Jared LaJaunie: Dunk your head underwater and then when you can't breathe anymore and you want that next breath and you want success that bad, that's when you actually have success.
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Patrick Baldwin: This is a new one. We've got Jared LaJaunie. We had Skye LaJaunie on here. We end up hanging out with Jared and Skye at Rocket-X in Dallas. We've talked about that. I was like, “Jared, we've got to hear the other side of the story. Let's get you on The Buzz.” Here we go.
Paul Giannamore: Is this the rebuttal episode?
Jared LaJaunie: No, man. We're united and moving forward together. There's no rebuttal. Maybe two different perspectives of the same show but we're united.
Patrick Baldwin: He's smarter than he looks. Jared, grateful for you to make time and get on The Buzz. I do want to hear this non-rebuttal side of your story.
Jared LaJaunie: I started at Orkin when I was 18, married, house, kid, and was not looking to be a pest control guy. I just needed a job and got a job as a termite tech at Orkin making $9.75 cents an hour. I was super excited. I thought I was doing big things. From there, I became a pest control technician, a salesman, a sales manager, and then a branch manager. Ultimately, I got recruited by a small $2 million company in my hometown and ran that company for a little while.
In January 1st, 2008, the best year to start a business. If you remember, the economy was rocking. Everybody was starting businesses. Everybody was like, “You're so smart. This is the time.” January 1st, 2008, I started LeJaunie's Pest Control and a little small community with hardly no population and where there was not a lot of money. I just started doing it because I didn't know any better.
If I ever did it again, I would definitely run some demographics and figure out where a lot of people were at that had money. You don't know what you don't know. I was very naive. Anyway, I started January 1st, 2008, and we've been at it for over sixteen years now with me and my wife. We've been very fortunate and able to scale it to service four regions and have over 65 employees. It's been a heck of a ride. It's been interesting, fun, and humbling.
Patrick Baldwin: In hindsight, 2020, what would you have done differently from the get go?
Jared LaJaunie: There are so many things I'd have done different. Have you ever heard the saying that ignorance is bliss?
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah.
Paul Giannamore: I say it daily.
Jared LaJaunie: That was so applicable. I was ambitious as a young man and driven. I had a real burn-the-boats mentality and I had no idea what I was doing. It served me because I often say if I would have known how difficult and how hard it was going to be, I don't know if I'd done it. I was ignorant to what I was getting into and what it was going to take of me and what it was going to cost that I did it without abandon. I learned.
If I had to do it over again, I would do a lot of things differently. I started where I was at in my backyard and it was a rural town. It was difficult. I know now that you can pay people to run reports that tells you where the most people are, how much money per capita, and which markets are the best. I would find one of the best markets in the country and I would start there. I know that sounds like a novel idea but imagine that I'm starting to sell pest control where people and money are at. Crazy, I know. That's what I would do.
Paul Giannamore: Had you done that back in 2008 in Sioux City, South Dakota which turned out to be an awesome place to have a pest control business, would you have moved to South Dakota?
Jared LaJaunie: I would have done everything in my power to try to do it. Honestly, at that point in my life, I don't know if I'd have had the resources, finances, and ability to even do that. I was ambitious enough where I would have tried. I have friends in the industry now that I've talked to. I have one friend that did that. When he was young, he researched the best place in the country and moved from Utah to Washington, DC and left his family and did it. I know people that have done it. I'd like to think that I would have done it if I'd have had enough knowledge at that time. Quite honestly, I don't know if I could have financially have been able to do it even if I had the knowledge at that time in my life.
Paul Giannamore: At bare minimum, you would have been able to figure out where in Louisiana it would have been better to do it.
Jared LaJaunie: Absolutely. I started in my hometown, Houma, Thibodeaux, it's very rural, and then eventually, we expanded into New Orleans. Once again, I was very naive. New Orleans is one of the better markets in the country. It was an hour away from me. It took me about six years to be like, “Maybe I should go spray bugs in New Orleans.” If I had it to do from scratch, I probably would have started my company in New Orleans from day one. I definitely would have done that.
It worked out because now we have a lot of business in my hometown as well as New Orleans. If I started in New Orleans, that probably wouldn't be the case. A lot of times, the things we do and when we're naive and don't understand, they do work for our good even though we don't understand it when we're doing it. Also, because it was so hard, I learned a lot. I may have not been able to become the person I am today and the operator I am today if I wouldn't have done it the hard way. Does that make sense?
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah. How long were you out doing it on your own?
Jared LaJaunie: I started as a one-man op. I cashed in my 401(k) from Orkin, believe it or not. That was about $35,000. I bought the truck. I bought the chemicals, the process, and we got to it. I was a one-man op for about one year and then I hired my first employee and continued to scale over the years. Skye would come in and out of the business for the first several years but she had her own business. She's visionary too. She had a salon and she was having a lot of success with that. She would come in and help me but she wasn't involved in the day-to-day.
After about 6 or 7 years, she unselfishly gave up her successful business to come help me probably because she saw I needed the help, quite honestly, because I did. She really committed to coming in LaJaunie’s and helping us. We saw a direct impact and growth from when we both started working it together full time. That was when we were about the 7 or 8-year mark and we've been at it for over 16 years. About halfway through, she dedicated herself full-time to coming into it and it's made a huge impact.
