Chad Louk on building Prodigy Pest Solutions from $7,000 to 8 figures

Chad Louk opened Prodigy Pest Solutions in 2018 with about $7,000, no loans and a rusted-out Ford Ranger single cab he’d bought from his old company for $4,000. Chad is 6’6”, and he said driving it was like a clown car.

Prodigy didn’t pass $1 million until year 3, the year Chad finally got out of the truck. Today it’s an 8-figure company with 4 Florida offices, and his second company sends door-to-door teams to pest control companies in other states.

My partner Jonas Olson already wrote up his conversation with Chad about growing slow. I wanted to hear when Chad pulls reps out of a market and what his techs sell once they’re gone.

Who is Chad Louk?

Chad Louk is the founder of Prodigy Pest Solutions, a multi-branch, 8-figure pest control company in Florida, and of Prodigy Marketing Pros, which provides door-to-door sales teams to other pest control companies. Outside of work, he’s a dad, a private pilot and a race car driver.

Both of Chad’s older brothers knocked doors, so he skipped his high school graduation and flew from Chicago to DC to start. In his third week, torrential rain held him to 2 sales, and that summer never recovered. He finished that summer with 78 accounts and about $13,000, a fraction of what his brothers sold their first summers. One brother pulled him back in, and the next summer Chad sold 228. His third summer brought six figures in 4 months.

His brother then brought him in as an ownership partner in a Florida company, started on Chad’s 21st birthday. With a third partner they built it to about $800,000 before Chad took a small buyout and opened Prodigy in Lakewood Ranch, about an hour south of Tampa.

Reps learn the service before they sell it

Chad says the secret to door-to-door is recruiting people to replace you, though he recruited nobody in his first 3 years. Back then he did his own selling.

He didn’t pitch on fear (your neighbors have rodents, sign today for a discount). He walked the home pointing out problems and didn’t sound like a salesman until the end, when he showed what the current company was missing and gave his price. Each pitch took longer, but he had to talk to far fewer people.

He likes his reps to start in Florida, where he says knocking requires 40 hours of training. They learn how to do a service, the products and what’s legal.

“I think other organizations have this mindset that we’re a sales company that happens to do pest control. I’m a pest control company that happens to do sales.”

Many of his reps come from big sales organizations, which he admits train sales better but drop the ball on service and ethics. His reps may sell less, but Prodigy keeps more of what they sell.

He also wants reps to slow down in the first 30 seconds. Most homeowners open with “I already have a company,” and a rep who plows past it has lost them for the rest of the pitch.

Knock a new branch to $2 million

Knocking brought in about 95% of Prodigy’s growth to $1 million. It’s closer to 60% now, and Chad would love to get it to 40%.

He got lucky early. Lakewood Ranch was the nation’s top master-planned community in 2019, 2020 and 2021, and Prodigy was the only company knocking it. Now 14 do.

Knocking isn’t a profitable way to grow long term, but nothing beats a rep talking to 100 people a day for breaking into a market. He sends about 20 reps per office and tries to take a new branch from zero to $2 million in a year.

“I believe that a $2 million branch has a market share in that community and people are going to recognize the name and you’re going to organically grow.”

Then he cuts the program for a year or sends a smaller team to replace cancels. Knock the same homes every year and you close less, get more cancels and make people angry. Past $5 million, techs and SEO take over. That branch may not grow 40% a year anymore, but it replaces its cancels and keeps trending up with inflation. Greg Young uses door-to-door for new Natura branches in a similar way.

Chad doesn’t use mailers or door hangers now, though a month before reps arrive in a new market he’d be open to flyers, mailers and bandit signs so homeowners recognize the name. Jonas makes a much bigger case for traditional marketing.

A door-to-door team you don’t have to build

Chad’s second company, Prodigy Marketing Pros, gives other pest control companies a complete door-to-door sales team. Chad calls it a white-glove service, not a training program. His team comes to your office, runs the meetings, gets the uniforms and sets up the software. You pay Prodigy instead of paying each rep, Prodigy handles the accounting, and your job is to service the accounts.

It sells in 8 states for 5 companies, counting Chad’s own. It’s built for companies that already do well with SEO or acquisitions and want another way to grow. Some want into a new area, so they send a team to build the brand and density before bringing in SEO.

The best fit has been around a couple of years, does a couple million in revenue, and has stalled or is ready to double down. Chad is upfront that it hits profit hard at first and makes sense a year or two later. He won’t work in Florida, since he can’t compete against himself.

