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On this episode of Pest Control Success Stories, Dan Leibrandt interviews Kirk Slack, founder and CEO of Dang Pest Control in Tyler, Texas. Kirk spent the first half of his career in commercial real estate until the 2008 crash, then rebuilt from nothing by throwing a lawnmower in the back of his truck. Over the next 14 years he grew that lawn care and landscaping company in Austin to $3 million a year before selling it to one of his competitors. He is now running the same playbook again in pest control, having launched Dang Pest Control roughly a year ago with his wife, his son, and his stepdaughter all involved in the business.
Kirk walks through how he built the first company on pure guerrilla marketing, from cheap flyers and nine arounds to the early days of Google when you could switch the phone on and off like a faucet. He credits much of his growth to Jonathan Pototschnik's Lawn Care Academy mastermind, the same group Jonas Olson came out of, where owners toured each other's facilities and gave brutally honest feedback. He gets specific about what "know your numbers" actually means, why five KPIs beat twenty, and how cost of goods sold tells you instantly whether your problem is pricing, routing, or a crew sleeping in the truck. He also explains why so many operators leave mowing and landscaping behind, and why he chose pest control over fertilization and weed control when it came time to start again.
The back half is about how he is filling the schedule in year one without a big ad budget. Kirk breaks down his Facebook group strategy, including the simple habit of photographing his truck outside local businesses and cross posting to community groups, which put a single post in front of 175,000 people in his market and has made Facebook his second largest source of referrals. He talks about giving away free advice to people who will never hire him and collecting five star reviews for it, why AI search is already sending him calls, and how comic book style branding is building a name people search for directly. He closes on the thing he says most owners get wrong, which is not the mistake itself but the silence afterward, because customers forgive almost anything except feeling ghosted.
Kirk Slack, Owner of Dang Pest Control:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DangPestControl/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirk-slack-a1034b1a
Website: dangpestcontrol.com
Dan Leibrandt, Co-Founder of Pest Control Millionaires:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/DanLeibrandtOfficial
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/danleibrandt/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanLeibrandt
Website: https://danleibrandt.com
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:28 From Commercial Real Estate to a Lawnmower in the Back of His Truck
02:50 Guerrilla Marketing and the Early Days of Cheap Google Ads
05:10 Nine Arounds and the Mastermind That Changed Everything
08:29 Know Your Numbers, Implement, and Don't Reinvent the Wheel
11:30 Cost of Goods Sold, Five KPIs, and Catching Problems Early
14:56 Three Offers, a Wedding, and the Move to East Texas
16:43 Why He Left Lawn Care for Pest Control
22:21 Nobody Is Dying: The Mindset He Brought to Company Number Two
26:35 Making Pest Control Fun and Building a Brand People Search For
28:42 Getting Calls From AI Search
30:26 Inside Pest Control Millionaires
39:17 The Facebook Group Strategy That Reached 175,000 People
45:40 Turning Free Activity Into Real Leads
50:32 Communicate Early, and Why Customers Only Hate Being Ghosted
53:47 Where to Find Kirk
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