Josh Fleenor on building Pest Pros to almost $10M by betting on people

Two days after open heart surgery, Josh Fleenor’s 3-month-old daughter was finally in his arms. Then the work phone in his pocket vibrated, and his first instinct was to set her down and deal with it. He’d started to before he caught himself.

That moment is why he started Pest Pros Pest Solutions in Sacramento. When we recorded at a house in Florida during PestWorld, Pest Pros was doing almost $10M a year about 7 years in.

Before the show, I asked Josh for his secret to growth. He isn’t big on door-to-door or the marketing strategies you’d expect. He said it’s his people, and the conversation kept circling back to them.

Who is Josh Fleenor?

Josh Fleenor is the CEO and founder of Pest Pros Pest Solutions, with about 25 years in pest control. Like a lot of owners, and like me, he got into the industry by accident. He answered a newspaper ad for an internship with a big developer, but the paper had the number wrong. It rang at a small pest control company, the charismatic owner talked him into coming in, and he never left the industry.

He worked at a few companies after that, then landed at a large family-owned company that took off. He moved up to branch manager and ended up running a couple of regions in the Bay Area. My partner Jonas Olson has also interviewed Josh, and his write-up covers how Josh turned a $55K branch into $500K a month. Josh and I spent most of our time on what he built after he left.

A buzzing phone started Pest Pros

Josh was already stretched thin when that call came. He was dealing with national accounts, and an escalation could mean being in San Francisco at 1:00 a.m. and staying until about 3:00. He had to be back in the office by 5 or 6, so he’d drive back and sleep on the office couch.

He’s careful to say none of that was on his employer. He was the one so attached to the job that he nearly set his daughter down for a phone call. Looking down at her, he made her a promise.

“I’m gonna do it for you, and I’m gonna do it in a way that’s healthy where I’m home, but I’m building.”

I’d heard Josh tell this story on other podcasts, and it hit me just as hard the second time. His daughter is 8 now, and he hopes she runs the company one day (or maybe she’ll be a ballerina, he said).

About a year and a half into Pest Pros, Josh went through a divorce and a custody battle. They’re amicable now, but it was rough. When an owner in the same spot recently asked for advice, Josh told him to stay focused on his purpose. Be all there for your daughter when you have her, he said, and build the business when you don’t.

Ask what the best vendor ever did

Pest Pros opened in March and did $747K its first year. A few clients came over when a company Josh’s partner had started was dissolved. Beyond that, Josh went to work on LinkedIn, back before it was saturated with salespeople.

He messaged property managers, told them he was building a company that would be second to none in service for property management and asked what vendors had done over the years to wow them. A lot of them were amazed he’d even asked. Soon they wanted him to look at a property, and regional managers wanted him to look at 10.

His team also popped into leasing offices to show some personality. Sacramento rents were climbing, so Josh asked managers what a unit costs them when it sits vacant because of roaches. Pest Pros would fix it by their deadline and guarantee it. They came in aggressive, with a crew vacuuming up roaches, and that reputation let them charge more and more. Today they have well over 1,000 multifamily properties on service.

Every market needs its own research

Once there was a marketing budget, Josh tried Yelp, which he’d helped build into a program at his last company. Yelp was huge in the Bay Area, but Sacramento didn’t respond the same way, and by then each lead was going out to 6 companies. Then COVID hit, LinkedIn turned into a ghost town, and the budget went to Google.

Owners ask Josh what they should be doing in their area, and he tells them to get out and research it, because every market can be different. I say the same thing about paid directories. I know people crushing it on Thumbtack in North Carolina and another guy doing great on Angi in Portland, Oregon. PCM’s guide to choosing paid directories is a good place to start testing.

Since then it’s been phase after phase. A commercial sales team now goes after school districts and third-party audited accounts. Marketing started as guerrilla work on the ground. Now Pest Pros runs pay-per-click, billboards and commercials and sponsors the Sacramento Kings and Sacramento State football.

100 reviews used to be a lot

When Pest Pros moved into Google, hardly anyone in the market had many five-star reviews, and 100 was really good. Josh figured they could get there just by asking every client, since the service was already five-star. They sailed past 100 and became the top five-star review company in the area. The phones rang off the hook even organically, and pay-per-click made them ring more.

Competitors copied it, and Josh thinks they should. When he coached high school basketball, he always said a great coach is a great thief. What he points to, though, is the other end of the scale.

