in growing Natura into one of the
(00:20):
most respected pest control companies in the Pacific
Northwest. And we actually had Eric on my
other show, Local Marketing Secrets about a year ago is
actually May 2024, which is pretty crazy to think about.
So I'm really excited to catch up with Eric, talk about what's
changed, what's working, and thelessons he's learned since then.
So, Eric, welcome to the show. Danny, thank you so much for
having me on the show. The intro that you made, very,
(00:42):
very nice, super flattering. So I, I appreciate that making
me sound awesome. It's great to be back on the
show with you as always. Absolutely immense.
I kind of want to ask you a general question here.
You can take this wherever you want.
Like I said, we did a show a little over a year ago.
What has changed? And you even told me before we
got on the call, you said, dude,I feel like so much has changed
in the past 12 to 18 months. So let's just like start to dive
(01:03):
into that where. Do we even begin?
I mean, you know, the turn in general, one of the big changes
that we made is that we took ourservice manager at the time and
we brought him into a general manager role.
And so I bug bucks con that we had back in March, 1 of the
things that I spoke on at that conference was making the
transition from being an owner operator to an owner advisor.
(01:24):
And we can jump into some of thespecifics of that because I I
still think that that's really applicable to the pest control
industry and to any ownership role for that matter.
But it was a big change for us, you know, putting somebody in
that role that kind of overseas all the departments, in which
case we can kind of take a step back into that advisor role and
help coach and develop him. And then we replaced our
(01:46):
customer service manager and we were we replaced about 75% of
our staff from the on the customer service side, on the
inbound sales team side. And then you know, we brought up
a new service manager. So it was kind of a change for
us to change for both departments and a change to have
a a new role in the company as ageneral manager.
Fortunately we have really good experience on the marketing side
(02:08):
of things. Matt and and his team at Lizard
are phenomenal. I know that you and Matt have
done content together which might be recommend.
I did share that video out when you guys came out with it.
Really, really good stuff. We've had a great year for that.
So credit to them. It's yeah, I, I think back, man,
what was I doing in, in, you know, may of 2024?
And so many things have have been different.
(02:29):
So those are just a few of the big ones.
Yeah, talk to me more about owner operator to owner advisor.
I don't think I've heard that term before.
Yeah, so I, I want to take credit for this, but I feel like
someone else has had to have come up with this idea before.
I have. It just kind of occurred to me
as I was trying to plan this speech that I had for Bug Bust
Con. And the idea is, is that when
(02:52):
you first build and start growing your business, you wear
a lot of hats, right? You're the finance guy, you're
the marketing guy, you're the sales guy, you're the
technician. You do all the things and
eventually you start to replace yourself and you're delegating
all those roles and tasks to other people.
But at the end of the day, thosepeople are still all
independently reporting to you, right?
So when the sales team has a problem, you're the end result
(03:13):
sales guy, right? When the technician team has a
problem, you're the guy that gets to answer all the questions
and it's really difficult to focus on the things that are
really important to growing and scaling the company, to really
focus on the continuance of thatvision.
I'm to hang out and like quadrant to the stuff that's
important but not necessarily urgent when you're still that
guy. And so the idea is, is when
(03:36):
you're an owner operator, the business relies on you.
It relies on your involvement. You pull your involvement out of
the business, things don't move forward, right?
In fact, things kind of come to a little bit of a halt at best.
They kind of have to navigate some bumpy pathways.
When you make the transition from owner operator to owner
advisor, you're now building a team around you of high level
(03:59):
managers who then act as the operators of the company.
And then you sit down with them at least once a week and you
have a high level meetings whereyou look at the performance of
each individual department. You have them talk to the
performance of that department. You have key metrics that are
performance based, right? So it's not just an open
conversation. You're actually looking at
something specific data that that's that's not biased, right?
(04:22):
And you provide feedback to themfrom your experience, right?
So you might say, hey, tell me what's going well today, right?
Like, tell me, tell me how the team's doing.
Tell me what you've accomplished.
What are our areas of opportunity, what could be
improved and what's the action plan?
What are the things you're goingto execute on in order to make
those improvements? And then how can I help as your
(04:42):
mentor, right? And then you're just kind of
giving them that feedback, but you're granting them the space
to go out and execute on that thing and you're not
micromanaging anymore, right? So if they say, Hey, I need you
to check in with me midweek justto make sure I got this task
done, OK, not a problem, man. I can do that, right?
