Austin Gray: Really, I'd just like to dive into the business model, how you started the business, and get sort of into the details. So why don't you just jump in and tell us how you started the business?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, so during COVID in 2020, I was a freshman in college, and everything hit. So I was looking for a summer job, something where I could just make some money, and, you know, everything shut down basically. My cousin, who's now my business partner, hit me up and he said, "Hey man, I'm going to Raleigh, North Carolina." He had been doing door-to-door sales for pest control for, I don’t know, already seven years or so at that point. He pitched me on how much I could make if I was a hard worker and all that sort of stuff. So I went out with him; we went out to Raleigh, we sold that summer, and then we sold one more the following year. Then we decided that we were tired of putting sales on for someone else, making him rich, and we wanted to start our own.

Austin Gray: Where did you start?

Casey McDaniel: So, we started our own company in Grand Junction, Colorado—so a little bit smaller market. We were used to selling out in Raleigh. He had previous experience in Chicago and Des Moines and some bigger areas. Our business model—we decided on smaller markets because there’s just less competition. A lot of the big guys, the big door-to-door companies aren't there. Just simply because of that, our attrition rates are a little bit lower, and the growth has been quite a bit faster. We’re planning on kind of keeping sprawling out through all the small towns in Colorado, kind of avoiding Denver for now. Eventually, we'll get there, but we’re kind of hitting the small ones first and dominating those and then getting the cash flow up so we can go and compete with those mega companies in the big cities.

Austin Gray: And that's purely because there are already well-established pest control companies in Denver, right?

Casey McDaniel: Right. There are companies everywhere. We could compete in a big market; there are so many people that we could carve out enough to make a living. But we just decided, why go and battle the big guys? Winning in Junction, there was really only one other company that had true operations. Other than that, it was just some small mom-and-pop shops, single operators. We’re not trying to put those guys out of business; there are plenty of people there for everyone. But there was just so much underserved market that it was just a much easier opportunity for us to get into.

Austin Gray: Can you take us through the revenue model of the pest control business?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, so what we’re doing—we do offer one-time services if that’s what a customer truly needs and if that’s what they really want. But 90% of our revenue is recurring. Typically, we're selling a one-year contract to start, with quarterly services, so we come out and actually service the property once every three months. We do break it down into a monthly bill to make it a little easier for budgeting for the customer, and easier for us to keep on top of the bills and smooth out cash flow so it's not so lumpy. Typically, for a normal house—let’s say a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,500 square feet—we're usually going to charge roughly 40-42 bucks a month. It's about 100-125 a quarter that we come out.

Austin Gray: Now, do you offer free reserves anytime in between?

Casey McDaniel: Yes, we do offer free reserves anytime in between. This allows us to add more value and guarantee that the customer is taken care of. They're guaranteed the four services every year, and after their one-year contract, most people stick on, and then we just kind of roll month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter. Our cancellation rate is pretty low. We like that because it keeps it really easy to project our future earnings and revenue because it's all recurring. We do have one-time bed bug jobs or, you know, an apartment complex or a housing authority that'll call in for one-time services, but for the most part, we try to keep everything as recurring as we can.

Austin Gray: That’s awesome. I love the recurring revenue model. I've been following you on Twitter/X—whatever we’re supposed to call it now—and I've really enjoyed what you're putting out. I'm really interested to hear the breakdown of this model. It sounds like I've seen a couple of people engaging with you, looking at this as an add-on service. So did I do the math right that you're charging 126 bucks each quarter?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, right in there. Obviously, some homes are smaller, some are really big. Our commercial pricing is a little bit different. Typically for commercial units, like restaurants, we do try to do a monthly service. For residential, a monthly service tends to be overkill, so we’re not going to overcharge someone. But for a restaurant or a commercial unit that has a ton of traffic and is bringing in food and boxes and stuff, they typically do need that, so oftentimes we will charge somewhere between 100 and 150 bucks every month, and come on a monthly schedule for that.

Austin Gray: Is it a per square foot price that you break it down on your unit pricing model, or how do you do that?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, we do. In our handbook for our office person, when someone calls in, we’ve got it broken down. It's not necessarily like a dollar per square foot or 50 cents a square foot or anything like that, but we do have it broken down into different categories where she just looks, and if it's within this range, then she charges that price. So it's fair for every customer. We don't play the game where sometimes the sleazy salesman listens in and says, “Well, it sounds like this single mom really needs it, so for you, it’s going to be 300.” We don’t do that; it's fair for everyone. If you call in, you can guarantee you're getting the same price as your neighbor.

Austin Gray: So 126 bucks a quarter on that. Can you just take us through the breakdown of some of your margins and how... like how long does it take your team to fulfill that?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, so our techs, because we do offer free reserves, and those can pop up at any point, we can't book their schedule completely full. So typically, what we’re looking at—we try to aim for about 15 jobs a day. When reserves come in, it’ll top out at 20 at most, so that's about 30 minutes per job throughout the day. They can get two jobs done every hour. They're just paid on a flat salary. Some companies will do production pay; some do salary; some do hourly. We want to make sure our guys are taken care of even if things do get a little bit slow. So they get a salary the whole time, and then after that, they do get certain bonuses for reviews, sales commissions, and stuff like that.

