"The first thing people do when they find out what business I'm in is laugh," says Stacy O'Reilly, president of Plunkett's Pest Control in suburban Minneapolis. It isn't glamorous, she concedes, but in what other business can you be a hero so fast? "When you get a skunk out of someone's garbage can on Mother's Day, they'll love you forever."
O'Reilly grew up with Plunkett's, a business her grandfather bought for $5,000 in 1923. When her father took over 45 years later, the company had five technicians. By the time Stacy was handed the keys in 2003, Plunkett's boasted 160 employees and was the nation's 38th largest pest-control business in a fragmented industry of approximately 15,000 companies. Revenues in 2005 were $15 million.
Knowing that she wanted to run Plunkett's after her father retired, O'Reilly planned accordingly. After receiving her MBA in 1993, she worked at a variety of businesses, including simondelivers.com, McKinsey & Company, and Recovery Engineering. There never was a question, though, about coming home to Plunkett's. With humor and complete honesty, she admits, "I'd always dreamed of being a pest-control technician."
And there's the clue pointing to one of her biggest management challenges.
"Let's face it," she says, "most people fall into this career randomly and don't plan on staying. In a human capital-dependent industry like this, the pest-control technician who shows up at the door is face of the business." So how does O'Reilly hire—and retain—the right people? What does she look for in an employee? "The first person in the room to pick up your pen if you drop it," she says. "Besides having great people skills, technicians must be independent workers and highly skilled communicators. I tell people that this business is 99 percent communication and 1 percent ugly." (Who knew?) And the less a job-seeker knows about pest control, the better. "We hire the best people and depend on extensive training to get them up to speed in our green techniques."
For O'Reilly, everything is about employee retention, including growth. "This company must grow, end of story," she says. "I want a growing company and career opportunities for my employees." Through their hard work, she reports, the growth rate from 2004 to 2005 was 10 percent, slightly higher than the previous years' averages of 5 to 8 percent.
O'Reilly claims she's not sure what her strengths as a manager are, but it's clear that she recognizes the value of each individual. She knows the names and faces of all 190 employees, and it's her goal to have them feel connected with each other, even across a huge service area in nine Midwestern states. "We're committed to sustaining a company that nurtures the employee—however they stumble into this line of work—so that they stay long enough to see their 25th-anniversary photograph hanging in the lobby."
So what's the downside in this line of work O'Reilly obviously relishes? What's the worst part of the job? "Snakes," she says. "Definitely snakes."