Paul Giannamore: One of the questions that's popped into my mind since you've been talking and it hasn't exited my mind yet is when you're 18 years old, how do you meet a girl for 90 days and get married?
Jared LaJaunie: That is a good question. I'll tell you the story. She was going to college. There's a small college in my town. At 18, she was already in college. She was smart. You ever hear people just test out of high school and go right into college? She took a test and skipped high school because she was smart and took a test and went right into college at 18 years old. I met her while she was going to college down here.
She was a bartender at a bar and I was a helper on a beer truck. I would deliver the beer to the bar and I went in there one evening and she gave me some free beer and she hadn't been able to get rid of me since. Honestly, it was a whirlwind. When you know, you know. I like two other girlfriends when I met her. I was 18 so give me some grace. I'm different. Three months, I knew her. She came to me one day and she was like, “I'm going back to my hometown about an hour and a half away.” I was like, “Me, too. I'm coming.”
I've always been quick at making decisions. I've always been a risk taker. I knew her for about three months. She was like, “I'm leaving. I'm going back to my hometown.” I was like, “I'm coming. I'm not staying here. I'm coming with you.” I went there. Her dad let me move in the house with her, which was crazy at the time looking back, but he did.
Three months later, I proposed to her. I was madly in love with her and she said yes. We started that crazy journey. Even with that, I was also naive. I had no idea what marriage was or what I was getting into. Once again, ignorance was bliss. I had no idea what being a husband was and being a father was. There were definitely some challenges. Going through all that hard stuff helped me to have some of the success I've had today.
Patrick Baldwin: That's some real commitment. I'm wondering if we get the true story of how you and Skye met.
Jared LaJaunie: That is the truth. That's how we met.
Patrick Baldwin: Take us back eight years. Besides the business, you're talking to Skye, or she's talking to you about, “It makes sense for us to come together.” You did mention she had other businesses. You mentioned she's visionary as well, which I know her to be an integrator now in today's terms. What was that like? You'd have two strong willed, hardheaded, and entrepreneurial people. Hardheaded, I meant that in the nicest term possible. You all are very strong willed.
Jared LaJaunie: It was so easy. We immediately came together, agreed on everything, and we had immediate success right from day one.
Patrick Baldwin: How?
Jared LaJaunie: That's not true at all. In that 7 or 8-year period, I don't remember exactly but to the best of my memory, we had got to about $1.5 million or maybe $1.8 million, which is crazy because, in the last eight years, the growth has been exponential times for beyond that. One of the first things Skye did when she got involved full-time is she's a prayerful person and she knew that although we were hardworking and dedicated, we didn't know enough to scale to where we wanted to go. She was praying for God to send her somebody to help mentor and help teach us and help grow us.
She got on the phone with a gentleman who happened to own a pest control company, a successful one, and he also owned a digital advertising company. She called him, got him right on the phone right away, which come to find out, never happened. That was crazy. He picked up the phone. She talked to him for 10 minutes, told him the situation that we were interested in maybe getting into his marketing company, and he said, “I'll be there tomorrow.”
He jumped on his private plane, flew down to my office himself in person with his team, and spent two days with me and his team in my little small office down here in Thibodaux and laid it out to me how to do it, what I should do, and started mentoring me. I'll never forget he looked at me at that table and I saw what was going on. He said, “Jared, you got to do this, this, this, and this. It's going to take you about 5 or 6 years to pull this off, to turn around, and get it where you need to go. I looked at him and said, I'm cocky, “You don't know me. Give me a year. We're going to have this turned around. You’re crazy. You don't know me.” He was right, it took about 5 or 6 years. It didn’t take a year. It was a lot of work.
Also, from that same interaction, we ended up joining a mastermind group and got around some other people and some other companies that were doing much bigger things and being open-minded and learning and not recreating the wheel and getting around other people who were smarter than us and executing on what they were doing. By getting outside of our own market too and going to other markets and meeting with this people, there were a lot of things being done awesome in pest control and other parts of the country that were not being done yet way down here in South Louisiana.
It allowed me to get ahead of the curb and be doing some innovative things for my market that were not happening yet and nothing revolutionary but simple things like call tracking metrics, data, putting some technology, and texting customers. It’s stuff that's not revolutionary today but you go back, for my market, most of the companies were not doing it. We were the early adapters in our market. It helped us. This stuff is hard but at the end of the day, find somebody doing it good and do what they do. That's what we did.
Patrick Baldwin: We had a good conversation, Jared. I know you've got tons of ideas and Skye's got tons of ideas. How do you balance all these harebrained ideas coming out of both of you all?
Jared LaJaunie: That has been one of the toughest things for me. I'm a classic visionary man. I'm always wanting to chase the shiny thing. I'm like a squirrel, “Let's go get it.” I've started a business every year for the last eight years in some fashion or form. Some have been successful and some not so much, we don't talk about those as often. We did junk hauling and we did disinfecting, which is a cool story. I can share that story with you. We've resolved now.
To me, it's been a discipline and Skye helps me with it because she wants to do stuff too. We are just focused in now on building this pest control thing. We're not chasing anything else new. We're not diverting our attention. We're united and like-minded and scaling this thing focusing on this and not diverting our resources.
