Reaching higher

Joe Valentine, president of Luv-A-Lawn & Pest Control in Florida, has been able to step up his pest control and lawn care sales by implementing a new incentive program over the past year.

The initiative began at the start of 2020 and has helped the company grow steadily.

“We’ll probably do close to $8 million in revenue this year,” Valentine says. “At this point, we’re a full-service pest control company offering lawn care, shrub care, indoor pest control, termite protection, mosquito control and tree injection.”

Valentine says he always wanted to find a way to reach more pest control clients, and the new program was just the ticket.

“The low-lying fruit has always been selling lawn care. Because it’s the first thing people see when they pull up to their property and it’s the aesthetic value of their property,” he says. “We are probably 75% lawn care and 25% pest control. We certainly would like to do more pest control, and we improve every month with it. We have to do a lot more promoting, for pest control and termite sales.”

To combat this, Valentine gives out bonuses for each additional pest control or termite unit one of his 14 service consultants sells.

“For example, if there’s a salesperson who sells 16 pest control units in a month, he gets an extra 10% on top of what he’s already been paid,” he says. “And the same goes for termite units. They are very much encouraged to sell those.”

The incentive program has also blossomed into a friendly competition among the staff as well – with employees checking in with each other routinely to see how they’re doing.

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“There’s no doubt it has been motivating people,” Valentine says. “Every single day we text at the end of the day what our units and totals were. You can just feel the excitement when someone sells their 16^th pest control or fifth termite – they can’t wait to tell the team.”

And after a little over a year, Valentine says the move is still paying off.

“The first Friday of every month, I pay out the bonus money of the previous month. The first Friday in April, I paid out $19,000 worth of bonus money to our team,” he says.

A Problem to Solve. Even without the incentive program, there is plenty of work to be sold in the Florida market, according to Valentine.

“It’s a unique situation here – we’re always busy in Florida,” he says. “Obviously, you have your seasonal insect issues, but there always seems to be something to do on a lawn despite what month of the year it is.” 

Unusually, Valentine says in some years his best months are when others expect things to be the slowest.

“Our biggest month in revenue have sometimes been November,” he says. “When some people think things are slowing down, we have just gigantic revenue months. And that’s because of our build-up of business over the course of the entire year…if you sell somebody on a monthly account, they’re going to renew in November or December…we sell annual agreements for the most part and hope to maintain those customers for many, many years.”

Common insects are still around in November too, extending the selling season.

“We’ve got different types of weeds that need to be attended to throughout the entire year and your significant insect populations start around Mid-April and don’t end until Mid-October or November,” Valentine says. “That’s your cinch bugs and things to that nature.”

Valentine has been in the game awhile and says that this year he’s noticed an uptick in problem pests.

“For a short period of time we saw a resurgence in flea activity, but that was short-lived. We actually had a little bit of a termite swarm season this year,” he says. “And those are usually things of the past…I’ve been doing this for 36 years now and a tradition swarm season where you can’t get enough manpower and your phone is ringing off the hook hasn’t really happened in 10 years. But this year, we saw a pretty decent influx in subterranean termite activity.”