Will Terry has been a pest control technician for 13 years, all of them at Champion Pest & Termite Control in Pickerington, Ohio.
He is the senior technician. He trained the newer ones. He is, by his own description, not a "woo" type of person.
So when Helen Holloway, who owns Champion with her husband, Dwight, told the team in a year-end meeting that the company was launching a profit-sharing plan — that a percentage of every dollar Champion earned above its quarterly goals would go into a pool and be divided among the staff — Terry's reaction was measured.
"I was already motivated to do the best I can," Terry says. "But that was just an extra incentive."
What happened next is the part worth paying attention to.
Champion started the profit-sharing plan Jan. 1, 2025. The structure is straightforward: For every dollar the company earns above its quarterly profit goal, 20% goes into a shared pool.
Employees split half of that pool at the end of each quarter, with the remainder paid out after the year-end accounting is settled. To participate, an employee has to have been with the company at least six months.
A few months in, Helen Holloway sent the first payout email.
The team's reaction, she says, was something close to disbelief.
"Everybody pretty much was like, 'This is my part? Or is this what we're splitting?'" Holloway says. "And I was like, 'Well, no, this is your part.' And they're like, 'The whole thing?'"
A small buzz filled the office that day, Holloway says.
By the end of 2025, Champion had shared more than $30,000 among five employees.
For Terry, the first payout was practical. He had car trouble, put the repair on a credit card, and used the check to pay it off. The ones that followed went toward bills and savings.
Not dramatic. Not a vacation or a splurge. Just a little more room.
But something else shifted, too — something harder to put a dollar figure on.
Terry started thinking differently about the routes he runs. He still does the job the same way he always has, but now he does more of it. Where he used to finish a service call and move on, he now looks at the neighbors.
"As opposed to just doing this house, I may even try to solicit neighbors to try to increase more profit," Terry says. "Things like that I've been more active with because of the program."
He monitors the truck differently, too. Idle time. Gas. The small expenses that add up across a fleet of technicians running routes five days a week. He was aware of those things before. Now he thinks about them.
"It just makes me more conscious," he says.
Holloway describes the behavioral shift in similar terms. The team started asking whether new furniture was really necessary. They began policing overtime, not because management told them but because they understood what overtime does to the numbers at the end of the quarter.
When a technician left mid-year, the remaining staff knew his share of the pool would stay in and roll to them at year-end. They didn't complain about carrying the extra load.
"They have a vested interest," Holloway says.
That vested interest shows up in how Terry talks about Champion to people outside of work, too — specifically to people who might want to work there.
"If someone asks how the pay is," he says, "I lead out with that. 'If you become a member of the team, you do receive a percentage of the profits.'"
It has become, in his words, his opening line.
Champion has operated on the idea that small businesses can do things that bigger companies do — earlier than they probably should, and before they're quite big enough.
The profit-sharing plan is consistent with that. So is the 401(k) they offered before any advisor would have recommended it, and the culture days they build into the slow Ohio winters when the phone stops ringing and an artsy office employee finally gets to redecorate.
"These people give us their livelihoods," Helen says. "We love them."
Terry has been there 13 years. He trained the newer technicians. He is related to the owners by marriage. He had every reason to be invested in Champion's success before the profit-sharing plan existed.
And still, something changed.
"I take more pride in my work," he says. "It really has motivated me to do that."
Terry pauses, then adds what amounts to the advice he'd give anyone considering a job at a company with a plan like this one.
"Enter into every day like you are the owner," Terry says, "because you partly are."
