Chase Goodeill on Growing Pest Control Consultants to $11M Through 10 Acquisitions

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey there and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. I'm your host, Dan Leibrandt, and today I'm joined by Chase Goodeill. Chase is the president of Goodeill Holdings and the owner and CEO of Pest Control Consultants, one of the fastest growing pest control companies in the Midwest and the largest privately held pest control company in Illinois. His company is set to be recognized by PCT as one of the top 100 pest control companies in gross revenue, doing over $11 million a year. In this episode, we break down how he's grown Pest Control Consultants into an eight figure pest control business, how he thinks about acquisitions and integration and what actually drives sustainable growth in pest control today. Now without further ado, Chase, welcome to the show.

00:41 Chase Goodeill

Dan, thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about what we've done to grow. I am passionate about sharing those things and look forward to talking with you.

00:50 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely, So to start off, tell me how you got in the pest control industry. How did this all get started?

00:57 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, so pest control is a unique industry. Most people, you know, kind of fall into it. They don't, you know, decide they want to do pest control. You hear that all the time by all these business owners. But so my dad and grandpa were in pest control. My grandpa had a company in the nineties, built it up nicely. Terminix came in and acquired them. My dad had a non-compete with Terminix, but went to work for them as a branch manager. And then when his non-compete was up, he started Pest Control Consultants. I would have probably been 12 or 13 years old. At the time and during those summer months, would go with them to work, service in the exterior of homes while he would do interior. That was, you know, late nineties, early two thousands when, when pest control was done inside and outside on those recurring services. So I got to learn, you know, that, that process at an early age. Got married right after high school, decided to jump into the industry with my dad. I saw some of the success my grandpa and him had. And I started just like a lot of people as a technician.

01:56 Chase Goodeill

And then when my dad kind of pulled me out of the field and wanted me to do sales, I started cold calling businesses, specifically the commercial side. At that time would have been, I don't know, 2012, door to door wasn't something that was super relevant where I lived. So was, you the way I was selling was through cold calling and it worked out pretty well. We started growing and I learned a lot during that process, just getting in the trenches and doing the work.

02:24 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, so talk to me more about what you were doing when you were cold calling, what was working.

02:29 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, so I would just write a list of customers in my service area that we did not have specifically on the commercial side. Being in the Chicagoland, the winter time, we didn't onboard too many new customers in the winter, so we had to go after new customers. And so I would just make that list in my local markets. I would drop into those business places asking for the director of maintenance or environmental service or whoever was in charge of the pest control contract, get their business card, get, you know, exchange cards. And then I would you know, come back to my office at the end of the day with 12 to 15 contacts of people that I needed to reach out, schedule an appointment with, and try to present a proposal to. And so I would spend my days from, you know, 7, 38 o'clock in the morning just cold calling, making appointments for the next day, all the way up until 6, 7 o'clock at night. Next day I would go meet with the three or four people that agreed to meet with me. And that's when we started talking about the pain points they had in their pest control service. And I was able to switch over a lot of those services to our platform, mainly because we were local. We had the personal touch that we were able to save them some money being that we were local. And I was very fortunate during that time to sell as many contracts as I did. And that went on for several years until we building out our sales team.

03:48 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, okay. So how specifically did you close those commercial clients? Like, was there any specific thing you did to make sure that they become a customer?

03:59 Chase Goodeill

No, mean, the number one thing I did was I drove them to a yes or no. They told me, no, we're not going to buy from you. I would always present a proposal regardless, whether they weren't interested or not. But I was able to take them to a yes or no. If they told me maybe, I would follow up until I got a yes. I had to get creative and follow up, whether it sending them things in the mail or delivering pizza or donuts or whatever to their staff to kind of get their attention. Or just following up, dropping in cold, you know, until they would, they would meet with me to kind of talk more about it. So no magic formula, you know, just persistence. I really felt like we would do a better job than Orkin, than Terminix, than some of our other local competitors. And so when I got interest, I drove that interest, to conversion.

04:48 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, awesome. And then you mentioned following that you started to build an inside sales team. And what you told me before the call is that I think your inside sales team did like $3 million in revenue this year, last year. So kind of breakdown first off, like how did you build your inside sales team? And what do you learn from that?

05:11 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, so during the summertime, know, calls were coming in. We were in a niche market, two hours west of Chicago was our home base. We did really well organically. And so we would sell over the phone, we would do same-based services, and that's what was going on in the summertime. And we had some marketing strategies at the time, but we were just focused on converting all of our leads to a recurring customer, a quarterly customer. As time went on again, I mentioned I would sell commercial during the winter when the phones weren't ringing and then we got back into spring, you know, we the calls were coming in and things were rolling and I was in the office doing the majority of the selling until we had more leads coming in that then I could handle and then we started, you know training CSRs to sell and then shortly after that we're like, well, we need a sales team. The CSRs aren't necessarily the right salespeople and so we were hiring salespeople to take exclusively new customer calls and deal with all of our online you know traffic all of our online forms they would they would handle all of our Facebook leads they would handle In the same way we were gonna drive them to a yes or no if we got a lead we're gonna follow up Until you tell us no and we've got you know now we have you know Automize we can automate a lot of that stuff through journeys and things like that where they're constantly getting a message from us You know to buy us some more time so our reps can be on the phone closing deals and not doing as much as the follow-up themselves, but yeah, just built the team out. Had like you mentioned Dan We had a sales rep that closed over a million dollars in recurring revenue over the phone just last year That was the first time in our company that we had that we I think was right right at three million was our inside sales revenue added revenue that we put on in 2025 so we're super excited about that We're up a hundred and eighty five percent January of this year to January of last year new subscriptions added So we're really focused on dialing in the digital marketing in the offseason trying to get things in place with with budget and strategy so when we get to that April, May time of year that we're just running and gunning and running the play if you will in terms of execution.

