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Getting your business started with door-to-door sales.
An interview with Casey McDaniel, Owner of King Pest Solutions.
Bryan Shankman
February 15, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Workbench! The Workbench is a resource-rich weekly newsletter for current & aspiring home service business owners.
For this week’s newsletter, we spoke with Casey McDaniel(@pestctrlguy), the Owner of King Pest Solutions—a pest control service based in Grand Junction, Colorado.
We covered everything from the art of door-to-door sales, how to get your business off the ground with nothing more than a backpack, how to get 100s of Google Reviews, & more!
The 9 Key Takeaways
Below are the nine most essential insights from our conversation with Casey about starting and growing a home or local service business.
1. Bet on yourself
Fresh out of college, Casey struggled to find job opportunities in the finance industry, and, giving into his cousin’s peer pressure, he decided to try selling pest control services door-to-door.
After spending an entire summer knocking on doors, Casey had learned the ropes and was ready to start his own business.
Why sell someone else’s services when they can sell their own?
There weren't a lot of job opportunities or internships. I went ahead and gave in to my cousin and did pest control door-to-door sales for one summer. After one summer of that, we decided to start up our own.
2. Keep it simple
Unlike other home service businesses, you need special licenses to operate a pest control business.
The license requirements differ by state but, generally, there are a few different tiers:
Apprentice or Technician License: Entry-level license allowing individuals to perform pest control under supervision.
Certified or Licensed Applicator: Qualifies individuals to independently apply pesticides and conduct pest control operations.
Commercial Applicator: For professionals offering pest control services to the public; requires additional business qualifications.
Specialty Licenses: Focuses on specific types of pest control, such as termite control or fumigation that require specialized training.
Operator or Business License: The highest level of license for those owning or operating a pest control business covers technical expertise and business management skills.
When starting King Pest, Casey knew there were various licenses he could get, and the more advanced licenses would require a lot of time and capital investment to obtain and leverage.
Instead of getting ahead of his skis, Casey kept things simple and got the entry-level license.
You can go and get all your licenses and do everything in-house, but we felt, for us and our skill set, that would spread us a little bit thin. We focus on just the basic stuff. If they see some creepy crawlies in their house, most people look up pest control, and we’re going to pop up.
In the early days of King Pest, Casey’s entire equipment arsenal consisted of a backpack, a can of spray for interior spraying, and some initial chemicals.
3. Use what you know
Casey and his cousin (now business partner) started their career in home services by knocking on doors and knew that they could leverage this hard-earned skill to win business for King Pest.
The very first day they went knocking for King Pest, they secured their first customer by signing up a homeowner for a quarterly maintenance program.
By the end of March, their first month in business, they had done $7,000 in total revenue. By the end of April, it had hit $10,000; by August, it had hit $26,000 in total revenue.
There’s a lot of door-to-door selling in this space, so that’s how we’ve grown predominantly. My cousin and I were knocking on doors for the first few years. Now we have a team that goes out and knocks on doors. The vast majority of our customers come from that.
4. The winning door-to-door pitch
After knocking on thousands of doors between his first job and now his own company, Casey had refined his pitch to be clear, polite, low-pressure, and persuasive.
It’s obvious that showing up at someone’s door unannounced is scary for the rep and unexpected for the homeowner.
Casey hits three critical points in his pitch to ensure it’s as well received as possible.
Let the homeowner know he is already in the area doing work
Explain that his service is affordable and eco-friendly
Offer half off on the first service
We say, ‘Hey, our trucks are here in the neighborhood. We're going to be doing some services for some neighbors. If we can add a few more folks in the area, we're doing our first service for half off.’ We just let them know our service is affordable, that we're using products that are super safe and eco-friendly, and that we're doing our first service for half off. That usually piques their interest enough.
5. The making of a great salesperson
Door-to-door sales can be brutal—tons of rejection, harsh conditions, and days or weeks without closing a deal or getting paid.
From his own experience in the field and now building teams of reps, Casey sees two characteristics as crucial for a successful door-to-door salesperson:
Staying level-headed through the ups and downs
Consistently working hard by putting in reps
You have to be level-headed. You can't pound your chest and think you're on top of the world after a good day, but you can't beat yourself up and get into a slump after a bad day. The good reps are pretty even keel all summer long, and they are just really hard workers.
