Who Schedules the Pest Control Technicians? At Adams Exterminators, the Technicians Do.

At most pest control companies, the office schedules the pest control technicians. A dedicated team builds routes, assigns stops, and pushes appointments out to the field. The technicians show up and work the list.

With the Sinyard family, it is the other way around, and they think that's a big part of why Adams Exterminators technicians complete more stops per day while establishing a much more personal relationship with their customers.

At Adams, an eight-location pest control company based in Albany, Ga., each technician owns their route.

Adams customers auto-populate in the FieldRoutes Mobile app at the start of each month via the Auto Scheduling feature. Every account for which they're responsible is visible on their phones. From there, the technicians reach out to customers directly, move appointments as needed, and manage their own calendar without touching a desktop or waiting on anyone in the office.

Jeannine Fischer, a senior product manager at FieldRoutes, said the Adams model stands out precisely because most companies go the other direction.

"When you trust your technicians to do more, and use the platform to monitor and support them, you end up with far more effective operations," Fischer said.

The FieldRoutes Mobile app is built to support exactly that kind of empowerment. A technician can text a customer they're on the way, check in at an appointment, apply products, report conditions, collect payment, and schedule the next appointment — all from the same screen, without logging into a separate system.

Jana Kelly, a FieldRoutes product manager who works closely with Adams on their account configuration, said the company has done something notable: taken a feature set that wasn't originally designed for their use case and made it work at their scale.

"They're one of those customers who really maximizes what FieldRoutes can do," Kelly said. "They know how to make the platform work hard for them."

What makes the model viable at Adams isn't just the software. Beau Sinyard, who helps lead the company alongside his father and two brothers, said Adams pays its pest control technicians on production rather than by the hour. They earn a percentage of what they service. They don't get paid until the customer pays.

That pay structure makes route ownership personal. A technician who controls their own schedule, and whose income depends on completing it, has every reason to stay on top of their customers, move efficiently, and show up on time.

"Our techs do not receive their production commission until the customer pays," Sinyard said. "So it works incredibly well."

Kelly said spreading scheduling across the technician team, rather than centralizing it in the office, doesn't mean managing less. It means managing differently and trusting the people closest to the customer to make good decisions.

"They've spread it across their techs," Kelly said. "And they trust their techs to be able to do it, and the techs like having that control."

More on Adams Exterminators:
‘If You’ve Got Bugs, Call My Daddy’

How Adams Exterminators Cut Receivables to a Six-Year Low While Continuing to Grow the Business