Casey McDaniel: Honestly, a lot of people don’t realize that the chemicals are pretty cheap. The breakdown on that is it's just a few bucks of service. Then we've got our overhead: technology, insurance, rent, workers' comp— that sort of stuff. If we're keeping our guys really good and busy, we can typically keep margins anywhere between about 40 and 50%. If they’re not jam-packed, those will kind of get to the low 30s, but we try to not let it slip below 30%.

Austin Gray: And how big is your team right now?

Casey McDaniel: So right now, it is me, my business partner, we’ve got two technicians—we are in the process of hiring a third—and then we do just have one office receptionist.

Austin Gray: Okay, so two technicians in the process of hiring a third, you and your business partner, and then your office manager. Real quick for the audience, how old are you?

Casey McDaniel: So I am a bit of a younger guy, obviously. I am 24.

Austin Gray: Awesome! That's great. I feel like the last several guests I've had are right in that 23-24 range, and it just excites me so much to see you guys out there hustling—building something from the ground up. I get it all the time, even at my age. I’m 32. A lot of the builders I work with and the contractors are, you know, always saying, "All the Millennials and Gen Z don't want to work." My goal on this podcast—two things: One, I want to showcase people out there who are willing to get out there and bust it and build something from the ground up—and we haven't lost that backbone as Americans. Right?

Austin Gray: And then two, for our listeners, I want this to be the last podcast they ever listen to. I think we are in a time where people just consume so much content and they don't take action. So that’s why I'm having you on this podcast. You're obviously someone who has taken action, so the goal if you’re listening to this is I want these episodes to be the last podcast you ever listen to before you go take action and start your own.

Austin Gray: So Casey, take us back. You've got a business partner; you've got three technicians right now; you've got an office manager. Take us back to coming out of the sales process on the East Coast. You’re starting your business; how do you build the team from the beginning?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, so starting a company is kind of like becoming an adult—when you're a kid, you think like all the adults have it all figured out; they know exactly what's going on, and you know they’ve been there, done that—they're so wise. Then you get to be 20-some years old—probably 30—and sometimes you're like, "I have no idea what I'm doing! I still have to ask my parents questions all the time." Starting a business was the same exact way.

Casey McDaniel: You just have to go into it confidently and learn along the way because every single day, we’re like, "We have no idea what we're doing!" We hope that we come across as professional, and we hope that people think that we're a legitimate enterprise. So starting off, we don’t like debt. We've heard too many horror stories of guys taking out huge loans, then things go really good for a while, and then, you know, everybody lost everything in 2008. So we try to keep it as lean as we can. Starting off, my business partner and I did a lot of the work.

Casey McDaniel: Then we had a friend from college who was already in the pest control game as a technician, so we poached him, and he started spraying that first summer for us. We started off doing all the sales, knocking doors. I have a degree in finance, so I was doing all the accounting. We ran some simple Google ads, some Facebook ads—just tried to test out what we were doing. I was also the office person; I took all the phone calls and did all that. So in the beginning, we were just working like madmen, just getting it off the ground. If someone called in and had an emergency and our one technician was off for the day, either me or my business partner would head out the door, you know, up early, up late, getting it done.

Casey McDaniel: So we just did every single thing ourselves for the whole first year until we had enough revenue coming in to justify starting to hire out and delegate and get some of the other pieces put in place.

Austin Gray: At what point did you hire your first role?

Casey McDaniel: So our first technician we hired right away. Because we had the background in door-to-door sales, we knew that we could probably put on anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 in revenue the first year just from us knocking doors, depending on how much we could dedicate to knocking. So we started off right away, hired our first tech kind of the very first day that we were knocking, so that we could just focus on that.

Casey McDaniel: He was just a seasonal guy. It was just in between semesters for him at college, so he just did that first summer. As soon as he went back to college, he stopped, and that’s when we sprayed our own accounts. The whole first winter, there was no office person; that first winter was just us.

Casey McDaniel: Then when the next March rolled around— I guess that was just this March, actually—we hired a technician and an office person right away, and then about a month later, we hired our second tech.

Austin Gray: Were you hiring before revenue?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, that first one we were. We knew that we were capable of bringing in the revenue. We knew that we service year-round—there are bugs year-round—but the prime time to sell is really kind of April through August. We didn’t want to waste time burning ourselves out spraying and knocking before we had enough revenue. So, yeah, we brought him on right away. We started knocking doors the first day, and by the second day he was out there spraying and bringing in the revenue.

Casey McDaniel: Everything we did, our margins were even better, and we were still cash flow positive right away, even though we hired a bit pre-revenue.

Austin Gray: Did you and your partner pay yourselves right out the gate?

Casey McDaniel: We did not. We are an S-Corp, so with that, we have to pay ourselves a salary, and then any additional distributions throughout the year we can take at whatever schedule we decide. But the first four months, we didn’t take a dime, and then after that, we did start taking a very small salary.

Casey McDaniel: Then it was about six months in before we took our first substantial distribution. So it was a little bit touch-and-go in the beginning. We did have to have some savings saved up. If we wanted, we could have paid ourselves a bit more, but we wanted to have some buffer in the bank account, and we wanted to grow that up a little bit before we started taking money out.

Austin Gray: This is a question I get a lot, and I actually just did a post this morning on X about reinvesting your profits back into the business. It's funny; I had a friend who wanted to start a business, and they immediately think you can quit your corporate job and go back to making your six-figure salary, and it's just not the case if you're going to start your own business.