It's a numbers game. It's not any type of magic. Sometimes, the smoothest-talking guys interview, and we think they will be killers. But then they don’t work hard. It’s just about putting in the reps, not giving up, believing in yourself, and always thinking that the next door is a sale.
6. Building a door-to-door sales army
Hiring is complex and a key component of building any business. This challenge is magnified when hiring for a grueling job like door-to-door sales.
While building the door-to-door sales team at King Pest, Casey created a process to find, hire, and train great talent. So great, in fact, that one of his reps recently hit six figures in sales.
First, Casey casts a wide net to attract a large pool of candidates.
We just try to cast the net wide. We run all the standard ads on Indeed.com, and we drum up what we can locally. We’ll ask local universities if we can set up a table at the job fair.
Once interested, Casey makes sure to keep it real with candidates so that they are aware of the challenges that door-to-door sales present.
We tell them that this is not a cushy job. It's commission only. There's no base pay, and you're going to be outside working in the elements. If it's cold and rainy, then it's cold and rainy. If it's 110 degrees, you still have to get out there and knock doors. Carry a towel to wipe off your face. You're going to have days where you sell nothing. But you basically have unlimited income and can make a lot of money. You eat what you kill.
Casey and his team at King Pest ensure that all of their reps are trained continuously to stay on top of their game.
We have a sales training manual that new hires read before they start, and we do sales training with the team every single day throughout the summer. We have a one-hour meeting each day where they can bring up any objections they’re getting or things they’re struggling with. We do a bunch of role plays, give them feedback, and make sure that we’re getting a lot of one-on-one time with each guy. Then we send them back out there and let them go at it again.
7. Recurring revenue for long-term success
There are a few high-ticket services in pest control: bed bugs, termites, rodent infestations, & others. These require a lot of overhead and costly licenses.
Casey focuses on lower ticket services like ants, spiders, mosquitos, and preventive services. As such, Casey focuses on booking recurring services and a high volume of customers to ensure long-term, durable revenue.
The bulk of our revenue and 90% of our services are quarterly maintenance plans. We come out and service the customers’ homes once every three months. We spray the outside. If they need the interior sprayed, we can treat the inside; knock down cobwebs and wasps nests up to 30 feet high. We inspect the front and backyard and treat any ant hills or other little things that might have popped up.
8. Route density leads to better margins
There are costs associated with every house that King Pest services. If Casey’s technicians are driving miles between each customer, then the cost of gas, time, and wear on the equipment starts to add up and eat into his margins.
Casey focuses on creating route density so that his truck can drive into a neighborhood and knock out 10 or 20 stops with minimal increase in his cost structure per stop.
The more dense the routes are, the better his margins are.
The real margins come from us when we have great route density. If we can send one truck into a neighborhood and do ten or twenty services, we make way more than having ten services that are spread all across town. Dense routes cut down on your costs, including gas, oil changes, tires, and labor. If all your stops are in the same neighborhood, you can probably do an extra two to three jobs per day. You're maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. That's where the real margin squeeze comes from.
9. Getting 453 Google Reviews (and counting)
Door-to-door sales have been the foundation for King Pest’s growth. But Casey knows that digital tools like Google are typically the first touchpoint for consumers and that you have to be present there to succeed.
King Pests currently has 453 Google Reviews, and Casey has a unique and creative method to garner all these great reviews.
We printed off business cards for all of our techs that have a QR code to our Google page. After every service, the tech goes up to the door and lets the customer know that they’re done. Then they give them the card and say, “Hey, if you leave me a five-start Google Review with my name in it, my boss gives me a $10 tip.” It works really well. Customers go on Google and say, “This tech did a great job,” and we give them a $10 tip. Our techs are happy and push for the reviews, knowing they’re getting another 400 or 500 bucks a month off from that.
Wow! You made it all the way to the end, thanks for sticking with us.
The full interview with Casey is available on YouTube below and Spotify Podcasts here.