Jonas Olson on the wrong market, higher prices and thinking bigger

Jonas Olson grew a lawn care company to about $3M, then built Pest Badger to $10M in pest control. When I asked what he’d tell an owner at $1M who wants to get to $10M, he said to look hard at your market first. He fought his own for way too long.

Jonas is my partner in Pest Control Millionaires, along with Jake Sheldon. We aimed most of this conversation at owners under $1M, where most of the industry sits, and his advice was often simpler than they’d expect. Ask him which backpack sprayer to buy and he’ll say he doesn’t care, as long as the supplier treats you well.

Who is Jonas Olson?

Jonas Olson is the founder and CEO of Pest Badger, a Midwest pest control company. In mid-2025, when we recorded, Pest Badger had 14 locations and $10M in revenue after just a few years. He’s also the face behind one of the top 5 pest control channels on YouTube, which had 140K subscribers at the time, and the host of the Pest Control Millionaire podcast.

His first market was his grandma’s street. He mowed her backyard, knocked on her neighbors’ doors and cut grass Thursday through Sunday after getting home from an out-of-town job. At 26, with a new daughter, he quit that job to go all in. His first real client is still a client 12 years later.

That lawn care company was doing about $3M when COVID shut it down completely in Michigan. The Wisconsin border was 45 minutes away, Wisconsin stayed a lot more open, and pest control was deemed essential. So Jonas taught himself to knock doors. At the first one he nearly threw up and had to step away to get his composure back. He sold that one, and he’s knocked tens of thousands of doors since.

Your market can be the ceiling

Jonas thought he was a good operator, and he was. The market around him just wasn’t scalable.

“I was fighting the wrong market, the wrong demographic the entire time and I was hitting my head on the wall because I couldn’t scale anymore.”

Most owners get caught up in the market they’re already in, he said. So at $1M, the first thing to check is your market penetration and whether your market and your services can scale at all. Shifting his geography, along with his mindset, is what got Jonas past that ceiling and into 8 figures.

Small markets hurt his ad costs too. Agencies would white-label one winning ad for every client, and in his markets people saw it so often that his cost per lead climbed. That frustration is a big part of why he teaches owners to run their own marketing in the Pest Control Millionaires program, which now includes my SEO and Google course.

Who to hire first is one of the questions owners ask him most. His answer, a CSR before a technician, came up again in our later episode on the revenue levels where owners get stuck.

Raise your prices every year

My other partner, Jake Sheldon, told me Jonas kept telling him to raise his prices and he’d decided to listen. When Jonas looks at someone’s business, pricing is the first thing he checks. New owners call around and land in the middle or undercut everyone, and he sees owners who’ve gone 20 or 30 years without a price increase still charging $80 a quarter.

The first time Jonas raised prices, by about 20%, he sent the email and waited to see what would happen. Two people canceled. After that he did it every year. If a 10% increase costs you your bottom 10% of customers, you’re doing less work for about the same revenue.

Pest Badger wants to charge more than every other company in its area. They know their break-even on each job, add a 20% to 40% margin, and try to earn back what it cost to get the customer on the first service or within the first 30 days.

Same customers, nearly double the revenue

Before we hit record, Jonas told me about a mosquito company that fell into his lap. The owner had 700 or 800 customers and about $340,000 in revenue but had never really grown it. Customers more or less picked when they wanted service, maybe May and July, maybe a one-time spray. Neighbors got discounts too, which sounds great until 2 years later half of them are gone and you’re driving out to a single $50 stop.

Pest Badger put every customer on a set schedule, with service every 21 to 30 days, and raised prices. Some applications had been going for roughly $50 or $60, and Jonas wouldn’t touch one for less than $80. When we recorded, only 20 or 30 customers had canceled. Without adding a single client, the branch went from about $340,000 to $650,000 almost overnight, then added another $150,000 to $200,000 by upselling pest control. In early June it was already shooting for $850,000 for the year. Jonas later wrote up the Mosquito Crush acquisition for PCM.

He doesn’t think most companies should start out with a stack of services, though. Get really good at one thing, reach good market penetration and then add the next service. Learning to say no was one of his hardest lessons.

Discounts train customers to want discounts

Jonas was reading Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. books even before Alex Hormozi came along, and he’s not a fan of discounts. Give one, and that customer will always want a discount and will think of you as a discount service. He’d rather throw in something free that doesn’t take much time, like a mosquito or flea and tick treatment with the first service. Most offers he sees are a $29 or $47 initial, or a free one, with zero value behind them.

