Jeff Davenport on building Official Pest Prevention and starting over with Prize Pest Control

In 1998, Jeff Davenport set out to sell 1,000 pest control accounts door-to-door in Nashville, and he got there in about 4 months. He was selling Terminix service at around $36 a month.

Two years later, Jeff and his brother Jamie started Official Pest Prevention in the Sacramento area. They grew it past $20M a year and more than 170 employees, sold it to Anticimex, and Jeff is now building Prize Pest Control in the Dallas area.

Before we recorded, I’d just watched Jeff on Jonas Olson’s podcast. Jonas’s write-up of that interview covers Jeff’s switch to online leads and what keeps customers from canceling. I spent more of our time on how Official hired and grew, and on why starting over has been harder than he expected.

Who is Jeff Davenport?

Jeff Davenport co-founded Official Pest Prevention and is the founder of Prize Pest Control, which he runs with his two brothers. He found the industry at Brigham Young University in 1990, where a good friend had made $28,000 in 4 months selling pest control. Some families earned that much in a year back then, Jeff says.

His first summer, 1994 in San Jose with Eclipse Marketing, he sold 300 accounts and was one of the company’s top reps. Back at school, he met a couple of SalesNet reps who had sold around 480, and from then on he raised his goal every summer.

In 1999, Jeff and his brother sold in New Orleans, and the branch manager there credited them for his branch’s growth. That got them thinking about a company of their own. They picked Sacramento and knocked their first doors in Tracy, California, in April 2000, when Jeff was 28. Their brother John later joined as a partner, with Jeff on sales and marketing, Jamie on finance and John running Fresno.

Sales is a lagging indicator

Jeff’s 1,000 goal came from simple math. In Charlotte the summer before, he’d averaged a little over 7 sales a day. Four months with every Saturday is roughly 100 days, so he figured he could average over 10.

He says his approach wasn’t sophisticated, just tenacious. He made it hard to shut the door on him and was good at pulling people into a conversation.

“Sales is a lagging indicator. If you’re knocking enough doors, if you’re saying the right things, if you’re putting in enough hours, sales will come.”

So he set goals around the work. He counted doors knocked, people who talked to him, full presentations and closes. For every full presentation he drew a house and a 3-step service plan, then wrote a regular price and scratched it out for the discount. He’d finish each day comparing his pile of drawings to his contracts.

Later he added a mini inspection, setting his notebook down where he wanted to sit, walking the property and coming back to that seat to close.

Official ran one play for years

In Official’s first 2 years, nearly everything the brothers made went to paying reps while they lived off savings. So they went back to knocking doors themselves and recruited locally. Jeff compares Official to a football team that only runs up the middle. They had one play, and he thinks they ran it well. Accounts came in 4, 5 or 10 to a street, the kind of route density that helps a ton.

Reps sold much better with an owner beside them, so one brother ran the office while the other drove them out and knocked across the street.

One rep sold for them year-round for 12 or 13 years, after not working out as a tech or in the office. He earned commission on first-year sales plus a back end on every customer who stayed, building a book of business like an insurance agent. Top reps took a company vehicle home, too, because Official wanted leaving to be hard.

Make hiring a two-month interview

California takes about 60 days to license a new hire, salespeople included, so Official became what Jeff called a mini licensing factory. New hires were paid to attend a class on Zoom once or twice a week, often while still working another job, and Official covered their licensing fees. It started as test prep and grew into a little academy that also covered values and how to succeed in a service business.

It worked almost like a two-month-long interview. Normally you put someone in a truck and find out 2 or 3 months later that it isn’t working. In class, Jeff could see who was motivated to be there, and anyone who couldn’t hack the course wasn’t going to make it in the field. People who passed the exam kept coming to class and waited on deck, so Official could fill openings fast. They came out of the academy by performance, not always first in, first out.

The class fed Official’s management, too. Most of its successful managers started in entry-level jobs, and the academy helped Jeff spot people who could take on more. Outside hires have been harder for him to make work.

“Usually companies safeguard and protect and want to keep their star players. So if somebody’s available, it didn’t work out where they were before, and it often will not work out with you.”

Termite took off once someone owned it

Jeff thinks every pest control company needs money, brains and muscle. Even bootstrapping takes some cash, someone has to plan and lead, and a lot of the work is repetitive grind, like answering the phone and opening the door. He calls pest control a “get-rich slow business.” One person can bring all 3, but each department needs them from somewhere.

