Ryan Tate on the Builder Relationships Behind 95% of Rogue Pest Solutions' Growth

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey everyone and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. I'm your host, Dan Leibrandt, and today I'm with Ryan Tate, owner of Rogue Pest Solutions in Huntsville. Ryan's been in pest control for nearly two decades and brings a rare mix of sales and operations expertise. Rogue now has 34 employees company-wide, and Ryan operates it alongside his four partners. In this episode, we're talking about running a pest control company like a businessman, building teams that scale. And growing from one market into a multi st multi state operation. Now without further ado, Ryan, welcome to the show.

00:36 Ryan Tate

Thanks, I appreciate you having me.

00:36 Dan Leibrandt

Of course, man. So welcome me back to the beginning of your journey. W how did you initially get into pest control in this whole space?

00:42 Ryan Tate

Well, I'll try to keep it quick 'cause I think all of us say the same thing, right? Needed a job, found the industry, had a friend that was in pest control. My wife was trying to go to school and finish up a master's degree, so I needed to make some money. Had a friend that was working in pest control. He said, Hey, you can make a little money here, and so I jumped in a truck, started working, thought I'd be there six or eight months, and then really, really fell in love with with the people and the freedom that pest control gave you, to be out on your own, serving customers, taking care of customers. And so yeah, that's how I how I got into pest control like everybody else, just stumbled in. To it and been been here as you said for over two decades and don't don't plan on leaving.

01:27 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. Awesome. I know you worked at Waynes. So was your first company Waynes or which one?

01:34 Ryan Tate

So I worked at a regional company, it's a family-owned regional company, Kirkland's Pest Control in Middle Tennessee and North Alabama. Started there, worked my way from technician, so started out in a truck as a technician, worked into sales, then sales management and then branch management there. Got to the place that it just wasn't the right fit anymore from a culture standpoint. It's not where I wanted to be. I met the guy who's now the president of Waynes now, Shawn Hollis, and he recruited me to come over to Waynes and so I spent about seven or eight years at Kirkland's and then a little about the same amount of time, a little bit more at at Waynes and really got to grow through both of those businesses and really thankful for times at both of those companies.

02:25 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, definitely. Yeah, Waynes has grown into a massive company. I've actually talked with their CEO maybe it might have been two years ago at this point. Talk to me because I heard you say on Jonas' podcast that the owner, I forget if it was the owner or CEO, one of the people was a mentor to you. So talk to me about what you learned at Waynes and what that was like.

02:48 Ryan Tate

Yeah, we learned a lot and I would say that I have several mentors still to this day from from those relationships. Steven Splawn and Eric Eric Frye owned Waynes before the exit to Anticimex in twenty nineteen, mid twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. And those guys ran their business different, than what I'd saw it ran. Most of the people that I knew in the pest industry, w the first company I worked at was really bug men and salespeople who were the different personalities you kinda run into the pest control industry and when I met them they just had a huge vision for for building a great culture but then also building a really sustainable financial model through recurring revenue and using different marketing channels and making sure that you're being profitable and Steven was a CPA beforehand and so making us be in our P&L so both of those guys really taught me a lot. But really Eric Frye more than anything, Eric is still to this day a friend and a mentor to me and really just pouring pouring into us, some of us as leaders at that time, and really focusing on the culture. And I tell people in twenty nineteen when Anticimex purchased Waynes, I expected to work at Waynes my whole life, my whole career. So it was a it was a really, step back moment, where do we go from here? Kind of thing. And over the next few months, as opportunities came along, I really began to think about what that mentorship from Eric and Steven looked like. Why did why when Anticimex came into Waynes, this thing that we had built that we were, fighting hard to build every day? What was it that made it so special? When they looked at the culture of the company, when they looked at the financials of the company, when they looked at the growth model of the company, they were just blown away and the first rankings come out for Anticimex and a and a lot of our branches are, of the top ten. We had six of the top branches worldwide. And that was one of those things you step back and say, How did we do that? 'cause it didn't feel like we were we were we were building something I knew we were building something special, I just didn't know how special it was probably.

05:13 Ryan Tate

And so in thinking through that, I think there are three things that that I learned there. And it's culture, strategy, and execution. Culture being, the way it feels to show up for work every day, how you feel on Sunday night before you have to show up for work on on Monday morning, if you feel good about it. You probably got a good culture. If you feel bad about it, you probably don't have such a good culture. But really as leaders, culture is all about inspiring belief in something more than yourself, right? So if you're gonna have a good culture, you gotta inspire that that belief. Strategy being the second thing, strategy is all about requiring higher thinking of yourself and your people. We've done it this way, we've always done it this way. Everybody does it this way. It's not a good enough answer. I think that strategic piece of who you are gonna serve, what that ideal customer looks like. One-time services versus recurring services. Don't get into doing every service you can. All of those strategic things that you get into, I think strategy is overlooked. So, culture is about inspiring belief, which is all about the heart and how it feels to be there. Strategy is more about requiring hard higher thinking of yourself and your people. And that's the mind and then you can have great culture and good strategy, but at the end of the day you just gotta get stuff done and that's where execution comes in. And so execution is about expecting world class results, of yourself and your people. And so I really felt like at Waynes that's what I learned to do, inspire and belief, require higher thinking and then requiring world or expecting world class results and that's why we built something special there. And that's really what we're trying to do here at Rogue again, create that culture, strategy, and execution that that makes us a leader in the pest industry for decades to come.