Austin Gray: Sure, you're building equity back in your business by reinvesting the profits, but I feel like the discipline you and your partner have had is likely what has led you to a successful second year. In the early days, how much revenue did you guys generate out of that first door-knocking season?

Casey McDaniel: So at the end of the first year, we had only generated about 180,000 in that first nine months. Now we had contracts that were still good that had anywhere from three to nine months left on them, so our future guaranteed revenue was closer to, I think, 350,000 or so. But yeah, the first calendar year was less than 200,000. It was not a ton that first year.

Austin Gray: Well, the nice thing about it is that you were generating revenue in the short term, but you were also landing longer-term recurring revenue contracts, correct?

Casey McDaniel: Right. So yeah, the first year—we did fine. We were able to pay ourselves, pay our bills, and then yes, the second year we went out, sold again, and so it's just doubled up. We didn’t have very many cancellations from the first year, and currently, what our projected revenue for next year is it’s right at a half million, and that’s about where we’ll be finishing up this year.

Casey McDaniel: We’ve got a much larger door-to-door team this year. It’ll still be my business partner and I, and then we’ve got about a dozen others that have signed contracts and are ready to knock doors with us. With who we have in place, we’re looking to add about another half million in revenue this year.

Austin Gray: Oh, that's amazing! So you guys have figured out the process, and you probably learned this at your last company about how to structure deals with door-knocking reps, correct?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, the door-to-door industry is huge. I did a lot of the posts on X about it. When people think about it in the past, it’s the sketchy Kirby vacuum sales or guys coming to sell meat at your door or magazines. Nowadays, it’s really clean-cut big companies like Vivint and Aptive, and a bunch of these guys send out really good door knockers that are ethical and honest, and they have a great product.

Casey McDaniel: These door-to-door guys can make a ton. There are guys making over a million dollars a year knocking for five or six months. So, with that, it’s a big industry—there are a lot of different ways to structure deals. We’ve got a good mix of what we’ve signed this year, a couple of veterans and a couple of rookies. We’re pretty confident that between all of us, we’ll pretty easily be able to add right around a half million in the next year.

Austin Gray: Are you knocking still personally?

Casey McDaniel: So we finished knocking. The last door I knocked was August 31st, and then I’ve just been focusing on the company since then. Next year, my business partner and I are not planning on putting in a full summer; we’ll probably knock a little bit to fill in the gaps, make sure guys are staying busy, but we definitely won’t be trying to put on another 200k revenue personally. We’ll leave that to the other guys and focus on working more on the business than in the business.

Austin Gray: Okay, two things. Two parts of this question as it relates to hiring door-to-door sales reps. One, how is that structure set up between you, the company, and the sales rep when it comes to payment and incentive structure? And then... well let's start there so we don’t get too far ahead.

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, so as far as payment—typically, what we’re starting rookies at. A lot of companies will start lower, like 25% commission. We have to be competitive, so we’re starting our guys at 32%. That means every contract that they sell, you know, 125 a quarter is roughly $500 a year, so they would get 32% of that, which is, you know, 180 bucks or so.

Casey McDaniel: How that works is every time a customer pays us, we pay them. So if they sell a customer and they get serviced in May, then we do pay out their initial the next week. The customer's first monthly bill will roll in in June, and all the payments in June we bundle, and the rep gets paid out in July.

Casey McDaniel: So there's just a one-month delay, but that way, every month that the customer gets billed, the rep gets paid. This way we don’t end up getting screwed on a bunch of cancellations, and we don’t overpay a rep or have any problems like that. It’s a really simple structure—every time the customer pays, the rep gets paid.

Casey McDaniel: Then if they do over $100,000 in revenue— if a rep comes in from a different market to ours and they’ve been paying rent all summer, we have rent forgiveness. We'll go ahead and give them a check for all their rent for the summer. There are different little incentives that we’ll have for, you know, $200 to Nike or a set of golf clubs or, you know, a Yeti cooler. I’m not quite sure what the incentive list is this year. If a rep sells over like $125,000 in revenue, then they get to go on our company trip—I think we’re going to Mexico this year. Then over $250,000 revenue, we’ll go on our Elite trip and we’ll talk to the reps and see if they want to go to Hawaii or Europe or somewhere a little bit more exclusive and fun.

Austin Gray: So how do you recruit these reps?

Casey McDaniel: Various different ways. The best way is finding young, hungry college kids. We’ll call up a local campus—well, not local, just any campus. We’ll be in various states trying to recruit this year, and we just see if we can set up a time that we can be there. We show up with a tablecloth, a big banner, some candy and Gatorades, and we just talk to as many kids as we can.

Casey McDaniel: A lot of them are very familiar with door-to-door; a lot of their friends are doing it. We give them the offer, let them know what they can expect, and get their information down to keep in contact with them. We also try to get them out to sell with us. College campuses are the number one place for us.

Casey McDaniel: We’re also running job ads on Indeed for anybody local to us, and then anybody that does sign up we push hard to get their friends to come out because it’s a lot more fun to sell with your friends, your family, people that you know—be competitive with them. If they bring them out, we do give them an override commission where they’re going to make a few bucks off their friend as well. We don’t take anything from the friend; we just give an additional commission to the recruiter.

Austin Gray: How has Indeed been working for you?

