PestScale — Revenue recovery for pest control companies

Run your own numbers

Every pest control owner we've met can tell us what they sold. Almost none can tell us what they kept.

So here are a hundred of your customers. Drag through a year of service and watch what happens to them. Your inputs, our assumptions, both on the table.

New leads per month 45

Calls, web forms, Angi, referrals — everything inbound

Active recurring customers 400

Anyone on a quarterly or bi-monthly program

First-year value per customer $520

Initial service plus a year of recurring

100 customers, one year of service

Each square is a customer who signed up in January.

Service visit

Initial2nd3rd4th5th

—

Where it goes

Leads that go cold before anyone reaches them—

Customers lost across the service cycle—

Add-ons your techs never bring up—

Balances already earned and never collected—

Leaking per year —

What we're assuming, so you can argue with it

30% of inbound leads never reach a live conversation, and you'd close about a third of those. Retention follows the curve above — a small drop after the initial, then the real bleed at service two and three, which is where almost every pest control book loses its people. Roughly a fifth of your customers would take a termite, mosquito, or rodent add-on if a technician actually asked, and about a quarter of those already do. Around 8% of an active book is carrying an aged balance averaging somewhere near $165 — that one is usually low, and it is the only line here that is money you have already earned. These are our working numbers from the field, not a study. The audit throws all of them out and uses yours.

Six places the money actually goes

These are the ones two of us found independently inside the same company, and every operation we've looked at since leaks in the same places. They're grouped on purpose. Two of them end in a cancellation and they are two completely different diseases — most owners have one churn number and no idea which one they're actually looking at.

Open any one to read what's actually happening

Group one

Before they ever become a customer

You already paid to make the phone ring. This is what happens to it after that.

The lead that called at 4:40 on a Friday

Biggest leakFastest to fix
Measurable in 2 weeks

Somebody sees ants in the kitchen and calls three companies. Whoever picks up gets the job — not whoever has the better price or the better reviews. Your office closed at 4:30 and your answering service takes a message that nobody reads until Monday. By Monday the ants are somebody else's revenue.

Group two · the cancellation cluster

Two reasons customers leave, and neither of them is about bugs

Both land in your CRM as the same thing: cancelled. One is an operations problem and one is a communication problem, and a single churn percentage hides which is which.

They cancelled and it had nothing to do with pests

Most fixableCosts almost nothing
Pure communication

The tech doesn't show in the window. Or he does show, treats the perimeter while nobody's home, leaves a door hanger, and the customer only finds out three days later when the charge posts. No text on the way. No note about what he found under the deck. No heads-up when the route ran long and Tuesday quietly became Thursday.

These people usually aren't upset about bugs. They're paying for something they can't see, from a company that doesn't talk to them, and that combination shows up in the cancellation numbers more often than price does. I'd walk back through a neighborhood I'd sold three months earlier and hear the same sentence at four different doors: I never know when they're coming. That cancellation gets logged as “price” or “no longer needed,” which is exactly why it never gets fixed.

The third-service cancellation

Quietest leakCompounds every month
Almost never tracked

Almost nobody cancels after the initial — the bugs are gone and they're happy. They cancel at service two or three, when the initial glow wears off and they're being charged again for a truck that showed up, sprayed for eleven minutes, and left a door hanger. Nobody ever told them what the recurring service is actually preventing.

Group three

Money you have already earned

No advertising required for either of these. One of them you have literally already worked for.

Balances sitting uncollected on your own book

Fastest cashZero acquisition cost
Recoverable in weeks

A card expires. An invoice goes out on paper and lands in a junk drawer. Nobody at the office owns collections because it isn't anybody's actual job, so the balance ages quietly while your techs keep servicing the property — chemical, labor, drive time, all of it going out the door for free. I found this the hard way knocking doors: I'd pitch a house and the homeowner would tell me they already owed money and had been trying to sort it out for months. Nobody had ever called them.

Two hundred customers carrying a $180 balance is $36,000 you have already worked for. A good share of it isn't refusal at all — a declined card nobody chased, an invoice that went to the wrong address. Those accounts often sit in a strange limbo where the customer thinks they cancelled and you think they're active.

The upsell your tech was trained on and never does

Free revenueNo ad spend required
Needs a comp change

Termite inspection, mosquito program, rodent exclusion, the crawlspace they're standing in. Your techs see the opportunity every day. They don't bring it up because they're behind on the route, there's no script, and nobody's ever paid them for it. Outside of collecting what you are already owed, this is the cheapest revenue in your business, and most companies leave all of it.

