Atlanta, Ga.-based Arrow Exterminators held its annual Fiscal Year Leadership Summit July 29 and 30 to celebrate a record-breaking 2025-2026 fiscal year.
More than 500 team members and partners descended on the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, where Arrow Exterminators recognized outstanding achievements from across the company, including surpassing $475 million in total revenue.
The event also set the stage for continued growth in 2026-2027, as the company introduced its new internal fiscal year theme, “Lead Every Day: Chasing Greatness.”
Arrow Exterminators was founded in 1964 and is the largest family-owned pest and termite control company in the United States, ranked by revenue. Chairman of the Board Joe Thomas is a Pest Management Professional Hall of Famer (Class of 2009).
Words to live by: Arrow Exterminators President and COO Tim Pollard said the “Lead Every Day: Chasing Greatness” theme refers to “the choices we make every day, how we support our teams, and how we continue raising the bar for ourselves and our company.” (PHOTO: KELLI PRICE PHOTOGRAPHY)The dream team: The Fiscal Year Leadership Summit brought together company executives, managers and corporate support teams to recognize outstanding achievements. Pictured from left are President and COO Tim Pollard, Service Center Manager Chris Sprinkle, VP of Benefits Hali Smith, Service Center Manager Joe Conway, Chief Administrative Officer Shay Runion and CEO Emily Thomas Kendrick. (PHOTO: KELLI PRICE PHOTOGRAPHY)A joint celebration: The Fiscal Year Leadership Summit marked the nation’s 250th birthday with festive décor such as this creative “cake,” which looked good enough to eat. (PHOTO: PMP STAFF)Class(y) reunion: More than 500 Arrow Exterminators team members and partners attended the two-day event. Presentations held during lunch and dinner gave attendees the opportunity to catch up with old friends and treasured colleagues. (PHOTO: PMP STAFF)
The Maryland State Pest Control Association (MSPCA), the Virginia Pest Management Association (VPMA) and other partnering organizations will offer a 100 percent virtual, live-streaming Spanish-Language Pest Control Training Course, designed to provide professional pest management education entirely in Spanish, on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Eastern.
The course is intended for Spanish-speaking applicators who are preparing to become Registered Technicians, as well as currently certified technicians seeking recertification credits in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, but is open to anyone who is looking for solid pest control training.
By offering the training entirely in Spanish and in a fully virtual format, the organizing sponsors hope to make professional education more accessible, support workforce development, and help Spanish-speaking pest management professionals strengthen their technical knowledge and meet certification requirements without the need to travel.
Recertification credits have been approved in Maryland for Categories 3A, 3C, 6, 7A, 10, and CORE. Credits have also been applied for in:
Pennsylvania: Categories 06, 07, 10, 11, and 18
Virginia: Categories 3A, 3B, 6, 7A, and 10
West Virginia: Categories 4A, 7, 8A, and 11
The cost to attend is $50 per person. Because this is a live virtual training, each participant must register with an individual email address in order to receive a personalized Zoom access link and meet attendance requirements for certification or recertification credit.
Pest management companies are encouraged to share this opportunity with Spanish-speaking employees who may benefit from certification preparation or continuing education. For additional information or to register, visithttps://tinyurl.com/spanish-pesticide-training.
About MSPCA & VPMA
The Maryland State Pest Control Association and the Virginia Pest Management Association represent and supports pest management professionals through education, training, industry resources, and professional development opportunities. This event is co-sponsored by the Maryland Department of Agriculture, the Virginia Department of Agriculture, the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech and West Virginia University.
Fall is prime time for yard cleanup, and many of your clients will soon be firing up their leaf blowers to clear their lawns of falling leaves and branches before winter sets in.
A common recommendation is to keep a well-maintained property to comabat a wide range of pest problems. But advising your clients on exactly how they manage the accumulation of landscape debris, especially leaf litter, can be just as important in reducing tick pressure as we approach the colder months.
A 2020 study published in the Journal of Medical Entomology looked at the impacts of blowing leaves into the wooded edge of a property rather than bagging or composting them. Researchers found that properties with accumulated leaf piles had up to three times more host-seeking nymphs of the blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis) than in untouched natural edges or the surrounding forest, compared to those properties where leaves were removed.
Thick leaf litter traps moisture and moderates temperature, creating a perfect refuge for the nymphs. By concentrating leaves along the transitional edge where lawns met woods, homeowners unintentionally created a prime tick habitat where their family and pets are most likely to pass through on a daily basis. Plus, when you consider that rats and mice also use brush piles to overwinter, you now have a perfect storm of rodent harborage and tick habitat that could encourage disease transmission.
This fall, encourage your clients to rethink where their yard debris ends up. Recommend bagging leaves for curbside pickup or composting rather than blowing or raking them toward the woods. If a landscaping contractor handles the property, ask that collected leaves be hauled offsite, or at least moved well away from high-traffic lawn edges instead of piled at the property line.