“Majority of the time, people are not buying off price. They’re buying off value. So if you can create enough value, they’re willing to pay more for your service than anything else.”

Say a competitor charges $150. You walk the customer through pest control, a lawn treatment and a mosquito treatment, then tell them it’s all just $200. You can’t build a company with no profit, Jonas said.

Take your name off the truck

His first company was Olson’s Lawn Care. Taking his own name out of the brand was step 1, and step 2 was a character. Buggy the Badger is on every Pest Badger truck, and the emails and texts customers get come from Buggy, in his own tone. Most of their customers are women, so Buggy talks to the women of the household. Some of that came from his mentor, Jonathan Pototschnik, who has a dog on his own brand.

Pest Badger’s trucks are pink, an idea Jonas got from a book about a restaurant with one pink delivery car, a lobster on its roof, that people said they saw all the time. Jonas was moving into Green Bay, his colors were green, and he knew he couldn’t go in there with a green truck. Only about 1% of vehicles are pink. I told him pink might be the most masculine color you can put on a truck, since you have to be confident to rock it.

You can track a brand, too, by giving “saw your truck” its own source code when callers say how they heard about you. Jonas wouldn’t even put a phone number on a truck now. People will search the name on Google or ChatGPT and call through Google anyway.

Owners ask him all the time whether they should wrap their trucks. His answer is 100% yes, and the earlier the better, because branding doesn’t get cheaper as you grow. Pest Badger added its tagline, “Have a pest-free day,” along the way. Put a lot of thought into it, he said, and he even told owners to call me and read my book, which was kind of him.

Then trademark your name, logo and tagline. A friend of his checked his company name in his own state, but by the time he was doing about $10M, a much smaller company turned out to own the trademark. Buying it cost around $100,000, maybe more.

Churn gets fixed at onboarding

To Jonas, most churn gets fixed during onboarding, by being honest. Tell a customer they’ll never see another bug and you’re lying. It takes a few applications, a home that’s never been treated may see more activity after the first one, and mosquito control might cut mosquitoes by 80% without getting rid of all of them.

Then follow up with a welcome package at the door 2 days later, a check-in call and texts. Jonas used to mail every new customer a packet with stickers, coupons and lumpy mail like a fly swatter, and he wants owners to come up with the modern version. He figures customers from Google, Facebook and traditional marketing stay 5 to 7 years on average, and he likes to see 3 to 5 from door-to-door.

Think bigger

“Think bigger. It’s all mindset. It’s what’s between your ears.”

Jonas says he’s no different from any other operator, and 90% of them are probably smarter than he is. What sets him apart is what he tells himself at night. For the longest time, whenever he came across a Magic 8-Ball, he’d shake it and ask if he’d hit $100,000. It said yes. Once he did, he asked about a million, then 5.

Jonas learned the hard way to be careful about who gets his time. Business is hard enough without people who keep pulling you away from it. He doesn’t have hobbies either. The business is his hobby.

He also makes a point of getting around people who are further along than he is. “I intentionally always try to put myself in rooms that I don’t belong in,” he said. This industry is small enough that you can get in. We talked more about how 7-figure and 8-figure owners think in my next conversation with Jonas.

My take

I’m with Jonas on leaving the phone number off the truck. Someone who sees a pink truck with a badger on it searches the name and calls from whatever Google shows them, which for a local company is usually the Google Business Profile. If that profile looks neglected, a lot of what the wrap earned leaks away before anyone calls.

His market lesson applies to search, too. Once you rank at the top in the towns you serve, the next gains come from new territory, which I covered in building local SEO outside your core location.

Jonas also admitted that when he started, he didn’t think he had the credibility to run a podcast. He started one anyway and made a few of his best friends through it, Jake and me included. If he’d waited until he felt credible, the three of us might never have built Pest Control Millionaires or written Zip Code Kings.

Where to find Jonas

YouTube is where Jonas is most active, and he answers comments and messages fast. When a woman just starting out in his own market commented that it was too bad she was too close for him to help her, he told her he didn’t care if she lived right next door. He’d still help.

• Pest Badger: pestbadger.com
• Pest Control Millionaires: pestcontrolmillionaires.com
• YouTube: Jonas’s channel
• Facebook: Jonas Olson
• LinkedIn: Jonas Olson
• Instagram: @jonasaolson