Jared LaJaunie on taking 9 years to reach $1M, then growing LaJaunie's Pest Control past $12M

On January 1, 2008, Jared LaJaunie cashed in the 401(k) he’d built up at Orkin, bought a truck and some product, and started LaJaunie’s Pest Control. He hoped to sign 100 customers at $20 a month. That would bring in $2,000 a month, and he told his wife they’d be okay.

It took 9 years to reach $1M. When we recorded, 18 years in, Jared expected to finish the year at $12M to $13M. He calls himself a slow learner, but once he figured it out, they ran with it pretty quick.

We met at PestWorld in Orlando, at the Pest House Allan Draper put together, and talked for about an hour. After that I knew I had to get him on the show.

Who is Jared LaJaunie?

Jared LaJaunie is the founder and CEO of LaJaunie’s Pest Control, a multi-location Gulf Coast company with dozens of trucks. He and his wife, Skye, founded it in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and today it serves much of South Louisiana, including New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houma and Slidell.

He got into pest control at 19, already married with a child and a house. Orkin hired him as a termite technician for $10 an hour, and over about 8 years he worked his way up to branch manager. Then he spent a year or two leading a small family company doing about $3M. He couldn’t get along with a son-in-law in the family business, nothing changed when he took it to the owner, and he went out on his own. He’s thankful for that conflict now. Jared told my partner Jonas Olson more about those years on the Pest Control Millionaires podcast.

He went where his competitors weren’t

Jared started in a rural market where the smaller local companies had no websites, still ran yellow pages ads and weren’t on social media. For his first 2 or 3 years, nobody else in town was using Facebook or digital ads the way he was, and it let him grab a lot of market share early.

He also went after termite pre-treats. In Louisiana, he explained, every new house has to have its slab pre-treated, so he’d stop wherever a house was going up and call every contractor he could find. He did those jobs at about break even. The money came later, from termite renewals and the chance to sell the homeowner pest control.

Get out of the bubble

At about $1M, Jared joined a mastermind where Donnie Shelton of Triangle Pest Control became a real mentor. Every 6 months or so, he flew to North Carolina to sit with companies doing much better than his.

Until then, he’d been in a bubble, with one branch in Thibodaux, the town he’s from, running the model everybody had used for 30 or 40 years. The mastermind taught him to sell pest control over the phone with an inside sales team, build a sales funnel, track KPIs and decide from data instead of whatever he felt like that day.

Pest control used to be a monthly service, and the group got him to switch to quarterly service with monthly autopay before it was cool. Today LaJaunie’s won’t take a customer without a credit card on file, billed on the 1st or the 15th. Jared says that one decision changed his whole business because of what it did for cash flow.

Seeing people in the group do big things made him believe more was possible, and it got him thinking about getting off the route. He also moved to New Orleans and changed who he spends time with. Almost everyone in his close circle today runs a business, and most of those businesses are bigger than his.

A 2-week ride-along isn’t training

The systems he brought home weren’t fancy. He started using Bill.com for accounts payable, moved payroll from weekly to biweekly, wrote SOPs and set an exact way to hire and fire. Every service the company does got filmed and turned into training.

Before that, a new hire rode along for 2 weeks and heard, “Okay, go kill bugs, man.” That’s how Jared had been trained, and he made it, so he got upset when it didn’t work out for them. Now training takes about a month and keeps going after that.

Hiring got stricter too, with reference checks, credit checks, DISC personality tests and multiple interviews. Jared still figures any hire is a 50/50 shot, so they’ll often hire 2 people for one opening. It’s rare for both to work out, and when they do, the company finds a place for the second. Early on he kept the wrong people too long, family and friends included. Now he usually knows within a month.

Most ceilings are in the owner’s head

Jared and Skye wanted other owners to get what he got from a mastermind, so Skye and a co-founder started Eagle’s Nest, with a goal of 100 joyful entrepreneurs. Each month 7 or 8 members fly in, rent a big house with a private chef and go through every detail of their businesses. Then they set goals and answer for them on a monthly call.

The problems members bring are nearly all mindset, Jared said. Almost every owner is a great tech, and that pride keeps them on the route because nobody else can run it as well. Maybe that’s true, he tells them, but then you’ll be running it forever. Jonas starts with that same trap when he lays out the 4 points where pest control companies stall.

The other big one is belief. Tell a lot of owners they can run a $10M company, and they say they’d be happy at $3M.