Mowing and trimming vegetation along that same transition zone adds another layer of protection, keeping the border drier, sunnier and far less hospitable to questing ticks.
The residential version of this story is simple: A garage door seals against a slab with a rubber gasket; the gasket wears; the mouse comes back. One opening, one wear item.
A loading dock is not one opening. It is four systems stacked on top of one another, built by different trades, maintained by nobody in particular, and the account manager calls the whole assembly “the dock door.” That is why the shipping area is the part of a manufacturing account that never stays clean.
The header above an overhead door is quiet, dry and almost never disturbed, which is why it collects webs and nests long before anyone notices. IMAGE: SEASIDE GARAGE DOOR EXPERTS
1. The pit, not the door
Start with the thing that stays open whether the door is up or down.
Most docks use a pit-style leveler, which is a steel deck that sits in a formed concrete pit, hinged at the back, with a lip that folds out onto the trailer. The leveler has to move inside that pit, so it cannot be tight against it. The standard result is a gap of roughly 1 inch running down both sides of the leveler and across the rear of the pit, open to outside air at the dock face.
That gap does not care about the overhead door. It is below it and behind it. A facility can shut every door at 6 p.m. and still have three open slots per dock position, plus the chain pull slot, plus the plug holes left from installation, plus whatever gap has opened between the transition plate and the concrete.
A quarter inch is a mouse. Half an inch is a rat. One inch by 3 feet, times four dock positions, is a highway.
Check it with the door down and the leveler stored, from outside, in daylight. You are looking straight into the building. If you can see the inside of the warehouse from the driveway with everything closed, that is your finding, and it outranks anything you will write about the door itself.
2. The corners of the dock seal
The foam pads around the opening are there so a backed-in trailer closes the gap between the truck and the building. They wear in a predictable pattern. The head pad at the top takes the beating; the side pads pull loose at the top corners. And what opens up is a small triangle at each upper corner where the head pad and the side pad no longer meet.
Look at the two top corners, not the middle. That is the same rule as the residential door, for the same reason: Everybody looks at eye level.
If the account runs dock shelters instead of seals, the wear shows in the curtain edges where the trailer body rubs, and in the bottom 6 inches where the tires and the bumpers hit.
3. A rolling steel door is not a weather door
This one surprises people, and it is worth knowing because it changes what you write in your inspection report.
A rolling steel service door is a curtain of interlocking slats riding in two guides, coiled on a barrel above the opening, covered by a sheet metal hood. None of that is a seal. The guide seals, the hood baffle and the rubber astragal on the bottom bar are separate line items that somebody either specified when they bought the door or did not.
On a 15-year-old warehouse door, for example, usually they did not. Even if they had, by now the seals have likely become brittle or were torn off by a forklift, and never came back. So look at three places on a rolling door: down both guides where the curtain meets the track, along the bottom bar, and up at the hood.
The hood is the one that gets missed. It is a cover over the coil, not a closed box, and on a lot of buildings it is the warmest, driest, most undisturbed spot on the exterior wall. Birds find it first. Then it is a nesting site 12 feet up with a direct line into the building.
4. The door that is never closed
On a door that cycles all day, the spring is what wears out first, and a broken spring is how a dock door ends up staying open. IMAGE: SEASIDE GARAGE DOOR EXPERTS
Half of what I get called out for at a warehouse is not a seal problem. It is that the door will not come down, so it stays up all day and everybody stops thinking about it. Two reasons dominate.
The first is the spring. A standard torsion spring set is usually rated somewhere around 10,000 open and close cycles. A dock door running 30 cycles a day gets there in under a year of plain arithmetic. When it breaks, the door is too heavy to close safely, and the building runs open until somebody schedules the repair.
The second is a bent bottom section. Forklifts hit doors. Once the bottom panel or the bottom bar is deformed, the door lands crooked or the safety edge reads an obstruction and sends it back up. Nobody calls that a pest issue. It is one for as long as it lasts.
Worn dock bumpers feed this. When the bumpers are ground down, the trailer contacts the building instead of the block, and the first things it crushes are the seal and the door track. Bumper wear shows up as a damaged door, not as a bumper complaint.
What to put in the report
Four lines let a door contractor price the correct work instead of guessing:
1. Pit leveler: gap measured at the sides and rear, with the leveler stored. 2. Dock seal or shelter: condition of the two upper corners. 3. Overhead or rolling door: guides, bottom bar and hood, noted separately. 4. Does the door actually close, and if not, why not.
To accomplish this, do “the dock walk,” which has four stops:
1. Outside, everything closed, leveler stored. Can you see into the building? That is the pit. 2. The two upper corners of the dock seal, where the head pad meets the side pads. 3. The rolling door: both guides, the bottom bar, then look up at the hood. 4. Ask whether the door closes at the end of every shift. If the answer is “it sticks,” that is a spring or a bent bottom section, not a habit.