07:09 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. So how are you closing all these leads? What's your secret?

07:14 Chase Goodeill

You know, when we answer the phone, we are using a process to funnel our customers to our subscription-based service. We tell them pest control is a process. It's like going to the gym and lifting weights. You can't do that one time and expect to be in good shape. You have to continually do it. And when you turn pest control off, the bugs come back. And so we just train ourselves reps to be door-to-door, like a door-to-door rep would be on a door. Like we're not selling a general service standalone. We're not selling a stinger job stand-alone. We're opening up a service where, we're going to do road control for you. We're going to sweep your eaves. We're going to granulate your yard. We're going to treat three feet up, three feet out, all the way around the home. And we use terms like best practice, industry norm, things like that to come out on those quarterly basis versus, you know, doing a one-time service. And so it's, we talk to them about the difference in price too as well. If we get to that point where, if they tell us what we want, just that one-time service. Well, got it, you know, the one-time service is going to cost a lot more. The best bang for your buck will be this one year service subscription. Give us a shot for a year. Let us show you the value. You know, it's not like it's a long-term commitment, but we both know if we get a customer signed up on a quarterly basis, the idea would be to hold that customer for three or four years, which is the average life of a pest control residential customer.

08:35 Dan Leibrandt

Got it. I heard you pushing on the recurring services and I told you, I also listened to you on the Bug Bux podcast and you were talking a lot about making sure that you have customers ideally on recurring contracts. For owners that might not be familiar, they might be doing a lot of one-time jobs. Why is it so important to get people on recurring plans and subscriptions?

09:01 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, it's like recurring revenue is the holy grail of our entire industry. Know, PE is getting so involved in the home service space, specifically pest control because of recurring revenue. The best thing about it is the cashflow, but the second best thing is you can forecast your months out in front, like projecting how many employees you need, how many techs, how many CSRs based on the customer volume that you have active, which is a recurring customer, and then the workload. So that part of it, Is the probably the two best reasons why you should be you know look looking at it from that standpoint the other thing is it's ultimately going to be the best option for the customer because the bugs in the seasons everything is changing products last X amount of time Everybody wants to prevent You know being proactive versus reactive is always a better play and most most people agree with that And so it's a relatively easy service to sell over the phone the other thing that you mentioned is how do we do it so quickly? We're sending our customers digital service agreements over the phone. We're collecting credit cards over the phone. We're scheduling same-day service over the phone. So we're making it super easy for our customers to say, we'll go with you guys. There's no reason to really call anybody else to get in...

10:14 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, got it. Yeah, that's a trend that I've noticed across industries. You know, you take like an Amazon. Why? Why is Amazon so successful? It's because they make it so fast and so easy. So it seems like you guys are doing the same thing.

10:26 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. And if I can be the Amazon of pest control, you know, I think that's a good play for me.

10:33 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And also I wanted to backtrack and ask you, so Pest Control Consultants was originally your dad's company, and I think you said you started when you were like around 12 years old or so. So then what did that look like taking over the company? I mean, how did your role transition? I mean, how do you take over someone else's business and make it your own?

10:54 Chase Goodeill

Yeah. So when my dad had the company, I was just a, you know, a teenage boy. It's my junior year in high school. I've worked for my dad, my senior year. I worked, I got married right after high school. Uh, I graduated in May of 2006 and then was married to, my high school sweetheart in August of that year. And so I went to school for business knowing I was going to work for my dad at the time. Our business was probably doing less than 25,000 a year. Um, because he, you know, he's, he was two years off, you know, two years into his business. Wasn't really, he had a second job as well. Just trying to make ends meet to build it up. So I was grinding with my dad. We were in the trenches together of the business. I was servicing accounts for four or five years. When I got taken out of service and put into sales, it took me a minute to kind of understand what cold calling, what cold drop-ins, what follow-up, how to push, how to become unreasonable with people. But once I figured that out, I started selling like crazy. I would sell... Hundreds of thousands of dollars with the recurring revenue a year on a cold basis, not a warm lead. And when my dad noticed that the business was growing, we were hiring more techs, he gave me 30 % equity of that company when I was around 24, 25 years old as kind of sweat equity for some of the output that I was doing. And so as time went on, I was doing more just, I wasn't servicing accounts, just selling, inside sales in the summer, cold calling in the winter time. And the business was growing. We did an acquisition together, my dad and I. We bought one of our local competitors that had three or four techs. They had a juicy $100,000 annual contract that we really, really wanted. And we were told that we would not get them through our cold calling efforts. They were extremely loyal to the owner. So as time went on and my dad retired, my dad was snowboarding in the winter time. I was running the company for probably the last two years that he was the majority owner.