07:10 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, that's awesome. You mentioned that so that's culture strategy execution. And one of the biggest parts of culture is inspiration, inspiring people. So how did you get inspired and how do you inspire other people?

07:25 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I think we all have a why and we've all the golden circle, TED Talk by Simon Sinek where he talks about that, the what, why, how. If you can get people to stop thinking about the what and how and start thinking about the why first, I know that's not reinventing the will, but it's cliche because it's true. And so if people are working for more than the daily tasks that they do, if there's a bigger why, it could be their faith, it could be their family, it could be a lot of different things. But if you can connect on the why, I think the what and the how is a lot easier to figure out. And I think for me, my why is first, my faith and being a follower of Jesus Christ and wanting to honor him and everything that I do and how I go about things, in the why. Of seeing everything in life as a stewardship. I don't own anything. It's all been stewarded over to me and stewardships end. And so I should go, parable of the talents, go grow that, tenfold, and so it's ready for the next generation, but just trying to be a good steward of the things that God's given me. So that's my why and what gets me excited. And then also pouring into other people is a really big part of what I do. I really want to pour into people. That's spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally. I really want to pour into other people and think that's what gets me up in the morning, is that faith piece and really wanting to impact people, seeing my business as a being trying to be a force for good. It's a wealth building tool but more important than that it's an impact build building tool and I want to have impact on on people. And then on the second part about people, how do you inspire people or thinking about inspiring people? I think you inspire rather than require, right? Anytime you require, that's the lowest level of leadership. That's the boss mentality, not the leader mentality. I think leaders get up and inspire people to do what they should do. And if people can't be inspired about what you're doing, they're not a good fit. So if you can't inspire those people, then then there's probably not alignment there and you probably need to do something else. But I think going to inspiration before you go into requiring it out of people is super important, which means you gotta know your people, know what makes them tick, and make sure you hire for that culture fit, not just because they're good at their job or they can do the job.

10:07 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, really good answer. And I like that you tied it back to Christ, as I mentioned, I'm a Christ follower. It's funny because the last person I interviewed, which should come out next week at the time of recording this, I interviewed Tony Carder, another really successful pest control owner. And I on that podcast, I mentioned the parable of talent. So it's come full circle. Super relevant here. And I've for me personally, honestly, I hate to admit, but I used to be obsessed with money. And that was the main thing that was driving me. And I would pretty often get burnt out and it'd feel empty. But like you said, once you're doing it for that higher purpose, you're doing it for God, you're doing it for your family, it's like you just have this overflowing energy.

10:57 Ryan Tate

Yeah, if it's not e I believe that if it's not eternal, it's not gonna last, right? That's obvious. If it's eternal it's li it'll last. If it's not eternal it won't last. But if what you're doing can have the why be an eternal impact, you won't really get get burnt out. I was talking to my kids about that this past week, about we were in particular talking about selflessness and the importance of selflessness and I think having the right why gives you the ability to go and be be poured out, which that word poured out is a really is a really tough word in our society that people don't like to think about, given more of themselves, given a lot of themselves, being selfless, but I think the greatest leaders in all of human history have been pretty selfless. But anyway, we're kinda probably veered a little bit further than than you wanted me to on that.

11:50 Dan Leibrandt

No, no, not at all. I was I was asking you. I'm personally curious. On on the strategy point, something I found fascinating was you mentioned not just doing things the way that everyone else has done it. And I've specifically heard people like some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, like Elon Musk and Jensen Huang mention this and referring to it as first principles. What do we know to be true? What like let's not just do things the way they've always been done, the same way, Elon builds something like a SpaceX. He's not building it the way NASA's doing it or these other companies are doing it. You have to build it from the ground up. So I guess I don't even know if I have an exact question here, but how do you go about strategy? How how do you like not reinvent the wheel, but just figure out the best way to do things?

12:41 Dan Leibrandt

Hey guys, Dan Leibrandt here. Real quick, if you're a pest control owner looking to grow, I have two amazing resources for you. Number one is our free Pest Control Millionaires Facebook group. We have over 4,000 owners just like you in our community and would love for you to be a part of it. Go search Pest Control Millionaires on Facebook and request to join the group now. Number two is our book, Zip Code Kings. This was authored by me, Jonas Olson, and Jake Sheldon to be the ultimate guide to pest control marketing. We discuss everything from branding and traditional marketing to local SEO and Facebook ads. Go to Amazon and search zip code Kings to get your copy today. Now that being said, let's get back to the show.

13:21 Ryan Tate

I think you start at where you wanna go, right? And then work backwards off of that. If we start at what we've always done or start on the activity, I think we can get mixed up. Because, any result is all about the activity, right? What you what you can do disciplined over and over and over and over again is gonna be the outcome you get. But I think sometimes we get so caught up on this we lose focus. So I think starting on the outcome of like what do we want? What are we trying to actually achieve here and then step back off of that? Well if we're gonna do that we've gotta do this and kinda work back and be willing to mess up. I think I think the fear I think we all follow the path of the person in front of us because it's easier, it's a little smoother, and people don't look like you look at you like you're crazy if you mess up, right? If you go over here on your own. So I think having the guts to go out and try stuff and realize, hey, I'm gonna fail. I'm gonna mess it up. But at the end of the day, whether I've made the right choice or wrong choice, I can win in it by knowing well, hey, I know what not to do. That's off the list. Now let's go do this. But I think that starting with the end in mind and strategy bottlenecks I think are really, really, really prevalent in our in our industry. I think to what I've heard a lot of people say, you getting in the industry, what you say is your opinion, that that we got a lot of really good hearted people. So I think we got a lot of companies with really good culture. And we've got a lot of people that are really good at killing bugs, or if they're a lawn company growing grass, right? And they're really good at that. What we're not really good at is understanding that middle or that strategic piece in the middle that needs to go in there, that you step back and make decisions that that are, we like to say for three wins, it's a win for the company, it's a win for the customer, it's a win for the employee.