Group four

The reason none of the above ever gets fixed

You can't repair what you can't see, and most pest control books are flying on memory.

You can't tell which marketing actually worked

Not a leak — a blindfoldMakes the other five
impossible to fix

Angi, Google, yard signs, the truck wrap, the guy who knocked doors. Ask most owners which channel produced their best customers last year and the honest answer is a shrug. So the budget goes where it went last year. Once you can see it, you usually find you're funding two channels that produce almost nothing.

Who's telling you this

We sold $350,000 for the same pest control company, in the same four months, off the same doorsteps.

Blake Leach

$150K

Impact Pest Control, four months. My rookie year in door-to-door — I'd never sold anything before I picked up a clipboard.

Isiah Lawson

$200K

Same company, same season, same neighborhoods. He outsold me and I've never let him forget I was new.

That's the part that looks good on a website, so there it is. Here's the part that actually matters.

We worked the same hours at different doors in different neighborhoods, and we walked away with the same list of problems. Neither of us cooked that up afterward. Two people watching one company from the outside in, landing independently on the same things.

Being out there all day meant we saw the operation from the customer's side of the door.

What that actually looked like

I'd close a family on a random Tuesday and find out a week later the service never got finished, because the tech never showed. We talked to customers who cancelled at their third service and told us, word for word, that they didn't know what they were paying for anymore. Isiah kept running into people we'd already sold who were still waiting on a first visit.

Then there were the balances. Somebody handed us a list of customers who owed money and told us to go sort it out, so we sat there texting every single one of them by hand. Most of them weren't refusing to pay anything. Their card had expired. That was it. A stack of accounts already sold, already serviced, needing about thirty seconds of somebody's attention — and the company was fine letting all of it go.

And the techs. Forty minutes behind the route, walking past webs and wasp nests because there was no time. One of them stopped mid-route to go get a haircut. I lost count of the customers who told me they never knew when anyone was coming, or whether anyone had come at all.

We were carrying revenue in the front door and watching more of it walk out the back.

Here's the thing though — none of it was anyone's fault, exactly. There was no system. The owner was running payroll and answering the phone and pulling a truck out of the shop, and nobody had the hours left to go look at where the money was actually going.

That's the work. We find the money you already earned and didn't collect, and we build the thing that keeps it from leaving again.

— Blake Leach & Isiah Lawson, PestScale · hello@pestscale.com

Start with the audit

One week. We get read-only access to your CRM, listen to a sample of calls, and mystery-shop your own company. Then you get a document with numbers in it.

Your real speed-to-lead, measured — not estimated. We submit your own web form, call your own after-hours line, and time it.
Every inbound lead from the last 90 days, sorted by what happened to it. Including the ones nobody ever touched.
Your cancellation curve by service number. This is usually the slide that makes owners quiet.
How consistently customers hear from you before, during, and after a service — and whether that pattern lines up with who cancels. We sample by hand where your software doesn't log it.

Everything else in the document — seven more findings

Aged receivables pulled apart by cause — expired card, failed autopay, disputed invoice, genuinely ignoring you — with the recoverable share separated out.
Customers still being serviced who haven't paid. This one usually produces the first check.
Every cancellation from the last year sorted by stated reason. If your team hasn't been logging reasons, we'll say so plainly and call the first fifteen to ask — that's usually more useful anyway.
Revenue per customer against what your service mix says it should be.
Which lead sources produced customers who stayed past a year — as far back as your tracking goes. Where the source field is blank, the blank is the finding.
A baseline: leads in, contact rate, average response time, booking rate, open estimates, failed payments, cancellations. Recorded before we change anything, so improvement is measurable instead of asserted.
A ranked list of fixes, each tagged with a dollar figure, how hard it is, and who owns it — us, you, or both. Some of what we find won't be ours to fix, and we'll say so rather than quietly leave it off the list.

Revenue audit

$750One time. About a week. Credited in full toward your first month if you keep going.

If we can't show you at least three times the audit fee in recoverable annual revenue, you don't pay for it. That's in writing, not a line on a website.

Book the audit

How the rollout actually works

We don't disappear for two months building something. The core system goes live fast, and then the real work starts: watching what your business actually does, and fixing what the numbers expose.

SETUP · WEEKS 1–3

Get it running

We connect to what you already use, get the customer data organized, and put in the first fixes — the ones the audit already flagged as bleeding. Missed-call and after-hours text back. Lead routing with a name and a clock on every inquiry. Follow-up on estimates that went quiet. Arrival texts and post-service reports switched on and rewritten so they actually say something. A process for chasing failed payments and aged balances.

