Set and Forget: What Automation Looks Like for a Small Pest Control Operation

Second in a series.

DeLane Patterson switched his Arizona company, Open Range Pest Control, to FieldRoutes in March 2026 after his former software platform stopped keeping up with his ambitions. 

"I ultimately decided to switch to FieldRoutes because (his previous provider) just didn't look like they were having the automations upcoming, the kind of stuff I was looking for, and FieldRoutes really did," Patterson says. 

The operational difference took about a week to feel.

Reminder emails formerly required a manual click every morning. Forget once, and the next day's customers heard nothing. Mass messages went to everyone on his list — no filtering, no way to reach just his monthly customers, no way to send to only the customers with the mosquito package.

Now it's set and forget.

"I can look right here and see every customer that's confirmed their appointment for tomorrow," he says. "It's just at a glance. I didn't have that ability before."

Reporting changed, too. His previous platform couldn't produce a cancellation rate without cross-referencing many separate reports, Patterson says. FieldRoutes surfaces it on his dashboard alongside metrics he didn't know to ask for. 

The average tenure of Open Range’s 1,900 customers? 6.4 years.

What Patterson talks about most, though, is time.

"If it frees 10 hours a month from me," he says, "that's 10 hours I can be out doing what I did today." 

That day, Patterson had closed a $10,000 sale in the field, because the software’s automation cleared time for him to do what he says he does best. 

For years, Patterson's termite business has run on a cycle he knows well: strong from September to March, then quiet. It's a feast-or-famine rhythm that defines pest control in Arizona, but a FieldRoutes feature he'd never tried before is starting to change it. 

Coming in Part 3: A trip to the Bahamas, or an extra taquito?