Maximizing Pest Control business organically- leveraging generational hard trends.

David Bennett

Emerging Technologies in the Pest Control Industry

Our society is immersed in technology, the renaissance evolution remains on the upward trending curve, catalyst accelerators in metamorphosis fueling this quantum leap opportunity, driven by the lower cost is the trio of:

Computing processing power capability.
Bandwidth higher capacity data transfer electronic transfer.
Digital Storage bandwidth increase capabilities.

With the IoT and 5G development more is on the way!

We all have cell phones! Apple iPads, Microsoft Surface, Android Fire, Samsung Galaxy, Chromebook, tablets, etc., are prevalent in our businesses, gaining new functionality at breakneck speed. Ironically, leading the pack with astonishing adeptness, capability, comprehension, grasping navigating multitudes of new apps daily with adroit aptitude are the younger generation, who have and are growing up using these platforms in life verses solely using them for just occupational purposes.

Fear of technology and our ineptitude with it causes us not to explore as our children do.

Sometimes it’s easier to call for our 12-year-old for help ordering food on an app rather than try to figure out how to do it ourselves or navigating the counter tablet at Panera Bread, how to get everything ordered while worried about how to add a baguette to the order after all entered just prior to payment. Admittedly we continue to do so, when confronted with technical challenges, hesitate regarding how to perform a certain task. Naturally, rather than get caught up in virtual assistant endless purgatory avoidance of being able to talk to a human being, because of the absence of menu items that we are looking for help with, the best consultant is readily available—simply grab anyone ranging under 28 & three quarters down to 9 half years old, more often than not they will fearlessly, enthusiastically help with vigor demonstrating their comfort level, skills, competence and confidence to an older generation who had to progressively learn these skills.

It is intimidating and frustrating when we are holding the phone in our hands and know what we want to do, but have trouble managing around the application to get it to do what we want it to do. But when you hand the phone off to your child, they can resolve the issue in seconds, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and your child is staring at you blankly wondering if they will have to pack you off to a nursing home because of emerging senility.

On the other side, the pest control company’s business faces functional challenges for reporting, auditing, accounting, documentation, how to streamline simplify business processes, finding the time to perform administrative tasks, often means late nights or getting up a zero dark hundred hours getting everything done. We can’t expect our 12-year-old to run our business for us—they do have to go to school, after all!

We recognize the disconnect within the pest control industry, hard trend of younger generation employed and the digital emergence. Related to the business challenges, while listening, observing, keeping a keen eye out, we were awarded the opportunity to review a comprehensive progressive app, specifically engineered toward pest control companies called Solvd!

Emerging Technologies in the Pest Control Industry and Solvd!

We are fast moving past the days of paper based workflow, have moved whether our business has or not into a dynamic world

utilizing apps, Google maps, which can tell you what the speed limit is and where construction is as you drive down the road, and other apps which can do more functions than certainly we know. There are countless accounting and invoice programs, precision pesticides, Integrated Pest Management, video control and real time face to face communication technology, customer database programs available including apps with different functionalities. Many times, we must install individual functionalities as separate programs, and desperately switch between them all in order to use them in our workday. The sheer amount of knowledge that the average person must have to operate these programs is stunning, and overwhelming to those in the workforce who never had these technologies.

Running a business is not easy and the pest control industry has unique needs. There are multiple things to consider: customer targeting, payroll, work orders, invoices, types of jobs – exclusion for example, chemical use and inventory management, how long a job will take, scheduling of employees, efficiency issues. Pest control companies are as unique and individualistic as the owners and pest control issues in their communities. There are things that crop up that you didn’t anticipate, and which software and apps do you use to manage all these needs? You might have to download multiple programs to manage all of it! That takes up precious memory in your computer and more tasks to manage. Emerging technologies in the pest control industry illustrate that there is a generational shift with employees who have grown up using integrated technology who are able to deftly utilize it, in addition to optimizing and accommodating the tenured team of professionals. It is critical to

make any introduced platform inherently simple to bridge the gap and to harness both skill sets with ease.

With all of these challenges, we’ve found Solvd, new software that is fully configurable and scalable for any sized business, accommodating technicians varying skill levels. For instance, adding to, maintaining the business contact database, work orders and billing invoices without having to constantly re-enter the same information, it manages all these things seamlessly, resulting in efficiency, with more time to allocate for business growth!

On the technician side Solvd helps to:

Utilize robust service order and service-program templates to help implement best-practices, train technicians, augment knowledge and skill set, and capture rich media content.
Leverage the full libraries of customer & inventory records anytime to harness the full power of your data.
Model properties of any size and shape (e.g. sports stadiums, multi-unit high-rises) and loop service steps through them to accomplish the most complex services.
Monitor in real time what jobs you have been assigned and receive update notifications.
Modern and simple user experience will improve technician satisfaction and overall retention.

It became clear when demonstrated to us the benefits of Solvd, in its own right, spliced with the hard trend of younger generation being employed, equals easy adoption for them to utilize on the job. They are more familiar with intuitive modern applications and modern user experiences as they have grown up with societal digital immergence (using apps on mobile technologies), so giving them a modern intuitive app that is native to themwill save business owners significant time on training in addition to allowing them, other employees, and you as a business owner to benefit from the ability to capture, process, and document data in real time in easier and more productive ways in the field and in the office.

In this article we hit couple of highlights–every individual pest control business has specific nuances. We encourage and recommend reviewing the Solvd platform by contacting President, Jason Greenberg at [email protected] or via the form on the Solvd website, or call 773-842-6055 and schedule a demo! They will also be attending PestWorld at booth #110.