10 Key Moves for Go-Forth in Scaling to $40 Million

By Eddie Wooten

For a company projected to exceed $40 million in annual revenue for its pest control services, it's impossible to pin its success down to a key strategy, to the most vital decision made, to the single most impactful change in trajectory.

"I wouldn't say one thing," says Chase Hazelwood, third-generation owner of Go-Forth Home Services in High Point, NC, "but I could probably give you a list."

We're glad we asked. 

Whether it’s people or processes, the blueprint for Go-Forth has evolved since its founding in 1959 by Frank and Johnie Goforth and in particular since Hazelwood, their grandson, bought the company from his father, Chuck Hazelwood, in 2013.

Go-Forth reported $5.6 million in revenue for 2017, earning the No. 96 position in the PCT Top 100 in May 2018. Go-Forth is No. 40 in the most recent PCT Top 100, with revenue of $29.5 million listed for 2024.

Revenue of $40 million for 2025 would represent a 615% gain—that’s more than 7x—over those eight years.

Here are 10 of the key strategies, vital decisions, and changes in trajectory that are propelling Go-Forth Home Services and what Hazelwood says about them.

1. Pricing

What they’ve done: Go-Forth charges a fixed rate for its services, prices that are determined by the company after factoring in direct costs for labor and materials and indirect costs of overhead expenses. And it’s the same across their 23 locations.

What Hazelwood says: “The standardization of flat-rate pricing makes it easy to sell. It just says, 'This is what we're going to do.'"

2. New branches

What they’ve done: Go-Forth, since buying Lake Norman Pest Control in North Carolina in 2012, has expanded to 23 locations in multiple markets across its home state, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. They’ve chosen to focus on mid-sized markets after experiencing explosive growth in Fayetteville, NC (the state’s sixth-most populous city), and in Greenville, NC (11th in population). Go-Forth is in Johnson City, TN, but not Knoxville. They’re in Athens, GA, but not Atlanta. When Go-Forth opens locations from scratch, it sets a payback timeline and relies on ads and SEO to drum up business while relying minimally on door-to-door sales. 

What he’s saying: “We don't do a tremendous amount of door-knocking, and it never makes up more than 10%, 15% of sales. But learning how to start a branch from scratch and get it cash-flow-positive rapidly. We're looking to have it paid back for all the expenses of opening the branch within 18 months."

3. Metrics

What they’ve done: Go-Forth shifted its metrics evaluations in sales from results to activity. 

What he’s saying: “We track how many dollars in sales and how many sales you make, but the main thing we focus on is the activities that you do. For example, in sales this would be how many times did you find termites today? How many outreaches did you make? How many proposals did you give?"

4. Accountability

What they’ve done: Go-Forth’s use of metrics provides a way for employees to reach goals—or to be held accountable. And that doesn’t have to mean giving up on them. For example, Hazelwood’s investment in one employee, including a shift in communication tactics and riding with the person on the job, led to dramatic change.

What he’s saying: “I did his job with him. I stopped communicating the exact way I wanted to be communicated with and started thinking about how he wanted to be communicated with.

And it was absolutely unbelievable. In two weeks, he was hitting metric numbers, and within two months he was a different person at work. His personality didn't change, but he comprehended the steps. Telling someone to do something, showing them how to do it, is still different than doing it with them."

5. Processes

What they’ve done: Go-Forth has developed checklists or scripts for all of its employees to drive quality and results and reduce variability.

What he’s saying: “I read a book called 'The Checklist Manifesto' (by Atul Gawande), and it changed everything about the way that Go-Forth operates. ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ talks about how the best surgeons and the best pilots on earth follow checklists every single day. They're some of the smartest of us, but they follow a checklist because it's the most important thing in the world to make sure nobody dies on that plane and make sure nobody dies on the operating table. And that has really, really struck me.

"I made it my No. 1 objective: Write a checklist. For every single thing we get wrong, write a checklist. We started making checklists for everything. Salesmen, technicians, the phone calls into the office, admin—everybody has checklists. The COO has checklists. I have checklists I perform every day, maybe every week. And it's amazing."

6. Termites

What they’ve done: The company provides termite control. But Go-Forth is focused on preventative treatments, offered through upsells, rather than chasing revenue through active treatments.

What he’s saying: “We don't advertise termites. We don't have pay-per-click for termite control. We do a ton, thousands of jobs a year, but we do almost all of it preventative. Finding termites before they become a problem in a home is major.”

7. Recurring services

What they’ve done: Go-Forth’s termite strategy is part of its focus on recurring services. And two experiences for Hazelwood proved vital. First, in selling and providing termite service for his father in 2004, Hazelwood saw the difficulty in selling enough jobs to ensure profitability. Second, representatives of an accounting company Go-Forth hired in 2018 began to ask about the source of termite retreats. The answer: Active, rather than preventative, termite jobs.

What he’s saying: “So we began to only target recurring revenue. When you make a one-time sale, next year, you've got to make a bigger one, or two, to actually grow. We began to focus on preventative control (for termites), and that really allowed us to scale significantly more.”

8. Targeted growth

What they’ve done: Go-Forth aims to achieve EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, of about 20%. EBITDA is the difference in revenue after subtracting costs of goods sold and some operational expenses. But Go-Forth’s goal isn’t just for purely financial reasons.

What he’s saying: “We cross a boundary of stress above 30% that isn't sustainable year-after-year. You can do it a year. The real deal, honestly, about why grow at 20% a year is that 20% a year doubles every four years. All you're asking your people who want to develop and lead to do is, in the next four years, there's going to be twice as many managers at least. So they can see a four-year path. They don't have to wait until somebody gets fired. They don't have to expect someone to leave. They don't have to jockey for position in the organization. Within four years, we're going to have double the management, we're going to have double the technical staff. And that creates a sense there is real opportunity."

9. Employee pathways

What they’ve done: Given the number of companies the Hazelwoods own—Go-Forth Home Services, Go Forth Marketing, Carolina Core Professional Center, a human resources consulting company and more—they’ve created a culture of not just an exceptional workplace but an ecosystem in which advancement and career changes, outside of the aforementioned opportunities generated through growth, are available.

What he’s saying: “They can actually cross over from company to company and move from pest to HVAC, or pest to marketing, or vice versa. When somebody comes in and they have a relative—a cousin, a wife, a husband—there are ways they can come to work here and not even work for the same company.

"We've created an opportunity where a barista who works at the coffee shop, which we started in the building we own because we were bringing in all these employees and we wanted to create a great workplace, could go on to eventually run the coffee shop. Maybe spin off a mobile coffee company. It's kind of like infinite possibilities because we're trying to instill this culture."

10. Software

What they’ve done: Go-Forth, moving from a Windows-based system, used ServSuite for several years before migrating to FieldRoutes in 2018.

What he’s saying: “The first shift was moving into FieldRoutes. I evaluated every one of the softwares. The reason we chose FieldRoutes was simplicity. It was simple to train people on. I wanted something easy for the technicians and easy for the call center, and there's nothing I've seen that's easier than FieldRoutes. That was a major shift for us."