Jeff Stafford on 40 years of commercial pest control, bird netting and bed bug dogs

Jeff Stafford, now president of Innovative Pest Solutions, had a young family and $1,500 in the bank when his mentor, Bob Keith, called with good news and bad news. Jeff’s test date for his operator’s license had come through. But the company’s new owners knew he was taking it, so Bob had to let him go.

With his boats burned, as Jeff put it, he studied like he’d never studied before, passed on the first try and started his own company in 1994. That company was almost all commercial, and so is Innovative, which now serves all of Southern California.

Most of the owners I talk to are mainly residential, so I learned a lot from this one.

Who is Jeff Stafford?

Jeff Stafford grew up around pest control and started in the field the day after his 18th birthday, more than 40 years ago, with his first child already on the way. He later worked for Bob Keith, who treated the technician sweating in the August heat as his first customer. Around 1989, Bob sold his company, then doing about $5M a year, to a buyer from Tokyo. After the sale, Jeff felt valued no more than the service vehicle.

In 1994 he launched Bird Solutions International, which has since installed 1.2 million square feet of netting at SeaTac Airport and taken on jobs at the San Onofre nuclear plant, Pearl Harbor, Petco Park and Amazon distribution centers nationwide. Innovative, his pest control company, is family-run and built on faith and servant leadership.

Commercial is a necessity

Bob’s company was almost all commercial. When Jeff asked him why, Bob told him what happens when the economy gets tough.

“With residential, we’re a luxury. We’re the first to go. With commercial, we’re a necessity.”

In Jeff’s 40 years, that has held up. People point to COVID as proof of how resilient pest control is, but he thinks residential did well then because everybody was getting paid to stay home. In 2008, when people were losing their jobs, he saw some big residential companies get hurt pretty hard. Residential is more profitable, he admits. He went for stability.

COVID did knock Innovative’s bed bug work down from about $200,000 a month to about $30,000. Recurring revenue kept growing anyway, and disinfection work helped carry them through.

Don’t decide out of fear

His first company doubled every year, but Jeff was a technician with barely a high school education who didn’t know how to manage the money or the growth. In 1999 he sold it out of panic. When I asked what he’d tell his younger self, he started with “do not make decisions out of fear.” He felt alone on a boat back then, and now he has a team he trusts.

Debt is the mistake he warns new owners about most. A friend of his in the Midwest took that advice and has run on a cash basis since day one, and Jeff says it’s one of the most profitable companies he’s ever seen. Jeff’s own company is still working its way out of debt, and he wants it on a cash basis within 5 years.

Recurring revenue means you never start at zero

After 1999, he kept Bird Solutions and built it into a national name. But about 90% of Bird Solutions’ work is tied to construction, and every job is one and done. So when one of his old bosses was ready to leave Terminix, Jeff funded a new pest control company for him to build, which became Innovative.

A friend in bird control asked why he’d go back. Jeff told him that in bird control, they both start every January 1 at zero. If Jeff ends December 31 with $1M in recurring revenue, he starts January 1 with $1M and builds on top of it. That kind of revenue is also worth far more if he ever sells.

Years later Jeff split Bird Solutions back out of Innovative. The bird side had to keep paying installers between jobs, and payroll spiked on its prevailing-wage work, so a healthy Innovative looked weak on paper. On its own, Innovative now averages about a 65% gross margin.

Put the niche in the name

When I asked whether new owners should niche down, Jeff said that’s exactly what blew Innovative up.

Innovative floundered for its first 4 or 5 years. Then bed bugs started showing up in California. Jeff’s company had been one of the original heat companies back in the mid to late ’90s, and he’d been studying canines. He trained with Pepedogs in Florida, bought heat equipment and a dog named Leroy, and started Bed Bug Solutions. With Google marketing and a warranty that blew everybody out of the water, it was bringing in more revenue than his pest control company within 3 months.

He picked that name on purpose. Nobody knew his pest control company, and he was up against Orkin and Terminix. Picture an apartment building with bed bugs and 3 quotes on the desk.

“Bed Bug Solutions would stand out because it says right in the name they specialize in bed bugs.”

Property managers saw the program solve problems nobody else was solving, and Innovative started picking up portfolios. My partner Jonas Olson makes the same case for a name that tells people what you do.

A detection dog is a full-time job

Innovative now has 6 bed bug dogs, 3 rodent dogs and a termite dog cross-trained on bed bugs. A national company that was stumped at a major airport brought in the rodent dogs for a week and said it never would have found what they found.

Before anyone buys a dog, Jeff wants them to understand the responsibility.

