Leading Change: The Evolution of Jared Toone and Scout Pest Control

Too little time being present with family.

Too little time serving at church.

Too little time enjoying vacation.

Too little became too much for Jared Toone. 

Same for his wife, Ashlee.

"You've got to quit working so much in the business," Ashlee told Jared, the owner of Scout Pest Control in Alabama, in 2018. "You need to hire people to do the stuff that you can, and then you need to spend your time working on growing the business and improving the business."

So Jared Toone transformed the business based in Tanner, AL. And he transformed himself. 

The results are staggering:

"A big part of improving the business, and my wife and I have had conversations about this, is improving me," Toone says.

Here are some of the key actions Toone has taken.

Hire more employees

Toone, with financial support of two partners, opened Scout Pest Control in 2013 in Tanner, a community just north of the Tennessee River, about 25 miles west of Huntsville in northern Alabama.

Toone’s experiences in the first few years weren’t unique to owners of new or small businesses, especially those in the pest control industry.

"You work crazy hours," Toone says. "When we first started, I would sell in the afternoons, from maybe 3 to 8. And then I would service the next morning. I would try to find an hour I could spend with my daughters and my wife. I would be up until midnight or so doing all the office work."

The Toones are parents to triplets: Charli, Abbi, and Mia, now age 15 but toddlers when Scout Pest Control opened. The couple added their fourth daughter, Penny, who is now 9 and came along just before the Toones figured out the business needed to operate differently. The Toones also have welcomed Lucy, who is now 6. 

For Jared Toone to fully begin making time for those closest to him, his first key move would be to add employees to Scout Pest Control. 

"I had technicians, and I'd spend more time selling or more time training office staff," he says. 

More employees helped, of course, but Toone still struggled to change the business.

"I was constantly so busy in actually doing the day-to-day work," he says. "I got bogged down. It was hard."

He couldn't find opportunities to recharge on vacations, either.

"I was just stressed out thinking, 'Man, there's all this revenue I'm losing and I've got to keep the revenue coming in because I've got to make sure everybody's paid."

His employees tried to leave him alone when Toone was away. But as owners of small businesses know, there's still that phone call or two presenting an issue that only the owner can solve.

"We'd go to the beach, and I'm gonna bring my cell phone down to the beach because I've got to be available," he says.

There was a solution, one that could answer most questions.

Establish manuals, processes, and training

Toone's training helped Scout Pest Control. Yet, in the early days of his move toward operational change, Toone would still field questions from his team. Every pest control operator has heard them.

"How do I …?"

Those answers would be found in Scout Pest Control's first manual, written by Toone.

"I could give that to technicians when we hired them and say, 'OK, here's how you do service,’” he says. “It covered most of the big tips and tricks. 'Here's how you get rid of this, here's how you handle this.'"

Toone's manual put systems into place, covering not just routine service but "tricky stops, hard stops."

Not only has the manual not sat idly, it's been updated multiple times, with another revision approaching the finish line in early 2026. His human resources director and residential and commercial services managers are taking the lead on authoring that update.

Manuals covering commercial and termite service are on the horizon.

"We've got processes in place, but this is making it even more clear where to get answers," Toone says. "Manuals are very helpful, but they've also got to be used. Just writing one that's put on a shelf and never looked at doesn't do anybody any good."

Coupling a manual with intensive training has proven to be a winning strategy for Scout Pest Control.

"It's not something where we just train and, 'OK, now you're done,'" he says. "We train, then we train, then we train some more.

"We also have a lot of follow-up where we go behind the technicians, we're checking on them. And we tell the technician what we do. We come in and say, 'Hey, here's how it looks.' And they know we're doing that for their own good to try and help make sure they're giving their very best and they understand what they're doing and why they're doing it."

Guidelines and training are good, but as Toone will tell you, "That's only half of it."

Build the culture

Getting the right employees placed in the right positions, Toone believes, is an important part of setting culture in the workplace.

