PestBossPro Blog — Running a Pest Control Business

Office Help and Roles: When a Pest Control Business Needs Someone Off the Truck

In the early years of a pest company, the office is a phone in the truck and a laptop at the kitchen table. The owner answers calls between stops, builds routes at night and sends invoices on weekends. That works until it doesn't. At some point, the calls missed while on a ladder and the hours lost to paperwork start costing more than a part-time office person would.

From Product Costs to People Costs

Controlling product, as covered in Chemical Waste: Keeping Product Costs Under Control in a Pest Control Business, is one way to protect margins. Getting the right work to the right person is another. Every hour the owner spends on tasks someone else could do is an hour not spent selling, training or running a route.

Signs You Need Office Help

• Missed calls in the busy season. New customers who reach voicemail often call the next company on the list.
• Leads sitting unanswered. Website requests in Form Responses waiting days for a reply.
• The weekly review keeps getting skipped because there is no time for it.
• Overdue accounts and past-due invoices are growing even though the trucks are busy.
• You are doing office work every evening after a full day on the truck.

If several of these are true, office help will probably pay for itself in recovered work and recovered evenings.

What the Office Person Owns

The first office hire is usually part-time, sometimes a family member, sometimes someone working from home. Whoever it is, give them clear ownership of a set of tasks rather than “helping out.” A typical list:

• Answering calls and replying to customer texts through two-way texting.
• Working Form Responses: converting sign-ups into clients, sending estimates and following up on open quotes.
• Scheduling from the Waiting List and setting route order on the dispatch board, with the owner's input on the first few weeks.
• Rescheduling skipped stops and texting customers about them.
• Following up on declined cards and past-due accounts.
• Checking the “need a chemical record” list and asking technicians to fill in anything missing.

What the Owner Keeps

Some decisions should stay with the owner, at least at first: prices and price changes, which products and mixes the company uses, hiring and technician performance, and how to handle an unhappy customer who wants a refund. Write down which decisions the office person can make on their own, such as moving a quarterly visit by a few days, and which need a call.

Product and application decisions, in particular, belong with whoever holds the license and knows the labels. Office staff can chase records, but they shouldn't be deciding what goes in a tank.

Train the Office Like a Technician

Office help needs training too. Spend a few days side by side before handing anything off. Show them how a customer moves from Form Responses to an estimate to a scheduled job, how to read the Waiting List map, how to build a route and how to handle a skipped stop. Write short notes on how you want common calls handled: a customer asking about a re-service, a new customer asking for a price, a customer upset about a charge. The more of your judgment you write down, the less often they need to call you on the truck.

Office User Roles

Not everyone needs to see everything. PestBossPro has office user roles, so the person answering phones and scheduling can have access suited to their job, while the owner keeps control of the settings that matter. Technicians, meanwhile, log into the tech app with your company login and their own personal PIN and see only their own stops.

Roles also make it safer to bring someone new into the business. If an office person leaves, removing their access is straightforward, and nothing they worked on disappears with them because it was all in the system.

Working Together Without Calling Each Other All Day

The goal of good roles is fewer phone calls between office and field, not more. When the technician taps Skip with a note, the office sees it and handles the reschedule. When the office changes a gate code on the address, the technician sees the new code on the card. Tech GPS on the office map tells the office which truck is closest to a customer asking for a same-day visit. Each person works in the same system, so nobody has to call to ask what the other one did.

Start Part-Time, Grow From There

Most small companies don't need a full-time office person on day one. A few hours each morning, or a couple of full days a week in the busy season, can make a big difference. As the company grows, the role can grow with it. This shift is a big part of the move described in From Owner-Operator to Manager: Stepping Off the Truck in a Pest Control Business. To see how office user roles, texting and scheduling fit together, visit the PestBossPro pest control business software page.