Every month, Kendra Snyder opens a spreadsheet nobody made her build.
It isn't for a bank or a board. It's for her team at Quest Termite & Pest Management in Hellertown, Pa., where Snyder has served as general manager for nine years.
She runs the numbers, checks where the month went right and where it didn't, then shares the whole thing with her staff.
"It might be our company, but it's not," she said of Quest, founded in 2002 by her husband, Chris. "At the end of the day, my job is to make sure everyone gets paid."
That's the starting point for a question most pest control operators don't answer with precision:
What does it actually cost to run one stop?
Labor is the biggest line on Snyder's P&L, but she doesn't stop at a technician's hourly rate. She builds in training, uniforms, and healthcare, because those costs ride along with every hour a technician works.
Then she adds the time it takes to do the job. The longer a service takes, the higher the labor cost. Drive time counts, too, even though it isn't billable.
"That windshield time has a cost associated with it," she said.
And there’s more:
Stops per day factor in as well. Fewer stops means lower productivity and a higher cost per stop.
The vehicle itself carries its own set of variables, such as costs of purchase, insurance, registration, depreciation, fuel, maintenance and repairs.
Re-services, when a technician has to return, cut into margin, whether the cause is a training gap or a pricing miss.
Marketing counts against the number, too: what it takes to acquire and retain a customer.
So does the company's overall overhead, the administrative labor, software, and insurance that keep the business running.
Add it up for an average technician, Snyder said, and the illustrative total she uses for a one-hour residential service comes to about $72.
"If I'm looking at an average residential maintenance service and I'm charging $100," she said, "my gross profit before anything else is about 28%. But if I increase that to $115, my profit goes up to about $43, and that increases my margin to about 38%."
Fifteen dollars. Ten points of margin. That's the kind of gap that stays invisible until someone does the math.
Residential pricing is comparatively simple, mostly a matter of square footage.
Multi-family and commercial accounts are a different animal. For those, Snyder built a separate spreadsheet that accounts for every bait box, every RTU, every Tin Cat, every fly light on a property, and how many minutes each one takes to service.
Plug in the count, and the spreadsheet returns a number for monthly service, bimonthly, quarterly, whatever frequency fits.
"That's going to help me determine where my profitability is going to be," Snyder said. "That's where I start with every lead that comes in here."
Snyder still keeps her own numbers. But she said FieldRoutes software, on which Quest has operated for three years, has changed how fast she can see the same picture: stops per day, drive time, miles per stop, revenue per stop, revenue per labor hour, windshield time.
This sharpened focus on Quest’s numbers began for Snyder, similarly, three years ago.
"It took a little bit to understand the seasonality and where the challenges are," Snyder said. "It took a lot of learning with technicians and training and putting together processes and SOPs. "And then once you finally get all that where you feel like, 'OK, now I get it,' now I got to take the next step and drill down and drill down and drill down."
Asked whether the timing of her deepening analysis lines up with the software, she didn't hesitate.
"There is a correlation," she said. "When it's in front of you, you think of the dashboard, and all the pieces of information that are in my face. If I go in there and say, 'It's July 28th and 45% of my work hasn't been scheduled yet' — big red flag. I'm losing opportunity. It's right there."
The company is on pace for roughly 30% revenue growth this year, without a new sales force or marketing campaign yet accounted for.
And Snyder says Quest’s gross margin is in line with the 58% average found nationally in late 2025 in a study by the National Pest Management Association, for which FieldRoutes is a Strategic Partner, and PCO Bookkeepers & M&A Specialists, a member of the FieldRoutes Marketplace.
Snyder credits route optimization and a new hire on her leadership team, but she's careful about what caused what.
That's the reason for the spreadsheet, and the reason she shares it.
"You have to look at this whole picture," she said, "to say here's what I could potentially be making, and here's what I'm actually doing, and where am I missing out on opportunity."
