4 Strategies to Increase the Revenue of Your Pest Control Business

How to Increase the Profitability of Your Pest Control Business

Status-quo is no longer an option in today’s fast-changing business environment. Even if your business is doing well, complacency is a significant danger. Changes in the business environment will soon need new investment. The pest control business will have to invest in new technology and tools. Innovative companies remain agile and always ready to change. They always look out for opportunities to better themselves. Doing the same thing is not likely to make any significant difference to the financials. Instead, increasing competition may put pressure on the revenues.
Read more: Top Tips From Industry Experts to Excel in Pest Control Business

Here are the top strategies to increase the revenue of your pest control business.

1. Get a grip on the financials

The basic strategy to increase revenue for any business is to monitor operations and cash flow. Make a list of all revenue streams connected to the company. Find out how and where the money comes in. Next, find out the various heads of expenditure and how much money each head consumes.
A pest control business has the following major expenditure categories:

• Fixed costs, such as rent, payroll, and insurance
• Variable expenses such as payment for utilities
• Discretionary expenses, or optional spendings, such as promotions and advertisements
• Capital expenses, or big-time spendings, such as buying new equipment

Track the following aspects of your pest control business:

• Track the revenue and expenses every month to identify patterns and trends.
• Prepare profit and loss statements. Find out whether the pest control business generates operational profits and make arrangements for the depreciation of assets. Include the interest or opportunity cost of the investments on the expense side.
• Use the statement to determine whether the business runs in profit or loss, and use it as a guide to predict the estimated revenue. Explore avenues to introduce new services or reorganize existing services.
• Increasing revenue requires attracting more customers or making existing customers spend more. Identify the revenue areas with the best scope for growth. Focus your marketing activities in these areas. 
• Analyze the different expense heads, and work to cut excess costs. Focus on investments to improve efficiency in areas with the potential for considerable cost savings.

2. Become customer-centric

The customer is always the king. Many businesses, however, pay only lip service to this mantra.
About 84% of enterprises that improve customer experience increase their revenue. A whopping 96% of customers consider customer service as an important factor in determining brand loyalty. Customer centricity enhances customer retention. Increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits from anywhere between 25% and 95%. Selling to existing customers has a success rate of 60% to 70%, whereas the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5% to 20%.
Becoming customer-centric requires reorienting systems and back-end procedures, keeping customer convenience in mind. It may require digital transformation to:

• Improve transparency, remove silos, and ensure the free flow of information. If customer support agents can access information quickly, customers do not have to wait.
• Automate critical processes to speed up the workflow and improve the accuracy of important processes. Automated scheduling and despatching improve the field team’s productivity. It eliminates mistakes in these critical functions and allows the business to keep its promises.
• Reach out to institutions and offer customized services for commercial pest control. For instance, offer to conduct the pest control exercise in the office at night time, to prevent disruptions during office hours.

Consider how any change will affect customers. Will the difference merely make things easy for the internal staff, or would it benefit the customer?
Read more: Pest Control Marketing Tips to Scale Your Business

3. Improve efficiency

In today’s competitive world, margins are low. Businesses make profits by cutting costs. Improving efficiency is a significant way to cut costs and increase revenue.
Field management suites like ReachOut allow pest control companies to improve efficiency in a big way. 

• Automate routine tasks such as quote generation, scheduling, and dispatching to improve accuracy and speed up things.
• Reduce the wait time between the quote acceptance and order fulfillment. The pest control business has to respond fast to any requests. Businesses face downtime with pest infestations, and households face severe discomfort with pests. Fast and prompt responses maximize customer value. Slow response, on the other hand, agonizes the customer.
• Automated scheduling and dispatching match field teams to incoming work orders. The algorithm considers proximity to the location, time-off, any unique skill sets required, and other factors to assign the right team to the right job.
• Sync work orders with inventory management to dispatch the team with the required tools and chemicals for a job.
• Co-opt tracking technology to offer ETA to waiting customers, assuaging their concerns.
• Live tracking and geolocation allow supervisors to track field agents and enforce greater control over operations. Field managers and supervisors can make real-time interventions to avoid issues and overcome delays.
• The field service suite makes available inspection forms to enable audits and surveys. Co-opting images and videos make reports comprehensive, and give definite proof of the work committed.
• A good field management suite auto-generates invoices. It collects electronic signatures. Clients get the option to pay electronically. Accurate invoicing and prompt collection of payments improve revenue collection.

Read more: Top strategies for selecting the best Pest Control Software

Invest in cloud and mobile technologies for anywhere, anytime access. Offer field agents and customers mobile apps to access the relevant portions of the field management suite seamlessly. Offer special apps for commercial pest control.

4. Invest in knowledge management

Traditional marketing activities yield diminishing returns in today’s competitive age. New entrants bring innovative business models and marketing strategies.
Invest in knowledge management to break out from competitors and establish a niche in the pest control business. Pest control is a dedicated service, and clients prefer pest service companies who know their job.

• Maintain a professional blog on pest control with high-quality content. Post new content at regular intervals. Share expert advice on the website and social media page.
• Explore videos and vlogs to reach a broad audience, and improve SEO rankings. 93% of businesses received new customers through a video they post on social media.
• Maintain an internal knowledge depository for the service team. Include details on the most common types of pests in the region during different seasons and safe ways to exterminate them. Offer checklists on the process flow, safety measures to adopt, and other essential work practices.
• Do not neglect the basics, such as a professional website with targeted SEO optimized content and pay-per-click ads. Give priority to local SEO to target the area of operations of the pest control business.

The estimated total value of the U.S. pest control industry in 2020 was $16.74 billion. The figure will grow in a big way. Pest control companies who take a proactive approach to improve their efficiency and delight their customers get a good share of the pie.
ReachOut is a powerful and easy-to-use pest control software that helps you manage customers, schedule your job orders, create beautiful invoices, and organize your business for success. Contact us to streamline operations and accelerate business growth with ReachOut pest control business software.