15:30 Ryan Tate

And really try to strategically look at that. And that takes I think you reading, listening to podcasts, asking friends, don't ask the people that are behind you, ask the people that are in front of you. If I'm trying to get across that that bridge, I wanna talk to the people who are crossed that bridge, not the people who haven't crossed that bridge, right? And listening and being that lifelong learner. I think if there's a gap in our industry, I think the str the gap is in strategy. I think a lot of people do a good job with culture. I think a lot of people get do a good job of just getting work done. I think the strategic piece that sits in the middle of that is where with you and Jonas, what you guys are are doing with Pest Control Millionaires or any of the other groups I think the strategic part is getting a lot better and we're coming a long way, but still we've got a long way to go in the industry.

16:25 Dan Leibrandt

Mm. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. As you said, that that's what I witnessed coming into the industry. I was trying to do marketing for e-commerce companies and software companies and I still working, but home services, there's just this huge opportunity. I d like we are ten years plus behind all of these other super advanced industries. So it's almost like we should borrow from those. And something that reminds me that reminds me of. Is on Jonas's podcast, which it's basically the same same concept, but you said that when you came into Waynes, you said, this is different because they think like businessmen. It's not just you're a technician, you're not just a sales guy, but we are totally business minded. This is complete strategy. How do we get as much profit as possible? How do we optimize for KPIs? And most owners, especially smaller owners, let's say doing less than a million dollars a year, just Aren't thinking about that. So to make this tactical for the audience, how can they start to pivot their mindset and start thinking like a businessman?

17:34 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I think you've gotta get yourself one, you've gotta get out of the truck when as soon as you can. For the one man operation or even the two or three man operation that is showing up to work every day and going out and doing full routes and your stresses are about killing bugs or in the lawn industry, growing grass, the actual technical part of it. I think the strategic part of the business is always gonna be left behind. And I think that's natural because it's not what we're good at, right? We're good at killing bugs. We're good at doing those technical things. So I think to first step is make sure you get out of the truck and do as little f customer facing stuff as you can. That should continue to work down as you grow as a business. But then one of the things we've gotta fill our time with is that learning in that strategic In that strategic time, setting aside time to actually learn and make decisions on what we should do next, strategically, what we need to do here, what we need to do there. And if, a real tactical approach, I would say, is what it what are we what are we the best at? What do we do best? This is not a labor that's hard for us to do. We just crush it on X. And we also make a lot of money doing that same X. I would take w those things and I'd say, okay, let's focus really hard on doing that. We're really good at it and we can make a lot of money doing it. And then the third part is can we grow it and can we scale it? Where those circles come together, I think, is where you've got to really focus your time. A lot of people I talk to are doing one time certain types of one time work or maybe even adding extra services of things that are taking up so much manpower, so much of their own, mental energy, mental strength, physical strength to do these certain things that really don't they're not good at. They don't make a lot of money doing because they're not very profitable and they're not scalable. It's not something that you can grow in bunches. And so I would say start thinking that way, what are we really good at?

19:57 Ryan Tate

What are we really good at making money doing? It's very profitable and we can scale and grow and start start doing those things more and more and start doing the other things less and less.

20:08 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, love that. Yeah. So stay focused and learn as much as possible. And now it...

20:12 Ryan Tate

Absolutely. And don't get spread out on too many different things.

20:16 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, definitely. Yeah, I've witnessed that in my business and all the people I've talked to. The people that are sporadic, that are doing everything, end up doing nothing. You could scale your one company to let's say a hundred million dollars instead of scaling ten businesses to ten million dollars. It's way easier to just do the one.

20:35 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I heard Craig Groeschel say and I was I wrote it on my whiteboard at home in my in my basement where me and my son work out and do different things down there, that every yes is a no somewhere else. Too many yeses is a no to everything. Right? Too many yeses is ultimately saying I'm not gonna be able to do anything right. So really too many yeses is a no to everything. You're not gonna do anything right and anything well and I think that, applies to that strategic part of the business a little pretty important part.

21:09 Dan Leibrandt

Mm. Well, and that gets harder as you level up as a business owner, right? Because as you get bigger, you get more opportunities. Maybe it's strategic partners, or maybe now you have some capital to invest and whatever it is. So n the more you grow, the more you have to say no. Yeah.

21:26 Ryan Tate

For sure. And man, that that's a hard thing, especially if you're a people pleaser. And so if you're really good at the culture part of things, you're probably a pretty good people person. You care about people a lot. When the phone rings you feel guilty if you don't answer it. I have a lot of that. But man, there's only so many hours in a day and making that list of priorities of, tasks, but also relationships. There's only so many relationships a person can manage from a leadership standpoint. That means that as you add some, some are probably gonna fall off and you just gotta be okay with that. Or maybe they don't fall off, they just change, right? And it stops being more it's more about quality and those times with where it needs to change rather than quantity, but yeah, I think that that's super important.

