Feb 4, 2012 – Marketing Your Skills
QUESTION:
Are technicians who are willing and able to perform reliable bed bug work accepting a premium in the workplace? Can you point me to reliable data or surveys to help answer this? There exists an element of risk in routinely undertaking this work. Does hiring by members of the pest control industry take this into consideration?
ANSWER:
This is a really good question, and honestly I cannot tell you if pest control company owners recognize and reward the value of the skilled and willing technician who can do bed bug work, day in and day out. I certainly hope they do. It was pointed out early in our reintroduction of The Common Bed Bug that this pest is unlike any other pest that we deal with, and it cannot be eradicated if the technician tries to treat it as though it were a carpet beetle, cockroach, or earwig. For one thing, there is no "tolerance" level for bed bugs. They need to be eradicated right down to the very last nymph and egg or the problem will continue. No other pest we deal with seems to generate the fear and loathing that bed bugs do, and for this reason the lawyers in the U.S. are looking at a cash cow. People whose homes are infested with bed bugs recognize that they MUST have obtained them from someone or somewhere else, and therefore are "victims" who must sue.
View past Ask Mr. Pest Control questions.
Are technicians who are willing and able to perform reliable bed bug work accepting a premium in the workplace? Can you point me to reliable data or surveys to help answer this? There exists an element of risk in routinely undertaking this work. Does hiring by members of the pest control industry take this into consideration?
ANSWER:
This is a really good question, and honestly I cannot tell you if pest control company owners recognize and reward the value of the skilled and willing technician who can do bed bug work, day in and day out. I certainly hope they do. It was pointed out early in our reintroduction of The Common Bed Bug that this pest is unlike any other pest that we deal with, and it cannot be eradicated if the technician tries to treat it as though it were a carpet beetle, cockroach, or earwig. For one thing, there is no "tolerance" level for bed bugs. They need to be eradicated right down to the very last nymph and egg or the problem will continue. No other pest we deal with seems to generate the fear and loathing that bed bugs do, and for this reason the lawyers in the U.S. are looking at a cash cow. People whose homes are infested with bed bugs recognize that they MUST have obtained them from someone or somewhere else, and therefore are "victims" who must sue.
There is tremendous profit to be made by our industry if we know how to remove bed bugs from a structure, and of course the list now goes well beyond just homes to include stores, schools, hospitals, theaters, etc. The liability to those commercial accounts is HUGE, and they should be willing to pay the price needed to eradicate the bugs before someone sues them or they make the headlines on the front page of the morning news. A properly trained pest control company recognizes the long journey to elimination of the bugs, and will be charging the price needed to be profitable. The pest control company should also accept that it too is immersed in the liability once it takes on the responsibility of removing the bugs, so the fee to do so needs to be high enough to take that into account.
So, there we are. A huge public health and liability issue with a pest that is terribly difficult to extract from a structure, so who are we going to send out to do the work? The new guy? I hope not. It must be the technician or team of technicians who are willing to do tedious work of this kind, who are diplomatic and outgoing enough to work with and get the cooperation of terribly stressed clients, and who are willing to accept that added burden of ensuring they do not take these bugs home with themselves. This can be very rewarding and profitable work when it succeeds, but it can be terribly frustrating and tedious to do. I think that deserves a higher pay scale than the technician who does other more routine work. Something about if you want monkeys you pay peanuts.
I don't know of any surveys on this, and no mention of pay scales ever came up during the many sessions I recently attended on bed bug topics at the NPMA conference. Perhaps money matters are just areas that university speakers and researchers prefer not to become involved with. However, if you plan to put a lot of time and effort into developing technicians who are successful with bed bug eradication you would hope to keep them with your company, and compensation talks.
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