I sold it off a doorstep before I ever tried to fix one.
First-year salesman posts $150,046 in four months, then sets out to stop the leaks he saw
Blake Leach closed 163 accounts for a pest control company in a single season. The number that stayed with him, he says, was the money that never arrived.
WEATHERFORD — Blake Leach had never sold anything when he picked up a clipboard in May. By the end of the summer the company’s own leaderboard showed 163 new accounts and $150,046 in contracted service against his name, a rookie season the firm put on its posters.
Leach says the sales were the easy half. Customers he signed on a Tuesday sometimes had no first visit on the books a week later. Others reached their third service and cancelled, and only then said why. Balances went unpaid not because customers refused to pay, but because nobody had asked them.
“I was carrying revenue in the front door and watching more of it walk out the back,” Leach said.
The owner, he says, was running payroll, answering the phone and pulling a truck out of the shop, and nobody had the hours to build the system that would have caught it. In September, Leach left to build it himself.
Continued on A7
Four months knocking doors for one pest control company. I had never sold anything before I picked up a clipboard. What I came away with was not a sales record, it was a list of problems nobody inside the company could see.
What that actually looked like
I would close a family on a random Tuesday and find out a week later the service never got finished, because the tech never showed. Customers cancelling at their third service told me, word for word, that they did not know what they were paying for anymore. I kept meeting people we had already sold who were still waiting on a first visit.
Then the balances. Somebody handed me a list of customers who owed money and told me to sort it out, so I sat there texting every one of them by hand. Most were not refusing to pay. Their card had expired. That was it. Accounts already sold, already serviced, needing thirty seconds of somebody's attention, and nobody had thirty seconds left to give.
None of it was anyone's fault. There was no system. The owner was running payroll and answering the phone and pulling a truck out of the shop, and nobody had the hours left to look at where the money was going. That is the work.
