Helpful handyman When Kevin Kordek bought Virginia Beach-based, AActive Termite and Pest Control in January 1995, the company was focused exclusively on pre-con- struction treatment and termite and pest control. Kordek knew early on that, in order to grow the company and make it his own, he would have to re- think its core services. “Handyman services were one of the things


I brought with me to the company,” explained Kordek, who worked his way through college doing odd jobs in the construction industry. “I got my contractors license the same time I bought AActive, and I wore a tool belt for the first 10 years I owned the company.” The first add-on service was a natural fit for the


new owner’s personal strengths. It was also born of necessity. “Back in the early ’90s when the termiticides


weren’t very effective, there were a lot of damage claims that I didn’t want to turn over to insurance as a new business owner, and I also didn’t want to have to pay somebody else to fix them—so I did them myself,” he said. “When I bought the company it was less than $400,000 in sales, and one big dam- age claim could’ve put us out of business.” In those early days, Kordek took a pest control


technician along with him on the repair jobs and trained him how to do the work. That technician


became the company’s very first handyman. Today, AActive has five people dedicated to handyman ser- vices, in addition to its 26 pest control technicians. Part of the secret to Kordek’s success has been his willingness to invest in the handyman division. “One of the lessons I’ve learned about add-ons is that they’re only effective for a company if they can make it a part of their core business model or if they hire somebody that can run that division who is more knowledgeable than an employee would be in that business,” he said. “Now, we advertise handy- man services in every communication we have with the client, and we’ve found that these services are less seasonal in terms of demand than our pest con- trol service, simply because there’s always stuff that needs to be done.” Not all of AActive’s attempts to add services have


been as successful. “We’ve had things I won’t call failures, but they


were very valuable lessons in add-on services,” he said. “One of the examples of that was about 10 years ago, when holiday lighting for winter revenue became popular for pest control companies. We dabbled in that for about five years before we sold the division.” In its first year, the holiday lights division


brought in about $40,000 in annual billing, but Kordek said the company “hit a plateau,” and the add-on service never got any bigger. “The profit that we made in year one, we spent


“One of the lessons I’ve learned about add-ons is that they’re only effective for a company if they can make it a


part of their core business model or if they hire somebody that can run that division who is more knowledgeable than an employee would be in that business


” —KEVIN KORDEK, AActive


every dime of it plus some in year two,” he said. “The point of diminishing returns was reached very early on, but our ego wouldn’t allow us to back out of it because we thought, ‘How hard can it be to sell and install holiday lights?’” It’s not that it’s difficult, he said, but it never


became a focus of AActive’s core business. Eventu- ally, the expense of maintaining the holiday lights service outweighed its benefit. Kordek sold the divi- sion five years ago. “The essence of add-on services is to use your ex-


isting client base as an additional source of revenue for services they don’t pay somebody else to do,” he said. “But one of the biggest risks that I see is when people sell an existing client an add-on service and then do it poorly, so they not only lose them for the add-on service, but they lose them for the core busi- ness service, as well.”


18 PESTWORLD NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 www.npmapestworld.org


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