David Royce

I was studying Silicon Valley companies trying to figure out like, what are all the cool things that, you know, Google and Meta and Zappos are doing?

And can we bring those in and make pest control sexy?

Because it's not a very sexy industry.

It's hard convincing a bunch of college kids that, hey, you're going to make a ton of money doing this.

And when you walk into a beautiful building and then you have the best training on the planet, it was always about the training for us.

That was my general thesis from the beginning on the sales side.

if the sales reps are truly selling more on average than anywhere else, then you'll be able to grow that consistently.

It's not just about hype or flash or we're the cooler guys to come be with.

And it was so true for us.

The average sales rep would sell 70% more with us if they had switched over from another company from the prior year.

And so we kept all those stats and the data just to be able to use as a proof point to people when they were trying to decide whether or not to come on.

So with Altera, kind of same thing.

We did that for another four years, expanded to a couple thousand cities, and then I was like, all right, what do I want to do?

I feel like I'm replicating the exact same thing over and over, and I was getting kind of bored.

And that's the hardest part, right?

The obsession starts to wear a little bit where you're like, I don't know what else really to do here.

And so then I'm like, okay, I'm going to take my right-hand guy, Vess, and put him in as CEO.

I'm going to step back as chairman and founder.

I can just focus on strategy, the things that I was most passionate about.

And then I'll have Vess run the day-to-day.