Saying No to CEO Roles, Yes to Ownership

you know, for new business anyway, is provide a first free call or whatever. So in other words, you're basically, not only are you not paying for amazing marketing, we call this negative customer acquisition cost. It's almost like a negative CAC.

You're being paid to acquire customers. I may be taking that a little bit far, but you understand my point. I mean, you would probably pay for this.

It's not a ton, but we do, right? So there is a cost to us for doing that. It's mitigated a bit.

You know, it's made less by the fact that they pay us on it. But, you know, we, the more, and that's interesting. I was kind of challenged on that model by somebody when I was buying the business and they were like, well, but you don't want too many of them to call you, right?

Because then you lose more money. And it was like, no, no, no, that's not, I want them all to call us. Because if I'm spending, like, that's only going to lead to,

10, 15 pest control companies becoming clients of ours, right? Like, you know, sure, there's going to be the ones that call us and never do anything more with us. And that's fine. I'm okay with that. But like, we deliver at such a high quality of work and at such a great value that one, we should probably raise our rates even more.

But besides that, like, you know, it is... it is meaningful for their purpose and what they're doing. And it does create an opportunity for us.

Now we still have to, we still have to convert those clients. Right. But I want, I want all that activity. I want like just bombard us with calls from best control companies because we will, we'll, we do such a good job that they, a lot of them naturally convert without having to really sell them on lunch.

They're like, Oh, we, we, you were thinking about, you know, do we need to hire somebody for a full-time HR? We don't really need that quite yet. Maybe someday we will, but right now, could you help us on a part-time basis?

Yes, absolutely. That's our lane. Let's do it. And then when they grow, we can support that new person. That's great too.

And to your point about perceiving real value from these relationships or these agreements that you have with the Pest Control Association and others, because, and I'm going to press you on this, Marcy, because this is a small enough business where, and given your own expertise, that you might say, why not start something from scratch?