pest control technician

outside sales representative

sales representative

inside sales representative

sales representative entry level

Saela

Let’s start with the pros and benefits from this position. And by benefits, Iʼm not referring to financial or career benefits because the only “job benefit” you’ll have is mediocre healthcare. Instead, Iʼm referring to the work environment, coworkers, etc... The coworkers are great. Thereʼs that sense of “weʼre all in this together” kind of vibe. Youʼre treated with respect and those who have more experience and pest control knowledge are of immense help. You have a question, someone will have an answer and thereʼs no judgment because weʼre all learning. There’s a 2-3 weeks training period. They offer paid training which you’ll be making $12/hr. You’ll also be required to study and take your Apprentice License test which they pay for. After that, you get a company vehicle which you get to take home, and a gas card. The van comes with a dashcam that monitors everything and watches/records you for distracted driving, tailgating, etc…
You also get an iPad which you will use to clock in and see your services.

In terms of management, that just depends on which branch you’re in. Managers each have their own personality and their own way to train, enforce company policies, and making sure youʼre doing your job correctly while being safe and deliberate about everything you do. They expect too much from you and sometimes mix fiction with reality. The manager makes it seem like it’s so easy to retain customers who want to cancel. In the real world, people have their own issues to deal with too. They could be swimming in debt, trying to cut down on costs, or simply choose to stop but Edge doesn’t care about all that. They just want customers to stay locked in on that contract. You end up sounding pushy and annoying which in turns makes the customers really uncomfortable. When you do succeed in convincing a customer to keep the service, the company will never know you did so. All they see is that you completed a service and so you get no recognition. And my goodness do they really impose their ideologies on their employees. Whether you agree or not, you’re required to take their “culture” quiz which from what I’ve seen, just seems like a bunch of pretext to hide how greedy they actually are. 

Let us dive into a typical day at work. You need to be at the warehouse by 7am. Starting with the summer time which is the busiest time of the year: Depending on how well-staffed your branch is, you will have about 12-18 services to complete. Sometimes even less than 10. Again, it all depends on how many services are scheduled that day and how many technicians work in that branch (if no one took a day off). Thereʼs a daily training of about 30 minutes (but it can take way longer). The branch manager will go over some slides or youʼll do some roleplay to practice your customer interactions. After about a month, you will start to see the same thing and so it is really repetitive and might even feel like a waste of time. But you do get some valuable information which you can use in the field when answering customersʼ questions about certain pests for example. They spend way more time telling you how to do your customer interactions and shoving their ideologies down your throat instead of actually teaching you how to properly deal with specific customer’s pest issues. You’ll have days where you’ll have a lot of long drives to do on top of a lot of time windows to meet on ridiculous routes dragging you all over. You’d want to leave the warehouse as early as possible to make sure you arrive on time to those houses but because you have to attend the repetitive daily meetings, well...you can’t leave as early as you’d like. After the meeting, you then have a 1 on 1 meeting with the branch manager who will just go over how well you did on your previous day. Remember you started at 7:00 a.m. and an hour has already passed and you made $0 so far because you’re not paid on the hour. 

The iPad you receive comprises a software that records everything you do in the service. Your manager will basically go over what you missed or if you have any questions. After that, you’re free to go and ready to tackle on the inefficient route you have that day. 

Salary is commission based. But during your 2-3 weeks training period, you’ll be paid $12/hr. After that, you start off at 10% and it increases by 0.5% every 6 months. You only get paid after a service is completed. Their advertisement of “$17-$19/hr” is truly misleading. Your salary throughout the year fluctuates drastically. You may have 12 services and think you’ll make $120 which translates to $15/hr. But wait, 1 or 2 customers won’t be home until 5 or 6 pm so you end up having to wait 3-4 hours in your vehicle and you’re not being paid for that time. Congrats, you just worked 10-11 hours at about $10.90/hr. If you’re lucky, one of them didn’t even want the service and kept trying to reach the office to cancel and so you waited all that time for the customer to show up just to find that out and made $0. Hopefully, you didn’t have any plans that evening. You won’t ever know what time you’ll get home and in the summer, they will just add services on top of services to your route during your day – messing up your route efficiency and turning your day to a 12hr+ work day. In many cases, I’ve had to drive 45 minutes back to an area because they’d add a service in the area I was just in. Lots of inconvenience there. But then again, they’ll just bombard you with their ideologies when you complain. They don’t care as long as they’re locking people on contracts and fees and making money.

