[2008 Leadership Profiles] Valera Jessee

In a small brick building just off the interstate in suburban Atlanta, Valera Jessee and a small office staff quietly keep the Georgia Pest Control Association (GPCA) running. The position of executive director of one of the largest state associations in the country demands a certain skill set: congeniality, diplomacy and office skills.

Jessee has all of them: She is a former Miss Congeniality in the state of Georgia; earned a bachelor’s degree in political science; and is a recipient of the Olivetti Typist of the Year Award. But, more importantly, she has the respect of an entire industry for the dedication she has shown to GPCA in her more than two decades of service.

Steve Arnold, chairman of the board and owner of Peachtree Pest Control, was president when Jessee became executive director of the association in 1986. He said Jessee was integral in growing the GPCA from a small group to one of the largest state associations in the country. 

“We went from a fledgling association run by a mom and pop to a full-blown executive director’s position,” he said. “She had a couple times during that (first) year she almost quit. She had no idea how much trouble she was getting into.

“She brought expertise that we were severely needing, and a knowledge base. Without her, we couldn’t have done it. She has mothered an awful lot of presidents ever since. I don’t think anybody could have done the job Valera did.”

Arnold called her a mediator and a diplomat, and a mother to the pest management industry and the GPCA. “I certainly could not have had a successful presidency without Valera behind me,” he said. “I don’t know that anybody has done more for this industry behind the scenes than Valera Jessee.”

QUIET STRENGTH. But behind the scenes is just where Jessee likes to be. In her office in a quiet office park in suburban Atlanta, she defers to others: crediting the association’s past presidents for its success, and her office staff for the work they do.

“This is what has made the GPCA,” Jessee said, standing in front of a wall of portraits of past association presidents. “They work for the industry.”

Rick Bell, vice president of government affairs, Arrow Exterminators, called Jessee a “quiet lady of strength and character,” and said a large part of GPCA’s success can be credited to her.

Twenty years ago, GPCA was the first state association to host a legislative luncheon. It now hosts dinners for key legislators as a way to get them involved in the industry, and holds special legislative events to address specific concerns.

Jessee helped create the Guardians of GPCA, identify a solid lobbying group for the association, establish Georgia’s state legislative day and was a leader in the Forum of State Pest Control Associations.

“She was instrumental, 15 years ago, in identifying a lobby group in the state. These guys are year in and year out the most powerful lobbying group in the southeast. They have enabled us to become a voice at the state capitol, and she has had a lot to do with that,” Bell said. “We have a tremendous grassroots effort in Georgia now, due in large part to the work she did many years ago.”

GOING TO THE GPCA. Jessee spent 15 years working as director of information and education with the Georgia Department of Agriculture after she graduated cum laude from Oglethorpe University. Her husband, Fil, worked at a public relations firm. The couple had a son, Daniel, and Valera retired from the department of agriculture.

Then, one morning, Fil went to work and the doors to the agency were locked.

“So we went from two career incomes to zero with a 14-month-old child,” Jessee said. Fil opened his own firm, and kept one of his agency’s former clients: the GPCA.

When Glenn Burnett, the former executive director, retired in 1985, Jessee applied for the position. She interviewed with Red Tindol and Bill Blasingame and got the job.

With about 200 members and a couple of conferences and training sessions, “it was not unmanageable,” she said.

“It was a nice part-time job. I went to Glenn Burnett’s house and he gave me Georgia Pest Control Association in a box. His lovely wife Mary watched Daniel while he explained to me what he did. He said, ‘It’s not too bad.’”

As soon as Burnett retired, though, the association’s members expressed an interest in growing the group. “It was the farthest thing from a part-time job that you can possibly imagine,” she said. “It really just started rising. I didn’t know enough to say no. I always said, ‘Let’s see what we can do.’”

They held board meetings at the Jessee’s house, sitting around the same table that now sits in her office. (It had two more leaves in it then, she said, and stretched from the dining room into the kitchen.) Shipments were put together in her garage and hauled out to the waiting UPS truck in Daniel’s little red wagon.

The association now has membership of more than 700 companies — a total of 5,200 pest management professionals — about 85 percent of the firms in the state. She pulls out a yellow legal pad and tallies up the training courses: the Athens conference, four annual cram days for CEUs, the 18 region meetings each month, the summer conference, the Dalton conference, the Tifton conference, the road show, the fourth Tuesday of the month classes at the office, the annual field trip.

“And I’m leaving something out, I’m sure I am,” she said, laughing. All told, it adds up to more than 260 training hours each year. “But we love it. We love the people we work with. They’re appreciative, they’re encouraging. They have great ideas.”

Connie Rogers, assistant director of GPCA, has worked for the association for 16 years, and cites Jessee’s integrity and professionalism among her leadership qualities.

“I’ve had members tell me her coming to work here is the best thing that ever happened to the association. She makes every member important,” Rogers said. “She’s my boss, but I consider her one of my best friends. She’s an amazing woman. She’s very generous.”

Rogers and receptionist Angela Ventura round out the rest of the GPCA staff.

A SOURCE OF SUPPORT. Bubba Tindol, president at Allgood Pest Solutions, said Jessee’s impact on the association has been invaluable. Using her intellect, diplomatic skills and state government connections, he said, she’s been able to help the association — and the pest management industry as a whole — advance through sometimes-troubled regulatory waters and come out on top.

“That she was Miss Congeniality in a Miss Georgia competition was not surprising, because she knows how to be so nice,” Tindol said. “That quiet, gentile, ‘Southern lady’ demeanor she has belies a very sharp, knowledgeable person with good leadership abilities. She’s sharp. That mind’s always working.”