But I'm certainly not going to be knocking on your door every
(05:03):
day and saying, hey, man, Are you sure you got that thing
done? That's, that's not the idea.
And then it frees up my time to go focus on other things like,
hey, should we look at other businesses to acquire?
I'm sure we look at investing inother arms of marketing.
Should we talk about going to these other industry events,
right. What else can we do to bring in
resources both intellectually and maybe in financially into
(05:25):
the business to grow the opportunities that we're
creating for our team? So that's a little bit of it in
a nutshell, but that's, that's the idea.
It's the transition from owner operator to owner advisor.
And that's what I'm trying to get the majority of the owners
that I'm connected with and the ones that I consult and coach to
understand and to eventually tryto get to.
OK, cool. So it's clear you guys are very
(05:47):
systems oriented. It, it seems like you guys have
like a weekly cadence. Everything is very systemized.
I was curious because I, I know a lot of owners that I talked to
are using something maybe like EOS or some, some kind of system
around their business regarding how they're working with their
team, how they're tracking and everything.
Or do you guys use EOS or anything similar?
(06:07):
Something similar, so we use the40X model.
Stands for four disciplines of execution, and I always
recommend that if people haven'tread that book that they do
also, you know, EOS or Traction would be a really great book to
read because any type of format or system or process designed
for building and growing your business is good to understand.
(06:28):
I would guess that of all the people who probably implement
some type of system in their business, 20% of those people
probably do it to exactly what the book says or to exactly what
that system is. Most of them end up adapting
that to their own unique nature within their company, right?
Ultimately, having a system, having a process and having that
cadence is probably what's most important.
But X is a pretty simple 1. You know, it just kind of helps
(06:52):
us make sure that we have thingskind of lined up.
So not that I've too far into the specifics, but we do have a
cadence surrounding that and it's a weekly cadence.
So we have a weekly cadence where we meet with our managers
and their managers meet with their people.
So our GM will meet with our service manager and office
manager and then the office manager, service manager on a
weekly basis meets with all their people.
(07:13):
Inside those meetings, we have our own format that I kind of
created, which is our development format.
Essentially. You sit down and yeah, some of
those same questions, right? Like, hey, how are you as a
person? How you doing?
I want to make sure that they understand I care more about
them or just as much about them as a person as I do an employee.
Then it's, hey, what are your wins, right?
What are your accomplishments? What's going well
(07:35):
professionally? We talked about that for a
minute. And then we dive into what their
areas of opportunity are, what could be improved.
And then we come up with an action plan.
And the importance of the actionplan #1 is that they have to
come up with it. They need to come up with the
specifics based on what they're trying to improve.
But #2 it has to be based on lead measures.
And that's another thing that the 40X model really hits on is
(07:57):
that you've got the lag measures, which is what you use
to measure performance, like closing rate is a lag measure,
and you have the lead measures, which is the behaviors that you
influence in order to impact thelag measure.
So, you know, asking enough questions on a sales call or
asking the right questions on a sales call is the behavior that
you're trying to hit on. So everybody has the same kind
(08:17):
of format, right? They've got commitments that
they have from the previous week, whether or not that
commitment actually had an impact, what they're trying to
improve, what their action plansare.
And then of course, as leaders within the business, we're
always asking what can I do to help to make sure that this
action plan of yours happens. So that's kind of our our system
that we operate within. And then the cadence of
(08:38):
accountability is making sure that that system is discussed
every single week. That's a very important part
because if if it's not discussedat, the whole thing kind of
falls apart. Yeah, yeah.
Gotcha. I've got kind of a nuanced
question, but I understand that you've worked with a lot of
managers and that that's something that you're
continually bringing up that we talked to the managers, then the
the managers are are talking to our staff.
(08:58):
What are you looking for in a manager?
What? What does an ideal manager look
like? You know, an ideal manager,
number one is organized, you know, I don't know if you ever
looked at kind of the, you know,the, that quadrant of time
management, right? So you've got obviously the, the
important and urgent stuff and quadrant run, you know, like
that's the things that are always trying to steal all your
time. Then you got the important but
not necessarily urgent and quadrant 2 and and so on and so
(09:21):
forth. And your manager needs to make
sure that they are putting the right things in the right boxes,
right? So they need to understand how
to manage their time properly separately, because I'm relying
on them to operate the business.And if they don't prioritize the
right things in the right way, then we're going to have a
breakdown of what ends up being at the mercy of the other.
