What Happens to Your Pest Control Service When a Company Changes Hands
You've been a loyal customer of a local pest control company for years. Then one day you get a letter: the company has been acquired. New name, new ownership, possibly new pricing. If you've been through this — or you're going through it now — here's what you need to know.
Why Pest Control Companies Get Acquired
The pest control industry has seen significant consolidation over the past decade. Larger regional and national companies acquire smaller local operators as a faster path to market share than organic growth. For the acquiring company, it's a business transaction. For the customers who built a relationship with the original owner, it's often the start of a frustrating transition.
What Typically Changes After an Acquisition
Your Technician
The technician who knew your property — your entry points, your pets, your preferences, your pest history — may no longer be your technician. High employee turnover is common in acquisitions as staff either leave voluntarily or get reorganized into new routes and territories.
Your Service History
Four years of notes about where ants enter your kitchen, which spots the previous tech treated, what products work best for your property — that institutional knowledge often doesn't survive a systems migration to the new company's platform. You may effectively start over.
Your Pricing
Introductory rates from the original company rarely survive long after acquisition. Expect pricing to normalize to the acquiring company's rate structure — usually higher — within the first renewal cycle.
Local Knowledge
If the acquiring company is based in a different region of Florida, their operational expertise is built around that region's pest pressure. The Panhandle is not Central Florida. The species, seasonality, and soil conditions are meaningfully different — and a team trained elsewhere may take time to learn that the hard way on your property.
The Customer Churn Problem
Acquisitions in the pest control industry typically see significant customer loss in the 12–18 months following the transaction. Customers who were loyal to the original owner — often a neighbor, a local family, someone they trusted — don't automatically transfer that loyalty to a new corporate owner they've never met.
Acquiring companies know this. Which is why they frequently increase marketing spend, offer promotions, and invest in third-party review and reputation tools immediately after an acquisition — to offset the customers walking out the door while trying to attract new ones who don't know the history.
What to Do If Your Pest Control Company Was Acquired
- ✅ Ask specifically who your new technician is and what their background is
- ✅ Confirm whether your service history and treatment records transferred
- ✅ Get your new pricing in writing before your next service
- ✅ Check whether the acquiring company holds a valid Florida pest control license (JB number)
- ✅ Look at their reviews — specifically the most recent ones, post-acquisition
- ✅ Consider whether this is an opportunity to find a company that's actually local
What You Get With a Company That Was Never Acquired
Cadenhead Services has been independently owned and operated in Crestview, FL since 1983. Same family. Same community. No acquisition, no rebrand, no corporate parent in another city making decisions about how your home gets treated.
When you call us, you're talking to someone who lives here. When a technician shows up at your door, they know your street. When we say we've been protecting NW Florida homes for over 40 years — we mean it. That history belongs to this community, not to a balance sheet somewhere else.
Ready to work with a company that will still be here in another 40 years? Call (850) 682-4333 or schedule online.
