Breton Bess on growing a pest control branch from zero to $5.5M with door-to-door

Breton Bess, owner of Insight Pest Solutions, quit solar sales because he’d decided he wasn’t good at selling. Around 2014 or 2015 he was making about $20 an hour installing alarms in Salt Lake when the company’s owner heard him on a customer service call. He told Breton to go knock doors that summer or have his hours cut in half.

That summer was not bad and not great, Breton says, but he learned he could sell. He went on to win a Golden Door Award for door-to-door sales in 2021 and grew one pest control branch from zero to $5.5M in 3 years.

Most owners who watch this show would be thrilled to hit $1M, so I asked Breton how he got to $5.5M. Almost everything he told me came back to people.

Who is Breton Bess?

Breton Bess is the owner of Insight Pest Solutions. He owns 4 pest control branches and has built and sold several others. He’s also a US veteran who served 8 years in the Marine Corps, where he fixed radios and satellites.

He first knocked doors selling solar in California, after meeting a couple of guys at church who made more in a summer than he made in a year as a Marine. After the alarm summer, he sat down with a bunch of door-to-door companies and found one that offered equity in a pest control company if he sold well for a year and then managed a team well for a year. He did both, and they helped him start a pest control company in Indianapolis, which they built for 3 years before the founder’s personal situation led to a sale. Breton has now been in door-to-door for over a decade.

Be the sergeant in your own life

The Marine Corps gave Breton discipline and attention to detail. You can drop out of a college you don’t like, but in the military you sign a contract and stick it out.

With no sergeant pushing him now, Breton says he’s become the sergeant in his own life. Plenty of guys tell him they aren’t motivated, and he says he isn’t either. He gets by on dedication and a very clear path to his goals. That reminded me of a line I like, that you fall to the level of your standards.

Breton admits to some impostor syndrome. Looking back, he wishes he’d thrown himself into bigger positions sooner, and he thinks he’d be a lot further along if he had. His mentors pushed self-education so hard that he dropped out of school to learn from them. His favorite self-improvement book is The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell.

Figure out when to replace yourself

Before Breton worries about how to hand something off, he figures out when. He looks for whatever eats his time that somebody else could easily do.

For an owner still running a route, that’s spraying homes. Pay someone $15, $20 or $25 an hour to spray, Breton said, and get better at marketing, whether that’s door-to-door or online. Learning door-to-door costs time or coaching money, but the deals you land pay for that technician quickly.

You have to understand a role before you hand it off, so write the SOPs, down to which products to use, where and how much. On the sales side, find a college kid bussing tables, take him out on the doors and give him the right script. Breton thinks solo owners resist this because the spraying or the selling is their baby.

Cross-sell the list you already have

These days Breton spends most of his time recruiting reps and building systems to cross-market mosquito and termite services to existing pest control customers. If you have 1,000 customers and get 2% of them on termite work, your business grows right away.

The more each customer buys, the less you spend on door-to-door or online ads to grow, and customers who get more value stay longer. Pest Control Millionaires, where I’m a partner, has a guide to upselling and cross-selling pest control with real scenarios.

One branch, 45 reps and $5.5M in 3 years

Breton doesn’t take all the credit. He didn’t have to handle operations at that branch, only door-to-door, his bread and butter. Since that’s the most expensive part of growing a business, doing it in-house kept costs down.

In the final year, 45 reps and Breton were knocking doors. He described the team as a brotherhood that set really big goals together and crushed them.

He gave just as much credit to what happens after the sale. Great service and a dialed-in call center keep customers around. With terrible attrition, he said, you’d have to do a lot more than $5M or $6M in revenue to end up at $5.5M. Greg Young told me something close to that when we talked about churn.

For an owner starting from zero, it begins with one guy who’s willing to go knock some doors. Breton’s advice is to figure out door-to-door yourself first.

Recruit athletes where they already play

On college campuses, Breton usually targets athletes between 18 and 30. Anyone who has played a sport long enough has been through the highs and lows, and those guys find a way to get better when things get tough. Jonas Olson told me the same thing about recruiting one of his old wrestlers.

Breton played volleyball every night with different groups, became one of the locals and found a lot of reps there. I’ve heard of companies setting up booths at colleges, but nobody had told me to go play volleyball with them.

