Case Study
Cowley’s Pest Services
Over the course of nearly 30 years, Cowleys Pest Services has grown exponentially while remaining a family-owned and operated pest control business.
Providing pest control services for residential, commercial, and industrial customers throughout New Jersey, the company has continued to grow and evolve over the years to ensure they’re always providing customers with the best service possible.
Since starting the company as a two-man operation, owners Drew and Bill Cowley have grown their business to employ over 35 full-time employees and service over 33,000 customers.
Founded: 1991
Services Provided
Residential and commercial pest control, including termites, bed bugs, and wildlife
Areas Served
Central New Jersey, including Monmouth, Ocean, Mercer, and Middlesex Counties
WorkWave Solutions
Contact Us, Business Reviews and Reports, GPS, Mobile, RouteOp, Call Ahead, WorkWave Payments
The Challenge
Cowleys Pest Services first partnered with WorkWave PestPac in 1991. The company began to grow more rapidly when Drew and Bill first partnered together, with Drew’s wife Sandy handling all of the scheduling, bookkeeping, and routing on paper. With this increased growth, it quickly became evident that technology had to play an immediate role for the company to reach its full potential.
As they began hiring employees and expanding, they found themselves wasting time passing a physical scheduling book back and forth among customer service representatives as calls came in to book new appointments. More employees meant a greater ability to serve customers, but it also meant more logistics and paperwork that the team had to then handle on their own.
[PestPac] is what tells me what’s going on inside of my business and all the different areas that I need to measure and improve… We have key performance indicators for different areas of our business, and we can pull all that information out of here every month and see how we did. And if we didn’t do well in a certain area, then we can go find out why… You have to know your numbers, and PestPac allows you to know what’s going on inside your business which is critical.
The Solution
The first step for Cowleys Pest Services was to find a smarter way to handle scheduling, and they found it with WorkWave. Initially, they used their new routing software alongside the physical scheduling book, but Bill points out that this changed quickly once staff members adjusted to the change. As he puts it, “It couldn’t have been more than a week… the book ended up in the garbage.”
After seeing how WorkWave’s scheduling software helped their team to do more, Cowleys Pest Services’ relationship with technology—and with WorkWave—took off. Scheduling, routing, and “just about every facet of [the] business” began to grow with WorkWave and PestPac. Over the 30 years that Cowleys Pest Services has been partnered with WorkWave, the technology has progressed to help them transition from scheduling books and piles of paperwork, to handheld computers, to mobile apps and paperless interactions. As Bill reflects, “When you have 20 technicians out there every day, and… everyone brings back their pile of paper, and then they have to process all that paperwork, that really doesn’t scale.” These days, their team is even larger and takes full advantage of the PestPac mobile app for a more efficient, paperless approach to operations.
It’s helped us grow our business. You can’t grow a business without the right software. You just can’t do it.
WorkWave has expanded its software to address the evolving needs of modern pest control companies, and Cowleys Pest Services has taken advantage of new functions and features to scale the software to match its own growth. By helping the Cowleys Pest Services team to automate many of their processes, WorkWave gives them the tools they need to focus on better serving their customers to maximize efficiency and profitability. “The software has gotten better and better and better as you keep adding new features, new modules,” Bill says. “So we’re able to do more things. We’ve kind of grown with [WorkWave]. You guys have grown dramatically, and so have we.”
These days, Cowleys Pest Services has come to count on WorkWave for everything from routing and vehicle tracking to payments and marketing, ensuring that their entire team is always on the same page and well-equipped to operate as efficiently as possible. Features like RouteOp and GPS allow the team to find the most efficient routes possible and even promote safer driving habits. Meanwhile, WorkWave Agency works with Cowleys Pest Services to tailor custom digital and traditional marketing strategies. When it’s time to collect payments from customers, they know that WorkWave Payments facilitates secure information management and helps them to get paid more quickly. Cowleys Pest Services has come to view its relationship with WorkWave as one that it can count on, knowing that WorkWave will always be there to evolve along with it and help it scale as it grows to reach its full potential.
The Results
Increase of 20-25 appointments per tech per day
6,400 jobs per month with RouteOp
Save 30-60 minutes of drive time per tech per day
