Your Pest Control Business Resolutions For 2020

The new year brings new resolutions.

For some, it means to eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more, or spend more time with family and friends. But what resolutions have you made for your pest control business? For the month of January, our blog series will focus on easy resolutions that you can implement to take your business to the next level in 2020. Here are a few ideas to get started.

Delegate, delegate, delegate. When you’re a one-person pest control operation, who are you supposed to delegate to? Good question. Being a small business owner may feel like you have to do everything yourself, but you will quickly get burned out. These days, you can outsource pretty much everything—from accounting and bookkeeping to marketing, to a virtual assistant if you can’t afford to hire a permanent one.   

Get mobile. This may seem like a no-brainer, but over 90% of small business owners aren’t optimizing their site for mobile devices. If you happen to be one of them, then you could be losing business. Your customers are using a mobile device, and you’re probably even using one to run your business, so it makes sense to ensure your website is optimized. This keeps you competitive, increases your visibility, and makes it easy for customers to contact you.  

Get social. Just like with mobile, your customers are already there, so why aren’t you? It allows you to be more conversational, promotes brand recognition, and you can use social media advertising to target the right customers to your website.  

Although new year’s resolutions are easy to make, they end up being hard to keep. According to the U.S. News & World Report, 80% of resolutions fail by February. Hopefully that’s not the case for your pest control business, but if so, you might want to take a different approach.  

Creating SMART goals is a great way to keep your business on track throughout the year.

SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based goals. For example, instead of just stating vaguely that you want to increase your profits for 2020, you would use SMART goals to hold you accountable throughout the year to help you get there. Here’s an example of how this would look for your business:  

GOAL: Increase revenue in 2020 by 10% through marketing efforts and customer churn reduction.  

Specific – I will increase my revenue in 2020. 

Measurable – I will set monthly goals for marketing activities and customer churn based on 2019 revenue to show if we are on track to reach the yearly target. 

Attainable – This is achievable based on the revenue we secured in 2019 and the market opportunity.  

Relevant – Investing in marketing supports current sales efforts and reducing customer churn keeps revenue in the business.    

Time-based – I have one year to reach this goal. 

Download the SMART Goals worksheet here.