12:46 Chase Goodeill

And then from when I took over January 1st of 2021, I became the sole owner, bought his 70%. We doubled in growth from 21 to 22. We doubled again and from 22 to 23. It was almost as if my dad would always tell me, Chase, I know you want to grow, you want to scale, but don't put the hog in front of the pig. Don't go too fast, too quickly. There's a lot of problems when you grow your business, insurance costs, liability, payroll, all the things that that a lot of people are afraid of when you are growing a business and scaling. And I never had that fear. It never scared me. I was excited about an opportunity to increase revenue, to hire more people, to do more acquisitions, to spend more money on digital marketing, to bring door-to-door sales teams in. I embraced those things and thought it was a challenge to see how big can I take this company before I hit my ceiling and potentially have to hire a CEO to replace myself. As you mentioned, we did $11 million in revenue in 2025. We'll do $16 million in 2026. The plan is in place. The sales teams are here. The digital marketing budget is up 185 % on our subscription sold January of 2026 versus January of So, you get to that point. You can bootstrap the first $1 You can realistically bootstrap the first $3 $4 million in Pest Control. What I mean by that is the owner can drive all the growth with minimal help through cold calling, through door knocking. Through a decent system like a FieldRoutes CRM. But you get to that point where you need people and you have to develop the people. And that becomes crucial to go from 5 million to 10 million is developing an office manager, developing a branch manager, developing a route manager. You need those elite technician, elite CSR that knows how to kind of build the team up and have good culture within your company. So those things were things I did when my dad my dad didn't want to do that too quickly. He was a little bit afraid of having higher payroll and hiring more talented people. Not that he didn't do a good job. When my dad was owner of the company, our EBITDA was amazing because he was really good at cutting the fat off. Like, let's only do, only need to do what we absolutely have to do. And he was really good at ordering product and only having what we needed to make sure our margins were really, really good. But the growth mindset piece wasn't necessarily there for him as...

15:12 Chase Goodeill

The Lord has blessed me with. And I always say ambition is priceless. It's a gift from God. If you're an ambitious young man or young woman, you know, that's an incredible gift and I'm grateful that the Lord gave me ambition if I'm being honest.

15:26 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, I feel the same. I'm super ambitious and I also agree, I mean, it's kind of a controversial take, but I agree with you. I don't know if you can train ambition. I think that's something that's just kind of innate. And that's a problem that I see with a lot of company owners that I talk to. They're like, you know, hey, I'm at like 400K a year, but I just, I'm kind of chilling. I mean, I could just grow a few percent every year and I don't want to have a big company and. I think there's nothing wrong with that. Think it should just, it should be up to you. I mean, you can, you can make your company whatever you want it to be, right?

16:04 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing wrong with us, what I call solopreneurs that, know, one man bands, you know, to them and one other person. Pest control is very lucrative. You can have good margin when you're small, not like my dad did, you know, so he didn't have to have big top line money to make decent amount of money, like you're saying, but it is an industry where you can replace yourself. Is an industry that can, you know, the business, if you will, that can be very self running when it's done properly by, by, by having good systems, good processes and good people. For me, when I was with my dad, my dad was still the majority owner, I read the book, E-Myth by Michael Gerber, why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, which if you haven't read that book to all your listeners, it's an amazing book that teaches you how to separate yourself from your business. He says in that book, I think that I always remember reading it saying, you think you're a leader, but nobody's following you're probably just out for a walk. And...

16:36 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

16:55 Dan Leibrandt

Haha...

16:56 Chase Goodeill

It's like, it's a really intuitive thing to say, but it's so true. And you know, you don't want to work you want a business that works with you not involved in the day-to-day trenches of pushing and shoving and It's fascinating. So it's an amazing book and that kind of catapulted me to think differently than my dad did but then the other piece was selling like this idea that if the economy's bad I can still create my own economy because I can I have the skill set where I can call on people I can knock on doors, you know, I can I can not have to depend on anybody to find a lead if I need to. Now we're at the point where, like I mentioned, millions of dollars of opportunities coming into our business. It didn't happen like that overnight. As your listeners know, when people are open in a pest control branch, you're not going to have 100 new calls coming in on day one. Nobody's going to know who you are. So getting out of obscurity is one way you can grow your business by joining your chamber, by joining Rotary Club. By shaking hands with people who have influence in your community. And I realized that at a young age that I needed to get out there and talk to people. And the more hands I shook, the more money I made. And that's just a life principle. More hands you shake, the more money you make. If people don't know you, they won't buy from you. So you need to make sure people know who you are in your community. And those are things that I kind of learned on the fly. But again, like we talked about, ambition. The ambitious person learns that quickly. The person that's not as ambitious, it's like, don't necessarily need to get out there. You know, it's just a different, it's a shift in mindset.

18:34 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, the more hands you shake, the more money you make. I don't think I've ever heard that, but that's really good. I totally agree. And that's the problem with most of these smaller owners is that no one knows who they are. They're invisible. They're not connected with other businesses in the area. Don't, they're not regularly selling. They're not getting their brand out there. Maybe posting on social media and doing that kind of thing. So you're totally right. I 100 % agree. And what I want to cover here then is, and, to backtrack a little bit talking about your numbers and you said you hit 11 million last year and you're projected to do 16, which I'm sure some people are listening to this. They're like, dude, there is no way that is so crazy you are growing so fast. So can you explain like, how are you growing so fast?

