Lloyd Pest Control president Ogle keeps longtime family firm rolling while putting his own stamp on itBy Dean Calbreath,
San Diego Union
November 15, 2006
In the course of his job, Jamie Ogle has come face to face with a dead opossum in the crawl space beneath a customer's house. He has hammered a rat to death with the back of his flashlight as it skittered around an elderly woman's attic. And his hand has swollen to the size of a catcher's mitt after being stung by a bumblebee.
But Ogle says his biggest challenge was taking over Lloyd Pest Control, a San Diego extermination company celebrating its 70th anniversary under his family's control, including 39 years under his grandfather James Sr. and 25 years under his father, James Jr., or Jim.
Transitions at a family-run company sometimes go horribly awry as the torch passes from a well-established parent to a young heir. Jamie Ogle – whose formal name is James Ogle III – was only 32 when he took over the company in 2000; many of his employees were older and had worked longer at the company than he had.
“I inherited a staff of executives who had worked with my father and were getting a new boss whether they liked it or not,” Ogle said. “It was a challenge to keep that team together and cohesive.”
What made the job even more challenging was that Ogle, who had just earned his MBA from the University of San Diego, wanted to try out everything he had just picked up in school.
“All the ideas that my dad had previously said 'no' to were now in play, although I later learned not to have too many moving parts at once – like changing the computer systems and phone systems at the same time,” he said.
Despite a somewhat bumpy beginning, Ogle kept his father's management team together and retained a large number of older workers. And thanks to some of his management innovations – like centralizing the company's phone system and pumping more money into advertising – he has increased the company's sales from about $13.5 million a year to more than $20 million, and its work force from 200 to 250.
Lloyd ranks as the 29th-largest pest-control company in the country and third-largest in Southern California, according to Pest Control Technology magazine.
With the relatively smooth transition, the Ogle family bucked the odds. In fact, a study of family-owned businesses by the Grant Thornton consulting firm found that only 10 percent of family-owned businesses survive the third generation, partly because of fights among siblings and cousins.
Fortunately for Jamie, his younger brother Robert was more interested in teaching English than killing bugs. Any friction during the transition was between father and son.
“Jamie and Jim went through the usual kind of thing that happens to a family business,” said Bill Adair, who has been a customer and friend of the Ogles for more than 20 years. “When it gets time for the elder to retire, it's always difficult to let go, and there's always the enthusiasm and vim and vigor of the younger generation saying, 'Yeah, I know how to do this.' But Jamie handled the transition well, and it's been interesting to watch him mature as a businessman and get the company into a good growth spurt.”
Pat Hyndman, another longtime Lloyd customer, said that “with the Ogle family, each generation is better than the one that preceded it. They've all been first-class people and a joy to deal with. And Jamie's a bright, personable young guy.”
Long family traditionJames Ogle Sr. started the family tradition of pest control in the 1920s, when he took a job as a rat killer at Western Exterminators in Los Angeles.
By 1936, James was making $821 a year, well below the median salary but not altogether bad for a high school dropout in the midst of the Great Depression. With a bit of frugality, he saved $135 in 1936 to buy an extermination company called The Lloyd Co., which he quickly changed to Lloyd Pest Control.
“He was an entrepreneur,” Jamie Ogle said. “He made his reputation for getting rats out of downtown buildings by any means necessary.”
In one method, James would stand on one side of a wall, spraying gas to flush out the rats. On the other side, his son Jim would be waiting with a sawed-off shotgun, poised to shoot any rodents that emerged.
The company stopped using shotguns a couple of decades ago, but not before a SWAT team was called out to stop an employee who was using a shotgun to chase a bird out of a customer's supermarket.
Unlike James, who had dropped out of high school to help support his parents, Jim Ogle earned a business degree at the University of California Berkeley. In 1975, James handed control of Lloyd to Jim, who put greater emphasis on customer service and quality control. Jim also brought in a certified entomologist, Herb Field, to help train employees in killing insects.
