Like many longtime industry veterans, Jim Maurer was bitten by the entrepreneurial "bug" — the desire to use his pest control skills for a new enterprise. After spending two decades working for prominent pest control companies, he struck out on his own, and has since built a one-man, one-truck operation into a successful, growing company.
Maurer, owner and operator of First Choice Termite and Pest Control, has spent 27 years in the industry, more than two decades-worth for Sears Termite & Pest Control, and then Middleton Lawn & Pest Control. He worked his way up from a lawn spray technician to director of quality assurance. In that last position at Middleton, one of his responsibilities was to set up the company’s branch offices throughout Florida. Maurer said he literally did everything: Find property, negotiate leases, hire contractors, oversee construction, and then set up the template Middleton had in place for running the business. He also did training for Middleton, which required even more travel and long hours. Eventually, he said, he started to burn out.
"While that was challenging, it took a lot of time. And I wasn’t real fond of that," Maurer said. "If I was going to work those types of hours and start all these businesses," he said, it just made sense to start his own company. So he did, founding First Choice in 2002.
GROWTH FACTOR. In the beginning, Maurer did everything himself, from cold calling businesses to worrying about how he was going to grow the business. Eventually, he was at a point where he knew he needed more help, besides the part-time secretary he had hired after two months to handle the phones.
Originally, he had the calls to his office automatically forwarded to his cell phone, which provided an increasingly frequent dilemma: How to provide good customer service when one potential customer is calling you while in the middle of a sales pitch with another potential customer. "I need to answer this. I have to answer this. I can’t answer this," said Maurer, of what went through his mind every time that happened. "You can’t make money in the office. But that got old fast. I wanted to answer every phone call. That’s when I quickly realized I’ve got to spend some money and get someone to answer the phones."
WINDSHIELD TIME. But not all growth was good. When his former employer Sears went out of business, many of its former employees tried to start their own companies, and Maurer said many failed because they tried to cover too large a territory with too few offices and employees.
First Choice has three other technicians besides Maurer, and it covers Central Florida and Orlando. He said he turns down business from Daytona and other areas because the jobs aren’t profitable. "It’s a big mistake" to try and cover Florida from one coast to the other," he said. "I’ve seen a number of people make that mistake, and they have problems. It’s too much windshield time."
TIPS AND TRICKS. Maurer said the best plan for a PCO who wants to run a successful company is to have a detailed, written plan, including a marketing budget. One of the areas where he got pinched when he first started out was using a software system that was ill-suited for his needs.
"There’s just so many things to running a business," he said. "I was keeping track of my customers on an Excel spreadsheet, and that doesn’t work very well. You can’t schedule out of an Excel spreadsheet. We had to go backward."
Maurer said he avoids advertising in the major phone books and glossy brochures, and instead concentrates on the smaller books covering the Orlando suburbs and direct-mail letters that he writes himself.
"I don’t know that (a brochure) really sells business," Maurer said. "What sells business is me and what I say."
The author is assistant editor of PCT magazine and can be contacted at cbowen@giemedia.com.