Casey McDaniel: It’s hit and miss. For the most part, for technicians and office people, it’s been great. We get really high-quality people that apply for door-to-door. We don’t always get the highest quality, so sometimes we have to weed through those a lot more because we don’t want just anyone knocking on people’s doors—that’s a lot of people’s first contact with us. So, we do have to weed through those a bit more and find people that are qualified. We get a ton of applicants, and we do have to be a little bit more diligent in the hiring process on those ones because we get a lot that are not the cream of the crop.

Austin Gray: Is that how you found your office manager?

Casey McDaniel: Yes. The office manager had actually previously worked for our big competition in town, and so she was already well-tried in pest control—a lot of the systems, the procedures. They just kind of had a falling out. She didn’t agree with some of their policies and ethics, so she quit for them, and at the same time, we were hiring. So she came on for us, and it’s been great.

Casey McDaniel: Both of our technicians were from Indeed as well. The technician that we’re currently hiring is the brother of one of our other technicians, so it’s worked out really well.

Austin Gray: Yeah, I can't remember who I was having the conversation with recently, but when people start recruiting family members, you know you've got something good going.

Casey McDaniel: Oh yeah! He said, "If you’re looking for someone, my brother is looking for a job. He’s just like me. He’s a go-getter." If you don’t hire him, though, he said, "I’ve got a few other friends of mine that I think would be great for this job." He loves the job. We pay above market, and we have really nice hours. Our guys work four days a week, 10-hour shifts, so they get a three-day weekend every week. They love that, so we're building a culture that people want to be a part of, and it's just starting to feed itself, which is really nice to see.

Austin Gray: That’s really interesting. I'll be excited to hear more about how that 4-10 schedule works out for you because I was just talking with our lead operator here going into our next busy season, asking him about, you know, what changes do you want to make? He’s going to be leading the field crew, and one thing he said was, "I think something that's really attractive for recruiting really good operators is working a 4-10 schedule and giving them a three-day weekend."

Austin Gray: I mean, we live in the mountains of Colorado—people, as much as you want to think they do as business owners, like they don’t care about spraying your homes like you do; they don’t care about digging the foundations like I do. They want to move here because they enjoy the outdoor activities. So, that is something that we’re going to try next year, going to a 4-10 schedule for our Valley field crew. We’ve got a federal project going on that will have to be on their schedule for one of our crews, but yeah, I’ll be interested to stay in touch with you on that, and we can share how it’s working out. I think in order to get good talent and people who are going to show up and do what they say they’re going to do, we’ve got to get creative as millennials and Gen Z business owners and sort of tailor to the new wave of people out in the field.

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, definitely! It’s something that I would recommend every company look into. Our guys have a lot more energy; they’re excited. I mean, they have a full extra day off. They’re happy to stick around a couple extra hours Monday through Thursday. We do have a tech that is Wednesday through Saturday, just so we cover the whole week as well since his wife was off Monday, so it worked out perfect.

Casey McDaniel: I would recommend it. It’s not that they’re lazy or anything, but, you know, they just want as much full-time off as they can get, and they’re willing to go the extra mile on the days that they’re working because the days that they’re off, they’re totally off. It’s nice, so I would recommend it to any business owner that’s in an industry that can work it.

Austin Gray: You mentioned earlier, for the technicians, you’re paying them a set salary, is that correct?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, and no additional incentives for completions, or...?

Casey McDaniel: They do have; so they do get a commission on sales. If they service one house and the neighbor comes over and asks, “How much to do theirs?” and they sell them on a contract, they do get commission there. One of their biggest bonuses is Google reviews.

Casey McDaniel: Google has a policy where you can’t pay a customer to leave a review, but we can pay our technician if a customer does. Each tech has a business card with a bunch of business cards that say “Tip a Tech” on the house basically, and it has a QR code that goes to our Google page. After every completed service, they go up, make sure it was up to expectations, see if there was anything else they could do for the customer. If they get the all-clear, they leave them that and say, “Hey, my boss gives me an extra $10; it's a way that you can tip me without getting your wallet out if you just leave a five-star review on Google.”

Casey McDaniel: One of our technicians, you know, during the busy season, he was bringing in 20 or 30 of those a month, so that’s an extra two to three hundred bucks on top of his salary, and so they love it. They’re pushing hard for reviews, and because of that, we’ve been in operation for 18 months now and we’re the number one rated on the Western Slope. It’s a good incentive for everyone.

Austin Gray: What is your website?

Casey McDaniel: It is kingpest.com. “Pests” is plural—so, yeah. Our big competition has been over there for about 11 months. They actually acquired another company to start, so they had a big head start, and then they had 12 years to get ahead of us. In the last 18 months, if you look us up on Google, we are ahead of them by about 70 reviews now, and next year we’re just going to pull away even further.

Austin Gray: So it’s a great way to incentivize techs to bring in those reviews. Customers feel like they’re helping out because they get to leave a $10 tip, and it doesn’t cost them anything. To be honest, as a business owner, a five-star review is worth way more than $10. We’ve been growing organically just through all the Google reviews coming in, and people will say, “Hey, I want Jasper. I see Jasper has all those reviews. Can you send him out?” Like, “Yeah, yeah! He’s great! We’ll send him out.” So then it just builds that culture, that community where people feel like they’re talking to real people rather than just a big corporation.

Austin Gray: Wow, this is awesome; you are building a great business. So number one on Google, how much would you say like how many of your leads, what percentage come through online at this point?

