Eve Pappas

The saying goes, “There’s no ‘I’ in team,” and for Eve Pappas, vice president, business development growth, Hoffman’s Exterminating, Mantua, N.J., there’s no greater mantra for her personal and professional life. As a young girl, Pappas was forced to take on a number of parental duties, not knowing how influential those moments would be on her as an adult.

“My mom ended up having tuberculosis and we almost lost her. She went into a sanitarium for a whole year,” recalled Pappas. As a result, Pappas was called upon to help her aunts, grandmothers and father raise her three younger siblings.

As such, Pappas learned how to take charge, put systems in place and make sure everyone was taken care of before herself. Through these trials and tribulations, she started to develop strong leadership skills, including tending her family’s garden and selling the most Girl Scout cookies in her troop.

“I guess I was a pretty good salesperson starting from when I was young,” she said.

As a child, Pappas recalled sitting around the dinner table with her father listening to business discussions, learning lessons that can’t be found in textbooks.

Then, in February 1975, Pappas’ father called her and her siblings to a family meeting to break the news that they would be moving from their hometown of Hinsdale, Ill., to New Jersey, for a promotion he received to vice president and director of operations at Plymouth, Inc.

At 16 years old, the move sounded unfavorable to Pappas. But today, following a rewarding career leading some of Orkin’s most successful service branches, acting as a business consultant to many pest management companies and currently serving as vice president of business development growth at Hoffman’s Exterminating in the Northeast, Pappas is glad that she and her family packed their bags so many years ago and headed to the East Coast.

Building Connections, Growing Businesses

Before Pappas discovered her love for the pest control industry and building relationships with industry colleagues, her dream was to become a physical education teacher, mentoring and coaching kids. While this didn’t turn out the way she had hoped, she now considers herself a “coach” for adults, instead of children.

“I’m just the coach calling the plays,” Pappas said. “It’s the team that’s making the calls, servicing the customers, collecting the money and making the deals.”

Pappas headed to Glassboro State College in New Jersey in May 1980. College did not pan out for Pappas, but during this time she picked up a sales job with Hoop Magazine, an official NBA publication, to sell advertising. In this role, she came across an ad for a sales position at Orkin. Wanting to try something new, Pappas decided to apply and, in February 1981, she started as a residential sales representative at Orkin’s Pennsauken, N.J., branch.

“I went ahead and started doing sales and did a pretty good job at it. I told them, ‘I want to be a manager in two years, or I’m out of here,’” Pappas said. “That’s really what I wanted to do because I felt like I could coach, develop and mentor people because that was my passion.”

Not long after learning the pest control ropes, Pappas was given the opportunity to manage her own team at the same branch by Wayne Golden, longtime Orkin manager who retired in 2018 as assistant vice president of government relations for Rollins, the parent company of Orkin. (Golden is a class of 2017 Crown Leadership award winner.)

“I became a service manager for two different branches,” she said. “I had the opportunity to be the head coach of [those branches], and we went from five technicians to 17 within eight years. At one time, we were servicing four casinos and a lot of commercial businesses.”

In her 27 years as an Orkin employee, Pappas held various leadership positions: Regional sales/ service manager; area sales manager; operations manager; branch manager; and branch residential service manager for the East Coast and Midwest. As Pappas gained a foothold in the industry, she started making connections, which led to more opportunities. More PCOs wanted her on their team as head coach, including pest management professional Bill Hoffman.

Pappas and Hoffman became friends while serving on pest control association committees in the early 1980s, when Pappas worked for Orkin and Hoffman worked for Western Pest Services, Parsippany, N.J. In 2005, Hoffman, now CEO of Hoffman’s Exterminating, Mantua, N.J., asked Pappas if she would join the company as his business partner to help grow the company.

At the time, Pappas was hyper-focused on her Orkin role, and also trying to maintain the right work/life balance. As such, she declined Hoffman’s offer but the two stayed in touch and their friendship continued to grow.

In the meantime, Pappas continued to hold various leadership positions in the pest control industry and build her network. But at home, Pappas was working hard as a single mother to raise her daughter, Jennifer Bowne.

