Tony Carder on the 24-month branch, 4-cent door hangers and starting over with his kids

In November 2024, Tony Carder’s son, Cody, opened the Panama City branch of TruNorth Pest Control with one truck and no customers. He did $3,100 that first month. When we recorded, Tony expected Cody to do about $80,000 in June, up from $22,000 the June before, and the branch was on pace for close to $1M a year. Nobody there knocks doors.

Tony has done this before. Active Pest Control, the company he bought from his dad at $4.4M, was doing $24M a year when he sold it in 2019. TruNorth is his second run, and this time his two kids are building it with him.

My partner Jonas Olson already interviewed Tony and wrote up his biggest lessons on focus, profit and selling. I wanted the ground game, the week-to-week work that grows a branch that fast.

Who is Tony Carder?

Tony Carder is the owner of TruNorth Pest Control, which serves metro Atlanta, middle Georgia, Orlando and Panama City Beach. His dad founded Active Pest Control in 1985. Starting in 10th grade, Tony left school at 10:20 every day to drill and trench on termite jobs with his grandfather.

After high school he went full-time, doing service for 6 years and sales for 5 or 6 before moving into leadership next to his dad, who was his coach for almost 17 years. Tony bought the company outright on June 1, 2006. By the time Rentokil acquired it in 2019, Active had 15 locations, 14 of them around Atlanta and 1 in Houston.

TruNorth has been open a little over 2 years. When we recorded, it had 5 locations with a sixth opening July 1, and Tony expected almost $8M for the year.

Every new branch needs 24 months

Tony has opened 8 offices from scratch, 7 at Active and 1 so far at TruNorth. Every time, he knew it would take about 24 months before the branch turned. Around month 23 or 24 you can see the pendulum start to swing, and years 2 and 3 are when it gains traction.

I can’t remember another guest putting a number on it like that. When I said an owner a year into a new market can feel like he hasn’t cracked the surface, Tony agreed that it just takes 2 years.

So TruNorth opens one scratch office every other year, which keeps it from carrying 2 young branches at once. The leader often comes from inside, someone who wants to move up and already knows the program.

Get out of the truck by month two

Cody ran service for 3 months before going to full-time sales. If Tony started over tomorrow, he’d run service for about a month to get a few customers, and by month two he’d be out of the truck. An owner still doing service is taking energy away from the thing he’s best at, telling people what the company does.

In a new market, Tony starts with a BNI group, the chamber of commerce and real estate agents. The Walton County chamber near the Panama City branch runs 6 to 10 events a month, which means 6 to 10 appointments. If you show up for a couple of months and then disappear, people figure you’re another fly-by-night. They start to trust you after a year of showing up to every event.

“You don’t date an individual on the first date and marry them. You build a relationship.”

The realtor budget runs about $30,000 a month across TruNorth’s 5 locations. It covers trolley tours that carry 12 to 14 agents for 3 or 4 hours, $50 gift card raffles, cookouts at open houses and lunch and learns. Tony’s top salesman figures he spends half his time entertaining.

There’s always somewhere to go. The county will hand over lists of new construction permits and new business licenses, and Tony will do new construction pre-treats even as a loss leader, then go hard after the new homeowner. Ryan Tate built Rogue Pest Solutions’ growth on builders, too, and in our PCM program we see the same opportunity in strategic partnerships with HVAC and lawn care companies.

Cody’s branch has led TruNorth in pest control sales for the last 4 or 5 months. When Tony asks TruNorth’s CEO what Cody does differently, the answer is that Cody does exactly what they tell him.

A $300,000 route can be a $1M branch in a year

Tony likes small acquisitions best, one or two routes. He used Columbus, Georgia, as an example, where Active started with one truck. About a year in, the branch manager was handing his card to small operators, and one called back. Tony drove down for lunch, and 4 months later Active had another $300,000 to $400,000 a year in revenue.

“You give me a $300,000 company, I can make it a million in 12 months.”

First, every customer on the list gets offered whatever they don’t have yet, whether that’s termite, pest or mosquito. The easiest sale is someone who already has a relationship with you. Add door hangers, yard signs, social media and realtors, and Tony says the branch puts on another $25,000 or $30,000 a month.

Door hangers cost 4 cents

Every tech hangs a door hanger on the houses on both sides of the customer and puts out a yard sign. Those neighbors end up with 4 door hangers a year. Near the end at Active, you could drive through a neighborhood and count 25 or 30 signs from that day’s service.