22:16 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely. Okay. So we covered your tenure at Waynes. Then when did you start your company and what were the first few years like?

22:25 Ryan Tate

So I have to go back and always give credit to the original founders of Rogue and Scott Sutton and Jamie Tatum. Scott and Jamie were my were Jamie was my coworker at Wayne, so we were both branch management supervision level. Scott was my boss and so he kinda ran the technical operations and the pest and termite side of the whole business at Waynes and he really he and Jamie saw it go from, a couple million dollars to a twenty eight million dollar company, regionally and they were a big part of that. And, twenty seventeen they both decided that it was time for them to move on, so they went to the owners of Waynes then and said, Hey, we kinda wanna go do our own thing. We have connections in the apartment world, which is different than what Waynes did and we think we can build a apartment business pretty quickly and pretty easily and I think they're they would tell you that their plan was to just build a business that was maybe a million or two million dollars a year, make a couple hundred dollars, couple hundred thousand dollars a year themselves and live a pretty easy remainder of their life that way. But through opportunities coming to them. And then one of my other partners in twenty nineteen left Waynes and joined Rogue as well in our northeast Alabama market to launch up there. And when he left some opportunities started coming that some builders started calling us to do some termite work, doing some pre-treat work for them that is a pretty good growth model and they began to build some of those relationships and then in twenty twenty three is when I and William Booth came on to Rogue and he launched which we call Cullman, Alabama that spot between Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama. He launched that market, but he's also the director of or VP of sales here. He leads all the sales efforts here at Rogue. And then I launched Huntsville that same time mid twenty three. So I know that's a long drawn out answer to your question, but I want to give credit to Scott and Jamie and Robert for for all the work that they did. But when we joined the team there was about thirteen or fourteen employees maybe in about one point four to one point six million dollars in revenue in mid twenty three when we when we joined.

24:59 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. Yeah, no, the background is definitely helpful to get some context here. Yeah, something you mentioned here and on Jonas's show is that, and I'm still confused, so I want you to explain. So the main way you guys have grown is through builders and you have relationships with builders, or what exactly is that?

25:18 Ryan Tate

So let me let me back up and give a I'm a principles over practices guy, so I'm not like to understand the principles and then drive down to the practices because I think it'll make it more pr productive for the audience. But I believe one of the main reasons people or I think there's two reasons they buy our services pretty much. They see bugs and have a bug problem, or they move. This first person who sees bugs is a harder customer to take care of. It's curative pest control. The people who move most of the time it's preventive pest control. Prevention is way more profitable, way way more scalable, way easier to do. So we have chosen to chase people when they move, not when they have bug problems. People buy our services when they move. One of the main reasons people move into houses is they buy a new home. So we have a lot of relationships with regional, national, and local builders. Where we do the Sentricon installation for the homeowner and then for that we do that, have that relationship with them, build a relationship with the homeowner, get to renew the termite service, but then also cross sell pest and mosquito off of that to the to those homeowners. So that's our ninety five percent of our growth has come through that. That that builder money. Yeah.

26:39 Dan Leibrandt

Wow, that is incredible. No, and frankly, it's genius. I and I like the way that you put it into two categories: like people see pests or they move. And every pest control company out there is trying to get the people that saw the pest, and now they're trying to rank on Google or whatever else it might be. And you guys are like, no, we're just gonna get it straight from the source.

27:04 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I think there's there when you can when you can be in the blue oceans instead of the red oceans, as you've people have probably read, meaning that the red ocean is where there's chum in the water and there's blood in the water and there's a bunch of sharks competing and fighting over that same, food source right there. And then if you just turn and swim away a little bit, you realize that maybe it's harder to go find or maybe there's some operational things that you've really gotta have button up or in our cash flow, you've really gotta make sure that you have the financial piece buttoned up so you can pour into those relationships as a lost leader. But when you get out there in that blue ocean you realize there's not a lot of competition there, so you're able to perfect it and get really good at it. It's very cash intensive up front and it's super hard to build relationships and it takes years upon years upon years to do that. And then you've got to be able to capitalize on it on the back end or it doesn't make financial sense. So we've we spent our time at Waynes doing some of that and we spent our time here at Rogue really perfecting that that whole process and honing in on those relationships with the builders. So It's r most door to door companies go into new construction homes, new construction neighborhoods, and they're chasing the same thing that we are. We just instead of just knocking on the door, we have a phone number and a current termite contract with and it's a easier cross sell.

28:38 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Yeah, really good point there. I read I believe it's called Blue Ocean Strategy. I read that book a few years ago. Really mind blowing. This is like what a lot of the top companies how they think about entrepreneurship and building a business. And like you said, we kinda have to bridge that gap between these big industries versus, a smaller industry like pest control that's still evolving and owners can take advantage of these strategies. And you mentioned, okay, so I wanted to d dive more in on relationship building. So you said relationship building is tough and obviously that's how you get these builders, that's how you get these deals. So how do you build those relationships? And how do you even meet meet those people in the first place?

