[PCT Leadership Winner] Tom Walters

Working more than 25 years for the same, family-owned company may seem like a comfortable situation. After all, you become accustomed to the personalities, expectations and routines at work. So what happens when your position is shaken up by a major leadership change? Tom Walters found out the hard way – and made the transition look easy.

Perhaps Walters’ ability to weather change stems from his long experience with Western Pest Services, which was acquired by Rollins Inc., the parent company of Orkin Pest Control, last year. Indeed, the management shift brought about by the purchase may seem like just another challenge for a professional who helped build the nation’s eighth-largest pest control company through savvy management and the ability to recognize and adapt to changing circumstances in a competitive environment.

CUTTING HIS LEADERSHIP TEETH
Walters was an entomology student at the University of Delaware, “scrambling to find a summer job,” when he noticed a card posted on a department bulletin board. The card advertised a position with Western Pest Services, based in Parsippany, N.J. After doing some research, Walters found that Western was a well-known and highly esteemed company where several UD graduates had found work. So the young Walters applied, got the job and had an exciting summer.

The Western team seemed impressed, too. They offered Walters a full-time job as a supervisory trainee near Philadelphia upon his graduation, and Walters joined the company in 1978. In his early days at Western, Walters learned the profession from the ground up, gaining experience as a technician and salesman. “I got a broad perspective of the business,” Walters says of his first year with Western, noting that all of Western’s branch offices provided a full range of services, including fumigation work.

Although each Western branch was offering an array of residential and commercial services, some branches lacked on-site management. Thus, a 24-year-old Walters entered the management arena as a team supervisor at the Mapleshade, N.J., branch. “I cut my teeth in team leadership there,” he recalls. “It was my first experience running a service department and leading a team, so I learned a lot by trial and error.”

Little did Walters know at the time that he had tapped into his passion for the business: building relationships and working closely with groups of technicians, sales people and customers. Walters’ first supervisor at Western (and the man who recruited him into the company), Bob Rummel, recognized Walters’ talent early on.

“Tom understands business and people, and he knows how to put the two together in order to move in the right direction,” he says.
By the late 1970s, Western began placing managers in every branch office, and Walters was offered a new opportunity as a branch manager in Washington, D.C. “Washington is a big city with a broad demographic mix,” he says. “It was a challenge to run a whole branch, particularly where there were some pretty rough neighborhoods to service.” But with the practical and management experience already under his belt, Walters tackled the job for three years until he transferred to the Virginia Beach branch, Western’s most remote branch at the time, where he spent the next five years.

FLORIDA BOUND
In 1985, Western purchased Quality Pest Control, based in Florida, and, in 1989, Western executives again turned to Walters, counting on his exceptional leadership skills to manage the growing business there. “We didn’t initially know much about running a business in Florida,” Walters says. “Western was a mid-Atlantic company and we had a lot to learn about doing business in South Florida. Moving to Florida and managing a business in three diversely populated, sub-tropical counties of South Florida was the biggest challenge I’d ever taken on. I learned a whole lot about the business there.” Yet despite any self-doubt he may have experienced, Walters handled his new duties well, assembling a strong team, many of whom are still with the company today.
Walters’ tropical new surroundings forced him to adapt to a different demographic mix and to a highly tourist-dependent economy. He found that the seasonal routine of the Northeast was opposite that of his new location, where tourists began swarming to the area around the holidays, and businesses such as hotels and restaurants had to be ready with a bug-free welcome for their guests. “The hospitality industry is a very demanding clientele,” he says. “They expect a very high level of performance in a tropical environment where pest pressures are more intense than in other parts of the country. You really have to be on top of your game in that very competitive marketplace.”
The business environment proved as different as the climate for the transplanted Walters. He found many independent operators competing with Western for niche markets, while larger pest control companies competed for big, community-based contracts. The combination of factors that drove the Southeast region’s pest control industry was so different from those in the Northeast that Walters soon knew he had to lead the business through some significant changes. “The way we operated the business in New Jersey just didn’t work in South Florida,” he says. “Basically, we had to adapt to a completely different business model.”
As he began to move the company’s Southeast business in a new direction, Walters’ experience working with Western’s commercial accounts came in handy. The majority of Western’s existing Florida business was residential, leaving a rapidly expanding commercial market virtually untapped by the company. Walters knew that competing independent operators could provide less expensive residential service, so he steered his team toward the commercial arena, beefing up the commercial sales force and focusing promotional activities toward business owners.
Six years later, Western enjoyed a thriving business in Ft. Lauderdale and the surrounding area and was ready to expand under Walters’ leadership. Working with Bob and Dick Sameth, Western’s second-generation owners, and General Manager Bruce Nelson, Walters developed a five-year plan that successfully moved the company into other regions of Florida as well as Georgia.