“I was at Orkin being a single mom, knowing that I had to do everything I possibly could to keep a roof over our head, food on the table and give Jennifer a good education,” Pappas said. “And I’ve done all of that.”

Pappas said raising her daughter to be the best she could be was her driving force during the difficult times and “why she got out of bed every morning.”

In 2008, Pappas wrote a letter to Rollins CEO Gary Rollins informing him of her retirement, but she said she knew she was nowhere near finished with helping other PMPs learn the business and “people” side of pest control, which was her true passion.

As such, she joined New Jersey-based Viking Pest Control in 2008 as southern regional manager, helping the company grow from $12 million to $20 million. In 2013, she took a turn on the supplier side of the industry, and went to work for mattress liner manufacturer Allergy Technologies, where she sold ActiveGuard mattress liners nationwide.

“[Selling ActiveGuard] gave me the opportunity to travel from Maine to Washington, D.C., out to Illinois and Indiana, to grow my knowledge and share the product with people from the East to West Coast,” Pappas said. “I also got to meet more owners and operators, rather than just being with one big [pest control] company.”

After a couple of years of traveling as a sales “road warrior,” Pappas was on the hunt for her next opportunity. The timing felt right, so Pappas reached back out to Bill Hoffman and finally took him up on his offer, becoming business partners after years of friendship.

“Bill and I started to reconnect on a weekly basis, and at the end of 2015, he made me an offer to come join the team,” Pappas said. “He put together a contract based on growth and profitability to show my investments with him in a five-to-10-year plan.”

Pappas said being both business partners and friends made their relationship stronger and gave her the opportunity to build awareness of Hoffman’s Exterminating on a much larger scale. When Pappas was hired the company had 12 technicians; today it has about 40.

Hoffman said Pappas has “broken the glass ceiling” for women being successful in a male-dominated industry.

“She just gets in there and gets the job done,” he said. “It wasn’t that we made her the best offer she couldn’t refuse, but what I offered her was a chance for her to mentor and teach others.”

Choosing Pappas to be a business partner was an easy decision for Hoffman. “She truly wants to help others and [our team] get better,” he said. “She is the cheerleader and person that is inspiring other people, getting them pumped up and she’s not afraid to tell you what she thinks.”

Both Pappas and Hoffman have been in the business long enough to see the increase in the number of women involved in the industry. In the 1980s, Pappas said, there would be just a few women in a meeting of many men. “I remember at PestWorld there would be eight of us sitting at a table, and last year, we had 200 people at the breakfast meeting,” Pappas said. “The more women that tell their stories, the more women we can get involved in our industry.”

Living With No Regrets

Pappas recently hit her 40th anniversary working in pest control and said she’s lived with no regrets. “God has treated me amazingly great,” Pappas said. “He’s given me the opportunity to serve others, which is what I really love doing and it goes back to me being a caretaker.”

One part of her life that has remained steadfast is family. Daughter Jennifer Bowne said from the beginning, it was always just “me and mom.”

“Looking back, she made a lot of sacrifices to send me to a private school and go on vacations, but that also came with her having to work long hours and missing hockey games [here and there],” she said.

Bowne said as she grew up, Pappas instilled the importance of empathy in her. Today, Bowne works as a schoolteacher. That empathy she learned from her mom is something she uses when teaching her students and as she’s teaching her daughter how to care for people.

“She always said, ‘Treat people like you want to be treated and bring joy to others,’” she said. “My mom finds joy in other people’s joy.”

Whether Pappas is making Thanksgiving stuffing with her granddaughter, or training employees, she gives 100 percent of herself to everything she does.

“I feel like she’s ‘all in’ and she’s always passionate in [each] role,” Bowne said.

Pappas’ wife, Janice Campbell, said Pappas eats, breathes and lives pest management. “We don’t go out to dinner where she’s not looking to see who does the [pest control] service," she said. “She’s [always] looking to see how she can help the business.”

Campbell said, “this is not a job for her, but a life for her. She likes to raise other people up with her, and not get up there by stepping over people, but bringing people up with her,” she said.