19:20 Chase Goodeill

One of the things that we always wanted to do is grow by 25 % a year because every every three years will double. And so that was our focus was 25 % early on through through actively pursuing recurring revenue. Now it's different because we have a budget for marketing. We have money in our company. We can we can spend, you know, 100 grand a month on ads, whether it's LSA, pay per click Facebook. You know, so we have that platform. We've also done 10 acquisitions since 2019. So, I have so many arms flowing into my companies organically. And what I mean by that is we'll acquire a company, we'll acquire their phone number, we'll acquire their GMB, and we leave their, we do some, we definitely go in there and put the right verbiage on the GMB, but we leave the phone number, we leave the company name, especially if it's been around and has a good reputation with lot of positive reviews, but that company flows to my call center, my sales teams, right? They also look in the market and there's my company, and that flows into me. So you might Google Pest Control, Rochelle, Illinois, you might get three companies that come up and I have all three because I've monopolized a little bit. We get, and we're in a, we're not in the heart of the competition in the Chicago suburbs, we're a little on the outside looking in. Now we're more actively involved in the Chicagoland. In fact, my vision for my company is to be a household name in the Chicago suburbs, like an EcoShield, like a Pointe. You know pest control, you know, those those two companies do really well in Chicago with all their door teams But we're right there too and we're pushing that we're switching a lot of their customers over But the way we're doing it now is the digital side. We have door-to-door sales teams We have a budget in place and you know, we'll do a we'll do two million dollars on the doors this summer We'll do three million dollars on the phone this summer. We do acquisitions to we did an acquisition in Chicago last last year in March It was a 1.3 million dollar deal that we closed. You overnight we added 1.3 million in recurring revenue to our business, which you can't always, you know, there's no, at this point, I wish I had four or five deals in my pipeline, but acquisitions, they come up and if they're good and they make sense and you have the ability to pursue it, then it's a, you know, we've always done that. You know, they don't always come up. I may have an opportunity in June or July that something pops up and someone says, hey, this is this opportunity. I've heard you're the guy that's buying all the companies out here.

21:43 Chase Goodeill

Then I'll look at those deals as well and see if it makes sense. To go from 10 million or 11 million to 16 million, you have to have the systems in place. You have to have a healthy budget, which means you have to have good EBITDA, right? Good net income so you can reinvest a large portion of your net income back into the business. You have to have the digital, you have to have the door knocking abilities, and you have to have the courage to execute it. And be willing to spend the money to get more money flowing into your companies. That's what I've been doing, spend as much money as I can to get more money flowing into me. And I will spend money to get more recurring revenue all day long. Because I'd rather have recurring revenue than a bunch of cash in the bank. Cash is not king, cash flow is king. And so making decisions about recurring revenue are easy. Let's spend the money to get more recurring revenue.

22:33 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. I wanted to dive into those 10 acquisitions that you've done just fairly recently. First off, I wanted to ask, and maybe you don't want to share, but has there been any like nightmare stories? Have you made any mistakes with acquisitions that you could share lessons from?

22:49 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, yeah, I have. There's one particular deal. So the first acquisition we did was in 19 and it was a town 30 minutes from our home office. And that was the deal that they had that six figure contract. That company had act, the owner of that company had actually sold two or three years prior to a new owner that had four or five pest control companies. But the original owner that had all the relationships with the customer list, because he was the one that built it out. He was working for the new owner. Well, the new owner and I had been talking behind closed doors for a little bit. And we had actually bought one of his companies a year or two prior. So, I'm sorry, no, that was the first one we bought. We bought another one of his companies a year or two after. So, this was the first one. Well, anyways, we cut a deal and like a lot of deals, you don't say anything to the technicians until you sign on the dotted line and close. It's very private. And this was a $400-and-some-odd-thousand-dollar deal. Wasn't... A huge deal, but at the time it was because we wrote a check for it. It's not always easy to write a check for almost a half a million bucks. So we closed it, we got the financing figured out, we met with the technicians and the owner told me that we had a concern that the previous owner did not like us because I was switching over all of his counts. I took so much revenue from him when I was going through cold calling and doing all the things I talked about. So my concern was that he wouldn't join us and that he may go out on his own and start you know, this his own business because we couldn't have a, you know, being that the non-compete probably wouldn't fall in place with this. This would be the second time his company was sold. So fast forward, he never showed up. He did go out on his own. He took that six figure contract that we were wanting. That's why we really wanted to buy that company. And he probably took another a hundred grand. So we, out of the 500,000 or 400, I think it was just under 500, if I'm being honest.

24:47 Chase Goodeill

He took 200k with him on the way out and so we overpaid the business, but that it gets better Few years ago. He called me back just a couple years ago and say alright Chase I'm ready to sell you know you want this account I want to you know I'm not going anywhere, and I told them basically no I'm not interested I'd have to be a complete idiot to buy your business after what you did to me there You know taking those accounts and not even giving us a shot to kind of bring you on board or whatever but...

24:50 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

25:13 Chase Goodeill

He kept calling me the same way I kept calling on all his customers and switching them over. And finally, I picked up the phone and said, all right, what do you have? What's going on? And he knew the one particular account, the six figure account. And long story short, I bought his business, those customers for the second time in about a five year span. But this time I only spent about 60 cents on the dollar for him. And it was a seller finance deal. So I knew that I wasn't going to pay him unless the account stuck with me. Which was really smart. But I did learn a lesson. There's a lot of guys that would never do that. But again, if it lines up with your goals, if your recurring revenue is the primary focus, if growing to a certain top line is a priority, then, which it was for me, it made sense for me to acquire that six-figure deal. Even though it was like, dude, this guy screwed me, he's an asshole, he does not like my family, he doesn't like my business. And yet, I went and bought him. For the customers for a second time in a five year period. So that I don't recommend that all the time, but worked out for us. We still have that large account and we've actually grown that they've acquired more stores. We've gotten more stores from that deal, but that's one little story where it's like, okay, you know, a lot can go south when you don't know what you're doing, you know, on that M&A side.