Since we've made that decision already, we've seen even more amazing growth than what we've had, which already I thought was pretty amazing. It is a discipline for me to stay focused and keep my attention on selling pest control and doing pest control. I definitely have realized, for this season in my life until a certain point, this is where my best interest is served. I've done a lot of other stuff and nothing else has returned or had the ability to scale like pest control has in my experience.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm laughing because we had ideas and you're like, “I've eight ideas in the last eight years. If I start another one this year, Skye's going to kill me.” I don't know if that was literal or figurative. I walked back in the room.
Jared LaJaunie: You all know Seth Garber pretty well. I know you're in business with FRAXN with them. I love FRAXN. I know a lot of guys are using it so we'll shout out FRAXN on the show. Seth always jokes with me because we run into him in several conferences over the years and he has a client doing poop scooping. I'm not kidding. I wrote a whole business model on poop scooping. I got a logo. I got a whole way of launching it and cross-selling. I got that thing figured out to where I'm confident, no doubt, I could launch a poop scooping company and scale and plug it in and make it work. I also know it would be a distraction of resources.
When you look at the margins compared to what we're doing in pest control, it doesn't make sense. If we weren’t scaling so fast in LaJaunie’s, maybe. It's poop scooping too, there is that thing. Seth always jokes when he sees guys, “Me and Jared, we're going to start this poop scooping company.” She's like, “You all better not.” We're not. It's just always this thing where they always say I'm the gas and she's the break in our company and in our life. She helps to keep me focused and disciplined, which does help us to progress further. I was this close to legitimately launch in a poop scoop company just to give you an ideal.
Paul Giannamore: Jared, unlike Fat Pat, I'm less interested in the poop scooping and more interested on your trajectory as a business owner and manager from the time you started this business to where you are now. A lot of people out there reading this were where you were some years ago. A lot of times, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. You got the $800,000 business, it's growing inch by inch, and it's tiring. We understand the beginning years, it was you, you were out there toiling in the pest control vineyards, and trying to find your next customer servicing. How did your path progress?
Jared LaJaunie: You hit on so much there. You're hitting on my heartstrings. Pest control has been so good to me, I'm so thankful, as an industry. Even now, I'm doing that podcast, Main Street Mogul. Part of my heartbeat with that is to try to help other people, young entrepreneurs in general, figure out how to do it as a genuine service because it's blessed me so much. I hear what you're saying and I always talk to people like this. You're that young guy, you're a single operator, and you wanting to scale. How do we do it? If you remember at Energy, I even asked you the question, why do some people scale to $1 million and some scale to $25 million and what's the difference there?
For me, it's a burn-the-boats mentality. I had a mentality if this doesn't work, I don't have anything else to do and nothing else to fall back on, this is it. I adapted that mentality almost to a point of obsession. I love the saying, “If you want to have success, dunk your head underwater.” When you can't breathe anymore and you want that next breath and you want success that bad, that's when you have success.
We just did obsessive and crazy things in the beginning. Anybody that breaks through, they're willing to do things that other people aren't. I'm not trying to be all prideful because I'm nothing special. I grew up in a trailer park. I'm a high school dropout. A lot of pest control guys, that's a common story. God bless pest control, it allows people who are underdogs, a lot of times, to have a life that otherwise they never could dream of having. It's an amazing industry.
For me, we did it. We knocked on doors. We made phone calls to 8:00 or 9:00 at night. We did the 7 days a week and 12 hours a day. All the stuff you hear, we just did that stuff. The biggest obstacle to most people while they really don't have success are to answer that question that I asked you at Energy. The answer came to me. I don't know if you remember Andrew, he had a $65 million pest control company. Do you remember him? You probably know him. You're probably trying to sell his company, I'm sure, is what you're trying to do. I'm sure you're good friends with him.
Paul Giannamore: I brought him to Energy. As a matter of fact, Fat Pat was hanging out with him. He was down here in Puerto Rico.
Jared LaJaunie: The Mexican said he's going to put a deal together with him and he won't need you at all is what he said. I talked to him.
Paul Giannamore: He says all that sort of stuff.
Jared LaJaunie: I'm joking.
Paul Giannamore: He says this stuff daily.
Jared LaJaunie: He seems to be a genuine guy, just a little rough around the edges. The mindset seems to be the biggest obstacle for people why they do one thing or they don't. That guy sat on a stage and for me it was profound because he was my age exactly. If you remember, he started his company on the same exact day and year as me. He started January 1st, 2008. He was the exact age that I was.
From his story, he had a similar bootstrap that he didn't have a whole lot of money at first. He was sleeping in his girlfriend's mom's basement. The underdog bootstrapped it. Here we are starting at the same time at the same age in the same year. He's doing $165 million. He had a giant company spanning the country. I'm doing what I'm doing. Not to belittle what I'm doing because I'm so proud of what I've done and I'm so grateful for it but the facts are the facts. I'm doing what I'm doing and he's doing a $100 bajillion.
You have to sit there and ask yourself the question, “What did he do different than me?” He didn't have any advantages that I didn't have. He didn't have any opportunities that I didn't have. There's no reason why I couldn't be doing what he's doing. You have to turn that around on yourself. I got to talk to him or I heard him say it on stage and from the day that he started that company, from the first day he purposed in his mind and told himself that he was going to be a $100 million company.