“When Jim first hired me, his dad kept calling me 'the college kid' and asking Jim why he thought he needed someone like me,” said Field, now the company's chief operating officer. “But Jim was like a second father to me, especially since my real dad died when I was young.”
Field says he admires Jamie because he shares many of Jim's qualities, especially humility. “You'd never guess that either of them ran a multimillion-dollar company,” he said. “They're very down to earth.”
Jamie Ogle was in high school when he began working at Lloyd as a part-time janitor as well as doing occasional repairs and maintenance on the company's fleet of trucks.
Ogle says his father never tried to push him into the business. “Dad was always saying: 'If you want to get into business, that's fine. If you don't, just make sure you enjoy whatever you do.' ”
But the idea of working at a family firm appealed to Ogle. At age 18, he got his exterminator's license. By that time, ants were the main pest the company dealt with, followed by termites, cockroaches, spiders and rodents.
“Any job we do in the field, I spent some time doing,” Ogle said. “There's a lot of hard work involved, like checking someone's attic in El Cajon in the middle of summer when it's 110 degrees. Or crawling through spider webs in someone's basement while you're looking for termites. Or wrapping a house with tarp to fumigate it when it's pouring down rain.”
Fighting the beesOr wrangling bumblebees without the proper protection. Assigned to rid a woodpile of bumblebees when he was in his mid-20s, Jamie didn't know that a typical beekeeper's glove is too thin to keep out a bumblebee's stinger. He also didn't realize that he was allergic to bee stings. After he was stung, it took an ice whirlpool to get the swelling down and a strong dose of Benadryl to combat the allergic reaction.
Even after becoming president in 2000, Jamie still goes into the field at least twice a year. But most of his time is spent in the office, monitoring expenses, talking with customers and keeping an eye on quality control.
Longtime customer Hyndman, who first met Jamie when he was crawling under Hyndman's house to check for termites, said the transition from Jim to Jamie was “more awkward than you might imagine,” because Jamie has a less conservative management style than his father's. But he added that “every month the company sets new records, so Jamie must be doing something right.”
James Spring, the marketing manager at Lloyd, says that when Jamie took over, the company was maintaining a steady, conservative course. “But Jamie came in with a lot of ambition and decided he wanted to really shake things up, pursuing things that we hadn't gone for in the past,” he said.
Not long after taking over, Jamie overhauled the company's advertising and marketing campaign – employing cartoon ants, fleas and roaches – and then hired a lot of new exterminators to handle the business that the new ads would bring in.
Unfortunately, the ads didn't bring in quite as many new customers as he had counted on, and within months, he had to make radical changes to keep the company afloat.
“When I took over, everyone on Wall Street was talking about the importance of growth over profits, and I came in thinking, 'Let's grow, grow, grow,' ” Jamie said. “But suddenly we were losing money, and I had to figure out how to curtail our hiring in a way that could keep the company growing.”
An innovation that worked better was Jamie's concept of centralizing customers' phone calls, so that all orders and complaints are fielded at a call center in the main headquarters on Morena Boulevard rather than the five branch offices. The centralization helps the company assign exterminators where they are most needed.
Listening inOgle placed the call center within earshot of the top executive offices. “That way, we can hear whether we're doing a good job or not,” he said.
Another innovation was to install video cameras on most of the company's fleet of 200 trucks, so executives can monitor accidents or risky driving as it occurs.
Since the cameras were introduced by DriveCam, a San Diego company, Lloyd has chopped the number of its claims in half, and the number of preventable crashes has dropped to zero.
Ogle says that even though some of the drivers were skeptical at first, most have since conceded that they changed their driving behavior after the cameras were installed. Some even noticed that their driving habits have improved off the job.
“It'll be on all of our trucks by end of the month, including my own vehicle,” Ogle said.
The biggest challenge that Ogle faces now is the downturn in the real estate market, which has dramatically slowed the number of termite inspections that Lloyd conducts.
“We haven't laid anybody off, but business is down,” Ogle said. “We're trying harder to develop our own leads to replace that business.”