26:23 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, dang, okay, so you have to make sure that you keep those accounts. And I actually remember what you said on the Bug Bux podcast, which was that usually you can expect, and I think this was like two years ago, so this might've changed, and I wanna hear your thoughts on this, that when you acquire a business, you can expect about 10 % of the customers to leave. Is that still the case, and how can you prevent that as much as possible?

26:48 Chase Goodeill

Well, the best way to prevent it is to buy a business where the owner is not servicing the accounts, where they're technicians and you get their technicians. When the owners are out there, it's more challenging because nobody's going to do it as well as the owner did. So that's a big part of it. When a lot of guys are starting out, you are buying the one-man bands or the two, one owner and one technician type businesses. So 10 to 15 % is probably fair. The deal in Chicago, that owner... Was completely hands-off. He had three full-time techs, and the owner was not out in the field. I think we did a little bit better. I think we were at like 8 % attrition by the end of the first year with all his recurring revenue or active subscriptions. But I think 10 % is fair because of transition. Things are different. CRMs might look different. Trucks might look different. Technician turnover could be a little bit high. But that's the double-edged sword of acquiring a business. You pay that 1.5x or 1.3x or in some cases 2x, yet you know you might lose 8 to 10 % or 5%. It just kind of comes down to the upside. For example, the company that I acquired in Chicago, for every one customer that cancelled, we signed up three new ones through all their local SEO. They had six GM listings in the Chicago markets, and every one of them had 250 five-star reviews or more. So, would get free leads, right? They're just calling in because they're filling out the forms on the website that we acquired that we're not paying anything for, and we would sign up new customers because of the flow that you already had out there. And that's one thing I think people should look for in acquisitions.

28:18 Dan Leibrandt

That's awesome. Yeah, I actually really like that strategy. I think you're the only one I've heard it from of like maintaining all of the other companies' assets, which I know a lot of people usually combine websites, combine Google business profiles or rebrand the Google business profiles. So you're saying across all the assets, I mean, even like the Facebook profile and the Yelp, you're maintaining all their stuff.

28:42 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, the biggest one is the GMB, the Google listings that you're talking about. We make sure that the numbers are going to our call center. Know, so we're getting, whether they call from that page or our page, it's coming to us. But we do want to be the bigger brand, right? Pest Control Consultants is the brand. But if I acquire a company and they have a good website, I might leave it for a year or two and see how many forms come in. If there's not much movement, we'll switch those site over to our site. In this case out in Chicago, where the digital was done so well. We're still talking about whether we want to switch it over to our website, but we're looking at its performance. Like, man, this is when we're getting a ton of free leads from this website, so why switch it? Now, we did go into their website and say, you know, this Pest Control Company is now part of Pest Control Consultants. So, people know that. It's very visible. We tweak all the verbiage on the listing, but... Yeah, we've got two or three companies that do perform well in their markets that we've left their website and we've left their GMB listing, but it all flows down to us. Eventually, the idea is to tuck everything in and make it our website, but within the first year two of the deal, you want to kind keep an eye on that.

29:49 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. And also I wanted to ask you, in terms of size of company you're acquiring, and you kind of hinted at this with not wanting it to be, you know, just a sole operator, but is there like a minimum size you're looking to acquire? Can there be a company that's too small?

30:08 Chase Goodeill

No, I mean, I've bought in one route, you know, that's we will look at a route that's quarter, you know, $250,000 route. If it makes sense, it's in our area. We'll pay for it. We'll go get it. I like to do deals that have two or three technicians, you know, going into last year, I'd never done a million dollar deal. And so that deal in Chicago was my first million dollar deal. Paid just, we, was a $1.3 million recurring revenue. We paid 1.9 million for it. Um, and I do it again over and over. Now I want to do a $2 million deal, $3 million deal. When you get up into the $2 $3 million in revenue, most of it's recurring, now you're talking the multiples that everybody talks about in our industry. And so if you're going to get a $2 million business, you better be prepared to pay four four and a half for it because of the asset, the trucks, all the credit cards, the contracts they haven't filed, all the things that can make a business more valuable, auto pay, all those things. So it's not easy to... Pull off acquiring a million dollar business or more, it gets harder and harder to finance. Our company is privately held, like you mentioned, so we don't have PE money. When we buy a two million dollar business, it's coming out of the cash flow of the business, it's coming out of my personal cash. Have to borrow against, have to have, the banks typically want collateral. They're not gonna give you two million dollars for a book of business that holds no value to the bank. But if you have real estate with equity, they'll attach it to that, then they'll loan you the money all day long. So I try to buy one piece of real estate a year with a good amount of equity that's going to, in a location that's going up in value. And that way I have some ammo if I find a deal and don't have to bring in partners because I have the real estate portfolio that the banks love to see.

31:46 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, interesting. Okay, so you're getting those real estate properties and then leveraging those and that can be an asset that you can sacrifice.

