How to Grow a Pest Control Business: Route Density, New Towns and Acquisitions

How to grow a pest control business comes down to order. Fill the routes you already run, hire so you can get off the truck, then add towns one at a time with a branch you open or a company you buy. Keep the customers you win. Marketing helps at every step but can’t fix growth done out of order.

I’m a partner in Pest Control Millionaires, a coaching community with over 300 pest control owners, and most of this post comes from owners on my podcast who’ve already done the growing. My side is marketing, and it comes last here because that’s usually where it belongs.

How to grow a pest control business past the revenue walls

Jonas Olson, who built Pest Badger past $10M a year, walked me through the revenue levels where pest control owners get stuck. Almost none of them are marketing problems.

Revenue	What’s usually going on	What gets you past it
About $250K to $300K	The owner does all the service and selling and trusts nobody else with it	A first hire. Jonas says it can be a CSR or virtual assistant who takes billing and scheduling so you can sell
$500K to $750K	Two techs and a CSR, but the owner still controls everything	Delegating. A tech who’s 80% as good as you is good enough
$650K to $1.2M	Three techs and no systems	A written sales process and SOPs. Jonas records his as short videos
$800K to $1.5M	The owner gets comfortable and chases side projects	A target number you plan backward from
On the way to $3M	The owner is still managing everyone	An operations or branch manager, at $80K to $90K a year

Jonas sees more owners stuck between $800,000 and $1.5M than anywhere else. A million has become the new $100,000, he said, the number people celebrate before they start pulling cash out. That’s fine if you want a lifestyle business. If you don’t, pick a number and work back from it, because opening a second town while you’re stuck at one of these walls usually gives you two places to be stuck.

Fill your routes before you add a town

Route density means fitting as many stops as you can into a small area. Tight routes cut windshield time, so each tech runs more stops a day and you keep more of every invoice. Customers scattered across a whole metro mean you’re paying techs to drive.

Before you look at a new town, put your customer addresses on a map. Find the neighborhoods where you already have a handful of customers and work those streets until they’re full.

Market to every customer’s neighbors with door hangers, yard signs and knocks, which I cover in pest control marketing.
Add door-to-door. Chase Goodeill suggests owners at $3M to $5M in competitive markets sprinkle it in for route density.
Sell more to the stops you already drive to, like termite or mosquito work for your pest control customers. I cover add-ons in pest control sales.

Dense doesn’t mean jammed. Tony Carder of TruNorth Pest Control told me owners say their routes are at $25,000 and then wonder why the company has sat at $600,000 for 2 or 3 years. If your next opening is a week out, the homeowner with ants in the kitchen calls someone else.

Picking the next town

Once your routes are full, pick a town your trucks can reach without the drive eating the margin.

Start where you already have a foothold. A town at the edge of your routes, where you have some customers and referrals, means the first truck there isn’t starting at zero.

Check that people can pay for recurring service. A quick way is to ask ChatGPT for the 20 cities near you ranked by average household income, then check that list against what you know.

Then look at the competition. Search “pest control” plus the town and look at the map pack. If several big companies with review counts you won’t catch for years are clustered there, a neighboring town may be the better first move.

Don’t assume your home market’s playbook travels. At his last company, Josh Fleenor helped build Yelp into a program, and Yelp was huge in the Bay Area. When he started Pest Pros in Sacramento, the market didn’t respond the same way. He tells owners to go research each market for themselves.

Ranking on Google in a town away from your office is its own project, covered in building local SEO outside your core location.

Opening a branch takes about two years

Tony grew his family’s company, Active Pest Control, to $24M a year before selling it, and he told me every new branch needs about 24 months before it turns. He has opened 8 from scratch. At TruNorth, he opens one scratch office every other year so he never carries 2 young branches at once, and the leader often comes from inside the company.

His son Cody opened TruNorth’s Panama City branch in November 2024 with one truck and no customers, and did $3,100 the first month. When we recorded, Tony expected about $80,000 that June, up from $22,000 the June before. Nobody there knocks doors. Tony starts every new market with a BNI group, the chamber of commerce and real estate agents, and he says people start to trust you after about a year of showing up to every event.

Door-to-door is the faster, more expensive route. Breton Bess grew one branch from zero to $5.5M in 3 years, with 45 reps knocking in the final year. He only handled the doors, and he gave just as much credit to the service and call center that kept those customers on.

A branch also needs a real office if you want a Business Profile there. Google’s guidelines allow one profile per location, and a mailing address where you don’t actually work, like a virtual office, isn’t eligible. Skip the workarounds.

Buying a company instead

Buying gets you customers, techs and sometimes a phone that already rings. Chase Goodeill took Pest Control Consultants to $11M in revenue in 2025, with 10 acquisitions since 2019, and every buyer should hear what he told me.

Expect to lose some customers. Nobody services the accounts like the old owner did, so Chase thinks 10% to 15% attrition is fair when you buy a one-man or owner-plus-one-tech company. On his first deal, the original owner walked away and took about $200,000 of business with him.