29:22 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I think it's yeah, I think with any whether we're recruiting, whether we're we're farming commercial leads or in this case build builder leads or working with realtors, whatever it is, it's time, It's time that that you're gonna invest into understanding first be understanding the process and understanding what that that person that you're gonna try to build a relationship, what their needs are, like what's important to them. From a from a vendor set standpoint or even if it's a friendship thing, what's important to them. And once you know that, you begin to put time into sharing the same space with those people. If you're trying to recruit people, you need to go share the same space with where where those people are at. If you're looking for digital marketing people, you probably need to figure out a way to go to some kind of job fair or someplace where there's digital marketing students at, right? And just be authentic. Understand what's important to them and then begin to build that relationship and then don't all the bigger the agreement is or the relationship is I think the slower you need to try to take it and if I'm on the door and I'm just trying to sell you pest control, I go for the close really hard right there, right? I meant it's not a whole lot to lose there, but I think in the bigger the relationship, the longer it should take and or the bigger the partnership that you're trying to get, the longer it should take. So I think you should invest a whole lot of time and not try to rush that person to a decision. And then if it's no, remember that no today is not no to ev forever. So just transitioning at that point to hey, if you're talking to a big commercial client or realtor or builder or somebody to hire, say, hey man, just if you if you're ever unhappy with the decision you've made here, let us be your first call next time. And I think having that, two, three decade approach rather than the here and now approach really makes a difference in building any of those relationships that you that you want to build, hiring or whatever it might be.

31:34 Dan Leibrandt

Mm. So sniper instead of shotgun approach. Be be, very tactical with who you're targeting and then make sure that you're building a lot of trust with those people.

31:47 Ryan Tate

That's right. And build trust for the sake of building trust, not for the sake of making a sale. I think a lot of sales training stops short and it talks a lot about we want the customer to feel a certain way. And we do want that customer to feel like we care. It's important that they feel like we care. But that's not the end goal. The end goal is that we actually do care, right? We actually care about that customer. And then if we genuinely care, I think it's easier to help them feel that. But if we're just trying to make them feel like we care, then I think that stops a little short of doing doing it the right way. And I think people see through that. People want you to be genuine. And so I think when you're genuine like that, I think it I think you reap what you sow.

32:37 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Totally agree. I think, of course, you should actually care. Don't just pretend that you care, even though a lot of people do that.

32:45 Ryan Tate

Yeah, and then once you get down the road, I think big commercial clients are probably the place that this is most applicable for most people. But, there does become a time when you have the relationship that you do have to go for the jugular, that you do have to say, Hey, I'm I've got the relationship. Now it's time to capitalize on the relationship and when those moments of opportunity the door cracks open, then you've got to jump in there and really lean on that relationship to get you the business, but know that you've been genuine and you're gonna care about that person, want to have a relationship with them and get to know even if they don't become your customer. And I think people feel that.

33:31 Dan Leibrandt

Hm, definitely. I wanted to ask you, because you guys have built basically this whole big business on these relationships and specifically these builders. Could you give me an example of one successful relationship? Have you gotten a hundred thousand dollars worth of deals from one person?

33:52 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I think I think any time you can get to the place where you build a relationship with one person and that person brings you multiple customers, that's an that's an awesome thing. And so we've got several relationships of home builders that do you know anywhere between 150 to 2,000 homes a year. And you build those relationships, you deliver and it's not easy, it's super hard, it's super cash intensive, it's super labor intensive on the front end and the back end. And you can't get distracted in doing it's gotta be your main focus. So yeah, we have several of those relationships. If we sell two hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of new business in a month, two hundred to two twenty five of that will come through our builder relationships and the rest of it will probably come through what realtor relationships.

34:48 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. What does that look like from the builder side? Are you telling them, once once they build the house, let's say, they're connecting with the realtor or how how's the service getting sold?

35:07 Ryan Tate

Anytime that you claim you have a lead, the NAP information has to be a big part of that, right? The name, address, phone number. So you don't have a lead unless you have the NAP information. So whatever that lead source may be, I think securing that proper contact info. But we own all of that. We own the process of sending the documentation to closing, following up and making sure that the homeowner understands their current termite warranty and then also understands the deal on the back end. But that has to be part of any relationship that to know that we're we're doing these installations or we're doing real estate deals or we're paying for leads from some other source. Whatever we're doing, we've gotta make sure that we get that NAP information and then we've got to use that NAP information to communicate with the customer well. And so getting that and securing that name, address, phone number is super important and that's really one of the keys and it and it's hard to navigate, but you've just got to build a relationship of trust. You've got to steward that that contact info well and make sure that you don't abuse it. And so it's a full relationship from the time of install or from the time of a commitment from a builder to the time of installation on the houses, to the follow-up and getting the closing paperwork to the builder. To fulfill the fulfill the needs that they need to be able to close on time and then the follow up for the first year to make sure that you secure the termite and crawl sale other services. It's real labor intensive, but it definitely has to be a partnership. It can't be I'm a vendor doing work for this realtor or builder or whoever it is. It has to be seen as a partnership. And if that person doesn't want to see it as a partnership, then you probably can't can't do business with them.

37:08 Dan Leibrandt

Hm, okay. So to be clear, it's a referral, the person knows they're getting sent to you. It's you're not reaching out to them cold, right?

37:18 Ryan Tate

Yeah, in most states you have to do a termite pretreat, of some kind. So whether that's doing a borate treatment on the studs doing a sub slab treatment and under the slab with the old fashioned liquid treatments or doing the Sentricon system at the end of the build. That has to be done and then in most states they ask you to warranty it for for one to five years and then what you're chasing as a PCO is that recurring revenue off of that for that customer to stay with you. Does that make sense?