31:53 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, because you can take that. That's right. Mean, I have a line of credit on my home. You know, I have a large amount of equity in my home. Have money I can take out of that at any point. I keep active, right? If a deal comes up that I want to pursue, I have that opportunity there. If I have equity in properties that I own and I want to borrow two, three million dollars, you know, I have cash to put 10 % down or 20 % down, but I have no way of coming, you know, I can't write a check for two million bucks or three million bucks. But I have real estate holdings that have good amount of equity. I'll just sign off as a lien, if you will. The bank has that second mortgage, but they'll fund my deal now because they have collateral to satisfy. And so that's what I mean by that. It's not something that, you know, it's not something, you know, and then on top of that, these are income producing properties more often than not. So it's just good to have that. Know, real estate does that better than anything in terms of freeing up some cash.

32:24 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

32:47 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, definitely. No, that's super smart. And with this biggest acquisition that you did recently, the million dollar one, what did you learn from it and what are you gonna take from that moving forward into your bigger acquisitions, which you say plan on doing a two, three and bigger acquisitions.

33:03 Chase Goodeill

Well, Dan, great question. There's an answer that comes to mind immediately. This was the first time I used a broker. All the other deals on $1 million, I've done due diligence myself. I've done all the legwork going through their CRM. I've done all the negotiating, the price on what I'm willing to pay, not pay. What we did is we, this particular deal required 20 % down and then I was financing the 80 % of the 2 million. We'll it 2 million bucks. So, I put 10 % down in cash, but we negotiated the seller to hold back 10%. So I satisfied the 20 that the bank wanted. But in order for the 10 % that the seller held back to qualify, all of his quarterly customers, which the majority of his recurring revenue was all quarterly, I would need to get two quarterly services from those customers in order for that 10 % to qualify as revenue that I would owe the seller within six months of our close date.

33:57 Chase Goodeill

So I had like an attrition clause there, right? It protected me. If I did a quarterly and then the second time around they canceled, that customer, I no longer paid for that customer. And it was, I got to give a huge shout out to Dan Gordon and Brian Post over at PCO Bookkeepers because Dan actually, mean, both of them really, you know, did that due diligence. They negotiated that on my behalf. We were going into the, they were using GorillaDesk. So we were scrubbing the customer list, ensuring that the customers were active, updated on billing and service. So obviously, if you get into the trenches of a million dollar or more acquisition, you want to have that due diligence team to do that because it's all the money that it's taking you to acquire that. But the hold back clause, right? The protection of, you're going to finance the 10, but in order to qualify, I have to see services being rendered. That saved me, it ended up saving me well over $100,000.

34:51 Dan Leibrandt

Wow, that's incredible. Good to know. And then you said that you're estimated to do 16 million. I mean, how do you estimate? How do you know that you're gonna do a number like that?

35:04 Chase Goodeill

Well, we look at our sales from last year, like our inside sales were right around 3 million over the phone. We're going to increase our budget on LSA. LSA is the number one platform. All your listeners are probably curious, right? LSA, when you dial in the LSA properly, that to me is the most powerful form of digital. And we're doing that really, really well. We're using Pay-per-click, the Google ad platform, and we're doing that really well. And we're doing some Meta stuff with Facebook. But those are the three. But the LSA stuff, we have everything so integrated into our phone operating system.

35:33 Chase Goodeill

CRM, we're doing a lot of win-backs, meaning we're going through all of our customers that have canceled service and signing them back up at a low initial, kind like a door-to-door account would be. So we're forecasting based on what we did the year prior, we're looking at economical fat. Like we think the economy is going to start roaring this year again. Based on what we're seeing from Q4 and into Q1, we think it's going to pick up and interest rates are coming down, things like that. And then when we talk about door-to-door sales, the way we look at door-to-door sales is we look at, like we have a budget and a market, right? So if I'm going to put a million dollars worth of revenue on the doors, it's going to cost me around a million dollars or so based on marketing deals and things like that. We have a partnership with a group out in Utah that we get our sales reps from that are relatively turnkey reps. And we've negotiated a good deal over the years. So my deal is comfortable for me. I know I'm going to get a million bucks or a million five from door to door. I can draw a circle on a map and I know exactly where they're going to be. I can also know what ACV is going to be. I know what it's going to cost me. So I have my marketing deal. I have my door to door deal over here. I have my inside deal based on what my marketing did last year and how well performed and forecast if we at least do that again next year. Plus we're adding more to our budget because we've grown by so much. I think we grew by 58 % collectively over my four branches. That I have last year. We're also opening a branch this year. We're going to be opening in a new location. I don't want to share the location just yet, but we're going to be doing that from scratch. And we'll take that from zero to a million over the course of four or five months with the door-to-door team. And so I'm excited to be part of that too.

37:14 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm. Okay, so starting that new branch, tell me what goes into it. Mean, so you're gonna just strictly door to door, what else?

37:25 Chase Goodeill

No, door-to-door is going to lay the foundation and then we'll move over to digital. We've got partnerships, door-to-door sales reps that are really, really top 1 % of what they're doing. But you need to create an LLC, you need to determine your partnership, what the members of the LLC are going to be, who they're going to be, what percentage are they going to own, what are their roles going to be, and you finalize the LLC. With that, you get a tax ID number. You'll need a tax ID number to open a checking account for the business. You'll also need a tax ID and an LLC to get a lease at a location, right? The landlords want to see that. You also, you need to get a FieldRoutes platform going, a FieldRoutes office if you're using FieldRoutes, which we do. We need to get a local SEO page going in the new market, which we will. And then we need to get a GMB page. We need to get our marketing set up on that platform. We need to get our website going where we have a new service area that's all built in. So those are all the things that, you know, we need start techs for the summer. When's our start tech going to be?