Official learned this when it launched termite and turf at the same time. California’s termite liability had always made them cautious, until a man bidding on a contract with California’s prison system offered to teach them termite work if Official handled the wildlife trapping on that contract.

Then they hired a former Terminix sales manager who knew termite sales. From his first month, he sold around $40,000 a month in termite work to existing customers. He also helped with the construction side, since a California termite job includes fixing any dry rot the inspection calls out. Termite grew from a few jobs a month to enough that they were training new inspectors.

Turf had no expert and no one responsible for its growth every day. They paused it and put more into termite.

Existing customers can take a price increase

The Anticimex offer came in October 2021, and the deal closed about 60 days later. The brothers ran it for one more year to hit sales benchmarks, and Jeff enjoyed seeing how Anticimex and its other platforms operated. His new boss tied price to pay. If your people want a premium wage, you have to deliver a premium service that supports a premium price.

Official had raised prices on new customers but rarely on existing ones. That January 1, existing customers went up about 15%, with very little fallout. Jeff credits inertia and the fact they’d rarely done it. They were still well priced, too. Jonas wrote up how he raised prices after an acquisition if you want a step-by-step version.

Jeff also wishes he’d gone looking for acquisitions. Small 1 to 3 route companies often sell fast once the owner is ready, and a slightly bigger company can absorb them. PCM’s guide to buying a pest control company covers how to find those deals.

Starting over is harder when nobody needs the money

Jeff ran Official for 23 years and thought he’d run it forever, so letting it go was really hard. He and his brothers started Prize to keep building and apply what they’d learned.

It’s been bumpier than rerunning a playbook. At Official, everything they had was in the company, and if it came to it, they’d have gone back to knocking doors. Jeff paraphrased an Alex Hormozi line about putting in so much effort that failure becomes impossible and said that’s how they ran Official. At Prize, none of them necessarily needs the money.

“When we get angry with each other, all of us could just say, ‘I’m out. Bye.’”

Three owners means six hands on the wheel, and they’re still figuring out how to make room for everyone. Hiring has been harder, too. After thousands of interviews in Sacramento, Jeff could recognize what he was looking for there, and in Dallas they’re still learning who works out. Prize has grown well anyway. Rather than build it up to sell again, they want an organization they’re proud of.

Leads all year instead of a summer surge

Prize has no door-to-door reps. Marketing generates leads, a call center sells them and service takes over. On a small scale, Prize now runs that system for other companies too. It generates leads in their zip codes, sells them and drops the appointments into the host’s CRM, whether that’s PestPac, FieldRoutes or GorillaDesk. The host does the service and pays Prize for each account. Jeff pitched it as something like 20 accounts a month all year, for owners who’d rather skip the summer surge. He thinks customers who called in may stay a little longer on average, though it varies a lot.

The waterfall isn’t the point

At Official, they rarely celebrated a goal before chasing the next one. Eventually, Jeff said, you realize you’ll probably make more money than you can spend, and you have to ask what it’s for. He compared it to a hike with friends. You reach the waterfall, eat lunch, walk back talking and stop for food on the drive home.

“The value in that experience is the whole thing, right? It’s not the waterfall that you were trying to get to.”

He’s glad he sold. The way he worked took a toll on his family, and he could picture himself giving everything to Official and selling at 80 with not much left. Selling didn’t make him a different person, though. He used to blame his stress and irritability on the job, then found the same flaws after it was gone. When a CEO in his Vistage group said he’d finally lose weight once his company sold, Jeff chuckled. He’d already sold his. Your flaws, he said, carry through beyond the company.

My take

When Jeff finished the hike story, I told him the phrase ringing in my head was “cherish everything.” People chasing 8 or 9 figures tend to go nonstop, with no reflecting and no looking back. I think you can keep that drive and still find some balance, and some of the days that hurt most are the ones you learn the most from. Like Tony Carder, Jeff sold a big company and started over, and he was honest that the sale didn’t settle everything.

His call-center program is the closest thing in this episode to my own work. Every account it sells starts with a homeowner who went looking for help, and for a local company that search usually lands on a Google Business Profile or a Local Service Ad. Built well, that inbound flow works a lot like Jeff’s 20 accounts a month, steady all year as long as you keep feeding it.

Where to find Jeff

Jeff is on Facebook quite a bit and on LinkedIn. Several owners reached out after his interview with Jonas, and he’s happy to trade messages, since he figures he’ll learn something too. For the call-center program, contact Prize Pest Control.

• Website: Prize Pest Control
• LinkedIn: Jeff Davenport
• Facebook: Jeff Davenport