37:49 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, totally. I just wanna be clear on that. Cool. Something else I wanted to ask you on is that you after actually w when you did the consulting, was that after Waynes or something else?

38:04 Ryan Tate

Yeah, when I when I left Waynes me and a former colleague of mine who worked with me at Waynes had started a business called Lime Visor where we were doing some she was doing books for pest control companies. And she had a few clients and she was like, Hey, I needed to sit out for some time to honor some commitments from from Anticimex and from Wayne, so I did that. And in the time of doing that, I went and, would c talk with the people I knew in the industry. We would sell that that service, but really at that time I did a lot of consulting. Consulting for people. We actually sold a couple businesses as well at that time. Not our own businesses, but had some friends that were like, hey, I w I wanna sell my company, but I don't really want to go to a broker. I don't want to do this. Will you guys help us do that? So we did that in two instances. But I did that for about eight months as I was waiting out the non-compete non-solicit. I knew when I left Waynes I was gonna I was gonna own my own pest control company. I just didn't know exactly where I was gonna land and who I was gonna partner with or whether I was gonna do it all by myself. And Scott, Jamie and Robert really made it a no-brainer for me to join them. But yeah I did spend eight months doing that consulting work which was different but it was a lot of fun too.

39:24 Dan Leibrandt

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about that. So I you mentioned it was pretty much all pest control companies, maybe one garage door company. What did you learn across that experience consulting with these different companies? What were they doing wrong? What like for for the audience, maybe what are some common issues you saw in key opportunities?

39:47 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I would say the biggest issue that I saw in doing that and I still see talking to friends in the industry, at points meetings or at PestWorld or wherever, is nobody's coming to save us as entrepreneurs. And so that consultant that you pay when I was being paid, it is ri really lives in the strategic realm. They're not gonna help you build the culture really. They can give you tips on it, but you gotta go build the culture and then you gotta be the one that goes and executes. That consultant is there to help you learn and then you gotta go actually do the thing that they helped you figure out you gotta do. And that that's where I think we get messed up. We feel like, okay, we don't know what to do, we'll call a consultant and that consultant will do it. Well no, he's supposed to consult. He's supposed to help you figure out what to do. He's not there to execute. And so I think that when you get to a certain size and you get stuck, whether that be the guy in the truck or a guy with, a three or four million dollar business that don't know how to get to the next level, which is a lot of the companies I worked with. A lot there was two things that people wanted me to do. One they w they were starting a relationship with me to try to hire me, or two, they were starting a relationship with me hoping that I would just go do these things in their business. And that's n that that was the that mindset was killing most of those companies from one million to three million. It was like that inability to learn the strategic steps to take to do the next thing. And I saw that over and over.

41:21 Dan Leibrandt

Mm. Yeah, I've done some I've done I've done some SEO consulting myself. It's the same thing. It always ends up people like, well, can you just do it? Or that now they're trying to get free work. So yeah, I've witnessed that too. But beyond that, what are you seeing within the business? What were you telling them to do and what was common?

41:43 Ryan Tate

Yeah, so a lot of the th there were I focused on sales, operations and leadership. Those those three things. And really trying to figure out, Hormozi says it as it do you have a supply issue or do you have a demand issue? What's the issue? Can you if you had an unlimited amount of leads, could you run or is the problem that you can't get the lead? What is that what side of the problem is so trying to identify that and I think the biggest thing that I see, especially when we talk about scalability, is bullets only work at certain certain sizes and at certain times. If you're shooting bullets, which means things that get one customer at a time you're you're gonna really struggle once you get to a one, two, three million dollar business, those cancels get so big you really need to be shooting cannonballs at that point. So you need to look at how do I get scalable lead flow in our business and something that's actually gonna scale with the business, not just one off basic relationships of what you can do and not understanding how to scale that lead funnel in some way. It you can do it a bunch of different ways and by the way it costs all of us a lot of money to do it. When you want a scalable lead flow, whether it's builders, realtors, door-to-door, SEO, it all costs a lot of money.

43:17 Ryan Tate

It just does to build a scalable model, it costs money. We're all paying money to do that. But you've got to say, okay, what am I gonna do? What is my niche in this in this market? What am I gonna do to scale that growth? Because the cancels are scaling. The churn is scaling. You gotta go make the actual lead flow scale and stay above that. So I think that was something that I saw over and over again, that and a lack of understanding of the financial side. But really it's that side that not the financial side, the other side that people really lacked understanding on.

43:50 Dan Leibrandt

Hm. Got it.

43:57 Dan Leibrandt

Hm, okay. So you need what you could call a lead machine, the so you gave examples of cannons, but what would be examples of bullets?

