Editor’s Note: In a Pest Management Professional exclusive, Allergy Technologies’ President Joseph Latino and Senior VP Dominique Sauvage, ACE, discuss how pest management professionals (PMPs) can increase cooperation and responsiveness with residents and staff in affordable housing — and how Allergy Technologies’ Affordable Housing Control (ATAHC) program may help mitigate the issue. The conversation has been edited for formatting and space.
Dominique Sauvage
Dominique Sauvage (DS): Let’s think about this from a technician’s point of view. You arrive at the housing complex focused on what you need to do for service. You have neither the time nor the financial latitude to stand around and wait for every resident to open the door. You knock, wait 30 seconds, knock again and move on. The residents were given a time window for your arrival. Some might not be interested in answering the door, sure, but others might be expecting you and just didn’t hear you, or couldn’t come to the door quickly enough. With the ATAHC program, there’s a resident property coordinator, or RPC, in place who ensures the next resident’s unit is ready for you before you finish servicing the current unit. He or she has taken the time to ensure Mrs. Jones didn’t fall asleep, wasn’t in the shower, or simply had trouble getting up in a timely manner to answer her door.
Joseph Latino (JL): The key word is tolerance. PMPs don’t have the bandwidth to tolerate others’ schedules, their ability to get to the door, or even just having a bad day. The humanity doesn’t translate. It’s true for nearly all service providers.
DS: Maintenance, plumbing — like PMPs, these professionals are dealing with people who often are already upset with the situation. When I was running a route, I had a lady cuss me out enough to make a sailor blush just for knocking on her door.
Joseph Latino
JL: At the most basic level, we’re asking for entrance into their abode to kill pests. They have to lay down their guard, their safety net. The whole confluence of events can become aggravating.
DS: Communication is key. Sometimes the technician is not as adept as the managers or residents would like. Regardless, you should not accept poor documentation or communication from your techs. How many units were treated? What was used? Were door hangers placed on the doors? Did social services need to get involved in a problem unit? How was it resolved?
JL: The PMP is there to remediate for cockroaches, mice, bed bugs or other pests. But sometimes, the cooperation problems that can arise in these accounts can go beyond their skill sets. Through the ATAHC program, we position PMPs to be the best they can be, like coaches with their teams.
Would techs do a lot better if the resident wasn’t there? Sure! There’s less potential for confrontation. But that’s not realistic. From the start, good pest control company managers recognize where their techs will thrive. A tech who is adept at being a “people person” will likely do the best at a public housing account.
The right technicians for this job have respect, empathy and understanding. They have thick skin and the ability to be flexible.
DS: If you conducted a poll, you’d likely find PMPs split on whether they consider public housing commercial or residential. Whatever you call it, the key is you need the right person to interact with people.
JL: Our program takes special pains by having them prepared. Our RPCs live in the buildings and are employed under Section 3, so we’re giving back to the community. They go to units in need of service 15 minutes before each appointment. If the resident is not ready, they can tell the technician to skip the unit for the moment and return later.
DS: Bed bugs don’t have a calendar; they don’t care when the appointment was scheduled. Our program includes inspecting all the buildings and treating those with confirmed populations of bed bugs. We adhere to a stringent monitoring schedule to catch them early in the introduction process because just one female bed bug left unaddressed can grow the population to 30,000 bugs in 10 weeks. In a nutshell, we’d rather treat the snowball than the avalanche.
JL: This summer, we attended a major conference for housing authority property managers. Our booth had a steady stream of interested and potential participants in the ATAHC program. As a result, we’re in various stages of contracts in about a dozen markets. We’re always recruiting “talent” — that is, we need local PMPs in these markets who can meet the rigors of our program.
DS: Consider “the Copesan concept,” where there are additional companies on the bench. While we need to initially partner with a mid-sized company in a market for volume, we also want to give smaller companies opportunities to help them grow to the next level.
JL: We set the ATAHC bar very high so housing authority managers feel comfortable and confident engaging with something successful. What we try to do is, if you’re not quite at that bar, we’ll push you up to the bar. We’ll help you with mistakes. It’s not impossible to reach, you just need to be willing.
DS: You have to have “the skill and the will.” At the end of the day, Allergy Technologies wants to be a leader in services for affordable housing for pest control. We need PMPs to make this successful. It has to be a partnership. It’s not one-sided; it’s a partnership to help you grow your business. Now, if your documentation or training is lacking, you’re most likely lacking in other aspects of your business, too, and need to improve upon that before joining us.
JL: ATAHC can be a lucrative opportunity for Allergy Technologies and its PMP partners. Participating PMPs get paid the same rate as securing a client from a lead or cold call. Notifications, scheduling, billing — all these administrative tasks are both a time suck and a mind suck. We help deploy labor efficiently. You have 20 units but can only get into 10? You’re not going to get to the bottom of the pest problem. Let us help you get into the missing 10.
We’re always pushing for top-line growth while preserving bottom-line revenues. Not one or the other, but one and the other. You help us, we help you.
illustration: roxanabalint / iStock / Getty Images Plus / Getty Images
The Rockford files
In addition to ATAHC’s success in Philadelphia, Pa., the program has extended into a Rockford, Ill.-based senior citizen multiplex. Local pest management companies are involved, and they, too, are seeing early success. To learn how you and ATAHC can work to curb bed bugs and other pest populations in public housing in your markets, visit ATAHCnow.com.
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from Pest Management Professional https://www.mypmp.net/2024/11/09/implementing-athac-can-be-a-win-win/
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