The friendship has to be real, because people can tell when you force one. Breton wants reps who’ll stay 5 to 10 years, and he counts his sales reps among his best friends. Recruiting has moved to social media since he started, so he also tells owners to post content that shows they’re the expert.

Either way, Breton doesn’t think you can coach reps until you can sell well yourself.

“If I don’t know how to sell pest control door to door myself, how am I supposed to train somebody else to sell pest control?”

Coachability beats experience

Breton has hired reps with anywhere from 3 months to 30 years in sales, and he’d rather start with none.

“I actually prefer working with guys that have no sales experience for the most part, just because they know they don’t know anything about sales and so they’re just such sponges towards anything I tell them.”

The longer someone has been in sales, the more set in his ways he tends to be. Breton looks for coachability first, then work ethic and a positive attitude.

Then comes training. He wrote a 60-page manual covering what to say and when, how to stand, verbal and nonverbal cues and the objections reps will hear. Since he works with a franchise company, there are tons of training videos too, plus audio recordings of Breton on the doors, and he planned to film more with Meta glasses. That might sound standard to Breton, but I’d guess plenty of people getting into door-to-door train a rep for a few hours with no clear process.

Say less at the door

Ask Breton what reps get wrong and the first thing he names is talking too much. Door-to-door runs on confidence and on how much you believe the customer needs you. He borrows an idea about certainty from a sales guy he listens to. If the homeowner is more certain that their current company is doing a good job than you are that they need you, you won’t get the sale.

Breton isn’t afraid of confrontation, so he’ll sit in an awkward silence. After his intro, the service and the price, he asks whether tomorrow morning or evening works better. Rookies ask the same question, but when the customer pauses to think, the tension gets to them and they jump in with more questions and more selling.

Owners have to watch this more than anyone, because they know the product names and the egg cycles. Unload all of that and customers realize how little they know about what’s sprayed on their home. They feel dumb, put their walls up and say they need to think about it. Breton reminds his reps what the customer actually wants.

“If we could wave a magic wand and just get rid of all the bugs for the customer, the customer would not care.”

So Breton keeps it simple and offers a few breadcrumbs only when someone asks a targeted question. That same thinking is part of why he doesn’t mix sales and service. His reps need to know what the company can and can’t service, not every product, because once ego kicks in they start showing off and the customer gets confused. I’ve heard arguments for both sides. Lenny Gray lands closer to Breton and told me he’d keep techs out of selling.

Switchovers start with what you can see from the porch

In saturated southern markets, the objection Breton hears most is that the homeowner already has a company. In less saturated places, like the Midwest, it’s that they handle it themselves. He treats both as a switchover pitch.

“It’s not my job to decide if that customer is happy or not with their service.”

Ask a friend how he’s doing and he’ll say “good” even when he isn’t, and homeowners answer the same way about their pest control company. Breton hears that their service has been great, then looks up at cobwebs in the eaves and a wasp nest that’s been there a year.

He compared it to a rep he grew up with who had never sat in a Tesla and was blown away when Breton took him to sit in one. Pest control has levels too. Some companies skimp on products, and customers get used to living with bugs. Breton has knocked neighborhoods where ants were swarming mailboxes, and he tells those homeowners they shouldn’t be seeing that. PCM’s door-to-door objections guide goes deeper on DIY and switchover pitches.

If your customers are the ones getting knocked, take care of them, Breton said, because otherwise they’ll get scooped up.

My take

You can’t separate the product from marketing and sales, and I said as much to Breton after he walked through switchovers. No amount of marketing saves a service that sucks. What Breton spots from the porch proves it from the rep’s side, since every wasp nest a tech leaves up gives a competitor an opening.

Search works the same way. A strong Google Business Profile can get you into the map pack, but homeowners read your reviews before they call, and your techs earn those reviews long after the rep has left. Breton’s closing advice pointed the same direction. Take care of people, he said, whether that’s customers, reps or call center staff. He’s had reps quit and then send their little brother to work for him 2 years later.

His recruiting tip about posting content that shows you’re the expert works for your website too. A site full of real answers about the pests in your area wins customers organically, and my post on local content marketing covers how to build one.

Where to find Breton

Breton mostly uses Instagram, and he said anyone who needs help with anything should just hit him up.

• Company: Insight Pest Solutions
• Instagram: Breton Bess on Instagram
• LinkedIn: Breton Bess on LinkedIn