And so time management organization, that's a huge one.
(09:45):
The other one is just interpersonal skills.
I think you've, you probably figured this out.
I'm just from talking to people.People have different
personalities, they have different learning styles, they
have different working styles. I, I used to talk to my team
about like the love languages ofwork, you know, like, how do you
want your boss to recognize you?Because some people like gifts,
(10:05):
they like the prizes, they like that kind of thing.
They, they want a little raise or whatever.
Some people like the acknowledgement.
Some people want to have a free time to do other things or they
want more responsibility, believe it or not.
So they want different things based on different
personalities. So it's important as a manager,
you have to be able to identify the learning style that the type
(10:29):
that they want to be appreciatedby.
And you have to understand that they all handle conflict in a
little bit of a different way. And you have to be calm and cool
and collected and know that justbecause one person handles
conflict one way, another personhandles it a different way.
If you try to manage them all the exact same way, it's not
(10:50):
going to be effective. And if you ask any parent out
there like, hey, like, do you parent all your kids the same
way? No, the answer's no, right?
Because they're all unique personalities in different ways.
And I don't, I don't mean to saythat you should create separate
policies for all your employees.That's not what I mean.
I just mean that as a manager, there's a grey area that you
have to be able to operate in that requires hacked and it
(11:13):
requires interpersonal skills. And also going off that, when do
you hire your first manager then?
You know, as soon as you can. And this, that's such a really
weird way to put it, but when you're trying to build and scale
a company, you're constantly trying to get in enough, enough
revenue, enough of a customer base to replace yourself in some
format. Every time you replace yourself,
(11:34):
it's an investment. And that investment's going to
cost money and it's going to cost time.
And so you see a lot of solo operators who build a book of
business, right? And they have a full route, you
know, and there's a point when they ask themselves, OK, do I
want to build this thing so thatit's bigger than what I have
now? And they start looking into the
numbers and they're like, OK, cool.
(11:54):
I'm going to have to hire a technician.
I have to buy a truck. I'm going to have to do this.
Maybe I hire an admin. And they go, well, all this
money is coming right out of my profit, you know, at first
before I actually get the accounts to do it, because you
have to have the people 1st. And you realize, well, I could
just stay as a solo operator andmake good money If if I'm the
only guy, like in fact, profit margins as a solo operator are
(12:17):
awesome, really, really good. And so you can load yourself up
and you can do a phenomenal job and have and make really good
money. But when you go to scale the
company, it's going to cost those profits.
So that's kind of first thing you need to understand is that
scaling a company is expensive and it cuts into your
profitability. But if that's your drive, if
that's your goal, then you're now trying to replace yourself
(12:39):
in as many ways as possible. And typically, I'd say that the
biggest load on your time is youas a technician, right?
If you're the guy that's sellingand servicing the accounts and
that's a full time gig right there, get a technician and get
him trained U get him U to speedon the processes.
Get him building relationships with your customers right?
Next thing that might end up taking UA significant amount of
your time is the admin side of it.
(13:00):
Be prepared to bring in probablya part time admin in the
beginning or a virtual assistantor some kind of person who can
handle the important and urgent stuff because the phone ringing
falls into that category one, right?
That that first box, it's going to take up your time.
You got to pick up the phone. If you don't pick up the phone,
customers aren't happy. You misleads all those other
things, right? Once you start scaling and you
(13:21):
start adding technicians becausenow you've got enough customers,
right? Maybe you have a sales guy that
comes in, which is great, and maybe you're trained your admin
or your office persons, you've expanded their hours, they're
now taking sales calls too. That's great.
Eventually you're going to find people within those departments
as they kind of separate out. People in those departments need
like more leadership and more involvement.
(13:43):
Then you're going to have time to give.
And this is kind of a tough stepfor most owners to make because
one, they don't want to give up that involvement usually is it.
My business partner Jake likes to say it owners like to keep
things within arm's reach, right?
As long as I can touch, you know, the customer service team
over here and I can touch what'sgoing on and the field service
team over here, you know, at least I know what's always going
(14:07):
on, right? Because as soon as you hire a
manager to manage those things, you have to check in with them
to know what's going on. And that's your business, that's
your baby, right? And it feels awkward and forward
and to let that go and to give over that responsibility to
somebody else. But the business will not move
forward unless you take the leapand do it.
