If this image reminds you of someone, I hope it isn’t yourself. I have to call this syndrome “leave me the hell alone, I am too busy chasing my tail in a circle to stop chasing my tail in a circle.”  

This issue is kind of like “working in your business, not on it.“ Doing “the work“ is something that needs to be done and sometimes we do need to lead by example. ‘The work’ is the day-to-day activities of your business, but many pest control business owners wonder, what will happen if they don’t do the work themselves? Importantly, business owners are also fond of saying, I can’t afford to delegate the work. The simple answer to this problem is your business will not grow meaningfully with you doing the work yourself. If you are doing the day-to-day work, you are the bottleneck. Do you think Donald Trump is dealing the cards at the blackjack table? Or mowing the grass on his golf courses? Hell no! So, you...

I have asked many pest control business owners this question, “Who has an operations plan?” About 10% of Them say yes. The other 90% that say no get asked more questions like… Are you a business owner? Are you operating? They tell me they don’t have an operations plan written down but said there was an operations plan in their head.

Here’s the problem with that… every business owner with no written operation plan walks to the door and says to himself, “Hey, I wonder how we should run the business today?” This process of reinventing the wheel will end up consuming all the valuable time of the organization and the business owner. In the name of flexibility and custom one-off solutions to problems, the shoot from the hip guy or gal has doomed themselves to a fire fighting existence.

So, if writing an operations plan is so powerful, why don’t 100% percent of pest control businesses have one?   Well, writing an operations...