Eric Bassett on becoming an owner advisor, scoring sales calls and promoting from within

I asked Eric Bassett whether Natura Pest Control hires its leaders from inside or outside. Partway through his answer, he stopped to think and realized Natura has never hired from outside for a leadership position. When it needed a general manager, it promoted its service manager.

Eric first came on my other show, Local Marketing Secrets, in May 2024. Before we hit record this time, he told me so much had changed in 12 to 18 months. Besides the new GM, Natura had a new customer service manager, a new service manager and about 75% new staff on its customer service and inbound sales team. That GM promotion let Eric step back into an advisor role, so we started there.

Who is Eric Bassett?

Eric Bassett is co-owner and vice president of Natura Pest Control, which serves Vancouver, Washington, and the greater Portland area. He has been in pest control for over 18 years, is an Associate Certified Entomologist (ACE) and specializes in sales, marketing, organizational development and systems. He’s a big reason Natura is one of the most respected pest control companies in the Pacific Northwest.

His sister Jana and her husband, Jake Claus, founded Natura, and Eric joined them in 2018. He has also co-hosted the podcast for Bug Bux, the owner community Allan Draper founded, and he coaches and consults with other owners.

This Natura is a separate company from the Natura Greg Young runs in Nevada and Idaho. Greg’s group partnered with Jake and Jana in Vancouver for a while before they split ways in 2017.

Stop being the person every department reports to

At Bug Bux Con in March 2025, Eric spoke about moving from owner operator to owner advisor. He’d like to take credit for the idea, but he figures someone must have thought of it first.

Early on, you’re the finance guy, the marketing guy, the sales guy and the technician. Eventually you hand those jobs off, but everyone still reports to you directly, so every sales problem and tech question lands on your desk. It’s really hard to spend time in quadrant 2, on what’s important but not urgent.

“When you’re an owner operator, the business relies on you. It relies on your involvement. You pull your involvement out of the business, things don’t move forward.”

An owner advisor builds a team of high-level managers who operate the company and meets with them at least once a week. Each manager walks through their department’s performance metrics, so the conversation starts from unbiased data. Eric asks what’s going well, what could improve, what the action plan is and how he can help. Then he lets them execute without micromanaging.

That frees him up for bigger questions, like whether to acquire other businesses or invest in other kinds of marketing. Jake told my partner Jonas Olson that promoting their GM is part of how he and Jana stepped back from the daily grind.

Any system works if you meet every week

Natura runs on 4DX, from the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, and Eric also recommends Traction, the book behind EOS. He guesses only about 20% of people run a system exactly the way the book says. What matters most is having one, plus a process and a cadence.

Natura’s cadence is weekly. The GM meets with the service manager and office manager, and they meet with their own people. Every meeting follows a development format Eric created. It starts with how the person is doing, because he wants them to know he cares about them as a person, not just as an employee. Then come their wins, their areas of opportunity and an action plan.

The employee writes the action plan, and it has to be built on lead measures. Closing rate is a lag measure. Asking the right questions on a sales call is a lead measure, the behavior that moves it. If the system isn’t discussed every single week, Eric says, the whole thing falls apart.

Hire your first manager as soon as you can

When I asked about timing, Eric admitted “as soon as you can” is a weird way to put it, then explained the trade-off. Solo operators have awesome profit margins, and every hire comes out of profit before the new accounts show up. Scaling is expensive.

If you want to grow anyway, replace yourself where you spend the most time, usually the technician seat, then add a part-time admin or VA, because a ringing phone is quadrant 1 work. As departments grow, they need more leadership than you have time to give, and owners resist handing it over. As Jake likes to say, they keep things within arm’s reach.

“It feels awkward and foreign to let that go and to give over that responsibility to somebody else. But the business will not move forward unless you take the leap and do it.”

Once a tech team hits about 5, Eric might name a lead technician who wants the job, hand over pieces of it, and watch whether he can deliver bad news and hold the standard when it’s unpopular. In the office, he starts looking for a lead once there are 3 or 4 people. Natura had about 6 or 7 office staff and 15 technicians before it put a GM over the service and office managers.

Good managers are organized and can read people. Some employees want a raise, some want acknowledgement and some want more responsibility. Ask any parent whether they raise every kid the same way, Eric said.