(14:28):
So once those teams get big enough, and typically you could
see anything from like 4:00 to 6:00 or seven members per team.
So for example, on the technician team, once that team
gets like 5 plus, I might consider identifying a lead
technician, right? Some guy who I think has really
good managerial skills, he has really good potential.
(14:50):
Maybe he's not exactly 100% there yet, but he shows that he
he wants that, he has a desire to and he has good skills for
it, or at least preliminary skills that can be trained and
developed. And over time, I'm going to
start delegating those skills over to them until they're ready
to really take on that position.I'm also going to see how they
respond in certain key leadership areas with their
(15:12):
team. Can they provide good news?
Can they provide bad news? Can they hold the standards
despite things being popular or unpopular or liked or disliked
by the team, Right. Can they handle all those
things? And that's the kind of person
that I'm looking for. So once I've identified that
person, I put them in that role,I start to delegate and
(15:35):
eventually we'll have a formal promotion where I say, hey team,
you know, it pleases me to announce that we're going to
have so and so as our tech manager or service manager,
right? Same thing happens on the
customer service side, although the customer service side from
scalability standpoint and pest control, you're going to usually
have far more technicians in thefield then you're going to have
customer service and office staff in the office, right?
(15:59):
But same thing kind of tracks. As soon as I have three or four
people in there or more, I'm going to start looking for that
person, right? Hey, who's the responsible
person who can I put into that role and who's going to end up
taking over for me? You know, we, we didn't have,
I'm trying to think of probably 6 or 7 office staff and about 15
(16:20):
technicians before we decided toput a general manager in place.
Somebody who was going to be, you know, looking after,
obviously the manager, service manager for the technicians and
the office manager for that teamwhere we could kind of take a
step back and join that owner advisor role that we were
talking about before. So that's kind of the loose
timeline on that. It really kind of depends on
(16:40):
your goals and how you're scaling, but for us that's how
it worked. So regarding all of the higher
level positions in a pest control company, are you
typically looking to hire internally or are you trying to
find these people externally or is it a mix of both?
I think internally is the best place to start.
Ultimately, I think you should always have your eyes out for
people who are hungry for those types of roles.
(17:03):
One of the things that I like todo in interviews when they first
come into the business is I say,hey, you know, it sounds like
obviously you're interviewing for a technician kind of role.
What other roles in the businessare you interested in, right?
Where could you see your pathwaygoing?
And sometimes people will say, I'm not really interested in
anything else, I just need this as a side job while I'm going
through school because this is really my career path.
(17:25):
And that's totally fine, right? But other times you might see
people that go, well, actually, I would really love to be a
manager or a VP, or I really love marketing, even though I'm
a technician. Like I would love to be a
director of marketing one day. OK, great.
Right. And I'm silently taking notes or
probably even physically taking notes about what these
aspirations are. Because as the business grows, I
(17:48):
want to look at our internal resources and promote from
within. I think that that shows that you
have a lot of care and consideration for the talent
that you already have. And these people are putting in
a lot of time and effort trying to build and scale and grow that
business, which means that they likely have a vested interest in
its success if they're able to get to these other positions.
(18:08):
So I prefer to do it internally.And when we are hiring, the
first thing that we actually do is we look internally first for
promotion. In fact, I'm trying to think of
if we've ever actually hired outfor a leadership position.
We have not. So we've always hired from
within, but even when it comes to hiring entry level positions,
we always check with our internal team first and we say,
(18:31):
hey, if you guys have any friends or family members or
people that you know of that would be a really good fit for
this position, let's talk to those people first.
Get them in the door, give them an opportunity before we go
trying to put a bunch of effort into Indeed, Monster and all
these other places that that hire people.
We used to have like a 90% of our workforce was hired via
(18:52):
referral of another employee. Wild as we as we built and grown
that number has changed a littlebit as it naturally would, but
we also incentivize our employees do that.
We actually pay a referral bonuses when they give us the
candidate that ends up getting hired later on down the road.
At six months and 12 months, we give referral bonuses to those
employees. So another thing I wanted to
(19:13):
cover was I know you talked to so many other pest control
owners and you're even working with a lot of them that might be
previously with the bug bugs program or you have your own
consulting clients. Maybe that's just one time basis
or recurring basis. I, I just want to ask you again,
generally you can take this wherever you want.
