Top 100: New to the List — Fast Action Pest Control

Editor's Note: This story originally appeared on pctonline.com as, "Celebrating 20 Years in Business with a Drive Down Memory Lane," before the PCT Top 100 list was debuted. Fast Action ranked No. 79 on this year's list. The company also celebrated 20 years in business this year. Read more on Fast Action Owner Gary Evans on how he grew the company to 18,000 customers and generating $9.9 million in revenue.

ELK GROVE, Calif. — Gary Evans started down a one-lane road when he launched Fast Action Pest Control, and he is now full-speed ahead into 20 years of servicing his longtime customer base.

Evans started working each summer in between college semesters for another pest control company and quickly realized the potential opportunities ahead for him in the pest control industry.

“I was selling door-to-door and I realized they were paying me so much that there must be a good living working in [the pest control] industry,” Evans said.

© Fast Action Pest Control

Fresh out of college with a degree in mechanical engineering, Evans said he started Fast Action in 2003 with another employee knocking door-to-door selling pest control services. Evans started the company as a “one-man show,” and has grown the company to have more than 100 full-time employees.

“I had a local contractor who sold some things for me, but I did everything,” he said. “As we grew, I hired a guy here or there, so I went through all of the regular stages where things are nice and simple with yourself and then you have five or six employees and it gets tough to break the barrier to being bigger.”

Nicknamed “Fast Gary” growing up, Evans named the company Fast Action because of his love for motorcycles; he has two sports bikes on display in the office lobby.

The bikes are on display for customers and employees for viewing entertainment only. Or so Evans thought.

“[An employee] teased me about not riding it enough and used to joke about taking it out,” he said. “One day he joked about it and I joked back and said ‘Sure.’ After I left, he went into my office took the key out of my desk, took it [for a ride] and crashed it

“Needless to say, he doesn’t work here anymore.”

He also incorporated motorcycles into his wedding day, using a blue Suzuki 96 as a getaway vehicle. “We were lucky her dress didn’t get caught in the chain,” Evans said.

© Fast Action Pest Control

The company uses red trucks with racing stripes which “stand out in a sea of white trucks with green logos,” Evans said.

Now servicing 18,000 customers and generating $9.9 million in revenue, Evans said the company started expanding services five or six years ago to offer termite treatments, repairs and exclusion work, in addition to recurring pest control services.

The company has grown 30 percent each year for the last few years, Evans added.

“Those aren’t always profit leaders but bring us a lot of recurring services,” he said. “Exclusion is a profit service because the [service] can be around $800 with a per year contract.”

Fast Action (No. 79) made it's first debut on PCT's Top 100 list this year. Evans said he's proud of the work his team has put in to earn a spot on the list. 

"Its another indicator that we are a premium brand and to keep it up," he said.

Evans said the company has mostly stuck to traditional ways of communicating and advertising like word-of-mouth referrals and face-to-face advertising, which has proven to be a successful business model.

“We do some SEO stuff and email mailings, but it’s just been good old-fashioned hard work,” he said. “We use [software] that gives customers their own dashboards and this gives a lot of control back to the operator that they know what’s going on.”

Evans offers his employees training opportunities and continuing education with product vendors to keep his team well-educated and on top of their game.

“Doing a good job and having a great company culture works for us because the management in place works really hard and we treat people like family,” Evans said. “The whole office still comes in-person to work and people enjoy the social aspect of being a team and being respected.”

© Fast Action Pest Control

The company built a new office location in 2022 and plans to expand to the San Francisco service area this year.

“We’ve slowly built up to this point … It’s been a fun ride,” Evans said.