“You do want to have a $10 million company. You just don’t believe in yourself enough, or you don’t have enough self-worth in yourself to believe that you even deserve to have a $10 million company.”

It happened to Jared, too. When he was doing $6M or $7M, he heard a conference speaker whose company was at $100M. They’d started at the same time, and the speaker had no advantages Jared didn’t have. But he believed on his first day that he’d build a $100M company and ran every decision through it. Jared’s first-day goal was that $2,000 a month. Today he believes he could get to $100M, and he says believing it makes a big difference.

Sometimes one shift is enough. A member who hated selling so much he didn’t want to answer the phone spent a weekend learning to see himself as a data-driven consultant instead of a relationship salesman. He went home and sold $20,000 in a week.

Look at your numbers every month

Plenty of owners Jared meets don’t look at their finances regularly, and some could be doing $1M a year without making money and not know it. When they finally go through their P&L in detail, other members who are good with numbers can spot right away that payroll, chemical or fuel is running high.

Jared admits he’s not the financial guy, and Skye works in the company with him. The day we recorded happened to be numbers day at Eagle’s Nest, and since it’s not his favorite day, he skipped it.

He still knows what to check. Start with profit, compare fuel, chemical, payroll and software to industry averages, and meet with your accountant every month. He also sees a lot of owners paying a personal phone bill, truck note or vacation out of the business account. Separate accounts give you cleaner numbers to make decisions from.

Go home and raise your prices

Eagle’s Nest walks owners through when to raise prices, how much and on whom. “But most of all,” Jared said, “go home and raise your freaking prices.”

Owners resist because they feel loyal to customers who helped build the company, and because they’re afraid those customers will cancel. Jared sees an increase as a favor to customers, since the cheapest guy out there can’t keep using the best products and hiring the best people. You lose fewer customers than you think, the increase more than covers them, and the ones who leave were usually the biggest pains anyway.

I told Jared I’d heard the same from Jonas and other top owners. Raising prices on the customers you already have is about the easiest growth there is, and Jonas showed how he took customers from $50 to $129.

You can’t grow and hunt for 3 months

LaJaunie’s runs pay-per-click, Local Service Ads, social media, mailers, billboards and wrapped trucks, and digital brings in the most leads. In slow stretches, the inside sales team cold calls. They offer termite service to pest customers and pest control to termite customers, and they set appointments with restaurants, hotels and daycares for the outside sales team.

A lot of Eagle’s Nest members in cold climates shut down for the winter. Jared tells them they can operate all winter long. Keep customers on year-round quarterly service, or triannual, which he calls super profitable if you can pull it off. In winter a tech can dust weep holes, brush webs, inspect, do an interior service or treat the attic, and since the customer is on autopay, you still get paid. PCM has a full guide to keeping your pest control business busy in the winter.

There’s nothing wrong with taking the season off if you’re happy where you are, Jared said. Just be honest about it.

“Don’t tell me you want your company to grow and you want to hunt for three months out of the year. One of them is a lie.”

Where it’s cold 4 or 5 months a year, he suggests adding wildlife, with a warning. He calls LaJaunie’s own wildlife department “10% of my revenue and 90% of my headaches.” Pest control can run like McDonald’s, with the same Big Mac everywhere, but every wildlife job is different. A customer who spends $4,000 or $5,000 wants one visit and never to see a mouse again. Techs work in attics and on roofs, and training one takes at least 6 months.

My take

Jared told me he learned more in 3 or 4 hours at the Pest House than from anything else at PestWorld. I had the same experience. At my first PestWorld, in 2024, I went to as many sessions as I could and was mostly bored. This time I didn’t go to a single session and got far more out of it, because I spent the time around owners like Jared.

I’d also point owners back to how Jared started. In 2008 he beat his local competitors online, and 18 years later digital still brings in most of his leads. In plenty of smaller towns, an owner can still get that kind of head start with a Google Business Profile that keeps collecting reviews and a website built around the towns they serve. Like his pre-treats, that work keeps paying for years.

On the show I said belief has to come before the result. When Jared told me he believes he could build a $100M company, I told him I think he will.

Where to find Jared

Jared pointed people to Facebook first, and he says that if you Google his name, he’ll come up in a lot of places. If you want to be inspired and work on your business with other entrepreneurs, he and Skye would love to have you in Eagle’s Nest.

• Website: LaJaunie’s Pest Control
• Facebook: Jared LaJaunie
• LinkedIn: Jared LaJaunie