Like previously stated, the summer time gets busy. The sales team is out trying to make as many sells as possible. Again, one word that defines the company is greed. They sell the service to new customers at practically 50% discount and because the job is entirely on commission, you can do the math – you’ll also be making less. Most customers don’t even know they’re being locked in on a contract. The salesmen tend to set really high expectations and sometimes even unrealistic ones. All of that falls on you when you show up to the customer and have to explain to them that whatever they were told is not something you actually do. 

Edge prides itself so much on the free re-services they offer to its customers. It’s free for customers but it’s the service specialist who gets penalized. You sprayed a house yesterday and if the customer calls in for a re-service for ANY reason, that 10% commission you made from that house now drops to 5%. Edge deducts 50% of your pay if a customer calls in for ANY reason. Really. ANY reason. Even if it has NOTHING to do with your service. The gates were locked and you were only able to treat the front? Half a pay for you because the costumer didn’t do their part and that was out of your control. You placed rat/mice traps and caught a few the next day and the customer calls in for a reservice to have those picked up because you did your job? Half a pay for you. Amazing reward isn’t it… 

Then comes the customer service. They just say yes to everything the customer asks. As a service specialist, we’re trained to do certain things but customer service tells customers other things and obviously have no pest control knowledge and it all ends up being a miscommunication with customers. Some customers are nice, respectful, and even generous. Others are just entitled and will just try to give you a hard time no matter how much you’re just trying to help to the best of your ability. 

Overall, I’d say the company really doesn’t care about its employees. Considering that service specialists are the ones who perform the work, they’re not paid for the amount of work and hours they actually put in. Edge doesn’t care about your mental well-being which creates an anxiety inducing atmosphere. You get no PTO, no 401k, no paid vacation, no vacation besides the major holidays (all of which are unpaid), and career advancement is nonexistent. I started being sleep deprived because of the stress I endured through how this company operates and “rewards” its employees. It’s just not worth it. Unless you’re desperately looking for a temporary job, I honestly would not recommend this company to my worst enemy. They would hire just about anyone anyways. Save yourself the trouble and find a fun, rewarding and fulfilling career path that helps you avoid the stress that can result from job dissatisfaction. Don’t make the mistake I made. I joined the company with high hopes and drive. I left broken but proud I finally got to leave.

Edge was always a temporary job though there were times that I was tempted to stay.  I gained particular success in Edge: I was being considered for a promotion and had been told by an assistant manager that I ranked among the top 10% of technicians at Edge based on many factors and was consistent and reliable.  I worked there for a total of 2 years, longer than most technicians. 
 However, the things that caused me to leave were many.  The first is the work hours- Edge is open from Monday through Saturday and while they give you two days off for the week (including Sunday), there is no guarantee whatsoever that you will get Saturday or Monday off.  They hand them out as you get hired so you could be off on Sunday and Wednesday, or Sunday and Friday- pretty hard to have a fun weekend where there aren't two consecutive days to do things.  The hours are terrible too.  You work until you are done with your route and there is no guarantee of getting done at any consistent time because it depends on how many services you have on the day (13 or 14 average but by the time I left it was higher around 18), how far apart they are, whether another tech called in sick, whether the customer will be home (I've seen time windows asking for the technician to come after 6:30 PM before and I've sometimes found myself working after 9:00 in the dark (14 hours total).

Edge wants want absolute dedication to the company in order to be promoted- show even the slightest hesitation in front of the boss as he offers you a lot of extra work and it will set you back significantly. 

Benefits are next to none- just health insurance and a payed day off for every year you've worked (until you get to 5 years and then they don't offer any more).  You get no extra days off despite earning one payed day every year.  You get an iPad but no phone so you have to use your own.  Edge pays only a pittance of the bill- usually $15 if I remember right, despite using it roughly 20 times a day.

The pay is commission based- which is okay.  But you don't get paid for the time driving (which is often 6 or more hours).  You don't get paid to wait around for customers either- so you could wait around an additional 4 or 5 hours to get paid $10.00 worth of commission.  Sometimes the system that they run (Pestpad) crashes and you have to sit around and wait on that too as the IT guys get it fixed (and they're slow).  You also don't get paid during the morning training sessions either, some of which end up taking an hour and half or more.  You only get paid when you do a service for someone.

Corporate holds their employees to extreme accountability.  Everything that is done on the iPad is carefully monitored and daily "grades" are given in the morning before heading out.  These had more of the feel of a daily scolding than an attempt to help you understand the software.  All morning trainings film the technicians and how they respond and just before I was left there was talk of installing dashboard cameras to watch the technicians for any sign of distracted driving.