"If you have the right culture, a lot of times poor performers are going to weed themselves out," Toone says. "They don't want to be in a culture where everybody is striving to do the very best that can be done."

A key part of Scout Pest Control's culture is delivering excellent customer service. Scout has earned a 4.9 rating on 1,900 Google reviews. 

Customers can count on a response from Scout Pest Control. Whether it's for a 5-star rating, for which technicians earn incentives, or the rare opposite, Toone and his team reach out because they consider all feedback a win.

Credit the training but also the culture, for both technicians and office staff, for those wins. 

"Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care," he says. "We also train on, 'This is how you talk to the customer, this is how you show respect, this is how you can go in there and help them feel value as a customer."

Delegate responsibilities

Working on the business instead of in the business has also shown Toone the power of delegating tasks.

Toone didn't initially succeed at removing himself from Scout Pest Control's operations. But now he'll only provide service himself a couple or three times a year, and he stays away from day-to-day office tasks. 

Though he's still involved in details, now they're the right details. He expects his managers to be involved in supervising their direct reports, and he does likewise with his managers.

"It's the job of the manager to be into the details, because that's the only way to consistently ensure quality and that the people are doing a great job,” Toone says. “One of the things that was really hard for me was not being the one if a correction needs to happen. I need to let that technician's manager know, and then they can reach out to the technician, correcting it with them."

Reap the benefits of change

In the more than seven years since Scout Pest Control and Toone implemented a paradigm shift, numerous other strategies have been a part of the company’s success. 

For example, Toone initially hired a door-to-door team that delivered new accounts. But Toone learned through attrition of those accounts that Scout could experience better growth if he took a lead role in marketing. 

Toone is also constantly looking for better ways. If he sees another company using a service strategy more effectively than his team, he says, "I'm going to implement it. I'm not hesitant to make changes."

Scout Pest Control, which recently implemented FieldRoutes as its CRM, is several years into embracing technology, which creates efficiencies and drives revenue growth.

Connectivity and performance issues for technicians in the previous platform prompted him to shop for a new software provider. Toone saw FieldRoutes in operation by visiting Magic City Pest Control in Birmingham, AL, and Go-Forth Home Services in High Point, NC.

Toone came away impressed with FieldRoutes' reliability, reporting capabilities, intuitive admin controls, flexible pricing based on active customers rather than user licenses, and features such as the conditions tab and Trigger Rules that support technicians and marketing efforts. He is also confident in FieldRoutes' long-term trajectory, noting that ServiceTitan's acquisition has steadily improved the platform—a contrast to his experience with his former software provider.

Toone also became a believer in author John C. Maxwell's "21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership," particularly his first one, "The Law of the Lid."

"An organization is never going to be able to exceed the capacity or the ability of their leader," Toone says. 

Clearly now, there is no lid on what Scout Pest Control and Toone can achieve. 

Toone is more present for his family, supporting the triplets on their soccer teams and even coaching the teams for which Penny and Lucy play.

"I'm able to do that because I have such a great team in place and systems and processes in place," Toone says.

He likes serving in his church, and working on the business rather than in it has facilitated more time for that. 

And Ashlee and Jared Toone, in 2025, took a trip to Greece with one of the triplets.

"I was gone for 10 days and didn't hear anything from anybody," he says of those once-expected calls from the office.

Whether you're talking business growth for Scout Pest Control or personal growth for Jared Toone, the results, indeed, are staggering.

"As I've been focusing on improving my business, it's also been a journey of helping me to be better," he says.

SCOUT PEST CONTROL

• Owner: Jared Toone.

• Year opened: 2013.

• Locations: 2. Main office in Tanner, AL, with a second office in Huntsville, AL. The company plans to open an office in Florence, AL, in 2026.

• Number of technicians: 12.

• Services: Residential (80-85% of Scout’s business) and commercial. Rodent, termite, bed bug, mosquito, and green.

• Learn more: ScoutPestControl.com