Scaling a Pest Control Business from One Truck to Multi-State — Jeff King, CEO, Pest Rangers

Jeff King started Pest Rangers in 2008 as a side hustle while working as a garbage man. Today it's a 37-person operation targeting $4.5M in 2026 — and AI now touches every part of how it runs.

In this episode Jeff shares the full origin story, what it actually takes to build a lasting reputation in a local market, and exactly how he's using AI today — from a 24/7 front desk that closes sales overnight, to agentic tools that coach his sales team and monitor his fleet. He also makes the case for why pest control operators who haven't adopted AI yet are already falling behind.

What you'll hear:

• Why answering the phone is still the single biggest competitive advantage in pest control
• How AI handles after-hours calls, triages urgency, and books jobs while his team sleeps
• Why operators are terrified of AI — and why Jeff thinks they're wrong

Jeff King is the CEO and founder of Pest Rangers, serving eastern Pennsylvania and surrounding states. He's made four acquisitions, served as president of the Pennsylvania Pest Management Association, and was previously on the NPMA National Board.

Learn more about Solea AI here 

Transcript

Introduction — Christopher Brodowski & Pest Control Unfiltered

Chris 0:00

Welcome to the first episode. Christopher Brodowski. I'm the co-founder of Solea AI, an AI pest control field service management software. And I spend most of my time talking to pest control operators about how their businesses actually run. That's what this podcast is really about. First guest was an easy call. Jeff King started the Pest Rangers in 2008 while he was still working his day job. He grew it into one of the most respected brands in the country, made four acquisitions, served as the president of the Pennsylvania Pest Management Association, and was previously on the NPMA national board. Jeff is also someone who's leaned into technology earlier than most in this industry, and he's got real numbers to back it up. We'll get into the origin story, what it actually takes to earn a reputation in a local market, and where AI is already changing his business today. Jeff, thanks for doing this. Let's get into it. Can you give us a 60-second Pest Rangers origin story? What made you say I'm going to kill bugs

Jeff King's origin story — from garbage man to pest control

Chris 1:07

for a living?

Jeff 1:07

Sure, Chris. Thanks for having me. Honored to be on the first episode here. I was working a second job. It was the City of Wolksfair. It was a I actually started off as a garbage man. So I was riding the back of a truck. Never thought I would do it. I remember my father telling me I had an opportunity to do it for another town prior to going to the city of Wolksfair. And he said, You really want to be outside in the rain, the snow, the heat. And I was like, nah. And then I ended up doing it for the city of Wolksfair. And sometimes I would think when I was working at the city, boy, if I did this two years old earlier, I'd be able to retire two years earlier. But I was glad I didn't and I waited because the city of Wolksbury gave me the opportunity to bid into other jobs. It was a union job. I was able to bid into the parks department, and the job I got was a golf course superintendent. And when I was there, they sent me to Penn State for a short course. I sat through there learning about pesticides, pesticide application. And I thought, boy, I could get into killing bugs because they're kind of training me about it. So I just need a few customers. And it ended up being a side hustle. And that's all it was. It was a side hustle. Started in 2008, 2008 to 2014, just grinding every day after work, weekends. At 14, I hired my first full-time employee. He was working with me part-time weekends. We were weekend warriors. He came on full-time. So I convinced him to leave his job before I left my job, which is a pretty good negotiator. And he had a lot of trust in me. So he left and we acquired our first company in 2015. No, 2014. It was small, but we took it on, learned a lot from it, and just built the business. And in 15, I got sick of dealing with politics. It just wasn't me. I'm not a political person. Yeah, not good. So I ended up leaving. I just said, screw it, I'm leaving. I was 11 months shy of a pension, both feet in the water, and it went full speed ahead. So really the business started in 08, but we really got serious in 15. And that's that's what made me kind of love bugs in the industry. But I had no clue how big the industry was and how great it

What Pest Rangers looks like today — 37 staff, $4.5M, multi-state

Jeff 3:11

is.

Chris 3:11

Wow, that's awesome. What does Pest Rangers look like today? From I mean, from you starting as a garbage man, it's been a long, exciting journey, a lot of grind. What does pest Rangers look like today?