How we decide what to build

What gets built depends on what your software can already do and where your biggest holes are. There's no standard checklist we run on every company.

Built inside whatever you already run — PestPac, Briostack, FieldRoutes, a shared inbox

FIRST 30 DAYS

Watch it and find the leaks

Now that things are running we can see what's actually happening instead of guessing. Leads nobody ever contacted. Response times that look fine on average and fall apart after 4pm. Estimates that never got a second touch. Customers sitting too long between the sale and the first service. Cancellations that trace back to a communication failure rather than a service failure. Balances worth going after.

What happens with what we find

Then we change the workflows to match what we found. This is the month where the audit's assumptions get confirmed or thrown out.

Monitoring · analysis · first round of corrections

DAYS 30–60

Improve what's working

By now there's a month of real data instead of estimates. We tune the things that move the number: follow-up timing, what the messages say, which stage of your pipeline people stall in, when the save offer fires, which lapsed customers are worth trying to bring back. Small changes, measured one at a time — not a rebuild.

What usually surfaces

This is usually where you find out which of the six leaks is genuinely your biggest, and it's often not the one you'd have picked in month one.

Targeted updates · measured against the prior 30 days

ONGOING

Monitor, analyze, improve, measure

That loop is the whole engagement. We watch the numbers, find the problem, change something, and check whether it worked. You get a short report and a note on what moved and why — no standing meeting on your calendar unless you want one.

Where we draw the line

We only touch problems we can actually measure and actually fix with the systems we manage. If something's outside that, we'll tell you it exists and stay out of it rather than invent work to look busy.

One-page report every two weeks · we watch it and tell you what changed

Pricing

Priced on the size of your book, because that's what determines both how much you're leaking and how much work it takes to stop it. A 3,000-customer company shouldn't pay what a 400-customer company pays, in either direction.

Typical pest control marketing agency$1,500–2,500/mo + $3,000/mo ad spend

Us$1,000–3,000/mo and that's the whole bill

We don't buy media, so there's no ad spend running through us and no markup on it. When you compare our number to an agency's, compare it to their number plus their budget.

Revenue audit

Find out what the number is before committing to anything. Most people start here.

$750One time. Credited in full toward your first month if you continue.

Full revenue leak audit
Mystery shop of your own company
90-day lead disposition analysis
Cancellation curve by service number
Aged receivables split by cause
Ranked fix list with dollar figures
90-minute walkthrough
No implementation

Start here

Most companies land here

Recovery system

750 to 2,000 active customers. Usually three to six trucks.

$1,500Setup, then $2,000/month

Everything in the audit, credited
Lead capture and routing in your system
Automatic missed-call and after-hours text back
Follow-up sequences live
Arrival texts and post-service reports
Failed-payment recovery process
Rule-based retention and save offers
Biweekly one-page report — we watch the numbers and send you what changed
Two-month minimum, then cancel anytime

Get started

Full operating system

2,000+ customers, a real office team, more moving parts to wire together.

$2,500Setup, then $3,000/month

Everything in Recovery system
Technician upsell program — scripts, tracking, and a comp structure you implement
Off-season revenue plan
Where your marketing budget should move, based on your own data
We monitor continuously, analyze every two weeks, and adjust as the numbers move

Talk it through

Under 750 customers? The system still works, but the math is tighter and we'd rather say so. $750 setup and $1,000/month, same scope as Recovery. If the audit says the leak isn't big enough to justify it, we'll tell you that and hand you the fix list to run yourself.

What we don't do

Worth saying out loud, because half the reason agencies get fired is that nobody was clear at the start.

We don't run your ads

No Google, no Facebook, no ad spend passing through us and no markup on it. If you need more leads on top of what you already get, we'll tell you and point you at someone who does that for a living.

We don't answer your phone

We build the system that catches what your phone misses. We're not a call center and we won't pretend to be one. If you want live humans on nights and weekends, we'll help you choose a service and connect it.

We don't lock you into a platform

Everything we set up lives in tools you already pay for, or can license directly for a few dollars a month. There is no PestScale product you have to keep subscribing to, no proprietary system holding your data hostage. If you walk away, every sequence, template, and report we built keeps running without us.

We don't text people you can't text

Every automated message goes out under your name, from your systems, to customers who are on your list legitimately. Opt-outs are honored automatically and reactivation is scoped to contacts you're actually permitted to reach. We won't blast an eight-year-old lead list because it's sitting in the CRM — that's how companies end up with a TCPA problem instead of a revenue one.

