The Pest Collective
The Pest Collective brings together thought leaders, scientists, operations experts, and business innovators to share practical insights that impact real-world commercial environments. Whether you manage facilities, oversee compliance, or lead operational teams, this podcast provides perspectives that help you anticipate challenges, strengthen strategies, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving industry.
The Pest Collective
The Multi-Site Headache: Standardizing Pest Risk Across Your Portfolio
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How portfolio and enterprise organizations manage pest risk across locations and why standardization and visibility matter.
Welcome to the Pet Collective, a podcast sponsored by Terminex, where we break down pest risk from the inside out. We go beyond the problem to continue to uncover root content and deliver solutions that make a real impact on your operations. I'm Dr. Nancy Criano and I'm John Fox.
SPEAKER_00And today we're chatting with board certified entomologist Terry Kaiser and exploring the complexities of managing pest risk across multiple site portfolios and why consistency is the biggest operational challenge. Terry Kaiser, thank you, sir, for coming on the podcast with us today. Thrilled to always see your name on anything. And when we get to work on something, it's gonna be awesome. So thrilled to have your expertise. Thank you for joining us. Today we are gonna be talking about the multi-site headache and managing pest risk across portfolios. So we have some areas that can be a bit of a challenge when there's multiple locations included or multi-unit housing and things like that. So gonna get some great info, I'm sure, gleaming from all your experience and have a great conversation today. So with that, could we please, sir, have a little bit of your amazing background and experience?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Terry Kaiser. I've been in the industry since 2007, so 19 years. I went to the University of Florida and study entomology and nursery and landscape horticulture. Then I've worked for three or four different pest control companies since then. Board certified entomologist, ISA certified arborist, category holder in the state of Florida, member of Mensa. I have a daughter, you know, let's just set it out, that kind of stuff. So uh Nancy, thanks for that reaction.
SPEAKER_01What, the mensa reaction? I was I was truly impressed. I'm not surprised, but I'm impressed.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thank you. I think Mr. Mike Foam is also a Mensa.
SPEAKER_01That would not surprise me at all. Now his episode makes more sense. Yeah, it really does. We have some smarty pants as we get to work in this industry with. It's awesome. I'm like, that makes me even more excited to just dive into the questions because Terry is going to be a wealth of knowledge. I can feel it in my bones. Let's dive in. So, as Jen said today, we're talking about managing multi-site locations, the pest risk across multi-site locations. So, Terry, why is pest management more complex for multi-site locations or operations?
SPEAKER_02So you have to with multi-site pest management, it can get easier with scale, but usually it doesn't because there is a transition from an entrepreneurship, sole proprietor, individual pest management professional that starts a company, does really well, and then tries to emulate what they're doing in the people that report to them. And you end up getting that inefficiency, that complexity of scale where you're not able to have your team do exactly what you would do when you're not there. That's part of the complexity. And that's usually the biggest hurdle for pest management companies to get over, is to take it to the next level. It went from one restaurant to two to five to 1500 and 15,000. There are complexities of scale. There's also some efficiencies of scale. So if you have a scope of work that works for particular pests and a particular client and it checks all the boxes and is has been vetted over years of experience, it can be very easy. You know, for example, if you had XYZ grocery in Massachusetts, it's gonna have different pest management problems than you would in Tucson, Arizona. If I was gonna write a standard protocol for Tucson, I may include scorpions as something to be on alert for. But I wouldn't do that in Massachusetts. So you get those occasional invaders, but some of the standard pests, like rodents, roaches, stay uh stored product pests, those stay the same largely, but then you have humidity, you have uh different client base. And if you don't calculate and use those variables in your scaling for multiple sites and multiple states, multiple cities, you will miss a visibility to what's going on. And you may completely miss the objective when it comes to treating a site for a particular pest because something is radically different that you did not factor into your calculation for a new site. So when you try and do one size fits all, just as you everyone can see with the clothing industry, it's not, it's one size fits most, and nothing, even those don't fit anyone well, they just fit anyone. Great. That kind of that kind of model doesn't work for any industry. People are still buying clothes because they don't want to go to a haberdashery or you know get everything tailored. You do you like that word? Haberdashery.
SPEAKER_01Made me smile.
SPEAKER_00Nancy's like, I'm gonna use that three times tomorrow.
SPEAKER_01Haberdashery is going down on my yeah, list of useless in a sense.
