Blindsided by Side Jobs

When you hire, you look for hard-working, dedicated individuals who will represent your firm in a manner that makes you proud — people with integrity whom you can trust. Unfortunately, sometimes when you think you have the greatest, most trustworthy employee on your team, personal issues can drive him to be dishonest. That’s what happened to me, and I lost $8,000 before I discovered the scam going on right in front of me.

Coach Pest Solutions is a relatively small company. Our six employees service residential and commercial customers across Southwest Michigan, offering services ranging from termite, bed bug and general pest management to wildlife control. About two years into the business, I hired a technician who was an all-around great guy. He excelled in technical work and was a gifted communicator — a real people person. Recognizing his ability to connect with our customers, I moved him to a sales position. That’s when the trouble began.

One day a customer called our main office to complain about him, saying that although he had treated and retreated for carpenter ants, he had not resolved the pest issue. I looked them up in our database, but they weren’t there. The customer suggested that maybe that was because this individual represented an affiliate of my company and not Coach Pest Solutions itself (this was how he had introduced himself).

Wait. What? I don’t have affiliate companies. It took me a moment to do the math in my head, but then I realized what was going on: This employee knew exactly how to manage a carpenter ant situation. The only reason he would not be able to resolve the issue would be if he hadn’t used enough dust. And the only reason he would short himself on dust would be because he knows that I monitor that chemical very closely and he didn’t want me to discover that he had been servicing customers off the books.

Further discussion with the customer uncovered that he had been servicing their home for a year — with my equipment and chemicals. They had paid him $125 a month.

I confronted the employee, who first denied it, saying that of course the customer was in the database. I told him I could forgive him if he just told me the truth, but he wouldn’t. I took him off the schedule until I could sort the situation out.

Turns out he had started this “side business” about a year-and-a-half before and had built up a clientele of two commercial and four residential accounts. He told them that his company was an affiliate of Coach, and sent them to our website to establish legitimacy. But he used his own paperwork, which was how he diverted the revenues to himself. Between the chemicals and the potential revenue I lost, I figure he had cost me about $8,000.

I fired him but didn’t press charges because I knew that he and his family must truly be struggling for him to have done something like this. What troubled me was that he hadn’t come to me to discuss the situation. Based on the long hours he had been working, I had thought he was making plenty of money. If he had just come to me, I would have found a way to help.

I worked hard to keep “his” customers. I went to each one, explained what had happened and introduced them to the technician who would be taking his place. I assured them that we would provide them with outstanding service and value. To prove that point, I offered them 50 percent off the next year’s service. All but one customer came on board right away; the other went to a big-name company but returned to us, dissatisfied with that company’s service, several months later.

Today, I operate more cautiously. Every technician has a GPS monitor to show where they’ve been, and they are required to turn in every piece of equipment at the end of the day, and record the type and amount of chemicals they’ve used.

We don’t believe that any of our technicians would ever commit such a crime against the company in the future, but this particular situation helped me understand that it’s a good business practice to keep close tabs on what’s happening. I’m hoping that the only thing happening going forward is that we’re satisfying a lot of customers and growing our business together, as a team.