Jeff 3:23

So we're we're aiming this year. Our goal is to hit four and a half million. We'll have 37 employees here going into the season. We cover eastern Pennsylvania all along the Interstate 81 corridor. It includes the cities of Scranton, Wilkes Fair, Hazleton Markets. Also run the Northeast Extension that goes from the Poconos up through Lehigh Valley into Philadelphia and just acquired a company in southern New Jersey. Jersey's weird. They say they're south and north. Most people in Jersey disagree, is there central Jersey? So we are just south, they call it South Jersey, but it's really over the bridges in Philly into those neighborhoods. Beyond that, Jersey is a big state too. I don't know. We'll see where we go.

The hardest parts of running a pest control business

Chris 4:06

It sounds like you're you're growing into more and more states. You've done a lot of hard things over the past 20 years, but what's the single hardest part of running a pest control business that people outside the industry would never guess?

Jeff 4:21

I'd say two things, the people and the routing. Um, people could be great or people could be difficult. So as much as we're a pest control company, we're a people business. So from employees to clients, we see many personalities. We're a customer service company that does pest control. So unlike your Rollins, your Terminix, I consider them marketing companies that do pest control. You know, routing is extremely difficult, especially running a model like we do. We enter the home, we do visits three times per year. Our goal is to building, build a lasting relationship with our clients. We don't just treat the exterior and invoice clients. I feel at that point you're you're just a line item on their credit card statement. When the industry has really moved to a production-based machine years ago, and it took away the personable service from many companies. Earlick Pest Control, who owned the Northeast, was a $100 million company who entered homes each visit. They built one heck of a business on relationships. That doesn't make sense to me to add 100 new clients while 97 leave because they don't see value. When you just treat the exterior of a home and leave a door hanger, you become as valuable as the lawn fertilization guy. I think coming into what we're seeing now with AI, it is removing people. People still need people, people are still going to want to interact with people. So in a pest control company, start removing your your front office and moving away to the AI systems. That relationship goes. Where's where is the relationship? So I think having that model where we see clients, I don't know, you might see an industry shift at some point. This will be interesting to track.

Chris 5:59

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's why you're you're growing so fast and winning against all the other guys. You've built a reputation that most operators would kill for. What's the one thing you did early on to earn trust with customers that your competitors still don't do?

Why answering the phone is still your biggest competitive advantage

Jeff 6:16

Customer service. You know, you got to answer your phone. It's really the secret sauce to a successful business. It seems crazy, but I didn't go to college. But common sense is that when a customer is looking to buy something, it needs to be accessible to purchase. We do extensive competitor research in our market weekly. It would amaze you how many do not answer the phone. Yeah, let me ask you this. You have a leaking sink in the house that you just discovered. Are you going to leave a message for the companies on their answering machine or voicemail and hope someone calls you back? No, because it's entrenched in our minds that contractors do not call people back if they're busy. And it leaves the consumer wondering if they're going to ever get a call back. So most consumers will dial until they get a service booked. They don't just have time to waste waiting around for someone to call it back. And what makes pest control operators think consumers think any different when their ants need to be taken care of? It's the same principle. We see it over and over again. The sales guys or the sales calls and say, Oh my God, you guys answered the phone. And we see it. When we're tracking that data, consumers are shocked when you answer the phone.

How AI works as Pest Rangers' 24/7 front desk

Chris 7:24

You use a lot of AI. I think you're one of the most innovative, pest control companies in the industry. Walk me through every place AI touches in your business. What does it do today?

Jeff 7:36

As a family-owned business, we struggled with the after hours dilemma. AI now acts as our 24-7 front desk. Um, it doesn't just take a message, it's trained on our pricing, our routes. It can actually close the sale, put a technician on the calendar, or while our team is at home with their families. It also serves as a critical triage tool and pest control urgency is subjective. If someone calls about bees on a swing set, the AI could identify that it can wait until the morning. But if there's a swarm inside of a bedroom, it also recognizes it as an emergency and alerts our on-call team immediately. It really separates the right now from the tomorrow morning with 100% consistency. Separately,