Casey McDaniel: So during the summer, there is still a good number, but it’s like 80% door-to-door just because we’re out there talking to people and, you know, forcing those leads and those sales. During the wintertime right now, it’s about 50-50: organic versus paid. We run Google ads, Facebook ads, Google LSA, and about 50% of our leads just come through our website on our contact form, just referrals or, you know, heard about us, just looking us up and not having to click any ads or cost us any money. So it’s been a good mix.

Austin Gray: How much are you spending monthly on marketing at this point?

Casey McDaniel: Right now, oh, and I forgot, we’re on the radio as well! We’re going to cancel that soon. I don’t know that we would recommend that; it has not been great for us. With the radio included, right now, we are at about $2,200-$2,500 a month in marketing. Once we cut the radio out, though—that’ll be less than $2,000 a month, and then we’ll ramp it up for the busy season next year again. But we try to keep it at somewhere between, you know, maybe 3% of revenue or so.

Austin Gray: There you go—3% of revenue for the marketing budget, and that’s including LSA, Google ads, Facebook ads?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, pretty much everything. We don’t do yard signs or door hangers or anything like that. We’ve been mostly just digital, and we’re focused on branding as an eco-friendly company. Part of that is, you know, no paper—paperless, keep everything on email, digital ads—all that sort of stuff. A lot of customers that like eco-friendly branding really appreciate that aspect as well, so it’s just being consistent in your branding is something that you have to keep in mind as well.

Austin Gray: Okay, interesting! I feel like you guys could crush it with door hangers and yard signs, but I won’t interject my opinion here.

Casey McDaniel: That’s something that we may do in the future for sure. The yard signs, the door hangers? You know, it’s labor-intensive, and I’ve hung door hangers before for another company, and you know, it’s hard. You can only do a couple hundred every hour, and it’s good. But I think that if we do go that route, the yard signs will be much more up our alley.

Austin Gray: So how many doors? Whenever your guys are knocking, or whenever you’re knocking, I mean, let’s say you knock a hundred doors. How many people don’t answer those doors?

Casey McDaniel: That’s a good question. A decent number, especially depending on the time of day. So prime time is like 5 to 9 PM when people are home from work, obviously—that’s when you’re going to get most of your answers. We’ll go and knock during the day as well just to catch the night crew and older people that go to bed early and that sort of stuff. Depending on the day, we might have 50% not answer, but then once we kind of get done with the neighborhood, we’ll just loop back through.

Casey McDaniel: We’ve got software that tracks all the doors we’ve knocked—whether they said yes, no, didn’t answer, maybe—whatever information. We’ll loop back later in the day and hit all those people that didn’t answer, and try to catch them. So once I'm done with the neighborhood, you know, I’ve talked to 90-plus percent of all the people in the neighborhood.

Austin Gray: Got it. I was just going on to say that could be a way to double up on your marketing. Send your sales reps with door hangers; every door that doesn’t answer can leave a door hanger there. But you’ve got the business dialed in! My head just always goes to ideas. So, like I said, I'm not here to interject my opinion; I'm here to learn from you. So, man, you've built a great business here!

Austin Gray: One thing I was going to ask you on the door-to-door sales techniques—I worked for Vivint; I knocked for Vivint the summer after college, and looking back on it, I don’t believe I approached it with the correct mindset. Are you familiar with the concept of lead measures versus lag measures?

Casey McDaniel: No, I’m not unfortunately.

Austin Gray: Okay, so it’s all about just setting goals and how you frame the goals. Lag measures are, "Hey, I’m going to go set a goal to sell 10 accounts today," versus setting a lead measure goal of, "Hey, I’m going to go knock a hundred doors," and completely disregarding the outcome. I’m committing to the action versus the outcome. So how do you frame the mindset for your sales reps? What are some metrics that you use to send them out each day with?

Casey McDaniel: Really, what I found out early on is I do feel like it’s a numbers game. Like you said, you just have to knock the doors. We just let them know straight up kind of when we’re hiring them, we don’t sugarcoat it. We say, "Hey, this is really hard, and it kind of sucks a lot of the time! If you work hard, you can make a lot of money. If you don’t work hard, you won’t make anything."

Casey McDaniel: It’s just numbers; if you get out early, get out at noon, and you knock till 9 PM, you’re going to find people that are going to sign up. Just telling them like a lot of guys will sugarcoat it, be like, "Oh, it’s awesome; there’s no better high than getting that sale."

Casey McDaniel: I just tell them, “Hey, personally, I actually don’t love knocking doors. It’s not my favorite thing. It’s the golden handcuffs—I keep getting roped in summer after summer because the money’s good. Once you figure it out, then it works out; but it’s hard, and it kind of sucks. A lot of days you’re going to wish you had a normal job, and you're not going to want to do it.”

Casey McDaniel: So, you just have to keep going after it. Once you finally do get that first sale of the day, then roll off of that and tell the neighbors, “Hey, Janet just signed up. We’re going to be here tomorrow!” Then, you can get the momentum rolling, and it starts to feel better. But you have to start over the next day.

Casey McDaniel: You just have to work hard, put the time in, and keep a positive attitude because the number one thing that’s going to kill your sales is a bad attitude. Whether you’ve got zero sales or even if the guy has 250 sales for the summer, as soon as he throws in the towel, it’s over. It doesn’t matter how many doors he hits. You just have to keep a positive attitude, keep getting after it, and just believe that the next door is a sale.