When I said some people call door hangers and yard signs a waste of money, Tony laughed and said, “I hope they keep saying that.” An LSA lead runs around $100. A door hanger costs him about 4 cents, and hanging 2 takes under 2 minutes at a house the tech is already servicing. The neighbor who’s been a customer for years is a built-in reference.

If an HOA objects, the sign only has to stay up a day or two. For the rest, see PCM’s take on getting the most out of yard signs.

Tony does think door-to-door works. What keeps him out of it is the manpower and the cost, which he’s heard runs 80% to 110% of the annualized contract. He might hire a team for the first year in a new market, one of the 2 places Greg Young told me door-to-door works best.

Answer the phone and get there today

Someday Tony wants to write a book called Answer the Damn Phone. AI and virtual assistants will help, he thinks, but they won’t replace people talking to people. He credits answering the phone for how well the Florida market is doing. TruNorth has also picked up a lot of former Active customers, and he hears one complaint from them over and over.

“The number one complaint we hear is not that they couldn’t kill their bugs, they couldn’t get nobody on the phone.”

Getting there fast takes room on the schedule. TruNorth keeps technician routes at about 80% of capacity and tries to get out the same day when a customer who signs up before noon needs it. Owners tell Tony their routes are at $25,000, then wonder why the company has sat at $600,000 for 2 or 3 years. Tell someone with ants in the kitchen your next opening is a week out, and they’ll call 3 other companies.

Tony says TruNorth lives off the crumbs of the mega companies, winning customers one or two at a time. I told him I see the same thing in SEO. As a company adds locations, CRMs and acquisitions, more things break. In his experience, a smaller company, starving for every new customer, pays closer attention to the details.

The team does the growing

Active went from $15M to $24M in 3 years, when a bunch of small branches took off at the same time. A full-time sales manager dialed in the salespeople who were good but not great, and a training coordinator got new hires ready. For those last 3 years, Active bought 3 new trucks and hired 3 people every month, and each group was on the street in 90 days.

I asked whether techs can be trained to do little things like rolling a customer’s trash can back up to the house. Tony thinks so. Chick-fil-A doesn’t beat “my pleasure” into its kids, he said. It expects it, coaches it and trains it, and TruNorth is putting EOS in place to set its own expectations up front. Tony doesn’t pull up on techs to catch them doing something wrong anymore. He’d rather catch one doing it right and hand him $20 for lunch for putting out the yard sign and door hangers.

When I brought up Preston Peterson’s point that dropping his ego was the key to growing, Tony agreed. He was the visionary, he said, but his people built the relationships. “Look at your two hands. They can only do so much.”

The kids start at the bottom

It took the buyer 3 years to talk Tony into selling Active. When the check got big enough, he asked his dad what to do, and his dad asked, “What is your legacy going to be?” Tony said his two children. “Then you know exactly what you’re supposed to do,” his dad told him, because it was never going to be the business. When they closed, Cody was finishing high school, and he told Tony, “We can always do it again.”

Neither kid started in the C-suite. Cody has worked as a tech, in sales and on termite jobs. His sister, Kaylee, runs the contact center. Both get the same vacation as everyone else and no extra benefits, the same deal Tony had with his dad.

Tony puts Christ first and his family second. Over the last year he’s asked himself what race he’s really running. Growing 3% to 5% a year while you’re happy is still growing, he says, even if his own ego wants 20% to 30%.

My take

I’m the digital marketing guy, and on the show I said almost nobody talks about this side of growth anymore. Tony doesn’t treat in-person and online as either-or. Someone meets a TruNorth person during the day, sees the logo on Facebook that night and remembers the face. He credits doing 7 to 10 of these things at once, consistently, for a full year.

His beach house story shows how far that reputation travels. Tony called an agent about a $6M beach house he was looking at buying. Two days later, the agent came back to say the property manager had already recommended a guy named Tony for the termite and pest control. A lot of referred customers still look you up before they call, so a Google Business Profile with steady reviews and real photos has to back up the referral.

Any owner opening a second market should hear the 24-month number before they start. Year one in a new town is slow whether you’re shaking hands or building rankings, and the owners who quit at month 12 never see the swing.

Where to find Tony

Tony helps other owners for free because he wants to see them succeed. He’s also in our Facebook group.

• Website: TruNorth Pest Control
• Facebook: Tony Carder
• LinkedIn: Tony Carder
• Instagram: TruNorth Pest Control