44:07 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I would say bullets is just the amount of relationships you have. As a business owner, maybe you're one or two min million dollars and you're the sales guy. You're the sales and marketing guy and you're just really good at shaking hands and kissing babies and meeting people. But you have a small amount of time that you can do that and as the business grows you need to be doing that less and less. So going the bullet would be you doing it. The cannonball is figuring out how you train five people to go do that. And so that that now that's scalable through that. Referrals are great, but referrals are only as good as your customer base, meaning your your customer base size has to continue to be growing for that that to have a huge impact. But yeah I think the bullets is just those things that are that are very limited and that are just those one off things that just kinda happen. But I think there's a lot of ways to figure out the cannonballs but it's just getting out of those bullet opportunities and thinking okay I can I can sell this niche of whatever that that lead flow may be, but if there's only ten of that's only gonna feed you for so long. You gotta if you know the pyramid everybody talks about for customers, Walmart and Amazon get to the bottom of the pyramid. So no matter what socioeconomical status you're own, you're buying Biz you're buying from Amazon and Walmart. All of us are buying from those two at some point most of the time, right?

45:47 Ryan Tate

They're at the bottom of the pyramid. And I so I think you just gotta find something that's that there's enough of for you to chase and scale your business with.

45:57 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. No, that that's really good. And I think a lot of owners need to hear that because a lot of owners I talk to, they I maybe before, implementing some marketing or joining the program or something, they just are basically waiting for referrals to come. That those are just like bullets that happen, maybe you get a bullet, a few bullets every week, but that's not scalable. You can scale referrals, but not totally. So, yeah, I really like that. And then...

46:25 Ryan Tate

Gotta be in what I've to say it more clearly, there are pieces to the puzzle, but the piece is not the puzzle, right? So referrals is a piece to the puzzle, Google rule reviews are a piece to the puzzle, some sponsorship things in the community and showing up to events are a piece of the puzzle, but none of those are the puzzle. And you either gotta do a collective of those things that can be the puzzle, or you've gotta go find a big sustainable lead flow model to go pour money in and begin to see the rewards off of that. Or your business is just gonna get stagnant. We bought one business while I was at Waynes, we were twenty eight, well, by that time we were larger, but we organically were a twenty eight million dollar company, let's say. This business was a seven million dollar business and when we got in there they had more leads than us.

47:20 Ryan Tate

And it was like, my gosh, that the problem with that business was not a lead problem. The problem with that business was a retention problem, right? If they got more leads than a twenty eight million dollar company, so going back to figuring out what the issues are, if you don't have a lead issue, maybe you have a retention issue, but trying to figure those things out and work from there.

47:45 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, definitely. Last topic I wanted to cover with you, Ryan. If you've got the time, is on partners. So do you have the time? Okay. Okay, cool. Partners. So you have four partners, that you said two original founders, then then you joined on. All these were Waynes guys, I believe. So how do you navigate the partnership and would you recommend partnering to other owners?

48:14 Ryan Tate

Yeah, so th this was is my approach. I believe, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together, right? And so I think that's where where you start. This was a unique situation from the standpoint of these are men that I had been in the trenches with for years, right? And not only did I know how good they were at their job, which made me want to partner with them, I knew who they were as men and fathers and husbands and there are people I wanted to spend time with. That's a big part of it too, right? So they were good at their job. They were they were high character individuals who I knew I could trust. And then there were people that I actually enjoy doing business with. I actually enjoy enjoy working alongside. And so having partners does make it more complicated from time to time. But again, I didn't want to get stuck in the truck and I wanted to build something bigger, right? I wanted to have more impact on more people and more communities and build something to have that bigger impact. So it just made sense for us to leverage our skills. And all of us, again, it's a little unique. We all knew each other's skills. And everybody does something differently than the other people. We're not all the same person that just happen to be business partners. So as a leadership team, we're able to, we were able to really have a built-in leadership team as we're scaling here to be able to cover all the different bases to help with that. So partnerships can be great, but it doesn't matter how talented the person is if you don't trust and just full transparency, don't need to get into it. Really deeply for a bunch of different reasons but we had another partner that it didn't work out with.

50:13 Ryan Tate

And so we had to go through that, right? And that's not fun. But you learn and you move on. So if you if the people are really good at their job and you can really trust them and you want to, you think about, hey, I'd like to go hang out with this person, then maybe you could talk about being in a partners partnership. But I wouldn't be in a partnership with anybody I hadn't met. I if I've known for a year, maybe I'd get into a partnership that I envisioned lasting for a year with but if I'm wanting a ten year partnership, I want somebody that I've known for ten years. I wanna know what a decade looks like with that person, right? Because life changes happen. If I'm gonna get in my marriage, I wanna really know that person before I get into a lifelong relationship with that person. So partners are hard, but I'm super glad we did what we did with all of our partners and we're we've been able to all leverage each other, our talents, gifts, and abilities and pour into our business and we're we're at where we're at because of ever that partnership. I would not we would not be at the place had William even just gone and done our own thing, we wouldn't be at the place we are now because without those other those other guys.

51:34 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, definitely. No, it seems like it totally worked out and it just ever everything fit into place for you. And I'm if you don't mind me...

51:40 Ryan Tate

Mm-hmm. And there's probably ten there's probably ten others that didn't. So, make sure that you know who you're getting in business with because was it Dave Ramsey says ever every ship will sell but a partnership and so it doesn't work out more times than it does, but if you know the person it can work out. Sorry to interrupt you.

52:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. No, no, you're all good. I wanted to ask, if you don't mind me asking, what didn't work out with that that guy who fell through?

