[View Point] Employee Number 2: An inspirational leader

They say that life happens while you’re making plans.That’s certainly the case with John Cook, who had planned to attend graduate school and become an architect upon graduating from Georgia Tech in 1950. However, three months short of earning his degree, Cook learned that his father, who founded the North Alabama Termite Company in 1928 and suffered from ill health for a number of years, had lost his battle with emphysema. At 25 years old, the young Navy veteran who grew up in the pest control business faced a career crossroads. Should he stay or should he go?

As Lyn S. Cook writes in Employee Number 2: The Story of John Cook and Cook’s Pest Control, “Closing the doors of his father’s modest operation would have been easy — except for one complicating factor: the termite guarantees his father had sold. These guarantees required the North Alabama Termite Company to perform annual termite inspections free of charge for five years. Several hundred homeowners had purchased these contracts. If it had been another kind of business his hard-working mother, Leona, might be able to step in. But running the North Alabama Termite Company was hardly considered ‘woman’s work’ in 1950. While weighing all of this, John knew he had to consider the Cook name. His father had worked for many years to build a good reputation for honesty and reliability. John recalled his dad’s timeless advice: ‘Son, do the job right the first time. Do what you’ve promised plus a little bit more. Satisfy each customer.’ Customers had trusted his father, who had given them his word. John could not abandon them. He resolved to keep his father’s promise and fulfill the guarantees. Returning to Decatur (Alabama) wasn’t what he had planned to do, but there was no question in his mind that it was what he should do.”

Fortunately, architecture’s loss was the pest control industry’s gain. In the 58 years since, John Cook perhaps more than any other PCO of his generation has embodied the highest standards of both personal and professional ethics, rooted in his deep religious faith. During that time, Cook has received dozens of industry and civic awards, including NPMA’s Pinnacle Award in 2001 and the PCT/Syngenta Professional Products Crown Leadership Award in 1989, while growing Cook’s Pest Control from a modest, family owned business to the eighth largest pest control company in the United States, generating $93 million in annual revenue and employing more than 1,200 people. Yet wealth and power aren’t what make 83-year-old John Cook greet each day with the optimism and enthusiasm of a man half his age. “I was never motivated by money; that has not been my objective,” he said. “For me, adding another truck and pest control route meant creating another job for someone or income for a family.” It’s a philosophy that has earned Cook and his wife of 61 years, Jo, the admiration and respect of hundreds of industry colleagues and thousands of past and present Cook’s Pest Control employees.

Employee Number 2, perhaps more than anything else, is a moving tribute to one of the pest management industry’s most inspirational leaders by Lyn Cook, who wrote and researched the book after learning that her father-in-law had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in November 2006. “By any earthly measure, John Cook attained wealth, admiration and success even though his career path turned out nothing like he planned,” she wrote on the final page of this impressive book. “But ultimately, he lives in the knowledge that true success and satisfaction are measured, not by man’s standards, but by God’s.”

The author is publisher of PCT magazine.