Dave Bradford on what makes a pest control company worth millions

Before he ran Certus Pest, a $100M pest control company, Dave Bradford came up in airline finance. So when a recruiter friend in Tampa called him about a pest control company, Dave told him it didn’t sound very sexy.

Then he did his homework, which took him to Dan Gordon of PCO Bookkeepers and to the public numbers at Rollins, Terminix and Rentokil. An industry with about 85% recurring revenue, EBITDA margins of 20% to 30% and really high free cash flow looked a lot better than airlines.

I first pulled Dave aside at PestWorld with a few questions. Over the past few years I’ve kept in touch with him and his CMO, Juan Rezk, who is incredibly smart. Dave has been part of more than 100 acquisitions, so this time I asked what a buyer like Certus looks for and what makes it walk away.

Who is Dave Bradford?

Dave Bradford is the CEO of Certus Pest, which he describes as a single business that operates multiple brands, with 25 branches when we recorded. He came up in finance at big publicly traded companies, mostly airlines, and was controller and treasurer at Spirit Airlines, where he worked through its IPO.

In 2016, Concentric Equity Partners, a Chicago private equity firm, hired him as CFO of Environmental Pest Service (EPS) in Tampa. EPS had made 70 acquisitions that weren’t put together very well. Dave’s team did 32 more, grew it to $82M and sold it to Rentokil at the end of 2020. After a short stint as COO of a pool service rollup, he joined Certus as CFO in September 2021, once its owner, Imperial Capital of Toronto, finally talked him into lunch. He became president in February 2022 and CEO that July.

Certus pays most for recurring pest and termite

I asked Dave what makes Certus pass on a company, and he started with what looks good.

He wants 85% or more of revenue to be recurring. Some one-time work is fine, but not 60% to 70%. (Paul Giannamore’s number was a little lower, at roughly 80%.) After that, Dave looks for positive organic growth, strong margins, and productive technicians and salespeople.

Certus will still buy a heavy one-time business, and it has bought wildlife companies. They just won’t get the price of a high-recurring company, because pest and termite is “the holy grail.”

On the red flag side, technician turnover is high on his list, meaning lots of attrition and techs who haven’t been around long. Licensing and compliance come next, especially termite paperwork, which has to follow state department of agriculture rules. When the due diligence numbers don’t line up, his team digs harder.

Know your monthly cancellation rate

Dave watches 2 retention numbers. One is how long the average customer stays, which feeds your lifetime value. He cares even more about the monthly cancellation rate, measured against your recurring base.

Say you’re a $1M company with $1M in recurring services. If you cancel $15,000 of annual contracts in a month, that’s 1.5%, which Dave calls average and pretty good for general pest. A good rate for termite and bait stations is under 1%. Lawn, which Certus also does, runs about 1.8% to 1.9%.

Some door-to-door companies run 3% or 4%. To Dave those are big red flags, though he says it comes with door knocking and tends to settle down after a customer’s first anniversary.

People drive this number. About 60% of a pest control company’s costs are people and labor, and Dave sees a direct correlation between employee turnover and customer retention. When Chris Anderson of Applause was on the show, he told me that after about a year on Applause, Certus’s employee attrition fell roughly 10 points and its customer retention rose about 5. If cancellations aren’t on your weekly scorecard yet, Jonas Olson’s guide to pest control KPIs shows how he watches them.

A $1M owner and a $100M CEO answer to the same number

Dave has said his job is to increase shareholder value, so I asked what that means for a regular owner. It’s pretty simple, he said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a mom and pop, right? A million dollar sole proprietor in a single branch or us with 25 branches and 100 million. It’s all about cash flow.”

The more free cash flow you have, the more the business is worth, whether that cash goes back in or into your pocket.

To grow it, Dave wants top-line growth and a close eye on costs. Gas, materials and technicians grow with revenue. With fixed costs, you decide when to bite the bullet, whether that’s an in-house bookkeeper somewhere between $5M and $10M, new software or a second branch.

Merchant fees and marketing are where Dave looks first

I asked what companies waste money on. Dave named 2 things he looks at right after buying a business.

He started with credit card fees. If you’re still mailing invoices instead of keeping a card on file, he highly recommends switching, because your life will be a lot easier. Merchant services fees are a bit of a black box, though. Once you’re running a lot through cards, you have room to negotiate, and you’ll get better rates if you understand how the fees work.

On marketing, he doesn’t think owners are overspending. SEO, SEM, LSAs and now AI are complicated (the week before we recorded, OpenAI announced it would start selling ads), and you need people who really understand them. When Certus hired Juan in 2023, it was using an outside firm and wasn’t doing what it should have with LSAs. Juan made a huge impact right away, and LSAs are a staple now.