SPEAKER_02So one size fits most doesn't fit anyone well. That same mindset in pest management, you're going to have massive gaps in your service protocol. So you need that 80% one size fits all, and then that 20% customization per site, per client, per even location. Two of XYZ grocers in Boston may be treated differently based on the river nearby, the construction of a new site right next door that's chasing any of the pests that are in that vacant lot into their location. So why is pest management more complex? It's because you have to factor for more variables while keeping the service quality the same. And it just takes a lot more mental bandwidth and strategic planning to get that equation right.
SPEAKER_00That's a good point. Especially the bigger something gets, too. Like a lot more planning will have to go into it. So I guess across those different locations, and you really kind of touched on this, but maybe we can go a little bit deeper. But operational blind spots. So if I'm, let's take like, I don't know, maybe multi-unit housing and I'm I'm managing five apartment complexes and I have a manager at each one. Where might, as a property manager, I have an operational blind spot? Because maybe I don't have a pest control background, I don't usually deal with it. What are some things I would maybe want to bring to the forefront of the mind of those five managers on site to start to get some continuity through a program?
SPEAKER_02A great question. And you accidentally hit on what I think is one of the most difficult things for property managers or any manager of a site to get right, which is looking at the organism as a whole, as a sum of all of its parts. You may have 132 units in your apartment building, and then down the street you have 204. And when we go into pest management, there tends to be a back to basics or back to what I know type of mentality. And what I mean by that is apartment one, two, three, four has bed bugs. Treat bedroom one, two, three, four, just like you would a single family home residence. With bed bugs or roaches or any of these pests, you have to look up, down, left, right because those are shared walls and there's voids. And that property manager just says, Hey, treat one, two, three, four. And it's very difficult for that property manager to really just take a go an octapire and say, what is the root cause of this issue? Because it could be that uh tenant who has an unregistered dog in their apartment. I don't have any pests, and they have bed bugs falling off the ceiling onto them, but they don't report it because they don't want their dog to raise a red flag and then now they have to find a new apartment. That may be the root cause. And so that property manager, that site manager needs to take an octave hire and say, hey, let's treat up, down, left, right, forward, back those nine apartments, and let's just do an inspection on eight, treat one, two, three, four, but get everything around it. And once you do that, pandemics, endemics, epidemics, all of those little crucibles of spreading problems almost gets eliminated because you're killing the monster while it's small, you know, and solving the problem before it gets out of that. So that would be the first thing that I would say with a multi-housing unit that it's sometimes you have to look at the lens that you put over your eyes. And those site managers need to say, Yes, I need pest management in one, two, three, four, but I need to protect the entire 184 apartments. I need to protect the hundred and or two hundred and four and the other, you need to take another look. And then another octave would be what goes in and out of that apartment. Where does the trash go when they put it in that trash bin? Like some apartments have that trash collection on the outside, right after the door, and they have that concierge service. Are we inspecting that trash uh receptacle? Because whoever's touching that, or if they're moving the bins, you are cross-pollinating, you are transmitting those pests without even thinking about it. And that's the complexity of scale that you get with some of these pests. They don't know you're there. They're trying to survive, they're trying to thrive, they're trying to reproduce. If you move them, you're part of their life cycle.
SPEAKER_00So and you said something interesting that I want to just circle back to. Sometimes people leave problems unreported because they're scared of being told on, or they're doing something maybe that's not part of their agreement. And so, like, I'll live with this problem to not create a different problem. If somebody's listening to this episode and maybe they're a new technician, a new PMP, what would be some advice to have that difficult conversation? Because our objective as a PMP is to go solve the problem. The landlord or the managing company or whoever wants the problem solved, but there is still this unique situation where treating a property for someone maybe who owns it who's not there, because we have a resident that's in the location. What would be a good way for a technician to have a conversation? And that's maybe a little off topic, but I think it ties in when you get those multi-unit apartments. You know, again, sometimes you're denied access because people are like, I don't want you in here, period. But we probably know from doing inspections, we need access into that unit because something could be starting and originating from that point.