Everything that he done, every action that he took, and every decision that he made was on that purpose to be a $100 million company. That's how he thought about it day to day. That was his thinking process. That was his goal. That was his mindset. He had the gall to believe that he could be a $100 million company. The balls on this guy. I could be honest and turn that around on myself and say, “When I started January 1st, 2008, what was my mindset?”
I had to be honest and my mindset was I better go out here and sell something so I can pay my car note and pay my house note. When I started, I almost lost my house and I almost lost my car. I wasn't making any money. I was operating from a poverty mindset and he was operating from an abundant mindset and a mindset where he believed that he could do it. I honestly believe that if I'd have started and had the knowledge and had a different mindset when I started from day one, I don't know if I'd be $165 million company but I'd be a much larger company than I am today. I truly believe that.
Paul Giannamore: You got one fact wrong, which may make you feel a little better. They're doing $65 million and not $165 million. He didn't beat you by that much.
Jared LaJaunie: Forgive me. Not that much. I feel much better. Thank you for sharing. Can I have a moment off camera to cry and I'll come back?
Paul Giannamore: Andrew was down here and everyone loved his talk so much at Energy. He came down with his brother and it was his brother's birthday and we celebrated it down here in Puerto Rico. I sat him down in front of the camera and I did an interview for him and I went a little bit deeper into what he was talking about in Florida. We'll release that. It'll be a good show.
Jared LaJaunie: That'd be cool. I'll be looking forward to it.
Patrick Baldwin: I do want to know about this abundance mindset. Was there a point in time that it clicked for you?
Jared LaJaunie: Yeah.
Patrick Baldwin: In addition to that, what effect did that have to the people around you when you changed mindsets?
Jared LaJaunie: It inspires everybody in a different way around me. I believe, any organization, it rises and falls with leadership and our mindset and the way we perceive it affects everybody around you. Have you ever heard of the pie concept? There's a pie and everybody gets a piece of the pie and when the pie is gone, that's it, it's all over with.
That's a limited mindset and that's why people get upset when they have competition or if you're doing customers and another pest control customer takes your customer or a new guy starts. You can get this feeling of jealousy or anger because you have a mindset of, “If he does a bunch of accounts, there's nothing left for me.” That's a poverty and limiting mindset and that's how a lot of people's mindsets. I probably shared it at one point too but I've definitely shifted to an abundant mindset.
The best analogy I can give of an abundant mindset is Adam in the Garden of Eden lived in an abundant mindset. He didn't have anxiety. He didn't have to worry. Everything was provided for. He was super creative and he walked in constant communion with God. An abundant mindset would be more like a tree with fruit where you plant it, you water it, and you tend it. It's fruitful, it grows a lot of fruit, and then you take a fruit off of that tree and more fruit grows.
I don't care how many people come get fruit off that tree or from that orchard, there's an abundance of fruit and there is enough for everybody. We have more success when we have that mindset and we're willing to work in collaboration with our peers versus work against them. I like the saying that collaboration happens at the top and competition happens at the bottom. That's easy to hear and say but when you understand that, that's true.
The guys that are killing it in all industries that are leading the way are talking to each other. You all know the Orkins, the Rentokils, and the Truly Nolens, I know they're competitors but they're not sitting there like, “Orkin got an account from me.” I guarantee you that the CEOs of Rollins and Orkin are probably friends and they probably know each other. They're probably collaborating more than they are competing behind the scenes. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. You guys tell me, you would know better than me.
Paul Giannamore: I get a lot of calls from guys that are investment bankers and they want to get into home services and pest control. I had one guy call me up and said, “I talked to some other guys in your industry and they were protective but you've spent a lot of time with me and pointed me in the right direction and was extremely helpful.” I always look at it like, “There's enough business for everyone. If I can raise up the standards in an industry, it makes us all better.”
You're right, Jared, when you think about it from a competitive perspective, you're not really competing with your competitors. What you're doing is competing with yourself to increase the value proposition for your customers. This is where all it comes down to. You're in a voluntary exchange economy. If you don't have your marketing and your advertising dialed in to explain the sorts of benefits and the value that you create, as a matter of fact, you don't deserve that customer's business to begin with. Get your act together first.
Jared LaJaunie: That's one of those saying, “We don't get what we want out of life, we get what we deserve.”
Paul Giannamore: How we deserve is the value that we create for others. At the end of the day, that's what it all comes down to, how can I create value for others? How can I create value for my customers? How do I create value for my employees? How do I make this the best place to be? When you talked about the pie, in any economic transaction, the producer is the one that has the ability to create a wider spectrum of value. The price is where do you slice the value created by the transaction? If you can create more value, you can take a bigger clip of that for yourself as the producer.
Some of the guys that I get really impressed by, if you talk about abundance attitude, think about the guys who build a pest control business. Let's say you two works for me and I own the company and I sit down with you guys and say, “I'm trying to make this an awesome place. I hope you guys will never leave. I'm going to try to do everything in my power to create growth opportunities for you. However, I can't be all things to all men and this might not be the right place for you. If in fact you decide to any day go out on your own, not only am I not going to give you problems about it, I would hope you'd come to me first and let me be a partner with you. Let me join this journey with you and let me get your back.”
There are tons of evidence in other industries where guys have done that and folks have gone out and created businesses and they've been partners and things. That's an abundance mindset, which is I have to create the value to keep the people. If I can't do that, for whatever reason, I want them to have my blessing and I want to be partners with them. I want them to know that I have their back and they'll always have my back. That's the way that I've always appreciated and there are owners that do that.
