Stephen Giger would run a report, hand the same report to his operations manager, and get a different number back. He’d hand it to his service manager, and he’d get a third.
"This can't happen, guys," Giger said. "You just can't."
When Giger, general manager of Home Guard Pest Control in Escondido, Calif., began running the business, he wanted one thing before anything else: numbers he could trust.
It took switching platforms to get them. Once he had them, he did something most operators talk about doing and few actually finish: He sat down and calculated exactly what it costs, to the dollar, every time a technician pulls up to a house.
Here's what he found.
The biggest piece of the cost is the technician doing the work. Giger's pest techs are paid on production, and that pay runs close to a fifth of what a service costs to deliver as Home Guard retains the customer for a second and subsequent years.
"I've got 20% of the cost of a service is going to be paid to the production of that employee," Giger said.
A technician doesn't work alone. There's the truck, the dispatcher, the office staff keeping the route moving.
Giger puts that overhead at roughly 10%.
The last piece is the cost of keeping the lights on, regardless of how many stops get run that day. Giger calculates those costs to be about 5%.
Add all of those costs, and Giger lands on 35%.
"If we're doing a hundred-dollar service, the cost on it is $35 and we're going to profit $65," he said.
He checked the number against his actual gross margin. It matched.
Giger's cost breakdown gets him to 35%. What moves that number in either direction, day to day, is routing.
Giger's fourth factor doesn't show up on a spreadsheet as a percentage. It shows up on a map, and it nearly broke his routing.
"In California, at the wrong time of the day, one mile can be 30 minutes," he said. "Another time of the day, one mile can be five minutes or less."
A schedule built on distance alone can put two technicians on routes that look identical and run nothing alike. FieldRoutes let Giger's team view stops by time as well as by mileage, and that changed how routes got built.
"This stop maybe belongs on this tech because even though it looks like he's farther away, he can come straight to it and it's only 20 extra minutes, not 40," Giger said.
Not every cost shows up as a line item. Giger's team started tracking which technicians had high re-service rates, the repeat visits that happen when a job doesn't hold and can't be billed again.
What they found wasn't just a cost. It was a warning sign.
"We've looked at a correlation now between our technicians with high re-service rates having higher cancellation rates," Giger said. "Something I could never really do" before switching platforms.
A high re-service rate isn't just wasted labor on a stop. It's often the first signal a customer is on their way out.
Giger still checks his numbers, and he can, because they all come from the same place now.
"All of this information comes to us from FieldRoutes," he said.
He's not guessing at 35% anymore. He knows it.