We don't manage your people

We can show you that a service was completed and the customer never got told. We can automate the message so it doesn't depend on anyone remembering. What we can't do is make a technician communicate differently, and we're not going to pretend otherwise — that part is management, and it stays with you.

We don't touch your books or your payroll

We'll show you exactly who owes you what and build the process to go collect it. Actually running the charges, and paying your techs a new upsell commission, stays with you and your bookkeeper.

The questions we actually get

How is this different from hiring a marketing agency?

An agency's job is to bring you more leads. Ours is to make sure the leads you already have turn into customers who stay. Different problem, different work. Most of what we fix costs you nothing in ad spend — it's response time, follow-up, what your techs say at the door, why people cancel at service three. If you genuinely don't have enough leads, hire an agency. If you suspect you're wasting the ones you've got, that's us.

What's usually the first thing you find?

Money you're already owed. Almost every book we've looked at has customers still getting serviced who haven't paid, and a stack of failed autopays nobody chased. It's not glamorous and it isn't marketing, but it's the fastest cash in the building and it costs nothing to go get. We usually start there because it tends to cover the engagement before anything we build has had time to work.

We run a door-to-door program. Does that change anything?

It changes a lot, and it's the part we know best — both of us sold pest control off a doorstep. D2D books cancel differently than phone or web leads: faster, earlier, and clustered around the first couple of services. A customer who called you had a problem already; a customer who answered a knock was talked into solving one, and that difference shows up in month three. The fix is confirming in writing what they actually bought, within a day of the sale, before the first invoice does the explaining for you.

So the audit is basically free if I continue?

Yes — the $750 comes off your first month, so you got a full diagnosis before committing to anything. Decide not to continue and you keep the document and the fix list, and we're square. We charge for it rather than give it away because free audits attract people who were never going to do anything with them.

Do I have to switch software?

No, and we'd talk you out of it. Whatever you're running — PestPac, Briostack, FieldRoutes, ServSuite, a whiteboard — the system gets built around it. Migrating a field service CRM mid-season is how companies lose a quarter.

Is this just an automation setup?

Automation is maybe a third of it, and it's the easy third. The rest is work software can't do: figuring out why your customers actually cancel, calling the ones who left to find out, rewriting what your techs say at the door, restructuring how upsells get paid. If a missed-call text-back is genuinely all you need, buy one for $99 a month and skip us — we'd rather tell you that now than take your money for two months.

How much of my time does this take?

The audit needs about two hours from you — a kickoff call and CRM access. Setup is roughly an hour a week for the first few weeks. After that we're watching the numbers on our end and sending you what changed. We're not going to add a project to your plate — that's the whole point.

How fast do I see anything?

Speed-to-lead moves in the first two weeks and it's the one you'll feel first. Retention takes a full service cycle to show up in the numbers, so figure 90 days before that line moves. Anybody promising you a retention turnaround in 30 days doesn't understand the service calendar.

Why a two-month minimum?

Not because the build is slow — the system is running inside two or three weeks. Month one is where we find out what's actually happening in your business; month two is where we act on it. Cut it off at thirty days and you're judging setup work before a single informed change has been made — and a pest control book runs on a service calendar, so thirty days isn't long enough to see retention move anyway. After the two months there's no term at all: cancel any month, no notice, no penalty.

What if I don't have clean data?

Almost nobody does. Half the audit is reconstructing what happened from call logs, the CRM, and whatever the office remembers. Messy data isn't a reason to skip the audit — it's usually the first finding.

You already paid for those leads. You're just not closing them.

Every pest control owner we've met can tell us what they sold. Almost none can tell us what they kept.

100 customers, one year of service

Six places the money actually goes

Before they ever become a customer

The lead that called at 4:40 on a Friday

Two reasons customers leave, and neither of them is about bugs

They cancelled and it had nothing to do with pests

The third-service cancellation

Money you have already earned

Balances sitting uncollected on your own book

The upsell your tech was trained on and never does

The reason none of the above ever gets fixed

You can't tell which marketing actually worked

We sold $350,000 for the same pest control company, in the same four months, off the same doorsteps.

Start with the audit

How the rollout actually works

Get it running

Watch it and find the leaks

Improve what's working

Monitor, analyze, improve, measure

Pricing

Revenue audit

Recovery system

Full operating system

What we don't do

We don't run your ads

We don't answer your phone

We don't lock you into a platform

We don't text people you can't text

We don't manage your people

We don't touch your books or your payroll

You've been burned by a marketing guy before.

The questions we actually get

Book a revenue audit

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