Tindol, a past president of the GPCA, said it’s Jessee’s ability to work diplomatically with many groups of people with disparate interests that makes her so successful.

“It’s easy to step on toes, especially when you work with government. It’s a minefield you walk through, and she navigates that well,” Tindol said. “She has the confidence of those people in the state. She’s got the confidence of all the (pest control) companies, the big ones, medium sized and small PCOs.

“A lot of them call her about personal problems and business things you wouldn’t think somebody would call the executive director of the state association for. But they do, just to confide in her to see what she thinks.”

Jessee said it was just part of her job to help pest management professionals work their way through a sometimes-confusing industry.

“We will help anyone whether they’re members or not, if they’re concerned about an issue,” she said. “A lot of people in the office call us, ‘My boss said to do this, and I don’t know what he’s talking about.’ And a lot of the documents our industry uses are known by five or 10 different names. Like a WDO inspection report, also known as a termite letter, or a clearance letter or a WIIR report. And when does it have to be turned in by? What are the deadlines on the technician hours and when do the CEUs have to be in?

“We walk them through it,” she said. “We spend a lot of time just talking to the people to help them figure out where they belong on this type of thing.”

Sitting in her office with tortoise shell glasses and a jeweled butterfly pin on her jacket lapel, she said she mainly acts as a conduit for committee ideas and information. “I contribute if they want some experience, but that’s not my job,” she said. “My job is to encourage them to have ideas, be involved, and I’m very diligent about getting committee minutes out ASAP.”

ADDING ANOTHER ASSOCIATION. Jessee also serves as the executive director for UPF&DA. She said it’s essentially a much smaller version of what she does for GPCA: two meetings a year and a newsletter. UPF&DA has less than 100 members, but they’re much larger companies.

“What they want is networking; they are not focused on becoming a large association so it’s a big lobbying force,” she said. “They’re like a standing army, and they want to stay connected. So my job is to create the environment for them at our meetings where they don’t have PCOs around that they need to sell to. This way, they can network with each other.

“You get the COO from distributors and manufacturers and it’s amazing the business that they can do playing golf, or meeting in an informal atmosphere — just being together without the other distractions.”

She said her position with UPF&DA — which she’s held for 21 years — allows her to see the industry from another angle.

“I can do a really good poker face. I can keep my mouth shut when I need to,” she said. “Because I do hear things from the PCOs the distributors and manufacturers wouldn’t like to hear, and vice versa. But I can also give them a hint: ‘That’s a field full of cow patties. I wouldn’t go there.”

TRAINING TOMORROW’S LEADERS. One of the programs Jessee has helped usher in is GPCA’s Leadership Development program. The program takes about 15 of the state’s top industry leaders and brings them together for networking and leadership training.

Every other year since 1998, the group attends a retreat on Sapelo Island on the Georgia coast. For two days, they do team building and leadership exercises. 

“They act like kids. They have fun,” Jessee said. “If you’ve never chased a deer at night in a golf cart….

“Everybody’s got so many responsibilities now, you don’t ever lay it down at the door. Taking them to Sapelo is the most important thing,” she said. “They make friends, like their fathers did, or their grandfathers, in the early days of our industry, and everyone had to hold together. And they knew each other. But it’s grown now, and the third generation, he doesn’t know this guy. They leave that at the dock, and they get to know each other.

“That has been one of the most rewarding things I have done within GPCA, is to see the friendships grow.”

Back on the mainland, the group visits the capitol with the association’s lobbyist, meeting key legislators and the commissioner of agriculture. Jessee said the friendships and the experiences from the six leadership classes have invigorated GPCA.

“That has been the greatest thing. And it has been the turning point for our association because every association — whether its your church, a civic organization — they begin to run out of potential leaders, and you have to start recycling. You need to bring in new blood.”

And it’s programs like Leadership that allow the association to be so successful. Jessee said there are 10 people waiting to be an officer in GPCA. “That’s exciting,” she said. “That’s unique for Georgia.” 

Valera Jessee at a Glance

• Executive Director of the Georgia Pest Control Association
• Executive Director of the United Producers Formulators & Distributors Association (UPF&DA)
• President of the Southern Association of Information Officers of State Departments of Agriculture
• Two terms as president of the Forum of State Pest Control Associations
• Editor of the Farmer’s and Consumer’s Market Bulletin, a weekly newspaper distributed to 250,000 people in Georgia’s agriculture industry
• Bachelor’s degree in political science from Oglethorpe University
• Family includes Fil (short for Filmore) Jessee and son, Daniel Jessee, 24
• Hobbies: reading, tending violets
• Former Miss Congeniality in Georgia State Beauty Pageant
• What you might not know about her: Jessee, who plays piano and sings, met her husband on stage, during rehearsals for Oglethorpe’s fine arts competition. They sang songs from “The Sound of  Music.”

A Mouse Costume

One of Valera Jessee’s first tasks for the GPCA came before she was even officially hired. Her husband, Fil, came up with a promotion to encourage positive coverage of the industry on area television stations.

Valera would dress up in a mouse costume and hand-deliver packages in cheese-pattern paper. The packages contained videos espousing the benefits of the pest management industry.

“We all know where those videos end up if you mail them. So, we borrowed a mouse costume,” she said.

So she drove around Atlanta in the costume, delivering videos. “We got a lot of play time on TV,” she said. “It was a regular mouse costume, with the big head and the tail. And it was hot, and it was June, and every time I put the head on, Daniel (her son) would cry.”