52:09 Ryan Tate

I think you need to have a really good partnership and an operating agreement in place of what that person's gonna do. So not only is equity shares super important, right? But what is each partner gonna do each day to impact the business? Because if you've got three or four partners that feel like, they're working really, really hard and you've got one partner that's not working hard who's supposed to be as a managing partner, and not pouring in to the business like they should and just kinda 'cause here's the deal with pest control. If you want a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar business with one technician, you can make pretty mu good money doing that. Right? Five hundred thousand dollar business with one technician, that that money's printing cash. You can make three hundred thousand dollars a year as an owner and be okay. But if you've got four other partners in the business, there's only one person that can eat off that, right? So I think having that management agreement in place and making sure that everybody's pulling their weight and unfortunately I don't think that's what was going on. And so you have to make moves, you have to make decisions, and I think that person's better off now too. So God God worked it all out.

53:24 Dan Leibrandt

Sweet. And last question around this. It seems like all of you guys run your own branches. So it's not like a CEO, CFO, COO, but you guys are distinct and run your own things.

53:40 Ryan Tate

So yeah, so everybody is the managing partner in their own market. So they're the buck stops here guy in that market. But then each one of us have a leadership role over the whole company. For William, his his expertise is in sales. So he owns our Cullman market and does a great job of leading that. And he's the one that makes sure the bills are paid there, makes sure, he's the one looking at the bank account, making sure cash flow's good. He's got P&L responsibility for that business. And if the work's not done, the buck stops with him on that. But he also has sales part of that. For me, there this Huntsville business is mine. The buck stops here with with that business, but then also I lead the admin team and then do a lot of the leadership development. Stuff that that we do here. So each of us work in that market individually, but we also each of us have these niches that we're good at in the business. For Scott, our original one of our original founders, he's really good on the financial side. He's not a CFO by any stretch of the imagination. None of us are, but he's he's really, really good at at helping us manage the cash flow, especially with the big amount of money we pour out on the front end. For our marketing efforts and our growth to make sure that we have the cash flow to take care of everything. And Jamie's really, really good at at leading frontline employees and making sure that those frontline employees are trained like they're supposed to be, make sure that they have the products and the tools that they need to do that. He's really good at that. And then Robert is great with builder relationships.

55:24 Ryan Tate

So we all kinda have our our niche. And then all of us are good at everything else you need to do in the business, but I think all of us are super strong in one area and we try to let that person kinda run with that area.

55:38 Dan Leibrandt

Dang. No, that sounds like a really good balance. So you and it seems like you guys have a structure that will last and you can you can really scale a company with those key roles.

55:50 Ryan Tate

Yeah, I think so. And I think you just gotta always not something that I wanna share, on this podcast, but we all know what time frames and end goals look like for each one of us. I'm forty one, William's forty five, Robert's forty, the other two are are creeping up on fifty and we all have the same goals for the next decade. But not all of us have the same goals for the next three decades. But we know that, right? And we can make preparations to know that, for me, William and Robert I'm not gonna stop working. That's not who I am. And so, the next three decades is what we're in for, but maybe some other folks only wanna be here for two decades or one decade. So, again, don't want to share the details on the podcast about that, but that is a b important part that we know about each other and so that clear communication helps and then we're really we're brothers in a lot of ways. We can say really hard things to each other and that's a that's a big thing. If you can't talk plainly, you don't have a partner. If you can't just flat out if you have to mince words, it's not gonna work. You've gotta be able to just talk to each other very lovingly but bluntly and honestly.

57:20 Dan Leibrandt

Totally. Really good advice. Well, sweet Ryan, we'll wrap up the show here. I really appreciate your time. And I think it's been an awesome show. I've learned a lot. And, I talked to a lot of owners myself, and I've personally never heard of the builders example. Tony Carder, I interviewed, he's really big on realtors. Jake Sheldon, my partner in Pest Control Millionaires, he's really big on movers. But the builders one is fascinating. And I think that might be a key unlock for some people listening to this. So cool. The last question I have for you, Ryan, is what is your message to the pest control owners out there? What do you want to tell them? What do you think they need to know?

57:59 Ryan Tate

I just double back down on the things that I that I said before. Gold build a co a company with a great culture, with with the right strategy, and then getting up every day to make and execute on those things and make happen. And it's probably gonna happen gradually, then suddenly. It's not just gonna happen suddenly, but I think you'll wake up one day and be exactly where you wanna be if you do that.

58:25 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Well, sweet. It's been so good having you on the show, man. Just really great connecting here. Where can people find you online and connect with you?

58:33 Ryan Tate

Yeah, you find me on LinkedIn, obviously I'm on Facebook. Also [email address removed]. You can shoot me an email anytime. Love to love to talk. But I also want to just say for you, I appreciate you guys what you do. I shared when before we started recording that, just the quantity of you guys having different voices on and talking and being curious and asking questions and being able to be an entrepreneur and some days are a little lonely, but you're able to turn on a YouTube video and listen to you guys interview somebody or just listen to you guys talk about how to be better from a marketing standpoint or whatever that is. So I appreciate what you guys are doing with the industry, what you're personally doing, bringing a higher level of thinking to the SEO and the digital marketing side. So appreciate you and what you're doing for the industry.

59:29 Dan Leibrandt

Well thanks, man. That means a lot. I appreciate that. Well sweet. Cool, Ryan we'll we'll stay in touch and thanks again for coming on the show.

59:38 Ryan Tate

All right, sounds good, thanks.

59:40 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah. YouTube has this crazy feature where its algorithm knows the perfect next episode you should watch. So click right here and watch it now. Just click it. Click, click, click.