Jared LaJaunie: When I was a young salesman, I studied Zig Ziglar and I picked up this mantra and I say it all the time but it feels appropriate here and I do try to live this out, “The best way to get what you want out of life is to help enough other people get what they want.” I truly believe that. Employment and getting good people to stay with you is one of the biggest challenges we face in the industry right now.
One of the keys to doing that is exactly what you said, being open, transparent, communicating a vision, and create an opportunity for them to grow financially as well as personally and truly taking care of that person and not just saying it but meaning it. You can't fake it. You really have to care about people and do it. That's a big key to retaining people. Even if you do that, people are still going to leave you, they're still going to go do whatever, and there's still going to be some pains.
I tell all my people all the time and I mean it that I want them to grow with me and I want to scale. I'd love one day to get so successful that I can help some of my people that's helped me do their own thing or partner. That's that abundance mindset. I always tell my people this, as long as you leave me better than you were when you got with me, if you move on to do something better and it's a better opportunity and you're a better person and we were a small part in helping you be better when you leave than when you were, go into your next, God bless you, I love you, and we're going to keep doing our thing.
I don't have any hard or bad feelings about that and I never have. Not to say that it hasn't been some adjustments over the years sometimes and I don't want to lose people and we have a pretty good retention rate. At the end of the day, I don't want to be the person that holds somebody back from what their future and opportunity has to be. Also, I love the idea of take enough vision and them understanding it that they do believe that if they stay with me and trust in me that I will help them see their own vision for their own life.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, you said that the outsiders, the private equity, and the money guys are looking at the industry saying they're not free to share information and protect it. I had a conversation with Dave Bradford from Certus, he said, “In the airline industry, we're a pretty open book. Of course, publicly traded.” They would share information that was still legal and say, “What are you doing with numbers here and there?” He said pest control is very different. I'm hearing this and I see this a lot. Is pest control an anomaly where we're protective, secretive, and we have the wrong mindset or is this common?
Paul Giannamore: My opinion on this is that it's no different from any other industry when they do industry comparisons. If you look at Richard Rumelt’s studies, Patrick, there's wildly different performance between the best pest control company and the worst pest control company. The delta between difference in high performers and low performers in any industry is different than the cross section of industries.
There's a bigger disparity in performance among firms within an industry vertical than there is across industries. Industries are the same in general and it comes down to the mindset of individuals. I bet you, if you look at Jared, you take Jared in 2024 and compare him to Jared in 2014, he would be saying very different things about his excitement and willingness to help people now versus when he was really just coming up and it was much harder.
That might not be true, Jared, but we all go through these sorts of developments and I know because I was like that. When I first started out, I'm like, “I got the secret sauce. I can't help this.” Over time, you start to say, “I've got my daily bread. What else do I need?” Now, I can really start to think about finding the people that I care about in this world and really helping make their lives better and there's way more leverage and power in that. I'm waxing poetic today guys but there's not a person reading this who wouldn't look back and say, “As I've grown and become more mature, my priorities have shifted.” PB, have your priorities shifted?
Patrick Baldwin: 100%. I look back and think it's this evolution, if you will. I like Jared's mentality. We're standing outside of one of the rooms and there's a handful of us and Jared's like, “I'll help you with your operating procedures. I'll help you.” He has nothing to hide, free willing to give and help others out. I was like, “This is awesome. Anything I can do to help?”
Jared LaJaunie: I love what Paul said and I think it's so true. We do only compete against ourselves. The only thing that really holds us back is how much we're willing to work on ourself and grow ourself and the risk we're willing to take personally, it's the only thing that stops us from growing or scaling, both in a business, financially and personally.
Paul Giannamore: I'm reading a book on mimetic desire now and it's interesting to me because so much of human wants are effectively the mimicking of other human beings. I talked to guys who run fine businesses and who are, by any objective standard, successful individuals. They've got the nice house, got the nice car, and all those sorts of things but they're miserable and they're miserable because they compare themselves.
They'll sit down with a guy who is doing $65 million and they're doing $5 million. Quite frankly, having a $5 million for this is pretty damn good. You got nothing to complain about. It's just kind of keeping up with the Joneses. I feel like social media and all of this stuff only amplifies these feelings. To your point, Jared, I say to every one of these guys, I want you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and I want you to think about your own path. Think about where you were last year. Think about where you were two years ago. Think about where you were three years ago.
If you think about how you're forcing change in your own life and you're competing with yourself to get better month over month, year over year, number one, it should give you tremendous motivation. You are making progress, you just have to look at it. Number two, there's always going to be dudes that have more money. There's going to be dudes that have the three chicks. There's going to be dudes that have all sorts of stuff.
You can't have everything. Life's a trade-off. You got to make choices. Even in the pest control space, looking at all your competitors out there, “Why do they do this? Why do they have that? Why don't we have this?” It's a loser's game. You can't win it but you can win by competing against yourself year over year until you die. That's a game you can win.
Jared LaJaunie: If you get better, everybody around you and everything that you touch will get better if you get better. That's a law. It should be if it's not. I'm making stuff up. It seems like it should be.
