VIEWPOINT: A Modest Proposal

PCT’s 1997 Business Strategies Conference, co-sponsored by Zeneca Professional Products, was one of those special moments in a business career. The staff of PCT and Zeneca (now Syngenta Pro-fessional Products) had worked hard to bring together 75 of our industry’s most talented leaders for a three-day, “invitation only” business conference in historic Williamsburg, Va.

It proved to be a successful event, but it became special – and memorable – because of one man’s vision and the courage he demonstrated at that meeting. Keelan Pulliam, a longtime executive at Zeneca, took the stage and challenged the industry leadership to step up to the plate and make a personal commitment to establish an “industry awareness” campaign designed to enhance our industry’s image and grow the market for professional pest control services. Keelan’s “call to action” was the foundation of NPMA’s Industry Awareness Council, which has since been renamed the Professional Pest Management Alliance (PPMA).

Important commitments were made by NPMA industry leaders that day, but after a promising start the program lost much of its momentum in the wake of staff changes and funding challenges in the years to follow. That seems to be the way things work out in the pest control industry when it comes to implementing programs that are designed for the good of the industry at large.

Okay ... let’s go back in time a few years.

Rob Lederer had taken over the helm of NPMA approximately 18 months before our second annual Business Strategies Conference. Rob hired on knowing the NPMA was an association with a lot of problems, including some serious personnel and financial challenges. The NPMA had decided to sever its ties with its longtime executive vice-president and association officials challenged Rob to turn around the ship in shallow waters. He did an amazing job his first year on the job, but he had a number of things to fix ... and he had to get the job done while dealing with a lot of infighting and growing tension among NPMA’s leadership, who weren’t universally pleased with his management style. By the time we arrived at the Business Strategies Conference some pretty powerful members of the association wanted Rob fired, and there was a lot of underlying tension relating to that movement during the three-day conference. Anyway, as it turned out, Keelan showed his wisdom that day by giving the Industry Awareness Council ball to Rob Lederer and Rob has worked hard to make the concept work.

Now he has Cindy Mannes on board as executive director of PPMA. Cindy is an extremely talented and committed professional who is working her heart out for you folks, putting her all into trying to bring the PPMA vision to a more dynamic life. Unfortunately, I think Rob and Cindy have a near impossible job as it now stands, unless more leaders and followers in this market begin to change their thinking, enhancing their personal and financial commitment to this valuable initiative.

The big blocker is MONEY, and the inability of pest management professionals nationally to understand, and respect, the business realities of their chemical product suppliers. For some unfathomable reason, a significant number of PMPs think chemical manufacturers are getting rich from their product purchases. Hello out there! If you haven’t noticed lately, chemical companies have been merging/consolidating/dying over much of the past decade because chemical sales (your purchases) have been declining, while their cost of doing business has been accelerating wildly. By contrast, the pest control service business has been growing at a comfortable 5% annual rate, while its chemical material costs as a percent of revenue have been declining.

So part of the problem is inaccurate market perceptions.

Bottom line, the association’s PPMA funding schemes have been revised several times during the last five years because they haven’t been conceived to reflect the realities of the marketplace. The basic feeling among too many in our industry – that chemical suppliers and product distributors accumulate big profits from this market and therefore should con-tribute big dollars to all NPMA programs, while spending their “human resources” collecting and contributing to the program – simply ignores the business realities of the marketplace. Second, many independent PCOs think that Orkin and Terminix have all the money in the world (and will gain the most benefits from the program) and so they should be carrying the major cost load for everyone else. Wrong again! The profit margins of many independent PCOs make the profit margins of Orkin and Terminix look like business failures!

So what’s my suggestion? Add one dollar per year to your service charges, per customer... to every customer... and give that dollar to NPMA’s Professional Pest Management Alliance. Send your donations – one dollar at a time – and don’t compare your business or your actions to your competitors’ actions or benefits. Just focus on what’s right for the industry today and next year and the year after that. The cumulative result will be more than $10 million annually to PPMA ... and that my friends will give NPMA the needed resources to grow the professional image and market share of our industry for everyone’s benefit. And if you lose a customer because you charged them one more dollar per year, well, you’ll probably become a more professional business without that customer.

Charge one dollar more to each customer per year. Maybe that’s too simple a solution!

The author is president of GIE Media, publisher of PCT magazine.