“Most pest control companies that I’ve seen that try to get started into canine end up with a $15,000 to $20,000 pet because the dogs require a lot of work.”

Somebody has to care for the dog 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and your pay plan has to account for that. Most bed bug dogs are beagles that only eat as a reward, so someone runs training sessions twice a day, every day. Jeff tried handling a dog himself and found he couldn’t do it while taking calls. Dogs feed off your energy, and one having a bad day can give false alerts, so Innovative won’t call bed bugs until someone visually finds them.

Leroy loved to work. Their second dog would starve herself rather than work, so Jeff gave that $15,000 dog to an employee as a pet.

Price a big contract for the responsibility

When I asked for the craziest job he’s worked on, Jeff picked pest control at the West LA VA. More than 90 surgeries had been canceled in about 3 months because of phorid flies, and the national company on the contract was failing. Bird Solutions had already taught Jeff how the government side works, so Innovative landed the emergency contract at $750,000 a year.

Jeff was warned that this was the biggest VA west of the Mississippi, and failing would go on his report card as a government vendor. He’d only take it at a price that let him hire the right people. He got that price and recruited 3 high-end technicians, 2 of them already handling pest control at Cedars-Sinai.

The team traced the flies to giant cisterns holding waste from dialysis patients, which weren’t sealing properly. Flies bred in the seals, crossed the hospital through the false ceiling and followed the lights down into surgery. The VA didn’t believe it until an entomologist spent a day on site and agreed. The fix, which Jeff believes cost seven figures, wasn’t pest control at all.

In 3 years, Innovative missed its 2-hour emergency response window twice, by minutes, and the official over pest control for every VA in the country called it the best program he’d seen nationwide. At rebid, though, nearly everyone who knew that work had moved on, and the buyers cared only about the lowest price, about half what Innovative had charged. Jeff wouldn’t have done it for that. These days VA contracts go out to disabled veteran businesses, and David Poplin, whose company qualifies, has the West LA VA.

Ask for the whole portfolio

In 2017 Jeff brought on Miguel Garcia, the top salesman at Isotech, the company from the TV show Verminators. Miguel also brought Robert, who Jeff calls probably the best canine handler in the nation, and until COVID, Innovative was buying 1 to 3 new trucks a month.

Miguel earned a partnership, and he taught Jeff a lot about sales. Jeff used to land one apartment building, do a great job and pick off the rest of the portfolio one building at a time. Miguel walks into a new management company, asks for all of it up front and comes away with 50 or 60 buildings. The worst you’ll hear is no, or not yet.

Multifamily clients are the most needy, so his techs are trained to make the property manager look good at all costs. If a manager forgot a unit, you go back and say, “Sorry, I missed it.” The manager is there 52 weeks a year. You might deal with that tenant once.

Don’t sell an account and walk away, he said. Offer to teach a class at the management company’s monthly meeting, or bring bagels and coffee without always trying to sell.

“If you don’t have a relationship, you’re going to find out you have a problem you got to fix when you have the cancellation.”

Consolidation opens the door for smaller companies

Jeff thinks the industry is more exciting than ever. As the big companies consolidate, he sees more opportunity for small and midsize ones, because they can still personalize service. When a big account assumes it needs a national, he tells them to find a company large enough to handle any pest problem and small enough that they never become an account number.

After a regional company gets bought, the complaint he hears most is that customers can’t call their technician anymore. Plenty of experienced techs hate that too, and a smaller company can give them a home.

My take

I told Jeff that canines can seem like a shiny object, and I was glad he brought some reality to it. If I were pricing one out, I’d budget for the handler before the dog.

I asked about niching down because I did it myself. Pest Control SEO works only with pest control companies. A name like Bed Bug Solutions does the same job in Google results that it did on a property manager’s desk, because a searcher can see who specializes before clicking anything. If you’re still choosing a name, I wrote up some SEO tips for naming your business.

Jeff says Innovative grows about 30% a year with zero marketing, and he plans to start marketing in 2027. Like Ryan Tate, whose builder relationships drive 95% of Rogue’s growth, Jeff built his company on people who trust him. I’d guess property managers check reviews like everyone else, and a Google Business Profile full of them could do some of Miguel’s selling before he walks in.

Where to find Jeff

Bird Solutions takes subcontract work on bird control jobs and will help train people, since Jeff figures there’s enough work out there for everybody. Innovative also does bed bug and canine work as a subcontractor for other pest control companies. Jeff is on LinkedIn, which he expects to play a big role once the marketing starts.

• Website: Innovative Pest Solutions
• Bird control: Bird Solutions International
• LinkedIn: Jeff Stafford