Jake Sheldon on strategic partnerships, standout offers and getting more pest control leads

Jake Sheldon did some quick math for me on this episode. A bigger moving company might do 10 moves a day. If it’s your referral partner, that’s about 250 cards a month with your pest control company’s name on them, handed to families by the movers who just got them into a new house.

Jake is my partner in Pest Control Millionaires, and he brings up strategic partnerships in our program literally every week. They’re the first thing he sets up in any service business he gets into.

This was my third interview with him. The first was on Local Marketing Secrets more than a year earlier, and the second was our Facebook ads episode, which kicked off Pest Control Legends. We recorded this one in person, while we were filming content for the program and getting ready to launch Zip Code Kings, the book Jake, Jonas Olson and I co-wrote.

Who is Jake Sheldon?

Pest Control Millionaires started with Jake Sheldon. Years ago, through his old marketing agency, he ran a class that taught pest control owners how to generate leads online, follow up and automate. It met in person at first, then moved to Zoom and stayed there once COVID hit.

Jake met Jonas Olson back when Jonas’s company was still small (Jake thinks Jonas was still teching), and Jonas was asking him for Facebook ads pointers. After Jake sold the agency, he asked Jonas to teach what he knew, and the class became Pest Control Millionaires. They brought me in later for SEO, and we call ourselves the trifecta.

The agency, Pest Customers Fast, mainly ran Facebook ads and had over 300 pest control clients when Jake sold it. He has also sold a pest control company for over $1M and runs a virtual staffing company. His equity stakes include 2 pest control companies and a moving company.

A handshake isn’t a partnership

A strategic partnership is two businesses sending each other referrals. A lot of service owners leave it at a handshake. Jake was in a BNI group back when he had a pest control company in Kansas City, and he says those groups do bring in referrals, just very slowly.

He’d start with a lawn care company, since it serves the same customers you’re after, and he’d put the deal on paper.

“You’re going to put an actual agreement together, not a handshake agreement, a physical copy of an agreement together that says you guys are going to share business back and forth to each other.”

Then the partner texts its customers. Say ABC Lawn Care has 2,000 of them. The text says they just partnered with your company, and anyone dealing with bugs can text back “pest” to get connected. Jake has run this with dozens and dozens of companies, and he says 5% to 15% of people commonly reply. At 10%, one list hands you 200 leads.

Spread those texts over a week or two so your office is ready. Jake learned that the hard way, when a lawn care partner with over 4,000 customers texted the whole list in one day. Hundreds of people wanted service and he had 3 techs. Jake had to jump in a truck himself, and some customers waited a few weeks for their first service. It almost ruined the partnership. His PCM guide to strategic partnerships goes further, including how to pitch a bigger partner and track referrals.

Movers earn the trust for you

Movers are the other partner Jake highly recommends. Instead of a text, he gives the mover a mailer-sized card with a promotion for them to hand their customers.

People who just moved into a clean new house want it to look nice, and the last thing they want is spiders, scorpions or mice running around. So the movers mention they partner with a local pest control company that takes care of all their move-ins, and anyone who says the mover sent them gets a discount. Put a tracking number on the card so you know where each call came from.

Jake likes this partnership so much because by then the movers have spent hours with that family and built real trust.

Referrals can run the other way too. When a customer cancels because they’re moving from Florida to California, that’s a $10,000 to $20,000 job for the mover. Jake says a 10% referral fee is common, so he negotiates for at least that. One $20,000 move earns you $2,000, like income from a side hustle.

Skip the $50 off

Not long before we recorded, Jake showed me the ad account for his Christmas lights company, which was getting leads for something like $1, so I asked what makes a great offer. Jake’s answer was to be different.

When he started his first pest control company, everyone he saw on Nextdoor, Facebook and Google was offering $50 off or $100 off. Jake was charging full price for the initial, and one of his mentors told him to try $67 for a month, as long as the customer signed up for the rest of the year.

Jake thought it was a horrible idea that would wreck the market. He tried it anyway and got a flood of leads, and the offer worked for years. (Back on episode 1, he explained why he was fine losing money on that initial.)

A more recent one was Jonas’s idea. New customers who signed up for general pest got 2 free mosquito services, while the initial and the yearly plan stayed at regular price.

“Do something different that no one else in town is doing and be willing to do something that other companies aren’t and you’ll get leads.”