What has been one of the biggestthings you've learned recently
from all these kind of high level people you're working with
(19:34):
just in the pest control space? What what's something you've
learned that's kind of been a game changer?
You know, the, the biggest thingthat I've learned is that not a
lot of business owners have that, that set cadence of
accountability. Like the 40X calls it.
You know, some of them they havelike meetings, right?
They'll say, hey, yeah, like we're going to, we're going to,
we have a management meeting every single Monday or whatever
(19:56):
the situation is. Or Oh yeah, we have meetings
when we need to have meetings. And, and you kind of see people
on like both two sides of it where it's like, well, we don't
want to have meetings just to have them because then they're,
you know, not productive. And it's like, OK, well, maybe
maybe not. They just don't have a formal
process for that. And maybe even more importantly
is that they don't have a. Formal process for employee
development. So for example, you know, you
(20:19):
could have an employee that's there and you're not actually
tracking performance because they don't have any performance
metrics that they track, right? So the only time you know,
whether or not they're doing a good job or a bad job is either
on other employees feedback or customer feedback, which can be
a real big problem. If you wait until an employee
comes to you and says, hey, likeI think that they're not doing a
(20:42):
good job, Aldar, they haven't been doing a good job for a long
time. Same thing for a customer,
right? If you wait until there's a bad
review that comes in or it's like, hey, yeah, I talked to
John on the phone and he was super rude and, you know, cut me
off and whatever. Or a technician in the field,
right? We have issues.
OK, so #1 if you don't have an evaluation process based on your
employees performance, we reallyneed to implement one.
(21:03):
There's a lot of ways that you can do that on the phones for
customer service staff and salesstaff, you know, closing rate
and handle time and all these other things.
There's a whole laundry list of stuff that you can look at to
look at the health of how they're doing.
But more importantly, we have a call quality evaluation
scorecard. So our managers in those
departments will actually listento phone calls.
(21:24):
An we have a sales process that I teach all my sales staff and
we reverse engineered that to create this call quality
scorecard. And that scorecard is what we
use to listen to calls and then score the calls.
There's 100 points. It's like a test, right?
There's 4 categories, 5 subcategories.
Each one is worth 1:00 to 5:00. So you have 2025 points per four
category and 100 points total. If you're doing everything
(21:45):
you're supposed to, right? That is within your control on
that call. You'll score 100 usually if you
score 100, that's a fantastic customer experience, right?
Anything below that is the same thing, right?
You probably score an A or AB ormaybe AC, right?
And just like in a passing grade, typically what you see is
people who are scoring C's and lower, like that's where the
(22:07):
customer experience really starts to struggle where like AC
and higher, OK, maybe you were able to skate by and we'll be
OK, but you got to make improvements D's and lower.
It's like, oh, you're having a negative impact on the customer
experience here. Not not only are you, you're not
going to hit performance metrics, but you're actually
going in the opposite direction.We also have service quality
(22:28):
scorecards, which is for the service team based on the
service that they provide. And that's a combination of the
service manager that's actually there with the technician on
site and a combination of a talking to the customer that
they were servicing and doing anaudit on previous services of
that technician has actually done.
So the evaluation side of it is really important.
(22:49):
Not only do you need to have metrics that you're evaluating
for their performance, but you have to have metrics that
evaluate their behaviors. It's that lead measure versus
lag measure kind of aspects to it.
I like to help a lot of businessowners implement that part of it
because that gives them so much more clarity about what's
happening in their company. A lot of times, you know, they
(23:09):
might reach out to you and be like, hey, we're struggling with
XY and Z, we're struggling with retention or I think we have a
lot of cancellations. They don't even know what the
retention is or, you know, we'renot getting a lot of reviews or
we bad reviews or you know, we get a lot of reservices and
we're going to implement a lot of those metrics and evaluations
so that we can see clearly what's really happening.
What's at the beginning of this process that eventually causes
(23:32):
the end result that you're not liking, right?
And then it's a matter of implementing those regular
meetings. So the developments we talked
about, hey, what's going well? What can we improve?
What's your action plan? Implementing that helps a ton
because then you can actually use that data.
You can use those tools, right? We sit down with an inside sales
person and we say, hey, what's going well you're closing really
well that's great Hey, what are your areas of opportunity?
(23:55):
Hey, you're you're struggling onupsells, right?
