David Royce

Like, why on earth would you go work 800 hours for somebody else?

like your own company.

And so that's how I got into it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

You know, I think they were skeptical, but they had seen how much success I had had in that industry.

And even myself, I was somewhat skeptical of, you know, can I go do this?

So there's a few things that made me successful in the industry.

So one, I worked for a large $100 million regional pest control company the first year.

so i saw how a bigger company operated and then two i went and worked for this small startup they'd only been in business for a year i got to see things at the ground level and a lot of times when a brand new startup you start to become this jack of all trades or you get to see a lot more going on than you would maybe just in a single department at a larger business three i had a finance degree i was studying finance to go to investment banking and most people in pest control services do not have a finance degree so that was helpful

And then fourth, I actually asked my boss, I said, hey, if you had the time, because he had a young family, he was super busy.

We expanded to a bunch of locations.

I said, if you had the time, how would you fix the business?

Because he was working in the business as opposed to on the business.

And he gave me a list of about 30 things and said, here's all the things I would try to figure out how to do better and improve.

And so I had somewhat of a blueprint to go, okay, well, I can go work on these things.

And then, you know, if I had questions, I actually had him invest in the company initially.

He tried to get me to just go do my own thing.

And then the key was selling his business.

He actually said, by the way, I'm selling my business.