38:22 Chase Goodeill

What dates are our reps arriving so that we're gonna start selling. And this particular deal, me and my partner, me and my two partners, we're gonna go to the service area for two weeks and I'm gonna knock with my partner and my other partner, he's gonna be our start tech. So we're gonna put on the first 150, 200 counts, get our hands in on this, physically be a part of growing this business, getting our hands dirty and then doing the work so we free up some cash flow and then when we... When we go back to our corporate office, which me and one of my other partners is actually my brother, who's my regional branch manager, the sales team's going to arrive after we lay the foundation of the first couple hundred accounts, free up some cash. So we're excited about that opportunity.

39:03 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, that's awesome. Yeah, definitely. And then I want to dive into door to door a little bit more. I had kind of a, I don't know, almost an annoying question. I usually post questions every other day in our Facebook group, the Pest Control Millionaires group, and I made a post, the comments kind of surprised me. I asked, does your company door knock? Why or why not? And almost everyone was saying, no, F door knocking. Door knocking's the worst, whatever. Can you tell me why you guys door knock and I mean why I guess you'd recommend it or advise against it?

39:44 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, I think in order to, if you want to scale and grow, you're going to have to sprinkle it in. And I tell people we're not a door knocking company. I door knocked and I did it myself for years. I recruited teams at Northern Illinois University, not far from where I live. But I learned how to do door knocking. It was easy for me because I cold called first. And so I already was used to, know, that cold intro and that follow up door knocking, you know, is very similar to that. Except it's actually an easier sales process because you're getting a yes or no within 10 minutes. So people, you know, I can't tell you how many times, Dan, that I've knocked a door and they're like, oh my gosh, I was just getting ready to call pest control. We've got ants everywhere. And I say, great, that's actually why I'm here. You know, we're taking care of everybody out here for those ants and spiders. Now you're not necessarily taking care of everybody, but you have customers in that area. And so you're name drop those customers and say, yeah, we're doing their service. My trucks are here today or they're gonna be here tomorrow. We've got a nice neighborhood discount that we're doing. And people are like, great, I was just gonna call, I gonna get BookRate, we're gonna save them some money and they get a little cheaper deal on the initial, and we sign them up. And so when you get that gratification of like, I'm solving a problem for somebody, they don't have to go call, they don't have to wait two weeks to get somebody out to their home, that's a really cool thing to do. And so people on the Facebook groups, I would dare to say that most of the people are saying that they hate door knocking, and have never personally doorknocked.

41:08 Chase Goodeill

You know, they just hated that these teams are coming in and taking their customers. That's why I started door knocking. You know, people were coming into my neighborhood, you know, in the suburbs of Chicago and, know, was Aptive, it was Pointe, it was Fox, it was Greenix, all these companies that was big sales team. And, you know, they knocked my door and I thought to myself, I can't have these outside sales team. You know, I'm in this market, I live here and these guys are coming out from Naperville or... Wherever, West Chicago, and there are college students from Utah. None of them actually live in Chicago. None of them actually know much about pest control, which is what people don't like. But what they do do is they know sales. And they're trained well. They know the CRM. They work the hours. And it's a numbers game. You talk to 10 people, you're going to sell one deal. If you're good, you might only have to talk to seven. But eventually, you're going to knock a door and someone's going to tell you, I was getting ready to call somebody. And then you get a sale.

42:00 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

42:01 Chase Goodeill

So I wouldn't hate it. I actually really respect it because it is a grind. These guys are out there from 10 a.m. To dark for four months, six days a week. And it comes back down to what I said earlier. The more hands you shake, the more money you make. You got to get in front of people. And that's why I love door to door. And that's why I did door to door. And now that we're scaling, I can't go out and do door to door being the CEO of a company in four states with 80 employees. My role is no longer doing that, but I can... That culture and that DNA is still in our company. And as long as I'm around, it'll continue to be in our company.

42:35 Dan Leibrandt

Well, that, yeah, no, I think it definitely gets too much hate. And I totally agree, especially with areas that have a lot of pests and, know, maybe neighbors that are dealing with lots of issues. It's like, hey, look, we're just coming here to help. Just, you know, are you dealing with any issues? Is someone already helping out? Are they doing a good job? So yeah, I think it's totally fine. There's nothing like, I think it definitely gets too much hate.

43:00 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, no, I always tell everybody when I one of my pitches was knocking a door. Hey, did your neighbor John tell you I'd be stopping by? No, he didn't. You know, they just let their guard down when you like you said that was a great little pitch that you just gave. It's like, hey, I'm not here. I'm just the messenger of good news of what's what I'm doing, what he's doing. You don't have to buy from me if you don't want to. But I'm going to if I if you show me any interest at all, I'm going to drive you to a yes or no. If you give me no interest, I'm going to not waste my time and go talk to the next person. But that's a great point. I think people that want to grow their company in competitive markets, and you're at that $3-5 million top line revenue, sprinkling in some door-to-door to create better route density, to kind of remain competitive. I tell my local market, where I live, that most people don't like door-to-door people, but I have to do it to remain competitive. All my competitors, so I have to do it a little bit too. And I don't want all these people from out of town coming in and taking my customers. When I tell my customers that, they're like, yeah, that makes sense. Now I kind of understand why you do door-to-door too. And it's like, so it's just kind of that shift in mindset on why you would do it, what are your goals, what are you trying to achieve ultimately in your business?