Or you're struggling on your callback list and hey, what's
the action plan Oh, you're goingto make sure that you call back
all of your leads at the end of every single day before you
leave perfect. This sounds great, you know, let
me know how it goes. Let me know how I can help,
right? Having that in place on a
regular basis means that your employees are always working on
(24:15):
improving something every singleweek.
And when you're doing that, yourbusiness as a whole is improving
every single week. But if you don't have those
processes in place, best case scenario, your business is
maintaining every single week. But typically what's going on is
that there's a little bit of moving backwards every single
week and you don't, you don't catch it until it reaches A
(24:36):
threshold that alarms you by thetime there's probably been a lot
of stuff that's going wrong. And just to kind of wrap that up
nicely, what would be the resultof doing something like that,
let's say a company has no scorecards, not really meeting,
not really keeping their people accountable.
I mean what happens after and what?
What are like the direct resultsthat turn decreases, you get
(24:58):
more reviews. What happens?
I mean, you name it, right? Anything that you want to
accomplish that can be a good step forward for your business
can be accomplished with a good system and a good process.
So for example, you get somebodywho's like, hey, I, I really
want to have more reviews from amarketing standpoint.
You're like, I would like to have, you know, 500 reviews by
(25:18):
the end of the year or whatever your number is, right?
Well, number one, you need to process for that #2 you have to
be able to gauge the performanceof the technicians.
How many reviews are they getting right from the people
who are struggling with the performance metric?
You have to have a an evaluationon what they're saying.
So you have to go out and spend time with him and see what
they're doing. And then on those regular
developments, it's so, you know,I'm noticing that you aren't
(25:41):
getting a lot of reviews. What do you think the area of
opportunity there is? And they might say, well, I
just, you know, not a lot of my customers are home so I don't
ever ask. And you say, OK, well, how about
we send them a text after the service and say, hey, John,
finish up with your service. Do you feel like I was able to
deliver a five star service today?
Would love your feedback. Here's a link for a review.
Right, boom. Or however, when you do it, but
you have to have some kind of system in place and that's how
(26:02):
you make improvements, whether that's closing rate reviews, you
know, you want to have a better revenue per lead, which has to
do with closing conversion, average contract value and other
things, lower reservice rate. We have to evaluate how
effective our service and the products that we're using, the
processes that we have, anything.
If you're trying to improve something in your business from
profitability all the way over to mitigating churn, employee
(26:24):
turnover, having those in place will do that.
Nothing drives me maybe more crazy than when we have a
problem in our business and I ask a question like, why is this
happening? And the answer is I don't know,
right? Or for example, like that, like
that employee quit. And I'm like, why?
Like, why would they do that? And they're like, I don't know,
(26:44):
right? And this doesn't happen often
because they know how much they don't like it.
But it's like, for example, you know, something happens like,
hey, so and so I think might endup quitting.
And I'm like, what's going on? And then they have a whole
history to tell me. They're like, well, from the
last couple of developments, we've talked about this issue,
we've talked about this problem,we've had the strategy in place.
They've not been able to make a difference.
(27:05):
I think that this is a won't situation, like it's a
personality conflict instead of like a can't skill versus issue.
Like they have a whole thing that they can tell me about
what's going on, right? The context is there.
And it's because they have a system in place, right?
They have a system in order to get the information and make
sure that we're either coaching people up or coaching people
(27:26):
out, right? And it's that element that if
you, if you don't have that in place, you have no information.
And when you don't have any information, you have no
direction. Yeah, definitely no.
OK, so the systems tied to everything, it's not just like
one or two stats, but especiallyhow you're treating your people
and how you're managing them. It's just, I mean, that's the
business. It affects every single stat is
(27:47):
basically what you're saying. Awesome.
Probably the last topic I wantedto cover here, which is kind of
a fun one. I'm curious to hear your
thoughts, especially with all the recent developments is AI.
So I feel like everyone's talking about AI.
I'm kind of getting sick of all the the AI talk, even though
that's kind of supposed to be mything.
I'm supposed to be the young guyand everyone's asking me about
AI stuff, but I'm curious, from your perspective, what's going
(28:09):
on with AI? Are you guys using new tools?
Are you trying new stuff out? Is anything working?
Tell me all about it. You know, I man, if I had a
dollar for every time somebody asked me about AI in my
business, I have, I have enough money to not have to worry about
business anymore. Me too.