Look for future leaders in the first interview

Eric starts scouting in the first interview by asking technician candidates what other roles interest them. Some just need a side job while they’re in school, and that’s fine. Others want to be a manager or even a director of marketing someday, and Eric writes it down. Promoting from within shows you care about the talent you have, and those people already have a stake in the company’s success.

Entry-level hiring starts inside too. Before posting on Indeed, Natura asks the team for friends and family who’d fit. At one point about 90% of its workforce came in as employee referrals, and Natura pays referral bonuses when a hire reaches 6 months and 12 months.

Grade your calls out of 100

When I asked what he’s learned from the owners he works with, Eric said many don’t have a set cadence of accountability or any formal process for developing employees. Without performance metrics, you hear about a problem from a coworker or a bad review, and by then that person probably hasn’t been doing a good job for a long time.

So Natura reverse engineered its sales process into a call quality scorecard. Managers listen to calls and grade them like a test, with 4 categories of 5 subcategories each, scored 1 to 5, for 100 points. A 100 usually means a fantastic customer experience. A C might let a rep skate by, and a D or below means the rep is hurting it. Technicians get service quality scorecards, built from on-site visits by the service manager, customer conversations and audits of past services.

The weekly meetings put the scores to work. A salesperson who closes well but falls behind on callbacks might commit to calling every lead back before leaving each day. A tech who never asks for reviews because nobody’s home could start texting customers a review link after the service. If you’re not sure what to measure, Jonas lays out the pest control KPIs Pest Badger tracks.

When every employee is improving something every week, so is the business. Without that process, Eric says, you’re holding steady at best, and usually sliding back a little each week until something alarms you. Nothing drives him crazier than asking why someone quit and hearing “I don’t know.” His managers can usually give him the whole history and tell him whether it’s a “won’t” or a “can’t.”

“If you don’t have that in place, you have no information. And when you don’t have any information, you have no direction.”

Tell callers when they’re talking to AI

Eric joked that if he had a dollar for every AI question, he’d never have to worry about business again. I told him same here.

He has interviewed plenty of AI platforms, and lead management is one of the uses he likes most. A new prospect won’t leave a message. They’ll call the next company, which probably has AI answering. In his opinion, text is a little ahead of voice, and any AI on his phones has to hit the same quality metrics his people do. Some tools are also starting to grade calls in real time, a job that takes one of his managers about 30 minutes.

I told him the top people in the space are still saying human first, with a robot answering only when a human really can’t. Eric added a rule I agree with.

“Don’t try to pull a fast one and convince somebody that they’re talking to a real person when they’re actually talking to AI.”

His AI would introduce itself as an AI assistant and let callers press one for a real person. Otherwise people start wondering if your company is even local.

Your marketing partner should see the next LSA coming

If you do nothing else with AI, Eric said, make sure your marketing partner is up to speed on what it’s doing to marketing. He gave Mat Rogers and his team at Lizard Marketing credit for a great year on Natura’s marketing. He also shared the video Mat and I made together when it came out.

Right before Local Service Ads launched, Eric’s account manager at the marketing company he used back then wanted to sign him up early. He asked if the background check and everything else was worth the trouble, and she said they just had to try it. For a while they got a high volume of high-quality, low-cost leads, until everybody else caught on.

My take

Most of my work happens before anyone picks up the phone. A Google Business Profile or Local Service Ads account can make it ring, but the person answering decides whether the call becomes a booked job. A 100-point scorecard tells an owner which part of the call is losing jobs, which a closing rate alone can’t do.

I admitted on the show that I’m a little sick of AI talk, even though I’m supposed to be the young guy everyone asks about it. Eric covered nearly all of it in a few minutes. His LSA story is a good argument for paying attention anyway, because whoever spots the next channel first gets the cheap leads while they last.

Eric’s message to the industry was that it’s always you versus you. Look at what other owners are doing and ask for advice, but measure yourself against yesterday. He also told owners not to be afraid to share a trade secret now and then, because it probably isn’t one, and the industry is better when we talk about what works. I see it the same way.

Where to find Eric

Eric answers Facebook messages quickly and is happy to field questions, and you’ve probably seen him in the pest control Facebook groups. He also consults, one-time or ongoing, on the systems and team building we covered.

• Website: naturapestcontrol.com
• Instagram: @iamericbassett
• Facebook: Eric Bassett
• LinkedIn: Eric Bassett, ACE