As I write this Pestology has been trading for 7 years and I myself have been in the pest proofing business for over 26 years – I’ve been a sole trader and a Director across several companies in my time at it.
It’s not an industry that I just stepped into after getting disillusioned with plastering is what I’m saying but that’s honestly a percentage of the market out there!
What I’ve noticed is a greater and greater occupation of the internet market place for rodent proofing and a part of this is due to changes in the pest control industry regarding the use and legislation behind rodenticides.
However from what I’ve seen, a lot of companies and people offering rodent proofing services really aren’t competent to do so and Google is now awash with outrageous claims, fake guarantees, forged reviews and false promises all dangled like fat worms on a hook to try and get a bite.
Eventually we see those that do bite as they wear the scars and tell us all about it – guess what… the claims were all fake, the service didn’t work and in general the worm really wasn’t that juicy as it appeared.
First thing to understand is that effective rodent proofing is actually very difficult – there is a reason the industry went for traps and baits as their mainstay solution as it’s a much easier strategy!
With rodent proofing you are putting a barrier inbetween an animal and its habitat requirements – i.e. food/shelter/warmth.
You are essentially presenting this animal with a life or death situation rather than a nuisance – you will therefore provoke a proportionate response from that animal and it will use all its cunning and power to overcome it.
So successful proofing requires not only an understanding of what the target species is physically capable of gnawing through, pushing through, climbing over, burrowing under etc. but also how that target species will respond behaviourally to a proofing intervention.
Nobody currently teaches this and the rodents themselves won’t tell you anything so this understanding is earnt through experience – many many hours of proofing and watching how they respond.
Because proofing in general within the pest control industry is generally shunned, very few people out there genuinely have this experience.
If you think an American giving a few pointers on mice proofing on YouTube makes you the master, then think again – House mice in the UK will laugh at your efforts.
If you think a quick drainage course makes you the Guru on rats then please confirm my opinion and enter the market – Mr Rat will show you who runs the show down there!
So when engaging a pest proofer on Google, approach it like internet dating – great hair and nice smile, yes? Take an interest but take time to check the credentials of the company or individual you are contracting – are they accredited in the industry, have they been trading long, any good references/reviews, are they financially stable etc.?
Go beyond the marketing theatre and vacant assurances – see the black and white of who you are dealing with.
If they appear sound in this regard then ask yourself why they are not issuing a guarantee (or its very short) – no confidence in the outcome? Any why is this?
As a customer you need the guarantee to underwrite your investment – otherwise big risk that it will be wasted and you will be back to square 1 with your rodent problem just with less in the bank.
If it is guaranteed then ask yourself whether the company or person is truly equipped to honour that guarantee – if not, it means nothing…
Guarantees represent a big liability for a company in terms of rodent proofing – it’s an activity that most definitely doesn’t always give first time results and even the best often struggle with it as you are dealing with living animals that won’t always play fair and can be completely unpredictable.
If you have to go back and back to a site to honour a guarantee then you start to incur big costs – not only are you incurring cost in further labour, materials & travel but you are also incurring ‘opportunity cost’, i.e. the time wasted when you could have been earning money doing something else!
To issue genuine guarantees then you need (1) to be consistently good at it and (2) be a certain size to adsorb their associated cost.
One-man bands and small businesses will struggle to honour guarantees because of this – they simply don’t have endless time or money to see through those jobs that don’t work first time.
New businesses entering the market are simply unaware of the cost – its comes as a big shock and something they are financially not prepared for.
Eventually it will bust these business types so they stop answering the phone.
You are then left alone – back with the rodents where you started and pondering options.
Pestology specialises solely in rodent proofing and does it on a big scale – the management behind it have a collective experience exceeding 100 years (!)
Pestology is accredited and established – demand for its service is through its reputation so it has to win every time and take on every challenge to reinforce this.
Pestology respects consumer rights and process for customer dissatisfaction – we are Which? Trusted Traders and they check that we do.
We have dedicated Compliance Officers that we send in to ‘fix’ problem jobs plus feed the information back into the business and through down to the installers that did the job in the first place – all via documented reporting protocol floating on a CRM that supports it so the learning curve has a constant incline throughout the business from A-Z.
This costs like you wouldn’t believe – Pestology spent over 260k on investigating and supporting guarantee claims last year alone so you can see whilst most other companies will look to duck this and leave it in their profits (buys a nice BMW to go with the others in the garage after all…)
But if you duck this then you don’t feed your learning curve and you flat line – this flat line then means you continue ducking some of the guarantee claims because you run out of knowhow to solve.
Knowhow is the payback for seeing things through – ducking doesn’t increase capability and therefore doesn’t build a reputation and it’s that which ultimately creates a value.
Some people will comment that Pestology is expensive – I don’t necessarily agree with this as I see all the costs that go into it but part of what you get is our knowhow, our resources and that unflappable committal throughout the business to beat the rat or beat the mouse that gets you the result you pay for.
For without the result, what justifies the investment in the first place?