Paul Giannamore: LaJaunie’s Law of Business, we're creating laws today. What I appreciate about you and your wife is that you guys are constantly focused on self-education and making yourself better. The biggest impediment to growth for a lot of these companies is in the mind of the CEO. The CEO is the leader and the manager of the business. If he or she is not educated, if he or she is not learning, or if he or she is not challenging themselves to do harder things to get out of their comfort zone and to propel the business, it doesn't matter. I have guys call me up and be like, “Paul, I'm stuck. I'm trying to figure out what the problem is.” Nine times out of ten, I'm like, “You're the problem. The buck stops with you. I'm the problem over here. You're the problem over there.”
Jared LaJaunie: When that's the truth, that's the hardest thing to hear.
Paul Giannamore: No one wants to hear that.
Jared LaJaunie: The hardest thing to open is a closed mind. You talked about people having a lot of money and being unhappy and two things came to mind when you were saying that. One, a lot of people, you're grinding, you're chasing, and they get some money. I find all money does for most people is it makes more of your true character come out. If you were selfish and you get money, you're just going to be more selfish. If you were not a nice person and you get more money, you're just going to be a less nice person.
Money doesn't change who we are, it just magnifies what we already are. That's why a lot of people don't get money because if they get a lot of money, it would be more detrimental than helpful. Money in itself can be a burden. If you're not responsible or a good person or the person that can handle the burden of a certain amount of wealth, wealth not only would not make you happy, it will be detrimental to you. I do want to be wealthy so I'm trying to become a better person so I can be wealthy. Not so I can be wealthy but the two go hand in hand.
I've read the autobiography of John D. Rockefeller, that's one of my favorite stories. I know some people don't like him. I'm a fan. I love his story and what he’s done. One of his last words and he talks about it was that no matter how much money you have, the only true way to be happy is to be content. You can be content on a yacht or in your house in the suburbs and money is not going to cause you to be content.
Money can give freedom. Money can open up opportunities and it can allow you to help a bunch of other people which can bring contentment. At the end of the day, if you're chasing money thinking that money's going to make you happy or even make you content, when you get it, if you get it, you'll find that is not the case. Contentment is the key and that comes from self-care and a lot of other things. Money will not bring contentment.
I was thinking about the other thing you said. A guy will have a $5 million business and not be happy or judge himself against others. I was at an industry event a while back sitting at a table and guys will come up to me and say, “How did you do it? I want to be like you. How are you doing so big?” First of all, that stuff embarrasses the heck out of me. I try to be humble. I always point out a stat to these people and I always can see their face and their mindset change. Sometimes you have to remind them.
Some of these guys are doing $2 million, $3 million, or $4 million and they're like, “I want to do what you're doing.” I'm like, “If you have a $1 million company, few companies ever make it to $1 million.” Maybe 10% of the companies ever make it to $1 million. Out of those that make it to $1 million, even less make it five years at $1 million. If you have a $1 million dollar company, you should be proud and you should be grateful. You have done something more than most people in the world have ever been able to do. If you have a $5 million or a $10 million company, you are the top of the top 1% of everybody doing it.
We forget that as we're grinding, especially when you get in a room like at Energy or some events and you've got these giants that are doing it. It's not that we don't want to absorb the wisdom from them and try to become better and always be growing but we also have to remember sometimes that if you're doing $1 million, $2 million, or $3 million, you should be nothing but grateful and humble. You are killing it. You are doing more than most people in the country are able to do. Be thankful for that $1 million or $2 million company. Do not be sad or compare yourself to anybody else. Be grateful for it. That's also very hard to get to $1 million.
Paul Giannamore: They always say that the first million is the hardest, isn't it?
Jared LaJaunie: Yeah, that was hard. Getting to a million is super difficult.
Patrick Baldwin: Picking up the pieces from what you both said and mimicking and challenging yourself, I want to go back, Jared, to the conversations between you and Skye. You can self-learn. You could read all the books on the bookshelf. You're doing mastermind groups and going to industry events on a daily or weekly basis. You two are challenging each other. I don't know if that's intentional or if that's just your strong wills. What do you see in terms of what that does for each other and for the business?
Jared LaJaunie: It's an excellent question. I don't think it's intentional. I don't know if I even realized it but what you said is true, we definitely do challenge each other. I always say that me and Skye want to get to the same place and we're very positive of where we want to go and even why we want to go where we want to go and we understand that very clearly. We do very much differ sometimes on how we want to get to where we want to go and how fast mostly is where we most differ on where we want to go.
Staying connected to these industry events and staying around people who are much smarter than me definitely inspires me and challenges me to continue to grow. Skye, she's not holding any punches with me especially, and even with herself. She's the kind of person I'll be like, “I can't figure out this SEO thing.” She's not like, “Poor baby.” She's like, “You better go figure it out. Come talk to me tomorrow after you figure it out. Don't tell me that we can or we're not.”
If you don't know how to do SEO or whatever it might be, she's definitely going to be the type of lady that's going to be like, “You could figure it out.” Anything that's a problem or a job, we're going to win because we have a brain and the problem doesn't have a brain, if that makes sense. One of our big things we like to say is, especially with our management team, it's okay to bring me a problem. I want to know your problems. Bring me your problems but just don't bring me problems.