There are some good things too.  You get a vehicle that you drive to and from work.  You can take breaks whenever you want them (because you're not getting paid).  The trainings are good and the culture is good too.

What is most enjoyable about the job is the fact that you can help people who truly and (sometimes desperately) need it.  It was always a rewarding thing to watch over time as infestations improved and disappeared and, if it hadn't, a fun challenge to figure out what could be fixed.  Pest control is a fun profession and you get to see a lot of very interesting things as well as a broad swath of humanity and how they live, not to mention a broad swath of different animals and pests.  But working at Edge is not the place I recommend.

That pretty much sums up my experience.  All told, my time there was stressful and frustrating on a daily basis.  There were good moments and times that I was happy, but the problems I outlined made for a very rocky relationship with the company.

Pest control is awesome. Helping people, working solo, being outside, it’s great. Too bad Edge is the worst. This is what  typical day looks like. 
You start at 7am, get your truck ready for 15min. You then spend 30-45min in training. The training cycles, so after a while you’ve seen it all so it gets pointlessly repetitive. On Thursdays, they have culture training, where the CEO teaches you how to be happy. You essentially get weekly counseling that you never asked for. Every month, you spend a half an hour doing a “desire chart” so you can set goals to achieve happiness. Sounds great, right? Remember that the pay is full commission, so you don’t get anything for this, and the training is everyday. On top of that, you will have time windows, so you could have an 8am customer an hour away and not leave the shop until 7:55.
The day is pretty nice. You drive, you do service. It’s a fun and rewarding job. Again, remember you only get paid for completed services. So that first job that’s an hour away? You’ve already been at the shop for an hour, plus an hour drive, so you’ve just worked two hours and haven’t made a dime (it’s not always an hour drive, to be fair.) They have also started installing cameras on the interior of the trucks, so they’re watching you the whole time- Fun! The routing is great too. Everything is auto-routed, so the computers decide. Fool proof. You’ll enjoy the benefits of auto routing when you drive twenty minutes to do a single customer in the middle of nowhere only to do his neighbor tomorrow. So 20min there, probably more on the way back since you’ll have to back track, and then you’ll have to do it again tomorrow because computers handle the routing. Remember, you don’t get paid for the travel. A typical service is 15-20min for an exterior service, and you’ll make about $12 per job. So you can potentially make $30 an hour. Wait a customer has mice and your 15min job just turned into 1.5hrs? No extra pay, you make the same. On top of that, you may have the remaining customers on your route given to other people because you’re running late. So, you lose out on your pay check. Oh wait! The office has gotten a call from a customer for a brand new service! What opportunity! He’s out of the way, his time window has already started, and you may lose customers at the end of the route to make room for this $13 flat rate wage, but who cares? It’s a great opportunity to take care of a new client! Oh wait, you’re done with your route at 3:30 today and he has a 5-9 time window and can’t be home until 7? You’ll have to wait in the truck, unpaid, to take part in the great opportunity. So rewarding!
The fact is, Edge is great to it’s customers. Their dedication to getting service completed and making sure the customers get the best experience is on the level of religious zeal. If I was a customer, I would choose Edge. For the employees though, the company clearly does not care about you, your time, your family, or anything outiside of work. There is no consistency in what the customers are charged (your pay check depends on it), you will have to drive ridiculous routes that make no sense (you don’t get paid for it), you will have to wait for customers who don’t show up (you don’t get paid for that), you may have to backtrack to hit customers who weren’t home (no pay for your time), you could be done at 4 or you could be done at 10 (don’t make plans for dinner).
This job is terrible. Everyone starts out really optimistic, lots of energy, and excited to do the job. After about 6 months, sarcasm sets in and everyone at the whole shop turns apathetic. No one cares because everyone knows that Edge doesn’t care. For all the preaching Edge does about “lifting and blessing” others, they do a terrible job of demonstrating it first to their employees.

Work-life balance
Pay sounds ok, $17 an hr.  They say it can go up based on the amount of routes received but it’s not true.  So why is $17 garbage? Because you work 9-12 hrs a day with no overtime.  So if you find a lower paying job and work the same hours your pay would be the same because you’d get OT.
Also, even if you complete a home perfectly but the customer requests a reservice for something out of your control, you still lose half your commission, they’ll take it out of your next paycheck.  
Got great work ethic? I know I did, but it bites you in the rear. Why? Because they’ll just keep adding services to your route without taking in account your location.  What that means is, you are given a daily route. Let’s say West Seattle to Renton. You are responsible to choose the way you route the homes ( some have time slots and some don’t) let’s say you start in West Seattle and make your way to Renton, as soon as you get there you’ll look at your map and magically see another service added on clear back in West Seattle.  There goes an hour or two adding in the new home. 

