Get Green Website Certificate and Free Emperor’s New Clothes!

I ran across a new logo today after reading about Green Servers on Blog Pest Control.com

It’s your handy dandy Green Certified Website logo: http://www.co2stats.com. And you can buy it now add it to your site and they will monitor how many visitors you get and determine the carbon impact of your website.  But wait, it gets better, Just by adding this logo to your site you will get visitors to Trust you more, stay longer, and link back to.  WOW! What a magically little logo! And you don’t even have to be green!  Just add the logo and watch the Green Cash Flow in.

BUT WAIT IT GET’S BETTER!  For each affiliate website that signs up after clicking through on your magical Green Website Logo you will get a commission.  So what we are really saying when we say Green is $GREEN$.

And Buy now and we will throw in your FREE EMEPROR’S NEW CLOTHES!!!

THAT’S RIGHT

FREE EMPOROR”S NEW CLOTHES WITH EVERY GREEN LOGO PURCHASE!

….Sorry got a little carried away.

I will just finish up with one of my favorite quotes from Troop Beverly Hills. “Patches, we don’t need no stinking patches.”

Choosing a pest control name.

Just  a few tips on choosing a pest control name.

1- Stay away from town or city names. Town or city names are not trademarkable.  Ask any trademark lawyer.  You may have the name for 20 years and a guy comes along and sets up shop across the street, calls himself  St. George Pest Control, and you can’t do a thing about it.  Plus it gets a little hairy in the marketing area as well.

2- Stay away from “kill, killer, slayer” or other like terms.  These names may sound great to you and you may think that they convey what your goal is, but studies show that such negative words can be deterrents.

3- Stay away from using specific pests in your name.  If you named your company the Mouse Control Guy, then you could be limiting yourself to targeting just mice.

This is solely from my experience at Bulwark Exterminating and my degree in marketing.  In the end, a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.  Meaning, if you provide a great service then no matter what you call your company, people will still come off of your referrals.

 

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Family Pest Control or a Pest Control Family?

What are the benefits of a family pest control over a big corporate run pest control?

What are the disadvantages?

Is there a happy medium?

One of Bulwark’s customers put it best for us… “Small enough to care, but big enough to do it right.”

But even beyond that is what Gerry touched on in a recent post.  A family business may have some flaws… what you may be shooting for instead is a business family.  Drawing from my experience with other family owned companies in the past, specifically a restaurant I worked for, it was almost hard to leave them because the owner and other employees had developed a real concern about each other.  I have even had one family company ask to keep me on for about 10 to 15 hours a week in the evenings, and I felt like I needed to stay to help them out.  The pay wasn’t great but it wasn’t about the pay.  It was about the family.

So does your family pest control company fall into the pitfalls of family members getting away with murder and ultimately ostracize the non-family employees? Or does your franchise run a tight ship were every sailor on board would risk life and limb for another?

Franchise, privately owned, or corporate…

Its not about family businesses but about business families.

Pest Control Advertising – Phone Books

What works and what doesn’t work in pest control advertising?

I am constantly bombarded with phone calls and emails for advertising. Now isn’t that just a little ironic? If your a marketing company or advertiser then shouldn’t you be able to reach me through your advertising methods???

If your advertising is that effective then why are you calling me instead of advertising to me?

Just food for thought.

Our most recent call was for yet another phone book directory. Paper must be getting cheaper. What a phone book company doesn’t see is this:

GENERAL PHONE BOOK STATS-
100 calls=
5 bogus calls – Solicitors/wrong numbers.
48 Existing customers – No New money just one of our local customers looking for us and happening to find us in the phone book directory.
24 referrals calls- Looking for us, if they don’t find us in your directory then they will find us somewhere else.
23 Sales Leads- (Potential new customers, shoppers) Dex quoted me that pest control closes at 33%.

So out of 100 phone calls you might close 7.59.

Now this is just an average, and perhaps it has little real bearing on if the phone book works for you. But for me it shows you what a sales guy doesn’t. “Oh, Billy Bob’s Pest Control got 300 phone calls last month. At $3000 and closing half of those that’s only $20 a new customer!!!”

Wrong, your pest control service might get new customers but I doubt you are really bringing in even close to 50% of those calls. Run the numbers yourself. Then ask yourself should I be working to pay the phone book? That’s what happens when your phone book advertising breaks even. You do all the pest control work the phone book steals all your profits.