Using AI to coach sales reps and catch service gaps

Jeff 8:18

I've made commitment to our inside sales and customer service team last year to make them better. It was something that I always looked at the service side outside on the road, and I thought I could do better on the inside. So I developed tools that track conversations that are happening all over our organization, anywhere customers communicate with us, including text messages. And I learned a ton. Like I can't tell you the amount of data that we mined since really April of last year. Clients whose scheduled services and our text didn't show because it was never dropped on the schedule. And when you have multiple people answering your phones, they cover for each other. You have the tech who was getting multiple complaints, but we didn't hear it because a different rep took each call and shrugged with us as a one-off situation. Meanwhile, the tech received multiple complaints, which should have been a red flag. We also see the praise of those employees who go above and beyond. So we not only celebrate sales wins the following day now with our team, because we have Agentic AI acting as their sales coach. We review each loss every evening. They get an email from their Agentic coach, which reviews where things went wrong and how they can better or recover and follow up with that lost sale. Service gaps are being identified and routed to the appropriate managers so they could work with their team to correct issues, using them as training moments. Operationally, I would say AI is touching our business in every way we could think of. Negotiating deals, monitoring competitors, watching our suppliers for pricing and receiving discrepancies, fleet management with fuel entries versus miles per gallon red flags. You know, when you have a fleet, it's easy for uh tech to pull up and fill his wife's car. But uh employing an agentic AI to monitor that, it makes that situation easy to track. Vehicle inspection compliance, anything we can automate, we're doing it and we're just doing it fast.

Chris 10:11

You're using AI in basically

The one thing Jeff would automate tomorrow — routing and scheduling

Chris 10:13

every part of your business now. But if you could snap your fingers and automate one back office function with AI tomorrow, which one would have the biggest impact on your bottom line?

Jeff 10:24

Routing and scheduling a hundred percent. It's by far one of the most labor-intensive and costly things we do. Yeah, it's 2026 now, and I just don't understand why this can't be easy. It's amazing that our industry tech suppliers don't recognize how hard this is for us. There has to be a better solution. Something takes the thought and time out of trying to fit someone on the schedule. I mean, it's doesn't seem so hard, but it it must be. I don't know, maybe maybe there is a solution. They just have not made enough noise to get people talking about it. But everybody I talked to, I know had multiple conversations today about this. It's it's hard. It's it's hard, especially at scale. When you have multiple technicians, you get a call coming in and you're like, where could I put this on the schedule? I mean, it should jump out at you. Yeah, it shouldn't have to be our research project.

Adopt or die — is AI existential for pest control operators?

Chris 11:13

Do you think AI and pest control is uh nice to have right now? Or are we already at the point where it's existential? Adopt or die?

Jeff 11:24

It's it's in my mind, it's adopt or die. I really think people need to quit being so passive and start paying attention. Pick up the Wall Street Journal, read it for a month, follow the business news cycle, the CNBC, and get your head out of the sand. It's 2026. We still have companies running without software. That's like running your business without the power of the internet. And you wonder, like, how? How does that happen?

Chris 11:47

Yeah, I just saw a two million dollar company that has their schedules on sticky post notes. There's they don't even use software. So it's there's a lot of simple things that you can do, just and you're already 10 times 10 times better.

Jeff 12:00

What's scary about that is like, where does it go from pay pen and paper skipping SaaS to AI? So I I don't know, like there's a huge gap there. Like you didn't even adopt software, so I don't know how you're gonna survive. It's like going from an abacus to a calculator or something, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. It's interesting.

Why most operators haven't adopted AI yet

Chris 12:21

You're someone who's embraced technology, but a lot of operators haven't. When you talk to other PCO owners at NPMA events or states association meetings, what's the number one reason they give for not adopting AI or automation?

Jeff 12:37

Here, I don't want to lose the family feel of my business. It seems that owners are terrified that if they put a bot between them and a customer, that like a 20-year relationship evaporates. I come from the Northeast where we have Wawa and Sheets. They're convenience stores that dominate the convenience store market. You can't order a hoagie or sandwich without using their iPad. So using a bot to take the 9 p.m. scheduling call that asks how much is a termite inspection. These are questions that are answered by AI. They give your human team more time to deal with the things they should be dealing with when you open up for the day. I guess you could kind of look at it like this in the traditional call. Somebody calls the office, they get in a voicemail, you call back the next day, it's a game of phone tagged, then it's booked. AI, you call, AI answers, problem triaged, books instantly. So I think the biggest scapegoat beyond that is security. People go, well, what about security?