Hold part of the price back. On his Chicago deal, Chase paid 10% down in cash and had the seller hold back another 10% that only counted for customers who got 2 services within 6 months of closing. That clause saved him well over $100,000.

Know where the money comes from. Banks won’t lend against a customer list, Chase said, but they’ll lend against real estate with equity.

Tony prefers small deals of one or two routes. His first move after buying is to offer every customer whatever they don’t have yet, whether that’s termite, pest or mosquito.

On price, Paul Giannamore of The Potomac Company told me buyers pay for cash flow, and a “times revenue” number only describes a deal after the fact. Companies doing $500,000 to $2M typically sell at lower multiples than bigger ones. If you’re buying, price the deal on profit.

	Open a branch	Buy a company
When it pays	About 24 months in, in Tony’s experience	Revenue on day one, minus some attrition
What you pay for	Office, trucks, people and marketing while it builds	Mostly the customer list, plus trucks and techs
Biggest risk	Quitting at month 12	Overpaying, or customers leaving with the old owner
Google presence	Starts from zero	Can come with a Business Profile full of reviews

The people who do the growing

Jonas told me most owners at $1M think they can’t afford a manager, because at the industry’s typical 10% margin one good hire eats most of the profit. He made that bet anyway at about $3M, hiring Trisha as director of operations for over $100,000 he didn’t have in profit. Within about a year, hires like her helped take Pest Badger from $3M to $7M.

Josh Fleenor grew Pest Pros to almost $10M a year in about 7 years, and when I asked for his secret, he said his people. Purpose is his hiring filter. He’d rather hire people new to the industry, every employee takes an intro leadership class, and what has moved the needle for him lately is learning to get out of his team’s way.

Chase thinks an owner can bootstrap the first $3M or $4M with cold calling, door knocking and a decent CRM like FieldRoutes. Getting from $5M to $10M takes people you’ve developed, like an office manager, branch and route managers, a lead tech and a lead CSR. A new town will need its own version of that bench.

Keep the customers you already won

Every cancellation is a customer you have to replace before you’ve grown at all. Paul Alley runs Pestmaster Services of the Hudson Valley with churn under 1%, and his customers stay 7 to 10 years on average.

Nothing he does is complicated. His techs stay out of the customer’s driveway in case the truck leaks oil, bring the trash can in from the street and show up in a clean uniform and truck. Before pulling away, each tech asks whether he’d pay for the service he just did. Paul hires for integrity over experience, pulls a motor vehicle record before an interview and walks every candidate out to see how they keep their car.

Retention also decides what the company is worth someday. Paul Giannamore’s bar for a premium company is about 80% recurring revenue, and he counts any customer who expects ongoing service, contract or not.

Marketing a new town

I tell owners under about $500,000 a year to put their marketing effort into their Google Business Profile and Local Services Ads. Past that, start on Google Ads and real investment in your website and SEO. When I wrote The Complete Guide to Pest Control SEO in early 2025, I drew that line at $1M, and I’ve since moved it down. My breakdown of SEO vs. LSA vs. Google Ads covers which to fund first.

For a new town, I’d go in this order:

Set up the Business Profile for the branch once the office is real, and ask every new customer there for a review. If you’d rather hand the profile off, that’s our Google Business Profile service.
Add the town to your Local Services Ads service area, so the phone rings while everything else builds.
Build a city page written for that town, not a copy of another city page with the name swapped.
Give the town its own tracking number so you know what it’s bringing in. My guide to pest control call tracking covers the setup.
Show up in person at the chamber, a BNI group and realtor events, the way Tony’s branches do.

Then give it the 24 months.

What I see break when companies add towns

On Tony’s episode, I told him that as a company adds locations, CRMs and acquisitions, more things break in its SEO. It shows up on my audits all the time.

The new town gets a copy-paste city page that brings in no traffic, so the homepage ranks for that town’s searches instead. The new Business Profile links to the homepage instead of its location page. After an acquisition, the old website and the new one are both live, with leftover duplicate pages and redirects nobody set up. The name, address or phone number on the directories stops matching the website.

When a company Chase buys has strong listings, he keeps its name, number and Business Profiles running and routes the calls to his own call center. Merging into one brand works too. Either way, decide on purpose and clean up the website and listings the month you close.

If you’re opening a branch or merging a website and want an expert to look at the plan first, that’s what a paid consulting hour is for.

Questions pest control owners ask

How fast can a pest control business grow?

It depends on your market and the risk you’ll take. Early on, Chase aimed for 25% a year, which doubles a company about every 3 years. Jonas grew Pest Badger past $10M a year in just over 5 years. Most owners grow slower, and that’s fine if it’s on purpose.

Should I open a branch or buy a company?

Buy when a good company is for sale at a fair price and you have the cash or real estate to finance it. Open a branch when you can wait about 24 months and have a leader ready to run it. Plenty of owners do both. Tony opened branches from scratch and then bought small routes nearby to fill them out.

Do I need SEO to grow a pest control business?

Not at first. Under about $500,000, a strong Google Business Profile, Local Services Ads and steady reviews do more. Past that, a real website and SEO help each new town bring in calls you don’t pay for one by one. If you want help with that side, book a call.