SPEAKER_02And if I had to answer your question the way I think you want it answered, I think you accidentally answered your question because of your wealth of pest control management history. What I mean by that is I just said pest control. We don't use that word anymore. We say pest management, PMP pest management professional. And the number one thing that we must do as professionals in the industry would be identification and inspection. You know, you brought up inspection. I can probably tell you if I walk into a random apartment that has a pest issue that isn't originating from that unit, a proper inspection usually leaves clues. Abraham Lincoln had a quote where he said, if I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I would spend seven of them sharpening the axe. And that inspection is sharpening that axe. If you just go in there, spray and pray and leave and say, Okay, Mrs. Smith, I'll see you next week, you're a spray jockey and you're not going to be solving issues. If you spent 70, 80, 90% of your time actually doing a thorough inspection, everything going forward gets easier. But if you're just trying to, hey, spray my baseboards, you know, because that's what we used to do in the 70s and that's what the customer asked for, may not be the best way of doing going about it. It starts with inspection, it ends with inspection, and proper identification of the pests, root causes, avenue sources, all of that is more important than which pests you're treating or how you're treating them. You got to get that part right. So inspection is where I'd go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So shifting gears a little bit, I want to go back to talking about managing multi-site operations. We were talking a little bit about we need consistency, but one size fits all or most is not quite the answer either. So two-part question for you, Terry. What or how can multi-site organizations standardize prevention strategies? And how do you balance standardized protocols with local site needs or regulations?
SPEAKER_02So this great question. The way I would is I would use the 80-20 rule. 80% of what we do will be identical. And that 20% will be niche. That your service protocol will be that 80%. If you try and solve every pest management problem now, past, future, in any location with one document, it's going to be 2,000 pages long. Nobody's going to read it. Nobody's going to retain it. But that 80%, that could get down to about four or five pages, you know, and where this is what I do, XYZ in every XYZ grocery or insert customer name here. That's what I would do. You make your service protocol. You don't manage for outliers. If you as soon as you try and manage for outliers, that's where you get that addendum, addendum to the addendum, and that document gets really long. So to boil it down to the nugget, how would organizations standardize prevention strategies? Don't try and get every possible pest in there. Hit your groups, ants, roaches, rodents, and standardize that where the most of one size fits most. And then that 20% is where you get it tailored.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Site specific.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00That's great advice. That does lead into you gotta love the agreements when they're like 20 pages long, because then nobody really reads them and it sort of wings it and turns into that cowboy scenario where you go, I don't know, we're just gonna do it because it's probably in there somewhere. But visibility and reporting, and I'm thinking probably maybe along the lines of service tickets or telling the story, because especially in multi locations, multi-units, when there's a lot of different folks to communicate information back to, relaying the visibility of what we do. I say to people a lot, if you see what we do, we might have done it wrong because Basketjoy shouldn't be leaving a trace of what we've done. That's probably not a great treatment. So getting the visibility to the right people and communicating to the right people, how does reporting tie into that? Like, how should you make the report of what you've done? Because you've got to get that out to probably one person that you might not see, maybe ever. So you've got to relay this information and sometimes through one or two other people to get to the main party who wants that information. What are some best ways to do that, Terry?
SPEAKER_02Very interesting question. Those of you who are listening, you can't see this, but my background always has like an inspirational quote. And my quote today is where the question is, the answer should be. And that means, like, for example, if somebody were to send you an email that says, please reference the slide deck, uh, you know, number 12, or please reference this document. The next question in that reader's mind is, okay, so where's that slide deck? Where's the document? So the energy behind where the question is, the answer should be in that email should be a link to that document, to that specific paragraph. And I know this is a bit verbose, but to use that same mantra, that same energy with reporting, you have to think about who your target audience is. It's usually the homeowner and or the resident andor the client if it's a commercial property, and answer the questions that your data, your what you're saying, will pose. So for example, if you use X product, Y product, and Z product and you put it in ABC locations, a question may be what is the toxicity of this? What is the LD50 or what like what is the like how dangerous is this around non-target organisms? And have that as an addendum there or as a part of the document. We don't use anything that is has an LD50 of above 5,000 or under 5,000. That answers the question if they want it. And that's that's a very specific example. But then you bring up uh visibility and reporting. Another thing that pest management professionals and enterprises tend to miss is as they go from one branch to two branches to three branches, they tend to treat them like their left arm isn't attached to the torso, which is attached to the right arm. And so the reporting, that 80% that you get from the data of the right arm is going to tell you a story. And so should the 80% on the left arm. And what happens is when these organizations start to expand, they eliminate or they reduce the effectiveness of their data and they become little pockets and basically their own. I'm my own company, but we all report up to John and senior leadership. This goes a little bit back to the first question when I said that there are complexities of scale, and then that there are efficiencies of scale, you always get the complexities of scale first, and then you'll get the efficiencies of scale. But if the sooner you can get those efficiencies, meaning what you learned from branch one and what you're learning from branch two, and you take that all together and you make a story as to is my scope of work appropriate? Is my treatment protocol appropriate? And you can take all that data, your data gets more confident, not less. Your sample size is significantly larger. And that efficiencies of scale will make it so any costs related to complexities of scale will be outweighed by the positives you get from scaling. That reporting and visibility, you need to think about your audience, both in the data in the back end background, what you're going to try and distill from the information that you're getting from your frontline technicians and specialists. And then you also need to know what the customer wants to see, the end user, who you have to identify who your end user is and answer their questions before they ask them. So they don't feel like they need to reply to the email or send you a letter. Then nobody does that anymore, but or pick up the phone and say, hey, what does this mean? If you're communicating and the person you're communicating to does not understand, you're not communicating. Hopefully that answers your question.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a good point. Kind of expanding on that. If you are an owner of multiple commercial properties, how could you ensure that you are getting accurate, consistent reporting from every site?
