How Adams Exterminators Cut Receivables to a Six-Year Low While Continuing to Grow the Business

When a pest control company grows year after year, accounts receivable typically grow with it. 

More customers. More invoices. More chances for a payment to age past due. The standard response is to hire someone to chase it down.

Adams Exterminators built a different answer, and the company’s receivables are now the lowest they've been in six years.

Adams is an eight-location pest control company based in Albany, Ga., whose growth has continued year after year. Rather than adding numerous collections personnel to keep pace with that growth, the company leaned into automation.

Beau Sinyard, who helps lead Adams alongside his father and two brothers, credits a combination of how Adams structures technician pay and how the company has built out its collections automation in FieldRoutes.

"Our receivables are the lowest they have ever been since literally 2019," Sinyard said. "And since 2019, our company has continued to grow. So that's wild."

Jana Kelly, a FieldRoutes product manager who works closely with Adams, sees a company that has built a comprehensive, automated collections system, one reaching customers at multiple points in the billing cycle without requiring a human to initiate any of it.

Adams has configured FieldRoutes’ Trigger Rules across eight distinct time-period buckets, from early reminders to deep-aging notices, plus finance charge rules and renewal reminders layered on top. When an account reaches a trigger threshold, the system fires automatically, sending customers a text message with a direct link to log in and pay, or an email, or in some cases a mailed statement. 

Customers enrolled in Autopay never reach those thresholds.

"It's so easy now," Kelly says. "You can automate things, and customers can self-service. There are all of these no-touch options for paying. Once you set up the triggers, they're just going to run."

The customer portal is a key part of that self-service layer. When a customer receives a text from Adams, the message includes a login link they can open on their phone and pay immediately. 

No call to the office. No check in the mail. No back-and-forth. 

Kelly says that frictionless payment path is likely a significant factor in Adams' receivables result.

"The ability to have something automatically remind the customer that they've got an outstanding balance, here's all these different ways you can pay, I'm texting you — and then the customer portal on top of that," Kelly says. "There are all of these no-touch options for paying."

The production pay model Adams uses for its pest control technicians reinforces the system from the field. Technicians earn a percentage of what they service and don't get paid until the customer pays, meaning every tech has a direct financial interest in making sure their customers' accounts stay current.

Kelly is careful to note that tools are only as effective as the configuration behind them. FieldRoutes offers the automation capability, but companies that see the biggest results are the ones that build their trigger systems deliberately and keep them running.

"Certainly we offer lots of automation tools — Autopay, Autopay triggers, all the communication triggers — which should make it easy to get more with less," Kelly said. 

Adams Exterminators is doing just that.

More on Adams Exterminators:
‘If You’ve Got Bugs, Call My Daddy’

Who Schedules the Pest Control Technicians? At Adams Exterminators, the Technicians Do.