The Level Up Podcast w/ Paul Alex
From Broke College Kid to $500M Pest Control Empire — David Royce Explains
29 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How did David Royce transition from a broke college student to a successful entrepreneur?
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We've done really well on the sales side. Our company would grow seven to ten times as fast as the traditional business model. The key aspect of this growth model is the sales force. If somebody came over from another company, they would sell 70% more with us that summer than they had the previous summer.
What advice would you give those startup founders or entrepreneurs on how to stand out in their market?
Most entrepreneurs, they get focused working in the business instead of on the business. You have to learn as an entrepreneur to either be a jack of all trades or to hire somebody else to do that if you want to scale. But the true test of scale is leave for 30 days on vacation, and if you come back and your company's still there, that's how you know you have a business that can actually scale.
All right, guys, welcome back to Love All Podcasts. This is Paul Alex. And today we have another great guest. He goes by the name of David Royce, who is the founder and chairman of Aptiv. So here's a great, great business model, especially in 2025, guys. Okay, let's talk about the trades. Let's talk about boring businesses that people don't look at, right?
When we look into businesses in 2025, what are we looking at? We're looking at, oh, okay, we could go ahead and work a remote lifestyle. We want to work that laptop lifestyle. But no, we have an entrepreneur.
that shows a different path he's been able to expand to over 5,000 cities across 34 states and within eight years his company active grew from a startup into the third largest residential pest control company in North America with over 500 million dollars in annual revenue guys phenomenal right and when we talk about entrepreneurs what makes a true entrepreneur guys having a team well
David has been able to lead by example and had over 6,500 employees. David, welcome to the show, brother.
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Chapter 2: What unique opportunities exist in 'boring' industries like pest control?
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. I'm going to sell it for 10 million bucks to Terminex. And I kind of was like, wait a second, you've only been in business for,
you know, barely four years and you're gonna sell the company? And he's like, yeah, he's like, you know, it's kind of time to cash out. We've done really, really well. And I thought, well, that's, that's like an amazing opportunity. So if I go start a company, if I can do something similar, even if I don't like it, maybe I can go back to MBA school and then transition into something else.
So he was very helpful. He was a silent investor in that business. I'd saved about 300 grand. He had 300 grand that he put in and, you know, he took a little bit of equity. And then if I had a question, you know, occasionally I could call him and say, Hey, you know, what do you think about this? It was almost like training wheels initially just getting going.
And would you say the experience was the major needle mover for you to have such a successful startup?
Yeah, so I'd taken business classes in college, and I read this book called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, and it just talks about the importance of creating systems with best practices and how much you can eliminate your risk by, for example, going and buying a franchise or doing something that you already know. A lot of people jump into an industry they've never even been a part of before.
So I'm a big advocate of getting experience and not just experience to know if you like it, but to also like develop some sort of a core competitive pit sales and like top 1% of 1% in sales. I wasn't passionate about pest control, but I could get really passionate about the sales side. And I loved helping other college students. I mean, it was really life-changing.
I mean, we literally created one of the very best jobs any college student could do in the entire United States, you know, in a three or four month summer. And so that, that's what I got passionate about. And then I was able to transition that passion into, you know, sales management and then entrepreneurship operations and then scaling nationwide.
And before starting your company, I know you mentioned that you were leading about 100 employees with that current employer. How did it feel being a manager, being in a position of power like that over 100 employees at that age if you were to go back right now?
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Chapter 3: How does culture impact talent attraction in a growing business?
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That's a great question. So there's something very unique that I did that isn't always possible in every industry. In some blue collar industries where you're just trying to create or you're trying to buy a stream of revenue, you can do these asset deals. So I've seen it done in pest control and alarm systems, some other industries like home services industries before.
So if you think about the big public pest control companies like a Terminex, who I sold to three times before ultimately deciding to sell somebody else in the last one. they grow about half of their growth is M&A. And so each quarter they have to hit certain growth targets and they buy up companies. And what they really want is not the brand.
They just want the customer base with the corresponding technician. And so what I was able to do was I didn't have a lot of capital. In fact, I almost bankrupt my first company. And I realized, hey, if I have more capital, I can expand a lot faster and I'm not going to be limited in my growth. And so that was the primary reason why I did it.
And I sold, so I sold the first one, just sold off the customer base and the score swine technicians, but I kept the golden goose, which was the Salesforce, the executive team and a key operator in each location. Then I started my second one, eco first. And that was more of an experiment of, okay, can we scale?
Can we go into four different States, you know, immediately right off the bat and have it still hold itself together. Whereas before I was just in Southern California and and I would go back and forth between each location. And so I was still there and able to see it, and I could feel comfortable with how the business was operating.