Austin Gray: Do you have any sort of data to support how many doors knocked equates to a sale?

Casey McDaniel: I do. I could pull it up here real quick. I know that... let's see—like is it 100, 200...50? Yeah, um... so last year in total we knocked roughly 110,000 doors and we had 600 sales. Let’s see here—where did you go? There you are. Um, so what is that? Six percent, yeah?

Austin Gray: Six percent, right.

Casey McDaniel: So six out of every 100 doors was a sale. If we knock—and that was kind of company-wide—if you take some of the rookies and stuff out of there, the numbers get a little bit better. My business partner and I were probably closer to about every ten sales for a hundred doors or so. But yeah, that’s where we were as a company.

Austin Gray: See, I think if I would have had that data back in the day, “Hey, all you got to do is go knock a hundred doors. Just commit to knocking those hundred doors.” The data tells us that you're going to sell six percent of those, or six out of every hundred doors.

Austin Gray: Sorry to cut you off!

Casey McDaniel: Every rookie sales rep that I’ve trained, if they’re at about 32%, I let them know, “Hey, that’s one sale, which equals around 180 bucks. If you were working a minimum wage job this summer, you’d work a full day. Colorado’s about $13 bucks an hour. You’re going to make like $120 a day or so; you need one sale! If you go work for eight hours, you’re going to find one person that’s a lay-down—someone that says, ‘Oh, we were thinking of calling someone’ or ‘Oh, how much?’ That’s great! Yeah, just sign us up!”

Casey McDaniel: You’re going to find at least one person, and if you do one person every day, you’re going to make like 20K during the summer—just finding one person a day. So, yeah, the numbers back it up that if a kid is working hard, he’s going to make 20 to 40K. Our average rep last year, rookie, made 28,000 in about four or five months.

Casey McDaniel: Putting that data in front of them does help, for sure. Just letting them know it’s not something I’m doing that’s magical; it’s not something you have to be a seven-year veteran before you figure it out. Just put in the time; knock a hundred doors—maybe knock 200 doors before you get your first sale—but you’ve got to figure it out, and then the money will come in.

Austin Gray: Man, this is awesome! One thing that I believe to be true is it doesn’t matter what business you’re starting; if you just go talk to customers in your local market, you’re going to get jobs out of this eventually.

Austin Gray: But not to put you on the spot, are you willing to just do a quick door knock with me right now and just share with people what you say whenever you knock on the door?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, for sure.

Casey McDaniel: (Knocking sound) Knock, knock, knock—Hello!

Casey McDaniel: "Hey man, how's it going?"

Austin Gray: Good, how you doing?

Casey McDaniel: "Good, good. Hey, sorry to bug you; I’ll be super quick. My name’s Casey; I'm just the bug guy here in the area. We’re just dropping through tomorrow; we’re taking care of a couple of your neighbors. They’ve been getting a few spiders, a few ants, and then with the warm weather. Since my guys are here on the street, we’ve got a few open spots around, so we’re actually doing a big community group rate. If I can get you done with the neighbors tomorrow, we're actually doing our initial service at a little over half off our normal price."

Austin Gray: "What do you mean?"

Casey McDaniel: "Yeah, so what we’re doing for the neighbors—you know, getting a few bugs. We’re pest control with King Pest. What we're doing is we’ll give a full inspection for—we'll treat exterior for sure, knock down some of your cobwebs and wasp nests. Have you been like the neighbors? Are you guys seeing more ants or spiders, or is it the wasps you’ve seen most this summer?"

Austin Gray: "Oh, pest control? Yeah, I mean my wife's just been on me about all the spiders in the house! Like, she’s just asking how do we take care of these?"

Casey McDaniel: "Oh yeah, for sure! I mean that’s what we do. That’s what the neighbors have been seeing. You and your wife, you’re not dirty or anything; you’re not the only one seeing them. So yeah, what we'll do for you on the interior when our technician gets here, he’ll for sure treat kind of kitchen, bathroom, and garage—those moisture points are where you’re going to see most of the bugs.

Casey McDaniel: So we’ll hit those and any other areas where you’ve been seeing some activity. Like I said, exterior—we’re going to treat the full foundation, three feet up, three feet out, around the whole perimeter of the home. We’ll knock down all your cobwebs and wasp nests up to 30 feet high. That’s going to take care of all those nests, keep the spiders down, and then we do treat just a touch in the front and backyard for you.

Casey McDaniel: So with that, like I said, tomorrow, if we can get you done, it’s going to be a little over half off our normal price.

Austin Gray: "And how much is that going to be?"

Casey McDaniel: "Good question! Are you guys like the neighbors—are you sitting around 1,500 square feet or so?"

Austin Gray: "I think we’ve got about 1,800."

Casey McDaniel: "Okay, perfect! Just a tad bigger. Well, yeah, on this size of home, if you were to phone us in, typically it would run more like 190. Tomorrow, since our guy is going to be right on the street, we are bringing that down to just 89 bucks. And then after that, what we do to guarantee our work and ensure that any eggs don't hatch in the future, nothing pops back up—what we’re doing for the neighbors is just our quarterly maintenance plan, where we’ll actually come back quarterly, just once every season.

Casey McDaniel: We do come back for free in between those visits, so we come once every four months. We'll break that down to a monthly bill for you—it’s real cheap. It’s just going to be about 40 bucks a month for you.