Why it matters
A warehouse account is a recurring account, and recurring accounts get lost over conditions nobody documented. The dock is the one place where an exclusion recommendation can be completely correct and completely useless, because the opening that got sealed was never the opening they were using.
The dock belongs to three or four trades. Reading it, though, still belongs to pest management professionals.
A result above 10 percent is a sign of strength for the month, and a reading below 10 percent is a sign of softness for the month.
“The past five months have been below the long-term average and there was no improvement in August,” William Blair Equity Researcher Tim Mulrooney said.
Dan Gordon, managing member of PCO Bookkeepers & M&A Specialists, added, “At this point, the data suggest that the industry is experiencing a sustained period of softer growth rather than a single-month fluctuation. We’ll be watching the next few months closely to see whether this is a temporary slowdown or the beginning of a longer-term shift in the industry’s growth rate.”
The month’s results by segment include:
The Residential Pest Index increased 7 percent year-over-year.
The Commercial Pest Index increased 10 percent year-over-year.
The Termite Index increased 4 percent year-over-year.
The Bed Bug Index was flat year-over-year.
The Mosquito Index decreased 3 percent year-over-year.
About William Blair/PCO Bookkeepers & M&A Specialists
The William Blair/PCO Bookkeepers & M&A Specialists Pest Index tracks the monthly performance of 159 privately held pest control companies across 40 states with combined annual 2025 revenue of $633 million. The purpose of the report is to track the monthly performance of several U.S. pest markets. It does not include residential door-to-door companies.
Insects Limited introduces Moth Block, a trademarked, pheromone-based mating disruption solution for stored products moths. Designed for use as part of an integrated pest management (IPM) program, Moth Block releases pheromone into the treatment area to disrupt male moths’ ability to locate females, helping suppress the reproductive cycle.
Moth Block gives pest management professionals and food facilities another proactive tool for managing stored product moth populations and strengthening long-term IPM programs.
About Insects Limited
Pest Management Professional (PMP) Hall of Famer David Mueller, BCE, (Class of 2019) started Insects Limited in 1981. It was founded on a statement made by one of his entomology professors, fellow PMP Hall of Famer Dr. John Osmun (Class of 1997) at Purdue University: “The future of pest control is without the use of toxic chemicals.”
Today, per its website, the Westfield, Ind.-based pheromone technology company researches, tests, develops, manufactures and distributes pheromones and trapping systems for insects in a global marketplace with a focus on the statement above. It provides products and services that are mainstream in protecting stored food, grain, museum collections, tobacco and fiber worldwide.
Demand CS insecticide with iCAP technology from Syngenta helps control more than 30 pests, including ants, cockroaches, mosquitoes and more. Microcaps containing the active ingredient lambda-cyhalothrin release over time for quick knockdown and long-lasting residual control for up to 90 days. Even when used at its low rate, it can deliver more than 10,000 microcaps per square inch of treated surface or area for greater control.
Demand CS comes in two convenient packaging options tailored for your business needs:
Demand CS 10-gallon drum (pictured)
Capable of mixing large volumes (up to 6,400 gallons of finished dilution)
No electric pump required with a simple, gravity-fed dispensing nozzle
Built-in impeller helps deliver a more consistent product uniformity
Stackable, ergonomic design for easier storage and transport
Demand CS Master Shipper
Contains 24 quarts of Demand CS in a single case
Provides up to 3,840 finished gallons of broad-spectrum, residual pest control
Purchase the Demand CS 10-gallon drum, the Demand CS Master Shipper or any combination of Syngenta products that generate at least $200 in base rebates by April 30, 2027, to automatically become a 2027 PestPartners 365 Program member — with no forms required. Plus, these purchases can get you one step closer to earning the uncapped Early Order Bonus, which can add up to 50 percent on top of your base rebate total with no limit when ordered by Nov. 18, 2026.
About Syngenta PPM
Based in Greensboro, N.C., the U.S. Syngenta Professional Pest Management division is part of Syngenta Group, a worldwide manufacturer headquartered in Switzerland. Among its many initiatives, Syngenta actively partners with conservation groups around the world to maintain natural environments and eradicate pests that threaten native species. As a developer of innovative pest control products, Syngenta works with conservationists to provide solutions to aid wildlife recovery efforts that help communities boost nature-based tourism and fuel economic growth.
In November, Syngenta marked the 25th anniversary of its founding in 2000 by the merger of Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemical. This milestone caps a quarter-century of innovation built on a legacy extending back more than 250 years to the founding of the Swiss chemical company Geigy in 1758. Today, Syngenta Crop Protection includes a line-up of approximately 37 seed treatments, 54 herbicides, 44 fungicides, 21 insecticides and counting.
