Brian Lunsford on buying his dad's pest control company and starting over with Kingfish

Whenever the other team lined up a field goal in Jacksonville, “Swat That Kick” went up on the Jaguars’ video board with the Kingfish Pest Control logo. Brian Lunsford came up with the line, and by the end of Kingfish’s 5 years as an official Jaguars partner, the crowd was chanting it.

Kingfish is Brian’s second pest control company. He and his brother took over their dad’s small Atlanta company in 2005, grew it into a 100-person PCT Top 100 business without knocking a single door, and sold it to Terminix in 2019.

I’d seen the partnership on LinkedIn and didn’t know of another pest control company doing that. So I asked what it did for Kingfish, and what Brian carried over from his first company.

Who is Brian Lunsford?

Brian Lunsford is the owner and CEO of Kingfish Pest Control in Jacksonville, Florida, and a second-generation operator. He was a producer at the Fox affiliate in Atlanta, which put him in NFL locker rooms, but the work wasn’t fulfilling. He spent 6 months working at a little diner on St. John in the Virgin Islands with his brother Brandon, then came back to Atlanta.

Their dad had moved to Florida and was running his small Atlanta pest control company remotely. It needed a website, modernization and some TLC. The brothers took it over in 2005, did the field work themselves for a few months and decided they belonged behind the computer.

When Terminix bought that company, Inspect-All, in 2019, the brothers kept their home inspection business and the small pest control and inspection company they’d just started in Florida, where Brian had moved in 2016. He and his wife, Kristin, now own Kingfish and its sister company, LunsPro Inspections, and he started the holiday lighting company JoyLights. Kingfish’s VP, Brian Wescott, came down from Atlanta to run it.

A $49 deal can buy a customer

Nobody knew the brothers’ tiny company in a big market. Groupon, Angie’s List and Yelp were taking off, so they took the loss leader approach and found ways onto the deal sites’ daily blasts. Before long, the phones were ringing off the hook.

A $49 deal would most likely lose money up front. They were betting the customer would think, “Wow, these guys are good,” and sign up for recurring service. That’s what happened, often with a good review on top. Every review got a reply, good, bad or ugly, and even when a customer was wrong, they stayed kind and stuck to the facts.

They answered the phones themselves, throwing handwritten notes across the room so someone could call back while the next call came in. Brian calls it total chaos, and so much fun.

Hiring couldn’t keep up. Brian said the interview was basically “Does the mirror fog up when you look at it? Okay, come on. You’re on the team.”

The partner who wants to spend less wins

The decision to take over Dad’s company came down to a fist bump. The brothers butted heads plenty after that, but one rule settled the spending fights, and Brian recommends it to anyone in business with family. Whoever wanted to spend less won. If Brian wanted $1M for a marketing campaign and Brandon wanted $500,000, they spent $500,000. Brian admits some of the arguments he lost made a lot of sense later.

They also paid themselves conservatively and kept most of the money in the company. Brian thinks owners who pull it all out the moment revenue takes off are making a mistake.

An NFL partnership was a bucket list item first

The Jaguars idea started with a sticker. After Brian moved to Florida in 2016 and built a house, he noticed the HVAC unit said its installer was a proud partner of the Jaguars. He figured that if the team trusted that company, he could too.

Brian is the first to say Kingfish is way too small to be an NFL partner. He came in as a personal investor, to grow the company and to check off bucket list items for his family, like flying with the team. It also got him coffees with CEOs he’d never have met.

It was very expensive, and Brian knew going in that trackable business never adds up to what branding costs. He doesn’t regret it, but a company Kingfish’s size doesn’t have to go that far. A minor league team could work, and radio costs a lot less in a smaller market. He swung for the fences, he said, and a base hit works sometimes too. I wrote up the basics of pest control branding for smaller budgets.

Your CRM will credit Google for your branding

Swat That Kick ran for half a decade on one of the NFL’s biggest video boards, in front of about 60,000 fans and sometimes on TV.

Then one of those fans needs pest control on a Tuesday. They Google it and see Kingfish next to the big boys. They don’t remember where they heard the name, only that they have. They click, see the Jaguars connection, and the phone rings.

Ask that customer how they found Kingfish and they’ll say Google, though a deeper conversation often traces it back to the Jaguars or radio. When I told Brian that most owners swear radio doesn’t work, he said they’re measuring it wrong.

“They’re just looking at the source code and they’re basing everything off the source code. And I think that’s a flawed way to look at it.”

A source code will never match what a branding campaign costs, he says, so he also goes by gut feel, word on the street, texts and LinkedIn messages. He’s not sure a very expensive Atlanta radio campaign ever paid off.