Casey McDaniel: So I've got a couple spots tomorrow: I’ve got an 11 AM or a 3 PM; do you know which one of those works best for you?"

Austin Gray: "Yeah, 3 PM is better."

Casey McDaniel: "Cool, cool! Our tech, his name is Jasper. I'll go ahead and get a little bit of information from you, and I can go ahead and get you booked down."

Casey McDaniel: (Proceeding to take the information) “We show them the contract right there, so that it’s not just me being super brief and locking them into it. We read them through it, get them signed at the bottom. Perfect! I’ll get you booked for tomorrow at 3 PM. Are you going to be putting this on a debit or credit?"

Austin Gray: "Credit."

Casey McDaniel: "Great! I’ll get the card right there while we’re here."

Casey McDaniel: "And then the next day, our guy swings by at 3 PM and gets them taken care of!"

Austin Gray: Sweet! There you have it—there’s the door-to-door clinic right there!

Austin Gray: So, talking payment—let’s jump back into the business side right now. What platform do you use to accept payment in the pest control business?

Casey McDaniel: So through our CRM, it's got that built into it. We use PestRoutes or FieldRoutes; it’s a ServiceTitan company. I'm not honestly sure what payment processor they use—it might be Stripe. But we just take it down right there; we can get card info in, and then it’s saved on file for recurring payments, so we didn’t have to go and vendor shop or do any of that. We just picked our CRM, and that was the one that worked best with us. It’s been a super simple, super smooth process, and we don’t have any problems with customer payments.

Austin Gray: Cool! How do you guys like it so far?

Casey McDaniel: FieldRoutes? It looks like it’s—I just looked it up; it’s a ServiceTitan company you mentioned.

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, it’s been good. That’s what our last company used, so we were familiar with it. A lot of the big companies use the same one, so it'll be super easy if we decide to acquire a company or if we decide to be acquired someday. It’s a lot easier to pull that CRM right into their database if they’re using the same one.

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, it’s got pretty much all of the features we want. There’s one that’s missing that we keep telling them about, and I don’t know how they don’t figure that out, but we’re not really looking to switch CRMs. We’ve been really happy with it. It’s super user-friendly, so our office people and technicians can pick it up really quickly; it’s not been a hassle at all.

Austin Gray: Sweet!

Austin Gray: Yeah, this is actually the first time I've heard of this one. We use Jobber, but I’ve obviously heard of ServiceTitan. Anyway, it looks like it could be a good fit for pest control, lawn care, and then it seems they're kind of tailored toward smaller to mid-markets, right?

Casey McDaniel: The big companies, like you said, you worked for Vivint. I’m sure you’ve heard of Aptive. Some of the big pest companies are Aptive, Moxy, Hawke, some of those—and they all use the same platform as well. It works for huge enterprises as well. Aptive is going to be a publicly traded company, they say, in the next 18 months or so. So it can be for a one-man crew, or it can be for the big dogs as well; it scales really well.

Austin Gray: Sweet!

Austin Gray: So you mentioned if you acquire a company—I want to hear about your goals with this business. What’s the vision for this thing?

Casey McDaniel: We want to be a regional company. I’ve got big desires, but I’ll be honest—I don’t want to take over the world. For the guys that want to have a national company, good for them; I’m not looking to work like a dog for, you know, 60 years. Eventually, I want to retire; hopefully, I retire early.

Casey McDaniel: We’re looking to be regional. We’d like to be in all of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico—that's kind of what we’re looking at. We like those markets; they're close to home. If we can get into those, then we would be happy with running it, cash flowing it for a long time.

Casey McDaniel: Eventually selling it when the time comes, but we’d like to be bigger than just a local company and bigger than just Colorado. So we’re looking to get into a few states, but, you know, in the next five to ten years, we should be able to realize that plan, and at that point, cash flow, live life a little bit, and then yeah, eventually sell it because I’d like to live life, enjoy my kids, and spend time with them and do all those things as well when I get older.

Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely! I bet these things trade for good multiples. I don’t know, I’m just taking a guess right now because they have recurring revenue, huh?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, pest control is one of the higher-trading companies because it is recurring. It’s a low ticket value, so you’re not relying on one single customer; it’s spread out, so it’s really low risk in acquiring. Every acquisition, you’re going to have some attrition, and that’s just part of the game, but yeah—typically for a company our size, you can get three to five times earnings. If you get into the five to ten million in revenue, those can jump up to, you know, seven to fifteen even.

Casey McDaniel: They can sell for pretty good—one guy just sold his company for 31 times earnings. I think the private equity company got fleeced, but he’s done working, so probably his kids and grandkids.

Austin Gray: Yeah, so it’s a good industry to be in, and it’s a good industry to exit as well.

Casey McDaniel: Nice!

Austin Gray: Well, cool! Thanks for jumping on the Owner Operator podcast. I get so much life and energy from interviewing people like you. It just makes me so happy that there are people who are my age and younger jumping in and being willing to get their hands dirty.

Austin Gray: I mean, y’all heard the story, you know? He didn’t just sit back behind a computer and go hire the people right out the gate. He’s been knocking doors for years and then took that experience and has kept it rolling to grow the business.

Austin Gray: I feel like being on X right now, or Twitter—whatever. There are so many people talking about this acquisition space and, you know, "Let’s go buy a business," right out the gate. I think a lot of people who want to be in this entrepreneurial game think that buying a business with an SBA loan is going to solve all their problems and it’s going to be super easy.