44:14 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely got it. All right, I've got two more questions for you, Chase. The first one is earlier in the show, I know you mentioned the E-Myth, which is a great book. Are there any other books you'd recommend to pest control owners or just anyone in pest control?

44:28 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, the door-to-door side, if you want to get into door-to-door, there's a couple books. One that most people probably don't know about is called Flipping the Script. And it's a great mindset shift on number one, what is door-to-door, how it works, kind of the mindset of working a schedule in a summer. It was a great book. It's what we use to train our reps that we recruited and went out with. The other one is the Lenny Gray book, Door-to-Door Millionaire. Everybody knows that in our industry. Lenny's class act. You can't talk to him and feel like door-to-door. He represents the door-to-door space extremely well. But the books that I will say what really changed my life, the E-Myth changed my mental game on business, but Grant Cardone was a mentor of mine. If you're not first, you're last in the 10X rule, those two books in my early 20s, those two books taught me how to sell. They taught me how to cold call.

45:20 Chase Goodeill

And I would listen to Grant Cardone's Young Hustlers podcast and him talking about being unreasonable with people, and getting out of your comfort zone. Because on the other side of your discomfort is where all your dreams are at, and all the things in life are on the other side of that. And that just resonated with me, and I essentially did what he said to do, and I started getting more accounts, more revenue, and growing my business and my network.

45:47 Dan Leibrandt

That's awesome. Yeah, I've watched a lot of videos from him. I think I've listened to one of his audio books, but I'll have to dive into his actual books. So that's a good recommendation.

45:54 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, the 10X, the 10X rule, and if you're not first, you're last, are really good reads. Grant's changed a lot. I mean, I was listening to him when he was just building his business. Now he's so big in the real estate game and he's gotten really, really, really big. But his early stuff was primarily all teaching people how to sell. And it was really good stuff.

46:16 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Cool. And then the last question I've got for you, Chase, is what is your message to the pest control owners out there? What do you want to tell them? What do think they need to know?

46:27 Chase Goodeill

Man, think the owners need to realize that whatever it is you're trying to achieve, if it's going to be, it's up to me is what I tell my partners. That extreme ownership, like if anything that happens to you, good or bad, it's because of you. And you need to be the driver. If you're doing less than 3 million, you have to be the driver. You will rise and fall on the kind of leader you are. I mentioned earlier, if you want to go north of that, then obviously you need to recruit people and build people and get people.

46:57 Chase Goodeill

The opportunity to do things maybe better than you can do them. But this industry, there's nothing special about me. If I can grow a business to 5 million, to 10 million, to 20 million, then so can you if you want to. But know your goals, know what you want before you start, and reverse engineer it. Work your way back. And then it's easy to make decisions. When I look at acquisitions and my wife tells me, boy, that's a lot of money, Chase. Are you nervous? Or where are we going to get the money? You know, it's going to take everything we have to close that deal. We talk about, it align with our goals? Does acquiring this business align with what we want as a family and what we want our business to look like when we're done with it? And if the answer is yes, then we make that decision every single time. If it's no, then we walk away from it. But having that mindset has really been a game changer. And I'll tell you, Allan Draper, you know, I've been on the Bug Bux, I think, a couple times, and him and I have talked. He's a friend of mine in the industry. He gave me that advice one time when I was wondering about doing an acquisition or I can't remember the exact situation, but he told me if it lines up with your goals, it's a yes. If it doesn't get away from it and it's super simple, but it's powerful. And so I think that's something that I would tell owners when making decisions about scale and growing and hiring people, you know, in terms of, in terms of their target, their own personal targets.

48:19 Dan Leibrandt

Love that. So extreme ownership and align with your goals. Well, awesome. This has been a great show, Chase. Thanks so much for coming on. I know how valuable your time is. Where can people find you and connect with you?

48:31 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, man. So I'm on LinkedIn. You can just look me up on LinkedIn. I'm there. I respond to messages. I jump on calls with guys. Facebook, I'm also on that. I love to connect. I love to give back. There's been so many people who have helped me get to where I'm at. So I look at it, you know, I want to do the same for other people that want to grow their business and, you know, if they want help or questions, I'm freely available to help them out if I can.

48:54 Dan Leibrandt

And anything you'd like to plug or promote?

48:57 Chase Goodeill

I would say, I mean, FieldRoutes, the platform FieldRoutes to me is still the best CRM for pest control owners that are wanting to grow. I would say the Pest Control Millionaire group, you guys are such an asset to the community. The Bug Bux group is amazing. There's just a handful of these groups and keep doing what you're doing. Because if I'm young and I'm in the industry and I saw, you guys would have gotten my attention at 18, 19, 20 years old. And I would be following and engaging, you know, and all the things you guys are talking about are legit and it's what you should be doing. Keep doing what you're doing, keep helping people. You know, I think there's a great amount of satisfaction in helping elevate other people.

49:41 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, well, I really appreciate that, Chase. Thanks for mentioning that. Thanks again for coming on the show. This has been great.

49:47 Chase Goodeill

Yeah, man. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

49:50 Dan Leibrandt

Course.