Trust the red flag

Brian has interviewed hundreds of people, and he can’t think of one red flag that worked out. It might be something a candidate said, a story that doesn’t match the resume or just an aura. If his team gets that feeling, he tells them they’re probably right.

Anyone who makes it to an in-person interview still gets a fair shot, and if something doesn’t line up, he asks right there. One candidate never mentioned a DUI from 3 years earlier, even when given the chance.

“If you had just told me, we could have worked this out because we’ve all made mistakes, but because you hid it from us, it’s going to be tougher to hire you now.”

My partner Jake Sheldon wrote about hiring A players for PCM, and Brian’s early Atlanta hires show what skipping that work costs.

Every email builds your culture

I asked how an owner with 2 techs should start thinking about culture. Brian said every interaction is a vote for who you are, whether it’s with your team, a customer, a vendor or someone in line at the grocery store. Fire off a brutal email to a tech, even when you’re right, and you’re building a culture whether you like it or not.

Letting go is part of it. When Brian hands someone a whole project, they notice the trust. He also tells his team the company comes after faith and family, so nobody should miss a soccer game for work.

About 2 weeks before we recorded, a Kingfish team member got a devastating medical diagnosis. An emerging technician leader read about it in a companywide email and went straight to Brian and Wescott.

“I would like you guys to allow me to take half of my commission that I earn while he’s out and give it to him.”

Brian had never seen anything like it. They told the tech absolutely not and promised to take care of his coworker any way they could. All the credit goes to the tech, Brian says, but he’s grateful for a culture that lets someone be that vulnerable.

For years Brian kept his faith in Jesus Christ quiet at work. Now he talks about it openly, without requiring anyone to share it. I told him it can be hard to be bold as a Christian, but I think that’s what we’re called to do.

Simplify until the mission is clear

Every December, Brian and a leadership group from F3, his workout group, each pick a word for the next year. His word for 2026 was simplification.

JoyLights started as seasonal Christmas lighting. Permanent lights made it a 12-month business, but those jobs needed specialized labor and weren’t recurring. This year Brian asked why it was taking so much bandwidth when pest control and home inspections are the bread and butter. JoyLights is now a 6-week company, and his team’s reaction was “Oh, thank you.”

He also shut down a handyman company, where every job was different and good leaders were hard to keep, and he and Kristin sold Jacksonville Real Producers, a magazine franchise they ran for 5 years.

That magazine doubled as a realtor channel. They hosted 200-person events every quarter for Northeast Florida real estate agents and barely mentioned their own companies, but agents who came to trust them sent business their way. Real estate agents are on Jake’s list of the best strategic partners for pest control, and Tony Carder told me TruNorth budgets around $30,000 a month for realtor marketing.

All that cutting has Brian’s team more excited than he’s seen in a long time.

There’s no magic bullet

I asked whether the deal-site playbook still works. Brian doesn’t think it does, or that it was ever a magic bullet. Today Kingfish’s big channel is Google Ads, and Brian said it’s that simple.

After 5 years of branding, Kingfish is turning to tactical sales. When Wescott was deciding whether to come down, he asked if Kingfish had to grow as fast as Atlanta right away. Brian told him no. Recently he asked, “Are we ready now?” and got the green light.

The first lesson Brian named from Atlanta is that big results are small actions repeated over a long period of time. Return the 5:00 Friday voicemail if you can, and make the weekend caller your first call Monday. People who run massive companies have told him they aren’t doing anything special, just a lot of fundamentals.

“What you’re doing is not lowly like Hollywood might make it seem. What you’re doing is very noble.”

If you want to provide for your family and build something with a return at the end, Brian says you’re 100% in the right industry.

My take

Brian told me I do a great job with branding in this industry, which is generous from a guy whose logo was on an NFL video board. His Google story is the one I’d want every owner to hear. Someone who has known your name for years still starts with a search, and the Google Business Profile and website they find decide whether that familiarity turns into a call. Your CRM only sees the last click.

I’d expect those 5 years of branding to help Kingfish’s Google Ads too, because people tend to click names they know.

On the show I brought up Gary Vee’s point that whatever happens with search, your brand may be the one thing you can control. If a home robot ever picks the pest control company, it might pick Kingfish because the homeowner loves the Jaguars.

Where to find Brian

Brian says he’s all over, so search his name or Kingfish. Message him and he’ll get on the phone or meet for coffee. He likes giving back and learns from those talks too.

• Website: Kingfish Pest Control
• Home inspections: LunsPro Inspections
• Holiday lighting: JoyLights
• Instagram: @brianlunsford21
• LinkedIn: Brian Lunsford