He figures he could post the same numbers in any of those 8 states, with different objections. In Maine, people ask why they’d pay for a quarterly service with snow on the ground. His teams don’t knock in the snow. In winter they work only warm markets like Texas, California and Prodigy’s own Florida turf. If you’d rather build your own team, Lenny Gray covers that side.

Techs sell on the second visit

Chad sees door-to-door companies as one-subscription companies. Prodigy’s techs now cross-sell rodent exclusion, trapping, termite bait stations, termite treatments and drywood work, because every extra subscription makes a customer stickier. Techs are also his cheapest way to get a customer. The commission is lower, they’re already there, and customers don’t feel sold to.

Nobody sells on the first service, because the customer just went through a high-pressure sale at the door. That visit is for doing a great job, like clearing spider webs and treating fire ant nests. Inside sales books the second service for when the customer is home, and a tech trained to cross-sell gets extra time to check the attic and roof for entry points. After that, the pitch comes once a year with a free termite inspection.

For referrals, Prodigy uses Clicki, the software Kendall Hines co-founded.

Hire ahead of the growth

Chad’s biggest mistakes came from squeezing profit to pay himself more while his team was stretched thin.

One Prodigy branch grew by $2.3 million in a year, going from 4 techs to 12 by adding about one a month. They rushed training, took whoever they could get, and it crumbled. Chad pulled the sales team out for 3 weeks so the branch could reset, at a cost he puts around $400,000 in potential revenue. Hiring 3 techs before summer would have prevented it.

So the October before we recorded, he added 5 corporate managers, including a technical director, an office manager and people for software and HR. They mostly cost money until summer, when Chad expects to grow by a couple million, and he likes having his back against the wall. For tech and CSR hires, Prodigy uses benchmarks from PCO Bookkeepers.

Stick to pest, termite and rodent

Chad is licensed in every category in Florida, but he subs out wildlife, bee removal and tenting. He sees tenting as the biggest risk in pest control, because the biggest misapplication fines he’s seen in Florida came from it, and he won’t risk his license or a claim that he hurt someone’s home or health. His techs’ safety matters too. He doesn’t want them wrestling alligators.

Prodigy sticks to pest control, termite and rodent work, mostly residential. Try to do everything and you’re good at nothing, he said. He refers out the rest, and those competitors now send him the jobs they don’t do.

Risk tops his KPIs too. Cancellation percentage, reservice rate and route completion all matter, but 2 weeks before we recorded, Prodigy had an accident involving 3 vehicles. That’s one of the quickest ways to damage a company, so driver safety scores get close attention.

Small acquisitions come with surprises

Chad has bought 4 companies, the largest around $350,000, and he isn’t too crazy about them. At that size the business is the owner, and when the owner leaves, customers follow. Small owners tend to sign up anyone, so price increases bring cancels, and software that wasn’t run right hides overdue balances and dead accounts until after you buy.

Next time he’d want a $1 million to $3 million company with an owner ready to retire and years of data behind the price. Even then, he thinks building $3 million with door-to-door would cost less. Many small sellers have also heard about big multiples without realizing a $50 million company growing 20% a year is a different business. Theirs is closer to 1 times revenue, a bit more on a good day. Paul Giannamore explained to me why cash flow sets those numbers.

My take

I told Chad I never recommend relying on one channel, SEO included. He agreed, then went further than I did. Door-to-door isn’t for everyone, he said, but SEO is, and owners who say they stay busy on word of mouth should imagine hiring one more person and adding SEO.

Chad’s reason for skipping mailers applies to search. A mailer pitches the same thing to everyone, so it might talk about fire ants when the homeowner’s real problem is spiders. Someone searching for spider control has already told you what to pitch, and your website should have a page for exactly that. Prodigy’s ad spend all goes to Google now, through Google Ads and Local Service Ads, after Yelp and Angie’s List fizzled out.

Chad told owners to lean on people like Jonas and me, and to learn every part of the business before hiring it out. He sat in on every presentation BASF and other suppliers gave his techs, and he holds marketing to the same rule.

“If you’re hiring out a company to do SEO and you don’t understand how any of that works, you’re going to get taken advantage of 100%.”

I want every owner to know what a good local SEO report looks like before they sign with any agency, mine included.

Where to find Chad

Chad doesn’t charge for advice, though he says to take it with a grain of salt. Instagram is the first place he sent people, and owners outside Florida who want a door-to-door team can get on a call with him.

• Company: Prodigy Pest Solutions
• Door-to-door sales teams: Prodigy Marketing Pros on Instagram
• Instagram: @chadlouk
• Facebook: Chad Louk
• LinkedIn: Chad Louk