Harvest Valley Pest Control expanding again

QUINCY — Eradicating bugs and rodents — not your ideal American Dream. But for David and Katie Kaylor it’s a business that has exceeded their wildest expectation.

“No one ever ends up in pest control on purpose I don’t think,” David said. “Don’t think a 5-year-old kid wants to be a pest control guy.”

It wasn’t in David’s plans either. In fact his ambition was to become a preacher. After graduating from Portland Bible College in 2002, he took a job a year later for a startup advertising website in Portland to pay the bills while he searched for a fulltime job at the pulpit.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, or maybe it was a bit of providence, the job ended rather abruptly in 2009 and David found himself unemployed.

“We grew that to about a $3 million company then Craigslist and the economy hit and kind of wiped us out overnight.”

After joining the ranks of the unemployed, David happened to speak with a friend of his who had become the CEO of a large regional pest control company that had a call center in Portland.

“That was my first foray into pest control. I played just about every role in the business.”

In 2012 he resigned his position as head of customer service and sales and moved to Quincy where he and Katie took part time jobs as associate pastors of Faith Community Church.

David had embarked on his life’s ambition to preach the gospel, but needed a second job to make ends meet for he and his family. Not long after he began his search, he got a call from his friend in the pest control business who told him a technician who had been working for the company in the Tri-cities had quit, and asked David if he wanted to get his license and go to work there as the new technician?

“I took the job and after doing that for a while, they drafted me back into management. I eventually advanced to a position where I was managing the entire NW Region — had 80 technicians under me,” David said. “Problem was I had to travel a lot, which meant long stays away from my wife and five kids — all under 12, and I wanted to stop doing that.”

The good part working as the NW Region manager David said, was it gave him insight as to how to run a company. And with that in mind he took a leap of faith and went into business for himself.

“I started Harvest Valley Pest Control in March of 2016. Back then it was just Katie and I. We now have 10 employees and cover the tri-county area of Central Washington. We have offices in Quincy, Wenatchee, Chelan, Leavenworth, and have just opened an office in Moses Lake.”

The big-ticket item for the company that caters to the residential and commercial industries, David said, is crawl space cleanup.

“We found there was a real need for that — no one in the Central Washington area was providing that service, so we jumped right into it. Rodents can get into a crawl space and just completely trash it.”

His current customer base is 75 percent residential and 25 percent commercial, but in the near future he’d like that to be a 50/50 split.

“We were entirely residential when we first started, but after reaching out to a lot of commercial businesses we’ve seen a 25 percent increase in that market,” David said. “We are servicing a number of food processing plants, apartment complexes and have just signed on an assistant living center. We also service the Mitsubishi Airplane facility.”

David said he hopes to tie weed and bird control into the business as well.

Another key component of his astonishing growth over the past 18 months, David said, is his unique approach to pest control.

“We don’t just hose down a building and call it good — we practice IMP — integrated pest management. The idea being there is a lot you can do prior to using chemicals to control pest activity,” he said. “We look at the environment around a home or business and figure out the food sources that are present for the pests — what moisture sources there are — what harborage locations an be addressed and any exclusion work that can be done. If you close off entry points, remove harborage, food and water sources, 80-90 percent of the pest problem goes away. Then you can use a very small amount of chemicals to control the other 10-20 percent.”

David says he’d like his business to be known as more than just a bunch of “spray Jockey’s” that come around every couple of month to dowse a home or commercial building with a bunch of chemicals — would rather it be considered a consultant company for his customers to help them develop a game plan to keep the structures pest free.

Being in business for less than two years, ago, David had no idea he’d become so successful is such a short time.

“We’ve been really blessed in that our growth has outpaced our original business plan,” he said. “It’s hard to project out where we’ll be in the next 4-to-5 years, but we see this being a $3 million company by then.”

Call (509) 797-0090 or visit moseslake.hvalleypestcontrol.com for more information on Harvest Valley Pest Control.