Austin Gray: The reality is—I was just talking to, um... do you follow Mike Botkin?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah!

Austin Gray: I was talking to him the other day and like, look at a guy like that—he's very good at his craft. He did a thread on just sort of the ups and downs of that, and he went and did a big roll-up in the space. I think that there are people who—that acquisition entrepreneurship is very well suited for—but I don’t think that that game should be taken very lightly. There’s obviously a lot of risk involved; there’s a lot of big money playing around, and there’s a lot of work that goes into it.

Austin Gray: I think people like Mike have done a great job, but I don’t think that’s for everybody. Kind of the third reason for starting this podcast was just to showcase people like you that, hey, you don’t have to go buy a business right now; you don’t have to go take out multi-million debt with this SBA game. You can start a business from the ground up!

Austin Gray: But in order to do that, it just takes some dirty work in the beginning—you’ve got to be willing to get your hands dirty in one way, shape, or form, right? You said you hired the technician early on, but that was simply because you and your partner knew that you were going to go generate sales, right?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, you’re exactly right. There’s no substitute for hard work. Whether you start your own or you acquire or whatever it is, there’s no golden ticket. Even if you buy a company for a ton of money that has operators in place, if you don’t know how to operate, if you can’t do it yourself, if those guys call in sick or quit, I mean, your whole company just fell apart. If those guys say, "Well, I want a sticker around, but I need double my salary," because you don’t know how to run this company yourself, you’ve given up all your freedom.

Casey McDaniel: You have to know how to operate in your industry. You have to work hard, and I mean, there are so many people on X that pretend like—like you said—that it’s just so easy. But you look at guys like Gas Bis guy, who started as a gas station attendant and now, you know, really rakes it in. It’s not because he was just hanging out at gas stations and got a huge opportunity. No, he worked hard; he figured it out. He worked his way up the ladder; he bought his first station—now he really gets after it.

Casey McDaniel: Every single successful entrepreneur has that same common thread. Every single one of them worked so hard in the beginning that now they can be a little bit more hands-off, but you can’t substitute that with money. You can’t substitute that in any way; you have to put that in at some point.

Austin Gray: Yes 100%. Especially starting from the ground up; I mean, there’s just so much work that goes in, especially whenever—you mentioned it earlier—you were taking the calls, you were selling, you were hiring people, you were thinking about strategy, you were doing the bookkeeping, you were running the finances.

Austin Gray: Those times early on, like you really just have to buckle down and make a bunch of big sacrifices. What I like about what you’ve done is you’ve identified your best use of time as an owner, and you’ve continually reinvested back in the business to grow and replace some of those roles you were taking on in the beginning.

Austin Gray: So if people listening want to start a pest control business—obviously not in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, or where else did you say?

Casey McDaniel: Kansas.

Austin Gray: There you go. If anybody else is out there looking to start a pest control business, like what would you tell them?

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, on X, we’ve had quite a few people reaching out, asking if we do any consulting, helping them with an acquisition, or starting their own. So we did just roll out a new consulting plan where if you want, it’s kind of like the opposite of a franchise. We’ll sell our employee handbooks, our sales manuals, all of our IP, all of what we’re doing—we sell that, and then we offer consulting as well.

Casey McDaniel: I’ve got a link on our website that we can send over on that. We’re happy to help if you just want consulting, if you want the IP, if you want whatever. Yeah, we’re already helping two guys in the space start companies in different parts of the country, and we’re definitely here to help. Like I said, we’re not going to go national, so we’re happy to help guys start up in their own local markets and start making some bug money.

Austin Gray: Bug money! There you have it! What's the price for that? Just curious.

Casey McDaniel: So, what we’re starting off at, if you just want the IP, it's going to be $1,500 bucks. If you want IP plus a website and some initial SEO that we've done, it's $2,500. After that, its consulting at $100 an hour. We go from there. Yeah, we can get more information on that. If anyone wants it...

Casey McDaniel: Man, that’s a steal! $2,500 bucks and you get an SEO optimized website plus the handbooks and IP—I mean, that's like—I’m not trying to be your door-to-door salesman, but if I’m starting a business right now in pest control, I’m paying you the $2,500 bucks, no doubt about it!

Casey McDaniel: Yeah, we get more people after this year; we’re hoping to help about six people—five to ten people start up after we've got more of that done, and we have more experience in consulting and we really know what we’re doing. The price is going to go up significantly on that, so yeah, that is kind of the discounted entry price for anyone that wants to get in this year.

Casey McDaniel: Once we’ve got enough people rolling on it, then we are going to up that because we do realize that it is a steal, and our time is worth money.

Austin Gray: Yeah, and you’ve put years and years of experience learning that, especially even from working at your last company too, and then taking all that you learned there and putting operations together from what you’ve built on your own here.

Austin Gray: So there you have it! Thank you guys for listening to another episode of the Owner Operator podcast. Stay tuned for the next episodes.

Austin Gray: Casey, anything else you’d like to say to the listeners before we jump off?

Casey McDaniel: I think that’s it. Just, you know, if you want to start your own thing, you've got to work hard, but it is possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old—find a mentor, just work hard, get after it, and there’s money in the streets; you just got to go and find it.

Austin Gray: There you have it! Work hard; do your best; never settle for less, and good things come. We'll see you guys in the next episode.