When you bring me that problem, also bring a solution with that problem. We may or may not do that solution but don't just come with a problem without the answer. Use your brain. Think about it. Tell me about the problem but also tell me what you think we should do to solve the problem. Don't just come to me with a problem.
Patrick Baldwin: I might be failing to think about the other businesses that are larger in revenue than you all in the pest industry that have a husband-and-wife face of the business company. Paul, maybe help me think through this. In my opinion, you all are the largest husband-and-wife leadership team.
Jared LaJaunie: I hope it's true but I doubt that's true very much, Patrick. I don't think that's true.
Paul Giannamore: I doubt it's true. There are a lot of companies out there that is super quiet and we wouldn't even know that but I do think it exists.
Patrick Baldwin: For today's argument’s sake, what words of wisdom do you have to the husbands and wives that are both actively in the business and growing this. Skye joined around $1.5 million and now you've scaled it at least four times. What wisdom can you impart to those married couples out there?
Jared LaJaunie: First of all, women in our industry in general may not be as much in the front as Skye is or in the day-to-day but I think all these pest control companies have a woman somewhere helping or a wife that's maybe in the background that's helping. The old saying is, “Show me a good man and there's a great woman behind that good man I can assure you.”
To answer that question, be willing to communicate and have good communication and not softball communication but don't be ugly or condescending but have open, honest, and hard conversations frequently. Me and Skye meet once a week, we do that EOS, and we have a same page once a week. We spend an hour once a week making sure we are united on the same page and we may disagree in that one-on-one but whatever we present to our team and when we present to our team, we're going to present a united front.
Even if you're working with your spouse and you may disagree, it's okay to disagree in private and maybe a one-on-one meeting but make sure that when you go to that team that you're united and they have no idea that you all may have disagreed on any decision moving forward. You got to present a united front, you have to.
The other thing I would say is you have to have very clear boundaries. We are both co-owners of LaJaunie’s and we are both leaders in LaJaunie’s but we're a husband and a wife first. One of the biggest challenges when we first start trying to do this, and every entrepreneur will probably be able to identify with this, is you work all day and you come home and you work all night whether you realize it or not.
You're talking about the business all night, you're talking about problems, and you're talking about employees, “I've done this. I've done that. No, you should do this.” You're working all the time. It's hard to have a passionate and loving marriage when you're working all the time and we don't even realize we're doing it. If in essence, if you work all day together and you go home and talk about work all night, you may not realize you're working all the time.
If you're talking about work all the time, you are working all the time. We had to set some hard boundaries on. At one point, we had to be like, “It's 6:00 and we're sitting out on our patio. Let's talk about something else.” We're changing the subject, we're not talking about work, and inevitably, we'd end up talking about it again and we had to be intentional and say, “We're talking about work again. Let's intentionally move on to something else. Let's talk about a vacation, our children, our goals, a book, or whatever and have those boundaries.”
With me and Skye, inevitably, we'll not talk about pest control but we'll end up talking about another business we might want to start in the future. We're always working but we do have boundaries on being mindful of we are husband and wife and we need to put a lot of consideration in that. It can't be about business 24/7. Nobody wants to sleep with their boss or maybe they do, I don't know. Over time, it would be weird. We have to be mindful of that relationship.
I always encourage everyone, their spouses have the capacity and wants to bring them in but also understand that it is a whole another type of challenge. I'm coaching with a guy and sometimes in coaching, I thought I'd help him with data and operational stuff but I'm finding I'm more doing mindset coaching than anything, ironically. He was like, “My wife just won't help me. She won't get in the business. I got to do it all by myself.” He was like, “she was in there at one time and it didn't work and now she's not.”
I'm like, “They're both hard. Do you want her back in the business? You remember what that was like?” He was like, “Yeah, that was even worse.” I'm like, “You're sitting here crying that you want her in but you yourself just told me that when she was in the business, it was even harder. They are both hard, just choose your hard. Which one do you want?” There's no easy here. Your wife come and help you is not going to suddenly make it better.
Your wife come and work for you is not the ultimate answer. As a matter of fact, at first, if you're not willing to grow once again and your spouse comes work for you, that may be the worst thing that ever happened in your life. That may end up in divorce. Be careful what you wish for. Her not working in the business and you having to put it all on your shoulders, I know that's hard too. Choose your hard, which hard you want? There is no easy to this thing.
Patrick Baldwin: We had Mark C. Winters on the podcast a while back. He co-wrote Rocket Fuel, part of EOS and the follow-up to it. That establishes the Visionary and Integrator. You sit in the visionary seat and Skye in the integrator seat.
Jared LaJaunie: I'm still trying to learn exactly what that is. I still don't understand. Yes, they call me a visionary but she tells me. I don't know.
Patrick Baldwin: She'll tell you exactly what to do. Business aside, I want to know what is having that structure though? Here's a book and here's a system, what does that do not for the business but what does that do for you all and giving you all some boundaries?
Jared LaJaunie: EOS, I wish we'd have started earlier. I recommend it to people all the time. It's a great system. It holds accountability in a system. It creates structure. It holds the team accountable. It puts goals in place. It's a great system. I hate it.
Patrick Baldwin: I did not see that coming.
