Jonas Olson on A-players, a day with Alex Hormozi and the jump from 7 to 8 figures

Jonas Olson spent 6 to 9 months recruiting a wrestler he used to coach in high school. The kid was back home after college, tending bar and drinking heavily, and he kept ghosting Jonas, so Jonas started texting his mom and dad. Today that guy is 27, owns multiple Pest Badger branches and can make 20 to 25 sales in a day.

I’d talked with him earlier that day. Over coffee, I told Jonas that chasing someone down like that was a real talent of his, one I never hear owners talk about, so we saved the question for the show.

Jonas and I recorded this one in person, after spending the first part of the day filming course material for our program and promo for Zip Code Kings, the book he, Jake Sheldon and I co-wrote. His brain was shot, he said, and now he had to do a podcast.

Who is Jonas Olson?

As CEO of Pest Badger, Jonas Olson took the company from zero to $10M a year in less than 5 years. At the time, it had 15 locations and was projected to do about $15M the next year and $30M within 2 or 3 years. It landed in the 1,100s on the Inc. 5000, and it bugged Jonas that it didn’t break 1,000. It also has a following almost no other pest control company has, with about 150K subscribers on YouTube, 70K on TikTok and 40K on Facebook.

Jake and I run Pest Control Millionaires with him. We covered his lawn care roots the first time he was on the show, so this time we talked mostly about people.

Some A-players take months to recruit

The wrestler’s name is James. Jonas has known him since before high school, and as his coach he saw a sharp, well-spoken kid with electric energy and a crazy work ethic. James became a state champion, played 4 years of college soccer, then came home and started bartending.

He finally said yes when COVID shut the bar down. They practiced their pitches at a card table in Jonas’s unfinished basement, then flew to Arizona to knock doors on another company’s blitz. James had never knocked a door, and he couldn’t make a sale. Jonas flew in from Utah, went out with him and closed a homeowner James already had on the ropes. Maybe 3 houses down, James sold one himself.

Wrestling grit carried him, Jonas said, because athletes learn how to take losses. For most of his first year, James came over every day to sit in Jonas’s hot tub and talk business, then went out and used what he heard. Jonas calls him his first real mentee.

Equity was the only thing Jonas could offer James back then. He’d do it again for someone like him, though he says there’s more than one way to set it up.

Since then he has gone through hundreds of people to find a handful more like James, and he can usually tell within 30 seconds. Jake quotes Jonas’s line that A-players attract more A-players in his PCM post on hiring them.

Work-life balance can wait

Jonas knows people will think he’s crazy, but he doesn’t believe in work-life balance, especially early on. He gave up friends who party, negative people and some toxic relationships. The one thing he won’t give up is time with his girls. He’ll stop what he’s doing for an hour to be at one of their events, even if he’s listening in on a meeting while he’s there.

He has no patience for the usual excuses, like opening day of bow season, a fishing trip or being part of the “4:59 club.” That goes double if you don’t have money yet, he said. Go knock the doors and send the emails and text messages.

Quitting drinking changed who he attracts

When we recorded, Jonas had just passed 5 years without a drink. It started at an event in Utah, where a group of very successful people went to Topgolf. A tray of drinks came out, Jonas grabbed a beer and went to hit balls, and when he came back every other drink was still on the tray. Granted, a lot of people in Utah don’t drink anyway. But everyone else was still networking and learning, and he didn’t grab another.

Then he started 75 Hard, which meant 75 days with no alcohol. He’d only been drinking once or twice a month, but one beer usually turned into 10 or 12. After 75 days he felt so good that he kept going, to 3 months, then 6, then 9, then a year. He didn’t get help. He just decided to be done.

He didn’t expect it to spread. Some of his closest friends quit drinking, and James had just hit 4 years sober. People around Jonas stopped smoking and started going to the gym.

“If I’m out there drinking and partying and look like an idiot, that’s who I’m going to attract.”

Buy the seat at the front of the room

Jonas went to Patrick Bet-David’s events when they were small. Four or 5 years ago, one had maybe 100 people, and Jonas was one of about 20 guys playing basketball with PBD. What stands out to Jonas is how high a standard PBD holds his team to, down to the smallest detail.

Last year Jonas paid 10 or 12 grand for the CEO version, a private room with about 100 owners, and sat up front next to PBD and Andy Elliott. The cheap seats had taught him to sit up front. In group sessions at the back of the room, he’d end up solving the problem for his table, and his answer would match the one on the board.

“The back of the room I wasn’t learning, I was the one teaching.”

Pest Badger’s New Year’s routine comes from PBD, too. Instead of going out on New Year’s Eve, the team gets together to write yearly goals and make vision boards.