Once other companies in town copy an offer, it stops working. That happened to one owner who went through our program, so he switched to a big gift giveaway and people started responding again.

Dan Antonelli applies the same idea to branding. When I interviewed him on Local Marketing Secrets, he told me he checks the colors a client’s big competitors use and stays away from them. Even if your offer is worth less than $50 off, I think being the different one is attractive all by itself.

A great offer still needs a closer

Jake says there’s a science to running an offer. The copywriting and the image or video both have to be done well, and the follow-up has to be fast. Then you need the right person on the phone, someone who knows sales psychology, because they’ll close a higher percentage. Otherwise you’re just wasting money, and that goes for mailers and door hangers as much as ads.

As I said to Jake, that’s where a lot of owners mess up. You almost have to know a little about everything, including sales, closing, your CRM and teching. If closing is your weak spot, I covered some basics in how to sell pest control.

Know you’ll hit 7 figures before you do

Jake doesn’t claim to have cracked the code on million-dollar companies, but he’s around people who have. He talks to Jonas every day, and the partners in his other companies have made 8-figure acquisitions, so I asked what owners at that level do differently.

First is what they believe is possible. Owners who haven’t broken 7 figures usually have a limiting belief about it. When Jake’s company had its first 6-figure month, a 7-figure run rate, it didn’t blow his mind, because he’d been thinking about it for a long time. Jonas made a similar case for thinking bigger when he came on the show.

Next is the team, which Jake says he couldn’t have done any of this without. Then he added marketing, because every 8- and 9-figure entrepreneur he knows has gotten great at it.

He hires for mindset, too. Most owners want a tech with years in the industry who knows bugs inside and out, but some of Jake’s best techs are just the right culture fit. He wants people who are hungry and moldable, and he passes on anyone prideful who thinks they know everything.

Give equity in slices

On one of our weekly program calls, an owner asked whether he should give equity to a door-to-door rep or a manager. Plenty of owners never would, Jake said, and that’s fine.

He’d use it to fill a gap. Picture someone who worked for Orkin for 30 years, a fantastic tech and manager with no idea how to get leads or sell. That owner should give equity to someone who has proven they can sell. Jake would vest it (not financial advice, he added), starting around 5% to 10% instead of 20% or 30% up front, and giving more as they hit set markers.

Every equity deal Jake has taken works that way. He does the work for free, brings his team in for free and earns more of the company as he proves himself.

“Hey, if I don’t add on XYZ amount of revenue and bring this kind of value to the company, you don’t owe me any equity.”

To use a made-up number, if he doesn’t put on $500,000 in revenue, he doesn’t get that equity. The owner takes on basically no risk.

Build like a buyer will read your SOPs

We’ve both seen owners hit $50K a month and go buy the nice car. Jake keeps asking himself whether he’s building something worth selling. Building to sell keeps your systems and your team where they need to be, even if you never sell.

He compares it to teaching. You learn something faster when you know you’ll have to teach it.

“Someone’s going to be looking at my books or … looking at my SOPs. Well, it’s going to have to be good if they’re going to be looking at them.”

If your plan is to hand it to your kid someday, you don’t think that way. To see it through a buyer’s eyes, read what Paul Giannamore said makes a premium company when he came on.

My take

On the show I admitted that SEO can be a hard pitch. If you’ve barely done any, it can take 6 months to see real results and up to 12 to see a return on it. You should still build a Google Business Profile and website that rank, but you have to pay the bills in the meantime. Partnerships, referral campaigns, upsells and price increases pay you back right away, which is why the program starts there.

Partnerships work because of trust. In every kind of deal I’ve seen, and especially the higher-ticket ones, the more trust there is, the more likely you are to close. A homeowner who has loved the same lawn care tech for 10 years doesn’t need much convincing when that company recommends you, as long as the lawn care company has a good name.

Jake closed with 3 things for owners. Take care of your customers, take care of your team (maybe even first) and learn marketing, because you can never know enough. To me it all comes back to people, whether that’s partners, employees, customers or family. I told Jake that’s where you find success, and you get fulfillment along with it.

Where to find Jake

Jake goes by his own name on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, and he told me he’d be posting a lot more of this material on Instagram.

• YouTube: @jakesheldonPCM
• Facebook: Jake Sheldon
• LinkedIn: Jake Sheldon
• Instagram: @jakesheldon25
• Pest Control Millionaires: Jake’s bio on PCM