 You only get paid a commission or a percentage of that service.  10%-20%.  If you receive a reservice on your route you are only making 1/2 of what the original person made.  There is a reason why the company is making Millions and the employees keep leaving.  I was making approx $1500 every two weeks, sounds good but was working 50-55 hrs a week.  

The managers are great, friendly and genuine.  This would really be a great job if they paid more.  For what we did we should be getting about 48k a year, based off a 40hr work week.  

You do get a company vehicle which saves on gas driving to work.  I just really wished they paid more.  

One addition annoyance was the sales team/customer service team were not actual technicians, which meant when they sold packages to customers they didn’t clearly explain to the customers what they should expect. If a customer were to call in complaining about spiders the sales team would say “we have a service for that and can take care of the spiders”. So when the technician takes a call to address the spider issue the customer becomes upset when we explain that we cannot get rid of spiders 100% and that we can only Control the numbers they see around their home. Which is why you’ll lose money as a tech.  Because the customer will ask for a reservice to address one or two spiderwebs.

My management was inept when it came to pest control I had a supervisor send me sound bites for crickets chirping to help him identify problems for his customers. The pay was on commission so the morning meetings and excessive drive time were unpaid. the final straw I had been at work for 15 hours and fallen through a ceiling around 9 pm that evening sent my supervisor all the information he needed I finished the service because all services must be completed on the day assigned NO exception. I got home about 1130 pm back in the office before 7 to find I had been written up for falling through the ceiling. Not a 'hey I saw we sent you all over the map yesterday and you only made 80$ in the 17.5 hours you were in yesterday and you potentially injured yourself are you ok?' i got here's a write up now get back to work were sending you all over the metro area again and you will make even less because you're gonna go clean up other service specialist messes and not get paid since we cant bill the customers to redo the service we should have provided, to begin with. We were told to break federal laws on a regular basis: heavy storm? Spray the pesticides anyway. The storm has saturated the ground and is now draining off to creeks and rivers? Spray it. Standing water along a driveway? Best believe you need to spray it. Sales were pushy and most customers weren't able to understand the contracts they were signing. Do you have bedbugs? Oh well here sign here and we'll Take care of those your yard and routine pests as well! thought we were going to be here a couple of times to take care of your main issue? Nope! We'll be here 14 times this year and 9 times next year 3000$ total. when they thought they were signing up for a 600$ bill for us to take care of bed bugs. Arguing with customers was a part of daily life. You signed a contract we have rights to be on your property to perform our service and you aren't going to tell us no! If you do manage to tell us no we have to call our supervisor and 9/10 times we'll be calling back to inform you we will be doing your service anyway. Beware if you think about working there.

As a branch manager you have 15 minutes to answer texts anytime of day,  including at night I would have to respond at 11 PM quite a bit.  There is no day off for branch managers,  you work everyday all day sundays is a few hours of paperwork,  there is "vacation" time but I worked and did something almost every day I had off,  so you don't get the needed down time to de stress and re organize.  The pay is well below industry standard and the bonus levels were not attainable,  no one hit bonus in 2018 even though the company itself grew 5x the industry standard for yearly growth.  

The culture is forced down your throat every second of every day and you are not allowed to have your own opinion.  I was told they wanted critical thinkers but was silenced everytime I opened my mouth about anything. They say they pay people to follow their culture but all technicians are actually paid for is commission for the actual services.

Techs again are paid on commission,  they are deducted money for follow ups,  which goes against the industry goals of solving pest issues.  They blatantly lie to customers saying we would be able to solve issues that our contracts didn't guarantee.

You will be expected to travel with little notice.  You will be expected to drop whatever you are doing in the little free time you have, cancel planned vacations etc.. to do what they want you to do.

I told them I had an emergency with my home and needed to have someone come out to fix it (5 days prior to the scheduled meeting) and they wrote me up for not being able to travel that day to give a presentation about monthly data,  we did weekly internet meetings on data. So this was not a thing that even mattered in the long term. 

They say how much they want people to succeed, yet they do nothing to actually support people or to set them up for success.

I do not advise anyone to get a job here unless you do not mind working non stop; being under paid and under appreciated.