AI is really, really cool. I, I like the tools, I like the
ideas, I like the potential and the vision.
(28:31):
You know, I, I've obviously spent a lot of time interviewing
different AI platforms, some that are specific to pest
control, some that are not specific to pest control.
And some of the things that I like a lot are lead management
and being able to kind of capture incoming leads and
cultivate that relationship. Whether it's from point A all
(28:51):
the way to the sale, like closing and converting and
scheduling and everything else. If the AI can pull that off,
whether it's via text or voice, which we'll talk about in here
in just a second, or if it's, hey, we're just hanging on to
that until somebody can can hop on the phone or until a real
person can pick up the conversation, that's fine too.
But putting that into your system allows you to avoid a
(29:13):
scenario where if things get really busy, people can't get a
hold of you, right? People can't connect, you know,
and existing customer type scenarios, that's not as bad
because I don't think an existing customer minds leaving
a message. But if it's a potential customer
scenario, they're not leaving a message.
It's not going to be like, oh, hey, I'm really interested in
your company. I want to get a price from you.
(29:34):
If you could please call me back.
You know, that sounds great. Dude.
They're not leaving a message. They're hanging out the phone.
They're calling someone else, right, who probably has AI
that's going to take care of theproblem.
So that element's cool. The voice related element of it
kind of depends on how you want to package it.
The text version, I think is a little bit more ahead of the
game than voice, just in my personal opinion.
And as we've talked about before, I have really high
(29:55):
standards for those phone calls,but I want to make sure that the
AI is able to hit on all those same quality metrics that are
regular people are going to be able to head on, right?
I mean, it's all designed aroundcreating a really good customer
experience. But there are very good voice
platforms like AI voice platforms for sales and customer
service and everything that you should definitely test and try
(30:17):
out. Same thing with text.
So a lot of these companies are are making big strides in that.
The other thing is creating training material is really
cool. So you can take a bunch of
information and #1 you can summarize meetings and create
quizzes with AI, which is reallycool.
So if you just had a long meeting about information, you
plug that information in, you say, hey, create a quiz, and
(30:40):
then you can have that for that team and the next team and the
next team, right? I know that there's AI now that
is kind of handling or starting to handle the evaluation side of
that phone call. Can we talk about that before
where I have a manager that sitsdown and he's grading all the
stuff takes him about 30 minutes, right?
Having an AI listen to it in real time and provide that
feedback. There are opportunities for that
(31:00):
now too. And then you, you and Matt
talked about this on the marketing side of things.
AI is making a big impact. So I would probably just make a
recommendation that if, if you're not going to do anything
else, you're not using AI on your sales calls, you're not
using AI for your for your team or whatever.
At least to make sure that you have a marketing partner who is
U to speed on the impact that AIis going to have on your
(31:22):
marketing. Because just like anything else,
you don't want to be behind the ball when it comes to marketing
efforts. I remember when I was lucky
enough that right before LSA came out, the marketing company
that I had and really the account manager I had in that
marketing company, I reached outto me and she was like, Eric,
this new thing is coming out. Google is doing this new local
(31:44):
service ads, Google guaranteed thing and I want want to get us
signed up for it early. So I need this information from
you. And I was like, you got to do a
background check and all this stuff like is this even worth
the worth the trouble? You know?
And she's like, I, we just got to try it and we were really
early in and we got to benefit from a high volume of high
quality, low cost leads for a while until everybody got on
(32:07):
board and then it was whatever. So it's it's trying to make sure
that you're up to speed on what the next new thing is in
marketing and having a marketingpartner, having marketing
resources that understand what those those impacts are can make
or break your business as far asthe advantage you have in your
market. So that's a big thing that I
would hit on. No, that was a really good
answer regarding all the AI stuff.
(32:27):
I feel like you hit on basicallyeverything in like a few
minutes. That was awesome.
I didn't lie when I say people hit me up about it all the time
and I'm like, OK, here we go. Yeah.
No, I can tell you've answered this question before.
Yeah, One thing I'll mention there, which might be the most
important is the call answering like you mentioned.
And I would agree with you, I don't think it's quite there.
It feels like we're almost there.
(32:47):
It'll give great responses, but it'll be just slightly delayed
where it's like, all right, thisis a robot.
You know, some people are OK with talking with a robot.
And like you said, that's betterthan talking to nobody.