What 20 minutes with Alex Hormozi was worth

A few weeks before we recorded, Jonas spent about 8 hours with Alex Hormozi. I’ve watched over 100 hours of Hormozi’s content, and my friends didn’t believe Jonas had met him.

Jonas says Hormozi is the same guy in person that you see on video, maybe a little more chill, and the best sales guy he knows. His book launch brought in $105 million in a day. When Jonas’s group asked him about the biggest surprise of the launch, Hormozi said nothing broke. It was kind of boring. They’d hired a backup call center, and team members making half a million dollars a year answered calls live.

To learn at that level, Jonas says, you pay to play. Hormozi paid Russell Brunson something like a million dollars to be in his course. Jonas paid a fraction of that for 8 hours, including 20 minutes one-on-one.

“I spent a lot of money. But it’s worth it for me because that one thing that we talked about would probably change my business forever.”

He didn’t say what that one thing was, but he’d already acted on it, calling people from lunch to change things. He’s going back in December.

Trade profit for people better than you

Jonas had just interviewed Jeff Davenport, so I asked what separates 8-figure owners like Jeff from owners around $1M. Mostly how they think, he said. Be a learner, be willing to fail and don’t expect anyone to congratulate you. If your friends run $500,000 companies, that’s probably where you’ll end up. Jonas still feels small, because he spends time around people like Hormozi, who does a million a day.

He also thinks owners have to pay for talent. Say you’re at $1M with the industry’s typical 10% margin, or about $100,000 in profit. A manager costs $60,000 to $80,000, so most owners decide they can’t afford one. The right person should take you to $1.5M or $1.6M and return 10 times what they cost.

He made that bet in Pest Badger’s second year, at about $3M. Fast growth had squeezed margins, and hiring Trisha as director of operations meant spending over $100,000 he didn’t have in profit.

“Am I willing to trade that $100,000 profit for a person of that caliber? And to me, the answer is always yes.”

Operations was where Pest Badger lagged, and Jonas thinks ego stops a lot of owners from hiring people better than themselves. Within about a year, hires like Trisha helped take the company from $3M to $7M, with tighter operations, lower churn and an SOP for everything.

Tell executive hires how hard it will be

Jonas will spend 3 to 7 months getting to know an executive and their family before hiring them. Not long before we recorded, he was hiring a regional manager for a job that was 80% travel. The candidate was 55, super smart and excited.

Jonas asked him to be honest about where he was in life. As long as Jonas runs it, Pest Badger works Saturdays and Sundays, and its call center is open basically around the clock. The man came back the next Monday. He loved what they were doing, he told Jonas, but Jonas was right that he wasn’t at that point in his life. Jonas thanked him and went to find the next person.

He has that talk with every hire, and he admits he’s trying to scare them off. When I asked how Pest Badger grows so fast, he said it comes down to the people, and they all work hard. Jonas is often on the phone until midnight with his CFO, who’s on Pacific time. We got into how Pest Badger screens senior candidates when he came back for a third episode.

EOS runs the week at Pest Badger

Pest Badger runs on EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which a mentor taught Jonas 5 or 6 years ago. The closest implementer was 6 hours away in Milwaukee, so they never hired one and just follow it closely.

There’s a meeting every Wednesday at 11. On Thursdays, Jonas runs back-to-back 20-minute meetings with the branches from 8:45 until about noon or 1. They track cancellations, production, COGS, reviews, accounts receivable and payable, sales, leads and closing percentage, from the company level down to each branch.

My take

Jonas calls himself a high implementer, and I’ve seen it plenty of times. A couple of weeks earlier I’d been at Tommy Mello’s event, and acting on a good idea right away is one of Tommy’s main things too. I see it in a lot of successful home service owners.

I told Jonas about a rule I hold myself to. If you’re not cringing at who you were 6 months ago, you’re not growing as much as you should. Jonas can barely watch videos of himself from 3 years ago.

Reviews sit on his weekly list right next to cancellations and COGS, and I’d put them there too. They affect how your Google Business Profile ranks and how many searchers call, so review count and recency belong in your weekly numbers with the rest of your local SEO reporting.

Where to find Jonas

Jonas says that if you type in his name, he’ll pop up. We were also just starting a Pest Control Millionaires YouTube channel for free training, case studies and coaching calls.

• Pest Badger: pestbadger.com
• Podcast: Pest Control Millionaire podcast
• YouTube: Jonas Olson and Pest Control Millionaires
• Facebook: Jonas Olson
• LinkedIn: Jonas Olson
• Instagram: @jonasaolson