Security and data privacy — what's real and what isn't

Jeff 13:34

What about data privacy? I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that business AI is just like the public version of Chat GPT that everybody uses. Obviously, businesses should be paying for their subscriptions, which then closes the loop. It keeps data within an encrypted environment. It's not used to train global models. It's the difference between talking in a public park versus talking in a locked conference room. You know, a real failure would be when AI hallucinates, and it does happen. We've experienced it in our own tasks that we had it working on. I've had it tell me names of people that didn't exist in my organization. I'm looking at it, going, that's not right. They call this human in the loop. Somebody needs to manage the system just like you manage employees. So somebody has to be overlooking it, making sure the data that it's pushing out is in fact clean data. Uh, it's no different than putting dirty data into a spreadsheet and getting dirty data out. Security is usually like the elephant around. Truth is, most of the security risks that we face aren't unique to AI. They're the same risks we have with emails or credit card processing. So with AI systems, you want to make sure that's SOC2 compliant, encryption, at rest, transit, and PII. Those are things that you really have to look

Where non-adopters are already falling behind

Jeff 14:45

for.

Chris 14:45

If you look at your competitors in your market who haven't adopted AI, where do you see them falling behind already?

Jeff 14:53

It's tough to say where they're missing, but maybe I could put it like this: like using an old school flip phone to today's smartphone, right? There's a lot more I could do with the latest Android or iPhone that you can't do with a flip phone. I mean, just try texting from that old flip phone. And that's probably the best way to put it so they would understand.

Practical advice for operators thinking about AI

Chris 15:15

I'm going to steal that anecdote. This is this is great. So, what advice would you give to those operators who are maybe thinking about AI? They're not totally against it, but haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Jeff 15:28

Just dip your feet in because every every day it gets better. And I really think people overcomplicate it. And uh again, multiple conversations with this. I just completed a course at MIT on AJC AI, and everybody's like interested. How was it? Well, and I said it's just it dumbs down the the terms, right? What is a when they say you have to be good at uh prompting, right? Oh, prompt, like we all had to learn how to use Google one day to search, right? And traditionally you would open up the phone book and and search that way with your hands, or Google, you just type it in and you pest control and whatever town. And a prompting, like people think prompting is like coding, and it's not, it's just it's just asking it what to do. Nine out of 10 times you could say it vaguely, and it gets what you're trying to do. So, and when it comes to agenic AI, that's just a whole nother superpower. Uh, simply, I'm looking at QuickBooks, I want you to tie into my QuickBooks and be my CFO and tell me where you know, and it'll do it. It's that simple, it's it's people overcomplicated. So they got to spend some time, play around with it, and don't overthink it.

Chris 16:36

What

What Pest Rangers looks like in three years

Chris 16:37

does Pest Rangers look like in three years if AI keeps compounding? What's the ceiling for a tech forward pest control company?

Jeff 16:46

I mean, it's it's so hard to look at it like that. I mean, just it just in AI alone. I mean, AI engineering was like something like a buzzword. And I just read in the Wall Street Journal maybe last week, week before, like AI engineering's dead. Now they're on to like AI visionary, AI implementator, right? They're like different, it's almost like AI is fixing itself. You know, you look at robotics, they say that these robots can fix themselves because they have the brains to do so. Pretty soon we're gonna have robots walking around, a neo-robot, Elon Musk is building a robot, and just just think it will cook you the best meal, right? What could it do in your house? Is it gonna do pest control? I don't, I mean, yeah, it probably can't order the materials, right? I don't know. It's years ago I saw somebody at an NPMA at a speaker at one of their events that that said the Uberization of your industry. Think about it. Where could your where is your weak points? Now we got robots, so people that could afford them, price point of twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars, a subscription fee of five hundred dollars a month. Well, for five hundred dollars a month, could it do your laundry? Could it cook for you? Could it clean? How many people is that knock off? It becomes affordable when you stop paying somebody to do certain things, cutting your grass. So I don't know. It's very interesting. Time

"The companies that win will be the ones that adapt"

Jeff 18:04

will tell.

Chris 18:04

Finish the sentence. The pest control companies that win in the next decade will be the ones that

Jeff 18:11

adapt with technology.

Wrap up and where to find Jeff King

Chris 18:13

Perfect. Jeff, this is exactly what I was hoping for when I started the podcast. I really appreciate you coming on. If you're an operator listening to this and you're still sitting on the sidelines with AI, I hope this moves the needle a little. The window isn't closing tomorrow, but it is closing. Jeff, where can people find you?

Jeff 18:34

They could find me, email me. I'll give you my email address. I'm an email guy, jeff@ thepeststrangers.com. If anybody has any questions, I'm an open book, willing to help anybody. I love seeing people succeed. And I know this is a topic that is very controversial. AI is a controversial issue and hot button issue in our industry, but it's coming. So get on the train.

Chris 18:56

Perfect. See you next week.

Jeff 18:58

You got it. Thank you.