And it ends up going to a competitor because, you know,
the market is so competitive nowin most places.
But what I've been recommending,what I've, I'm hearing from all
the top people in the space is human first.
(33:08):
Still, that might change. And you know, maybe humans can
do some higher level tasks, but for now, human first.
If you really can't have a humananswer, then you can have a
robot answer. Yeah.
And the one thing that I always recommend to people too is
don't, don't try to pull a fast 1 and convince somebody that
they're talking to a real personwhen they're actually talking to
AI. So yeah, yeah, you can have an
(33:28):
AI that mimics my voice, right? So if I wanted to, I could
create an AI that can manage allmy phone volume, that mimics
exactly how I sound. But one thing I'm going to do
for sure is say hi, you know, this is James, an AI assistant.
I can handle most things, but ifyou'd like to talk to a real
person, press one. Yeah.
And that's fine, right? Then you get people who are
(33:49):
like, I don't mind talking to James's AI.
I'm going to go ahead and ask him my question, you know, but
if I really don't want to talk to James, this AI, I'm going to
press 1. So you, you give the customer
the opportunity to have the bestexperience in that format
without making them feel like what is going on with this
person? Is this person fake?
Like, is this person not real? Like, oh, if they're not real,
(34:10):
like, is this this company local?
They go down a rabbit hole of places you don't want them to go
down. Yeah, no, definitely.
I agree. So we'll wrap up the show here.
Eric. Eric, I've got one last question
for you that I'd like to ask allmy guests, and that is what is
your message for the pest control community?
What do you want to tell the pest control owners out there?
What do they need to know? What do you want to tell them?
(34:30):
You know, I think the most important thing that I could
probably share right now is to just do what you can with what
you have, where you're at. You know, the network that I've
built, it's has a lot of really good supportive people in it.
And those people have pest control companies that range
(34:51):
from people that are starting tomorrow.
They have 0 revenue all the way to people who started 20-30
years ago. And some people have, you know,
10/20/30, forty, $50 million worth of recurring revenue.
I have buddies and friends that still work and some of the
biggest pest control companies in the world.
And the cool thing is, is that you in a race with you, it's
(35:14):
always going to be UVU, right? And the source of improvement is
looking at how can I make myselfbetter based on what I was doing
the day before. It's always nice to kind of look
at other people to see what's possible.
That's not a bad thing, especially if you ask you know
someone for their advice. Hey man, like what are you doing
for your marketing? Or how'd you guys get more leads
or how'd you break into the 1,000,000 dollar, $5,000,000
(35:34):
milestone or whatever that is? Getting that information is fine
as long as you don't forget. It's always you versus you,
right? You are your own main
competitor. And the other thing is I'd say
that there's plenty of pie to goaround for everybody.
So don't be afraid to network. Don't be afraid to to talk about
some trade secrets every once ina while.
I promise it's probably not a trade secret, but it's one of
(35:58):
those things that it's, it has the ability to improve the
industry as a whole. I believe it should be shared,
right? And the industry I think is
better when we come together andwe network and we talk to each
other about what works best. I think it makes things better
for us, for our customers and for the industry as a whole all.
Right, Eric? Well, I think it's been a great
show. Thank you so much for coming on.
(36:19):
Where can people find you on social media and learn more
about you? If you are on Instagram, my
handle is at I am Eric Bassett, and then I'm on Facebook.
If you're in the pest control industry, I'm sure you'll
probably see me in one of the Facebook groups somewhere.
If you want to reach out to me, feel free to shoot me a message
on Messenger. It usually responds pretty quick
and I'm always happy to answer questions.
(36:39):
Awesome. Yeah, guys, make sure to go
follow Eric. He's a stud, so all those links
will be in the description and anything else you'd like to plug
or promote. You know, hope to see you guys
at Pest World this year. Absolutely.
Yeah, I'll be there. I hope to see you there, Eric.
And also I'll plug this for you.You mentioned that you do some
consulting on the side, you do some one time stuff, some
recurring stuff. So if you guys want potentially
(36:59):
consulting, especially around the stuff we were talking about
in the show today, maybe around systems, around team building,
all that stuff, Eric's the guys to make sure to reach out to him
for that. Thanks, Danny.
Of course. All right.
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on, Eric.
It's been a pleasure and I hope to see you soon.
We'll see you soon. Pleasure to be on.
Cool, see ya.
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