AN EVEN BIGGER CHALLENGE
As a loyal employee and trusted member of Western’s management team, Walters was satisfied with his job. His wife Patti worked as a fitness instructor, his two sons, Andrew and Bryan, were in high school, and daughter Michelle was in middle school … life was good. Then Nelson retired.
“Tom was the obvious choice of Western’s owners – and even employees – to replace Bruce Nelson as general manager,” says Mike Katz, president of Western Exterminator and a long-time professional acquaintance of Walters through their work with Copesan Services, the largest commercially focused pest management organization in North America. “Tom was very successful and well respected throughout the company. He is a nice man, and he’s very good at what he does.”
Western has always promoted from within, Walters says. “That’s both a strength and a weakness because there may not often be opportunities to advance. But taking on Bruce’s position was a great opportunity for me and for others on my team who would have new opportunities to move up.”

Since becoming vice president and general manager, responsible for sales and operations in 31 branch locations in nine states, Walters admits that he misses direct customer contact, but he has no regrets. “My role today is more strategic and visionary, which I really enjoy,” he says.

Walters’ “visionary” nature has not gone unnoticed by his peers. “He is a solid decision maker and an excellent strategic thinker,” says Alfred Treleven, president of Copesan Services, who served on the Copesan Board of Directors with Walters. “I would feel comfortable taking a very complicated issue and throwing it Tom’s way. I am confident he would come up with three or four different ways of solving the problem. He would then be able to walk a team of people through the process to get the issue resolved.”

Despite his position on the executive team, Walters was surprised when Western’s owners, the Sameth family, sold the business to Rollins. He says that most of the company’s management anticipated a sale at some point but didn’t expect it in 2004. Yet, in true Walters’ style, he sees the company’s merger with Orkin as a positive move, offering opportunities to work together for greater success.

Walters’ optimistic outlook is no surprise to Treleven. “Tom is intelligent and emotionally strong,” he says. “He is a good thinker. His approach to issues or problems is to stay calm and work through them, even with issues where he has a strong emotional attachment.”

Although Walters responded to the acquisition by looking at the glass as half-full, not all Western employees saw things the same way. “There was a wide range of emotion when the news broke,” he says. “We expected people to be surprised and somewhat disappointed. And we knew we had to communicate very well.” In fact, Walters communicated with every Western branch – in person – to assuage any concerns. Along with Glen Rollins, Orkin’s president, Walters visited each office to discuss the transition with employees, answering questions, offering reassurance, and introducing Rollins at each stop.

Mike Wakefield, Western’s senior marketing manager, concurred. “When we were acquired by Rollins, it was a very scary thing for the employees. Western had enjoyed extremely low turnover over the years and the employees took a lot of pride in working for a family-owned business. I think that employees can respond to these kinds of changes either negatively or positively, however, I think they usually take their cues from management and the people they respect in leadership roles in the company. Tom was very skillful at leading people though this buyout. It was his positive leadership that provided employees a secure feeling and allowed them to continue their work as they always had – they kept providing the valuable services that made Western such an attractive company to Rollins.”

A NEW ERA
Since the ownership transition, Walters has his hands full managing the original Western branches, which retain the company name, as well as overseeing a region of Orkin branches in the Northeast and meeting with other executive team members at Rollins headquarters in Atlanta at least twice a month. He continues to extol the benefits of the new ownership arrangement, pointing out that the tremendous buying power created by the acquisition helps both companies with fleet purchases, insurance and other necessary expenses.

“I had always been very impressed with the Sameth family and the way they operated their company by putting people first,” Walters says. “I see now that the Rollins family has the same values, which is very comforting. And we can pick the best of both worlds in terms of our business practices, combining the best of Western with that of Orkin.”

The bottom line for Walters is the same now as it was the day he walked in to work at Western. “We simply try to exceed customer expectations,” he says. “We’ve always taken pride in our ability to recruit talented people by treating them well and providing them with all the tools they need to be successful.

When your people feel appreciated and positive about the way they’re being treated, they treat your customers well.” While Western continues to focus on its customer-service commitment, Walters continues to help move the company toward a bigger and better future. “We’re holding on to our current customer base while adding new customers,” he notes. “We constantly focus on delivering quality service, and with that we are improving efficiency. It’s a matter of keeping our goals in sight and paying attention to the things that really matter most.”

As a respected industry leader, Walters is committed to sharing this philosophy with others in the pest control industry through his work with the National Pest Management Association.

“Tom is as well rounded a business talent as I’ve run into,” Rollins says. “Over the past 18 months, I’ve seen Tom in a myriad of different situations, and I’ve always been deeply impressed by his character, instincts and knowledge of the industry. We’ve given him more operational responsibility, and the business is really doing better than ever.”

As Walters’ work has taken him to the uppermost echelons of the industry, he remains loyal to Western and motivated to see the company prosper in the years to come. Treleven notes, “If I were to name the top 10 people in the pest management industry, Tom would be one of them.” And Western will continue to benefit from the guidance of one of the industry’s best.