But I took my four very best managers and had them go open up locations. Things went really well the first year, said, okay, let's open up four more. And then we just kept opening up states. I think we were in nine states by the end of that business.
But it was a great way to learn how to run a regional company and how to operate from afar with people and provide a lot more opportunity to my operations managers. And so then the third, I sold that one. They came knocking again and said, yeah, we'd love to buy you again. And then the third one, it was like, okay, well, what can we do that's exciting? Because sometimes people get scared.
If you sell a business, they're like, wait, what's going to happen? And what I would do is I would pay all my managers and all my people to stick around for the next six months as we prepare to open up the next venture. And on the third one, I started studying companies out in Silicon Valley, like pest control is blue collar. It's like pretty boring, you know, not very sexy.
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Chapter 4: What systems are essential for scaling a business beyond the founder?
And then it became like, well, what about Thailand or what about Egypt or Africa? And so we would take the top five to 10 percent of salespeople out or our operations managers to these places. And we just we learn one when we set goals. and learn best practices from each other. But then like the second half of the day, it was like, all right, let's go skydive. Let's go swim with sharks.
Let's go scuba dive, cliff dive, you know, drive Ferraris around a racetrack. And so it was just outside of the box thinking in an industry where it had never been done before. Nobody had ever seen it. And so it really attracted the very, very best talent. They're like, gosh, it may be pest control, but this company really cares about its people and they're having a lot of fun.
So your secret to success on obtaining the best talent in pest elimination was building that culture. That's what I'm getting from this, man. I mean, you're really good at being a visionary, obviously. And it seems like you're going ahead and you're building that phenomenal culture where people want to work for you.
Definitely. And, you know, a lot of this came, I read a book by Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos. He wrote a book called Delivering Happiness. And in the book, you know, his first company, I think he built like 250 million and sold it. Initially, the first, you know, 10, 20 employees, they were really tight and had a great company culture.
But as they were growing, they just kind of started hiring anybody and they weren't as focused on culture just because it was a new business and he was new to entrepreneurship. And by the time he sold, he just really didn't enjoy going to work anymore. He's around a bunch of people that didn't share the same values.
And so when he came up with Zappos, he's like, okay, we're going to be very strict about who we hire. We're going to have this set of core values. We're going to hire towards those core values. And we'll even pay people to leave after their training if they're not totally on board. So it's this really cool idea. I just learned a ton from this book and implemented a lot at our company as well.
I love that. I love that. And it seems like culture is one of the pillars that makes your company stand out. Pest control is a very old industry. Everyone knows that with over 20,000 competitors just in the U.S., right? So what would you say would be your other pillars when it comes to having a competitive advantage that made your company stand out?
Yeah, so the Salesforce, you know, is very key. When I got into it, the industry had been around, or not so much the industry, but this form of marketing, you know, the direct-to-home, door-to-door concept, they've been around for at least 10 years. However, it wasn't really dialed in.
You know, it was more of this wet rag mentality where it's like, let's bring in whoever out, you know, throw the wet rag against the wall, see who sticks, and if the other guys go home, so what? And the training just wasn't that great. And so I really got excited about the training because I had such a bad experience initially where I knocked for a whole week and sold zero.
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Chapter 5: How did sales training contribute to David's early success?
And what we found is we could drive sales and actually 20 to 30% on sales are on tournament days. And so the company is able to make more, the sales are able to make more, they would compete for all these different prizes. There were brackets and say, I just made it a lot more fun.
I love that. I love that. And then it contributes back to the culture and being able to go ahead and push your teammates and your employees up on to present them as, hey, you guys are the bread and butter of the company. You guys deserve this. It's almost like an attaboy. And I always tell people that.
It's just like employees, teammates, whatever you want to call them, at the end of the day, they just want – to feel like they're cared for, right? And it seems like with everything that you did, that's exactly what you were able to present to your employees. So David, what would you say for a beginner entrepreneur or somebody who's a little bit more experienced
in traditional boring industries, just like pest elimination, what advice would you give those startup founders or entrepreneurs on how to stand out in their market?
Yeah. So one, I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, like, for example, if you think about mom and pops businesses, like small businesses, they maybe got one location. I think our country is probably two thirds small businesses and there's a unique competitive advantage that they have, right?
Because it's them in person, like they really care about the company and their incentive is, it's stronger than any employee that you would hire because it's coming to their family at the end of the day, right? They can sell something extra or keep somebody on for a little bit longer of a period. And most entrepreneurs, they get focused working in the business instead of on the business.
And for me, when I started my company, I just said, I'm never gonna service a house on my own. I'm never gonna sell another door. I'm going to create systems and processes. And it's not, that isn't very sexy, right? Like taking the time to write out policy and procedure manuals, to write out best practices, create training programs. It's not everybody's skillset.