Dave stays flexible on channels, too. In 2025, Certus bought a phenomenal Las Vegas business that was killing it on Yelp, so Certus took Yelp to other markets. It doesn’t work everywhere, but it’s done pretty well where they’ve tried it. If something else takes off, they’ll move the money.

A great price doesn’t make a great fit

Across all his deals, Dave’s biggest lesson is cultural fit. He thinks private equity sometimes gets a bad rap with mom-and-pop owners, and while Certus’s capital comes from private equity, he sees it as a fully integrated strategic buyer, like a smaller Rollins. (Brent Agee of AXN Growth Partners walked me through how private equity works in his episode.)

After close to 10 years, he’s learned that not every company is a good fit, even when the price and the economics work.

“The organic growth rate may be great, but how that seller was managing and running the business, the expectations that that owner sets with their people, may be completely different than how we run our business.”

He told me about a Georgia business where none of the technicians ran their routes on a phone or iPad. Certus runs everything on the tech’s device, and some of those techs wouldn’t switch easily. Since customer attrition follows the people, that’s real risk after closing.

On deal structure, Dave starts by asking why the owner wants to sell instead of bringing a strict template. Some want to retire, some want to take chips off the table, and some want a partner with capital to grow faster. When Certus bought a San Jose, California, company in November, the owner had expertise Certus lacked, so he stayed on with a bigger role across Certus’s California business.

Pool service runs on the same playbook

Certus had just bought a $60M home service business, and I asked how that happens. Dave credited his team. Part of why Certus is based in Tampa is that his COO, VP of ops and heads of M&A, strategy, HR and integration all worked together at EPS. He says they’re one of the few teams to take a private-equity-backed rollup all the way to an exit.

Imperial also owned a pool service and repair company, National Pool Partners. Lead generation and routing work a lot like pest control, and Dave saw huge cross-selling potential, so he worked with Imperial to bring the pool business under Certus. The customer bases barely overlapped, but the territories did, and the pool company was already in Texas, a market Certus is really interested in. The deal closed January 2.

Dave admits they haven’t figured out cross-selling yet. The pool company had no outside sales force, while Certus’s sales team has posted year-over-year increases of more than 35% to 40% for 3 years in a row, most recently over 41%. Salespeople love having more to sell.

One back office, many brands

Every company Certus buys moves onto the same systems, including PestPac, payroll, HR, accounting and Power BI dashboards. Dave wants even the credit card tokens moved over fast, because more insight means better management.

Brand is a separate decision. Certus owns Las Vegas Pest Control, and Dave says they’re never giving up that name because the lead generation from owning it in Vegas is extremely powerful. The San Jose company is keeping its brand too.

My partner Jonas Olson has rebranded every company he’s bought at Pest Badger so far, though he says a name everyone in a market has known for 30 years may be worth keeping. Certus made exactly that call in Vegas.

Keep the end in mind

To wrap up, I asked what Dave wants owners to know. Keep the end in mind, he said. Do you want to hand the business to your kids, or grow it and sell it? If you plan to sell, learn what buyers pay top dollar for and move your business toward that template ahead of time.

“Every person you hire, every system you implement, every partner, whether it’s in-house marketing or outsource marketing, make sure it lines up to whatever your goal is and what you’re trying to achieve.”

Dave says he isn’t a founder himself, and he respects owners who turn one truck into something big. He firefights like everyone else, but a strong team lets him step back. “If everything has to go through me, we’re never going to be successful,” he said.

My take

I liked how fair Dave was to owners on marketing. He didn’t accuse anyone of overspending, and he admitted Certus itself wasn’t getting what it should from Local Service Ads before Juan. I told Dave that the consensus I’m hearing from top home service owners and marketers is that you have to be doing everything now and testing as you go, the way Certus did with Yelp.

Las Vegas Pest Control says a lot about search. Certus moves every company onto one software stack, but it won’t touch a name that brings in leads on its own. A name that matches what people type into Google is a real asset, which is why I tell new owners to think about search when they pick a business name.

Plenty of owners are still stuck in the truck, and I told Dave that even an hour a day spent thinking about what you want to build could be super powerful. If an exit is the goal, start with Jonas’s conversation with Nick Bartolo on what your business is really worth.

Where to find Dave

Dave is happy to talk with owners of any size, even if it never leads to a deal. He’s open about what he thinks is valuable, too, and has told owners who weren’t doing bait stations that they need to, because it’s highly profitable.

• Website: Certus Pest
• LinkedIn: Dave Bradford