Initially I thought it would be a good work environment. The supervisors and manager of the inbound team were kind and considerate. However I soon realized that the supervisors didn't care about me or their job. We were often very busy and instead of helping us like they were supposed to, they would stand there talking and laughing. I would often hear them complain when they had to do any sort of hard work. Then when they made the manager of inbound also the manager of outbound, she suddenly became bitter toward us, hated me and continually micromanaged me for no apparent reason. I understand that she is under more pressure, but she shouldn't take her stress and frustration out on her employees. I had a hard time upselling products because the product they wanted us to upsell was unreliable and didn't work (MOS service). When they told us all the good the product does, I found their reasons to be vague and not backed by statistics to prove to us that it actually worked. This was also the product I received the most complaints about. We continually had back to back calls throughout the day. This didn't bother me, what bothered me was the lack of motivation to help us from the supervisors and manager. They could have jumped on the calls to help, or hired more people, but over the time I worked there they hired four people. Two got fired by our manager who was unwilling to work with them, and the other two quit. Overall for the volume of work we did, we were underpaid. The average hourly pay in Utah Valley for a customer service representative is $12.50/hr. Me and several other agents would have rather not been provided free lunch and instead been paid that extra $.50/hr. I found that the views within this review, were also shared by a number of other agents. Unless Edge hired new management and supervisors I would not recommend working there.

This company has its ups and downs just like any other company. As a technician though, they don’t care about you, you’re bottom of the barrel. They from day one will brag about how their company culture is ultimately superior, but at the end of the day, fail to live up to it. Technicians start out at 18/hr during training and then 10% commission when you’re done with training. Most techs I have seen have left after getting their first real check because Saela requires you to do the jobs of multiple positions in the company and then give you the worst pay in the company. They tell you how you need to keep a “love based mindset” instead of a “fear based mindset” but only preach this before giving you $1000 check for 80 hours of work. The only ups about this job are the people you meet such as new customers everyday and some coworkers, as well as having your own vehicle and being on your own schedule. Except Saela will micromanage by saying you need to be at your first house by 8:30 am for no reason. Management is probably the reason this job is a giant red flag. Your managers will feed you this corporate propaganda, make you go to meetings every Wednesday and Thursday for “culture”, and constantly tell you you’re not selling enough. Sales as a tech in this job is not worth it and any manager who says it is, only says it because they get a bigger bonus from it. If you sell a 300 dollar service, you get $30. And the rest goes to the company. They charge $60 for a bit of caulk around your AC line for christs sake. $60?! They are not loyal to their customers or employees and they as a company are not gonna last another 5 years with how this company is ran. Good luck to them.

Do not work here. The management is horrible. They didn’t give me any warning of not having a good performance and let me go after have being at the company for almost a year. The management down from the CEO want you to agree with everything they do at the company and if you don’t they will fire you all while asking you how you feel about the decisions made in the department. They just want you to say yes sir and do whatever it is that they want you to do no matter if it is right or wrong. The supervisor or “lead” is a horrible one who hardly ever does anything and is praised by management for some of the work she does, Hides in the bathroom for 15 minutes at a time as she has told me, goes on long walks outside while on the clock and gossips about everyone in the department and plays games on her phone most of the day.  She has a horrible attitude about the company and will discuss it with you as an employee and then go and pin every negative thing she has ever said about the company on you as she tells the managers about it. The environment is like a high school. I would never recommend my worst enemy to work in this department. They have horrible management in this department. The company in general is a multi millionaire  company because they screw people out of the money with outrageous cancellation fees and send them to collections if they can not pay them. A lot of the customers do not know they are being held in a contract because of the sly salesman and management. They are a greedy company who treats their employees awful and I would NEVER recommend working there.

From early morning to late at night, knocking doors and offering the best pest control.  But every door is not always pleasant.  In fact 90 percent of the responses are either negative or void.  Learning to push through constant self evaluation and be positive no matter what developed a strong determination to then greet another potential situation as if it was the first. If there were any hiccups management would seek to lift strengths from the weaknesses.  This is also while co-workers are cheering from the sideline.  Wanted for everyone to succeed, If I ever wanted to learn more about myself and what I want out of life it was on a street corner in the middle of a rainstorm.  Wondering if I should just keep pushing forward or give up.  This would also bring enjoyable results when someone finally places trust in me.  They take me at my word and move forward with the option I gave them.I even had the CEO seek to help me personally.  Want to help me succeed. Some branch favoritism. But motivation and support even if the sales are not rolling in.

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Pest control technician 117 salaries reported	$28.19 per hour
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Inside sales representative 8 salaries reported	$72,500 per year
Sales representative entry level 30 salaries reported	$4,967 per month

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