SPEAKER_02I mean, like that is uh almost a trap question, but yeah, I'll take us uh getting a trap consistent, accurate from every site. You know, you're never gonna have 100% accurate data. You just won't. Even with a single sample size of one unit, you're not gonna have a 100% accurate. That's the goal, but it's usually never the full story. And with scale, you compound that. There's a multiplier to having multiple sites. But if you wanted to have consistent, you need to know what your KPIs or key performance identificators would be. What do I want? I want to have no pests before, during, or after a turn in, let's say, apartment one, two, three, four. Those KPIs for that are different than say somebody who I want to have the least amount of visits possible from my pest control professional. If the customer doesn't align on expectations and goals for the relationship, it's doomed or at least going to struggle. You know, a pest manager professional, to Jen's point earlier, if we're doing our job right, not only will you not see that we did anything, you won't see pests. And frequently, that can give a end user the hallucination that there's no pests to prevent and we're out there spraying water. That's the goal of the pest management professional. And that delta between what we want and what the customer wants can create a lot of friction if you don't phrase the initial negotiations properly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that that makes sense. So basically, if I'm a commercial property manager, I need to set expectations up front with my pest management company. That makes perfect sense. So when it comes to managing multi-site locations, how can having a centralized pest control partner, pest management partner reduce disruption?
SPEAKER_02So naturally, the bigger an organization is, so naturally a centralized would be bigger than a uh mom and pop pest control, you will have the built-in, usually, I've never been a part of a company that doesn't have a built-in crisis management system. So when there's a hurricane, when somebody calls out, when you have 10 people in a branch and one person calls out sick, you lost 10% of your workforce. When you have a larger enterprise pest management company, one person calls out of a hundred individual branch, you lost 1%. And so you get that consistency. The training is usually more consistent with larger organizations. So that 80% congruent portfolio scope of work on how to manage a pest in a particular site is usually backed by tons of data, vetted by board-certified entomologists, PhDs. They usually have these people on staff. And that means that we're not only being efficient with the products that we're putting out, because we are stewards of the environment. We don't like to spray and prey. We want to put out the minimum effective dose of what we need to put out to get the result we're after. And so having that larger organization, you will usually have the support staff. So 24-hour people answering the phones, answering emails. You have this kind of support structure as opposed to when you have mom and pop and they just turn off their cell phone Friday at five, turn it on and Monday at eight, and what will be will be. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it depends on that customer's expectation. If I got roaches at 2 a.m., you got roaches at 2 a.m. I want to see you.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, makes perfect sense. Well, Terry, thank you for joining us today. The information that you've provided and the insight has been, you know, really valuable. So I appreciate the the conversation, or we appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.
SPEAKER_02No, thanks for having me. I'm honored to be here. Just education and knowledge is one of those gifts that you can give and still retain, which is a rare thing. And if everyone knows the best way of doing something by sharing information and knowledge, everybody gets better and nobody loses a thing. So thank you for the time. Thank you. I'm honored.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Terry, thank you. I mean, that it's one of my favorite things about our industry is just people willing to help each other. Teach each other, lift each other up. I mean, at the end of the day, we're all in this together, and there's plenty of bugs for everybody. I guess one of those, you know, was it rising tides raises all ships? And so thank you for being generous with your time and your knowledge. And I know people will learn a lot from this episode. So we appreciate you, sir. Thank you. Thanks, Terry. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Have a great day.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for listening to the Pest Collective. Be sure to follow and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you never miss an episode.
SPEAKER_01And remember, stay ahead of the risks of pests with protection you can trust. Schedule a free inspection with a local expert at Terminex.comslash commercial today.