National Exterminating Continues Family Legacy 50 Years in Business

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Buying employees cars, burying loved ones, paying for braces on employees’ children, covering healthcare expenses — these are all ways National Exterminating Founders Randy and Carol Abbitt have given back to their company’s key players over the last 50 years.

The Abbitt’s started the company out of their home situated on Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay, in 1975.

© National Exterminating

Randy would sell the service, go home and change and then go in the field to perform the service, while Carol worked the phones, recalled Jessica Godfrey, Randy’s daughter who is now a co-owner of the company.

“My mom is a very hard worker, not only at work, but at home as well. She gave that structure and flow to the company,” she said. “I feel like even to this day, my dad is a visionary and always looking for ways to expand the business and help our customers.”

Entrepreneurship is at the heart of her family, Godfrey said, and the National Exterminating headquarters is also home to several other business endeavors the family runs. As a little boy, Randy grew up fishing in the river. This passion led to the family owning and operating a marina in Newport News, Va., that is now owned by Godfrey.

“Fishing was always a thing in the Abbitt family and when my mom met my dad, she naturally fell into boating. It’s in our blood,” she said.

© National Exterminating

Finding Key Areas of Growth. National Exterminating General Manager Scott Monds has been with the company for 14 years and was introduced to the industry through his father, who fished along the river with Randy for many years.

Monds said from the beginning of his time at National, Randy wasn’t scared to “push the envelope.”

“He would get together with some other business owners and they would spitball ideas and that’s one of the reasons that we have consistent quarterly pest control services,” he said. “He broke the standards that were set in the industry, like doing termite pre-treatments for builders in our service areas.”

When Monds came on board — having no prior experience in pest control — he was able to focus on specific operational aspects for the company, like customer communication and how employees interacted with customers.

“I noticed we were doing wonderful inspections and giving the paperwork back to the customers, but they couldn’t understand it. It was like a doctor giving you X-rays, and you had to determine if you had a broken bone,” he said. “I feel like [improved] customer communication allowed our customers to understand how to better take care of their homes.”

With this focus on customer communication over the years, word of mouth and referrals from real estate properties became 60 percent of the company’s revenue, Monds said.

“We have a large real estate market here and we have our in-house treatments for when houses are being sold,” he said. “We send out about 20 letters a week just on the sale of houses and we pride ourselves on getting people to the closing table. There’s a lot of loyalty within our agents and getting the services done on time.”

Monds also honed in on how the company performs rodent control services and has been able to turn rodent work into a year-round revenue source, instead of just in the wintertime. 

While Randy doesn’t come into the office as much, he’s still around and “sitting at home in his office finding ways to grow the business,” Godfrey said.

“He’ll never walk away from it,” she said. “Not one person runs this company. We have a team that makes it all happen.”