And you have to learn as an entrepreneur to either be a jack of all trades or to hire somebody else to do that if you want to scale. And it's nice. You can initially maybe go into a second location and just see if you can do it. But the true test of scale is leave for 30 days on vacation.
And if you come back and your company is still there, that's how you know you have a business that can actually scale, right? I love that. Yeah, it's just thinking, how am I working on the business? I have some brother-in-laws that are dentists, and I'm like, you guys got to get your hands out of people's mouths so you can focus on building the business and scaling it.
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Chapter 6: What role does mentorship play in entrepreneurial success?
So what would you tell for anyone that's listening to this and watching this right now, if they were to go ahead and pick an industry, um, how would they go ahead and pick an industry and how would they go ahead and succeed in it?
Yes. The most amazing thing is the time we live in. You know, when I was in college, you know, the way that you mainly got into business, maybe you could read some books, but most people went to school, you know, they went through a business program to learn business initially. And there weren't even a lot of entrepreneurial programs back then. Today there's more.
It's almost like the market demands it, but yeah, In today's world, think about it like a podcast, right? There's so many business podcasts out there. There's so much information online. Now with like ChatGPT, you can literally, you know, ask, okay, what's the profit margin of pest control? What's the best profit margin in a blue collar industry? What is private equity buying?
You know, what industry has the margins where they're actually increasing or multiples where they're increasing. And so there's so many ways to learn about business. I'm still long on college. I think it just needs to kind of be redone. I think they need to tweak it a bit. But yeah, so the first thing I would say is if you want to learn an industry,
study it first, find an industry you think you might want to go into. Two, go get experience in it because the experience will make you that much more successful when you go to start your own business. If you think about franchises, franchise models have an 80% success rate. Whereas if you start a brand new business on your own, you have a 20% success rate. It's actually flipped.
You're that much worse off. Within five years, you're out of business, or at least 80% are. In 10 years, most businesses, I think it's like 95% are out of business. So those are some pretty tough odds. So it's like, go get experience. It's like, you wouldn't want to go compete in basketball against LeBron James, right? It's like, you may love basketball.
But the idea of like, hey, I think I'm gonna go get in the NBA. It's like, all right, well, how much experience do you have and how good are you? You know, you gotta build up to that. And some things are hobbies maybe, right? They're passion driven.
But what I found is a lot of the passion industries, you know, you literally have to work for free because so many people wanna go work in those industries. So, you know, it might be music or film, you know, it's really fun. Or you see a lot of people get into restaurants and, you know, the margins are really, really small.
So yeah, go find something, get experience, and then develop a competitive advantage where you're really good at something. And then if you can take that and go start, not only will you do better, but you're much more likely to get investors behind you if you need the money from somewhere else.
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Chapter 7: What strategies can entrepreneurs use to stand out in competitive markets?
If you want to, not everybody wants to do that. And that's okay. Like some people want a lifestyle business. Some people really want to scale, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you're busy and productive if you're not working on your A's.
I love that. I love that. So guys, work on your A's. I'm actually going to take that. That's a good framework to use, man, because I hear that all the time. It's just like, how can I manage my time better? And everybody has their own strategy and will work for them. But I really like your concept of actually separating from A, B, and C. That's good.
So David, what would you tell the audience right now? Okay. If you were to go ahead and speak to David back in college, before you started all of this, what would be some words of advice if you were to able to go back into the past and give yourself some advice to level up before you went ahead and you blew up these companies?
It's a great question. You know, I've, I'd probably say go work your ass off and it's more likely you'll figure it out. Like if you're willing to work really, really hard and focus and become obsessive at what you do, you've got the best chance. Like if you look at the very best athletes, the very, you know, the biggest rock stars, you can think of like a Taylor Swift or whoever,
they actually work really, really hard at their craft. They're obsessed about it. They have a process. They're engaged. And it creates passion. I found that most people love what they're good at. And sometimes it's not about the widget that you're selling, but it's about being great at something or helping other people. You can find happiness and joy in something else.
And when you're constantly trying to get better, I really believe that we're happiest when we're striving for our true potential. And you're never going to regret giving your best. It feels good. And I used to love working 14, 16 hour days. There's times and seasons.
And the thing I would actually tell myself is work really hard now, because when you have family and you have kids, you're going to want to slow down and take some steps back because your priorities change. And that's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. You know, it's another phase of life. And there's more opportunities for growth and learning on that side of life.
I love that. That's some great advice, man. Guys, always chase the greater version of yourself. I love that. So David, where can my audience find you, brother?
Yeah, they should go to LinkedIn. I'm there. If they got questions or something, feel free to reach out.
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