I’ve been working on an article for a trade journal. It’s sort of a “your job/our job” for those who contract out their pest control services to a pest control company. As I’m writing it, I’m thinking through my history and all the questions I get when I look at an account. Many of those questions and problems come up again and again. So now’s a great time, as the new year starts up, to look at some of those and how it impacts pest control.
“I’m paying (insert company name here), why aren’t they taking care of this problem?”
“We’ve never had this problem before, why now?”
“What do you mean when you say what other rodenticides (or insert pesticide here) do we use?”
“That’s what the customer wants.”
“But this is the way we’ve always done it.”
There are a bunch more, but these are probably my top five.
As for the first one, the “I pay you to take care of this” attitude, we’ve probably all run into the person who has just completely washed their hands of the situation. Most of the time, it’s due to ignorance and poor communication. Sure, the pest control company is there to deal with pests, inspect for issues, and prevent further issues. The thing is, that tech (or company) isn’t there every day, all day. This is why we say pest control is everyone’s responsibility. The pest control tech is responsible for pointing out deficiencies like sanitation problems and lack of exclusion. It’s the customer’s job to fix those issues, thereby preventing additional pest issues. This attitude is often easily fixed with a bit of education and information about roles and responsibilities.
I made a graph a while back showing how big a house mouse population can get if you start with two individuals, provide them with all the resources they need, and assume no deaths for a year. You can quickly see how that exponential growth kicks in and you wind up with a huge number of mice at the end of one year*. When you look at that info graphed, you see what seems to be almost no activity for the first 4-5 months. Most of our pests are small, nocturnal, and like to hide because humans are big and scary and they want to avoid us. Again, we’ve all run into the person who claims they “just noticed the issue yesterday” when it’s obvious German cockroaches are running rampant through a kitchen. There are times when this is probably right. The population hits some kind of tipping point and they are suddenly all over the place. A good preventative program, documentation, and monitoring can keep this from happening.
As an industry, we have gotten pretty good about rotating the pesticides we use so it’s a different active ingredient and the insects don’t build up resistance. It’s standard practice to rotate cockroach baits about once a quarter, similar with ant baits. For some reason, that hasn’t translated to general liquid “sprays” or to rodenticide baits. It confounds me. One of the first things I ask when dealing with an ongoing rodent problem is “when was the last time you rotated baits?”. I’ve found that some companies have not just been using the same bait for the past few years, but DECADES in some cases. Then there’s the next stage when I’m told “but they aren’t eating the bait!”. Much as I love chocolate chip cookies, you feed me cookies for years on end, I’m eventually going to decide cookies suck and I don’t want them. We know resistance exists in the US, we just don’t have hard data on where and how bad.
The final two often go together and it’s just sheer laziness. I can certainly buy a red swimsuit, whistle, and floaty thing, but that doesn’t mean I should be lifeguarding at your kid’s pool. A lifeguard is educated, trained, tested, certified, and knows how to use all their skills to quickly and safely deal with pest problems. I don’t care how many videos they watch on the internet, our customers are not experts. That’s why they called us! So why are you letting a customer dictate what you should be doing? I’ve heard so many times that “our customers expect us to spray their baseboards every visit”. Educate them, tell them why we don’t do that and how what we do is much more effective.
And that rolls right into “but this is the way we’ve always done it!”, especially when we talk about baseboard jockeys. Sure, pest control used to be that way. Pest control was also indiscriminately using DDT and killing the environment and going back even further to using strychnine and arsenic. If that’s your excuse, we should bring back the plague, malaria, and other pest-borne diseases that modern pest control has kept under control. Worst of all, you called me! Which means you know there’s a problem and you know what you are doing (or not doing) isn’t working. So why would you continue to do the same thing expecting different results?
So as we roll into the new year, let’s drop some old terms and old thought processes. There are better, faster, more effective ways to deal with pests. Educating customers goes a long way in getting better partnership and happier customers. If you need help with that, contact us, we do that.
*want to know how many mice?
Over 1.7 million.
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