Jared LaJaunie: That's the best way I can explain it. It's best for a company and I think a company should run it. As a visionary, as they call me, and I guess I must be, I freaking hate it. I'm wise enough to understand that it's good and that it needs to happen and I pushed through and I use it and I work it. For 2 or 3 years, I was like, “We’re getting rid of this. This sucks.” What it does for me is I don't do well in structure and accountability and it forces me to have to be like, “I said I was going to do that by this day at this time and I didn't, that sucks.”
“I want to go into four more markets and you're telling me that we got to get more route density and we got a whole plan and a structure and strategy to do it and I can't just go to another state and open a branch today just because I want to and feel like it.” “No, Jared.” That's the big thing with EOS and then my whole team is always like, “Jared, look at the data, slow down. We have a plan. We have quarterlies. We have meetings. We have a plan. We have a structure. We have accountability. Yes, we can go open a branch in Mississippi but no, we can't do it today.” I'm like, “Screw that, I want to go to Mississippi today.”
EOS reins me back in and I'm like, “Even though it might be fun to go open a branch in another state, it would not be wise.” Although I enjoy starting businesses and the structure and I love the endorphin rush of doing something new, I treasure being wise over my own fun. Does that make sense? EOS makes me have to be wise and holds me in a structure but I still hate it. I hate it but I'm smart enough to understand that it's good.
Patrick Baldwin: What does that do for the marriage relationship, though? Did that help give structure and boundaries for you all?
Jared LaJaunie: It did. Skye loves it. She works it well. She's helping other people in the industry now do it and implement it on the side to help them. Before, I would just do things because I felt like doing them. We all do that at certain stages. At a certain point in business, you become responsible for so many people that wild card stuff got to go. You're a $1 million or $2 million, you can get away with some of that implementing something real quick, some of that backlash. When you're small, you can make a mistake and recover from it quicker than the big guy can even start to even think to implement it.
When you get bigger, there's a difference between turning around a rowboat and a ship, a big difference. When you're rowing a little rowboat, you can move fast, you can make mistakes and recover, and it's not that big of a deal. When you start captaining a ship, you better get on the speaker and let somebody know that you're going to be turning or slowing down or stopping or it can be catastrophic. EOS gives us some guidelines to be able to steer a ship and I most enjoy just rowing a small boat but I'm growing and learning to become who I need to come to go where I want to go and I'm going to keep on that journey.
Patrick Baldwin: What's grown more over the last sixteen years, Jared or LaJaunie’s?
Jared LaJaunie: It’s hard to separate them. Any company will only grow as much as that person's willing to grow. The growth in LaJaunie’s has been a direct result of my own personal growth and Skye as well. Skye is a brilliant strategist. She's great at holding accountability. She's helped us. I'd like to think that I've grown more than the company has grown but the two are connected. If you look at any company that's grown and scaled, 1 or 2 things have happened, either that owner or founder has personally educated themselves and grown or they've been wise enough to realize they're not the person and brought somebody else in that was that person. One of the two has happened.
Patrick Baldwin: Speaking of LaJaunie’s, you did make a couple of comments about having the name of the business if you were to do things differently. What does that do when you're wearing the name around like that?
Jared LaJaunie: It's LaJaunie’s Pest Control and I'm very proud of it. We're not going to change it even though at Rocket-X, a lot of people were challenging me to rebrand, which I'm not. Once again, Aquaman did it. Aquaman makes $65 million. When I make $65 million, I'll rebrand. How about that? Right now, I'm not. I started in 2008, I started in not the best place to start. One of the decisions I would do differently if I ever had a chance to do it over again, I wouldn't name it after myself.
I would not name it LaJaunie’s Pest Control, which is my last name. I would have named it something much more generic like Bug Killers, Exterminators, Black Goes the Bug LLC, or whatever. I'd have named it something. Once you name it after yourself, everybody always wants to talk to Mr. LaJaunie. A lot of these people that called, “I want to talk to Mr. LaJaunie,” have no idea who Mr. LaJaunie is or have never met Mr. LaJaunie. They do not know Mr. LaJaunie but they want to talk to him. Everybody that got a problem wants to talk to him. They have no idea who I am, “I've never met him.”
I live in a small community. As I've grown and I got all my trucks running around the community with my name on the side, it's something I wish I'd have done different. I wish I would have named it something more generic because now, I'm permanently tied to it personally, whether I want to be or not. Not that I'm not proud to be tied to it personally but I have other aspirations. I want to move on. No matter what now, it's always going to be tied to me and I can't change that. I'm grateful for it but if I had to do it over again, I would have not done that same decision again.
Paul Giannamore: I loved the counterbalance to Skye on here with you, Jared. I'm looking forward to getting the two of you down here to Puerto Rico, it'd be a great time, and we'll definitely make sure we extend that invite to you.
Jared LaJaunie: Please do. I appreciate it. Thank you, Paul and Patrick. Thank you guys so much. You all go help somebody be rich today.
Paul Giannamore: We'll do it.
Patrick Baldwin: Thanks, Jared.
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Dylan Seals: Thank you so much as always for supporting us at The Boardroom Buzz. We know your time is valuable and the fact that you spend 45 minutes or an hour with us means the world. All the media that we put out from Potomac is meant to honor and celebrate you, the service industry owner. As Paul would say, “Yee who toil in the pest control vineyards.”
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Jared LaJaunie
Skye LaJaunie – past episode
Main Street Mogul
Mark C. Winters – past episode
Rocket Fuel
Potomac.tv