“We have a lot of five-star reviews, but I think the more impressive thing and the more difficult thing to prevent is we don’t really have one-star reviews.”

Pest Pros has gotten legitimate ones, from customers who went straight to Google instead of calling the office. Josh treats each one as a chance to show who they really are, with a refund or a gift card for dinner, whatever it takes, and he says those customers end up loving them. He credits his people, which matches what Chris Anderson of Applause told me about reviews starting with the technician.

Purpose is the hiring filter

Pest Pros runs on 6 core values: whatever it takes, love people, commitment to personal growth, genuine connection, giving back and, added later, intentionality. Josh admits it’s harder to work there, because people are expected to communicate, document and follow processes a certain way, and he says so up front.

Not long before we recorded, one employee was fighting those standards and complaining to everyone around him. Around the same time, one of Josh’s directors introduced a friend, a single dad and pastor with a 7-year-old daughter. Josh told him to pass the state test and they’d look at an opportunity. He passed, walked out to his car and bawled, because he knew what the job could mean for his little girl. Josh let the first employee go and offered the job to the second.

“If you can’t find your purpose here with what we’re doing, that’s okay, but go find your purpose somewhere else.”

Josh doesn’t want anyone staying out of blind loyalty. He pays well, but once people aren’t living check to check, he thinks a raise means less than a chance to give back and work with people who share their values.

Everyone takes the leadership class

Josh would rather hire people new to the industry, because they only learn it the Pest Pros way. He’s found that A-players hang around A-players, so once you have a few people who fully live your values, they tend to know others like them, in the industry or not. (PCM has more on hiring A-players for pest control.)

Every employee takes Intro to Leadership, which is about leading yourself. Leadership One is for future leaders who are starting to hold people accountable, and Leadership Two teaches upper leaders to own their department and build accountability.

Frank Cropper, Pest Pros’ director of leadership development, runs the classes twice a week. He’s a former teacher and vice principal, and he grew up with Josh’s twin cousins, who both work at Pest Pros. Seeing their posts, Frank figured they’d fallen on hard times if they were in pest control. Now one of them is his boss.

I asked Josh something I don’t think I’d asked a guest before, which was how you convince someone like Frank that pest control is worth it. They just showed him under the hood, Josh said, in a meeting that ran about an hour and a half. Frank spent 6 months in the field, moved to sales and was full time on leadership development by the one-year mark. People who won’t raise a hand at the start of his courses are sharing at a high level by the end.

Get out of your team’s way

When I asked what has moved the needle for him lately, Josh said learning to get out of the way. He’s so driven, he told me, that sometimes he tramples his own team to make something happen. Pulling back shows his team he trusts them, and that has built their trust in him. Things have gone very well since.

Next up is efficiency. At PestWorld, Josh was soaking up everything he could about AI. He wants to automate and stop chasing growth so hard, which he admits is tough for him. He also owned a gap in some layers of his company. He gave those leaders freedom without setting clear expectations, and he called that “a knock on me.”

My take

Paid directories really do depend on the market, as I told Josh, but the Google Business Profile is pretty consistent across markets, and reviews are a huge part of it. There are things worth optimizing on a profile, but I’d put a steady review habit ahead of most of them. Josh started asking every client back when 100 reviews set you apart, and he didn’t stop once he got there.

Most review advice is about getting more five-stars. Josh’s focus on the one-stars is rarer, and I think it’s smart. A refund or a gift card for dinner is cheap next to what a fair complaint can cost you when nobody deals with it.

In the spirit of his great-thief rule, I’d take Josh’s LinkedIn question into any commercial niche. Asking property managers what wowed them got him in the door, and the answers are a free list of what that kind of customer wants.

Josh closed by telling owners it’s okay to take risks, since every one of us got here by betting on ourselves. He talked about imposter syndrome too, and said Frank once asked him, “When are you going to give yourself credit?” Plenty of owners I know could use that question.

Where to find Josh

Josh is on Facebook and Instagram and is pretty active on LinkedIn. When I offered him a plug, he gave it to All About Hope, a Northern California nonprofit that gives hospitalized kids boxes full of art supplies. When his daughter was recovering from surgery to remove a cyst, coloring is how the family kept her distracted.

• Website: Pest Pros Pest Solutions
• Facebook: Josh Fleenor
• Instagram: @zekeflee
• LinkedIn: Josh Fleenor