Pest control begins with an uninvited guest and a very ordinary question: who can get here soon? CJ Edgington built a company around answering it, then answering it again before the ants, spiders or mosquitoes return. RIDD, the business he co-founded in Lehi, Utah, in 2020, sells a promise whose glamour is inversely proportional to its usefulness. Keep the house comfortable. Keep the calendar. Keep coming back.
Edgington serves as CEO beside co-founders Carson Bird and Jason Wilde. The three arrived with experience in door-to-door pest-control sales, including sales-management experience among the ownership group. They understood a blunt fact that many young businesses learn slowly: a good service with no distribution is a private hobby. RIDD began with people who knew how to walk a neighborhood, explain a recurring plan and hear the word no without confusing it for a verdict on their character.
That gave the company momentum. It also created a looming obligation. Every contract signed on a porch becomes a technician visit, a route, a reminder, a payment and, eventually, a renewal. Selling can happen in a bright summer burst. Service happens on wet Tuesdays in February. Edgington's real company would be built in the long distance between those two moments.
01 / DistributionThe porch was the first platform
Door-to-door sales has an old-fashioned physicality. There is no refresh button, no tidy funnel graphic and no place to hide a weak explanation. The representative crosses a lawn, rings a bell and borrows a minute from a stranger. In RIDD's case, that labor became a practical launch system. Existing sales relationships helped bring representatives into the new company, and the doors put early accounts on the board.
The offer was legible. Homes attract pests. One treatment may solve today's nuisance, but prevention asks for a schedule. RIDD packaged general pest control with services for mosquitoes, ticks and fleas, rodents, termites, German cockroaches, snakes, moles and carpenter bees. The recurring plan made a seasonal sale valuable after the rep left town. It also forced the company to become dependable, because a subscription is merely a promise with a billing date.
The door created demand. The route decided whether demand became a business.
By 2022, RIDD reported $8.9 million in revenue. The next year brought $14.5 million. In 2024, the figure reached a reported $25 million. Those numbers placed the company on the pest-control industry's PCT Top 100 and later on an Inc. 5000 profile. Revenue is the neat part of the story, a smooth line that fits on a chart. The underlying work is gloriously untidy: technicians, trucks, products, weather, customer messages and homes that never arrange themselves in a convenient order.
Revenue found a steeper ladder
Reported annual revenueA three-year view of RIDD's publicly reported revenue. The bars show company results, not Edgington's personal income.
02 / OperationsGrowth sends an invoice
At 6,000 customers, manual work could still masquerade as a process. People sent reminders one by one. Account closures did not automatically produce confirmation emails. Basic administrative gestures depended on someone remembering to make them. Then the customer count climbed to 30,000 in 2024. A small inefficiency repeated 30,000 times is no longer small. It is payroll.
RIDD's operations team began using trigger rules in its FieldRoutes software for appointment reminders, batch charges, payment status, account freezes and handoffs to collections. The mechanics sound modest because they are. A customer gets the right message when the account reaches the right condition. Yet the team estimated that these routines saved roughly $100,000 a year, about the cost of three entry-level administrative roles in its calculation.
Routing mattered even more. Moving a technician between homes costs time, fuel and the use of a truck before a minute of treatment begins. RIDD's typical technician day rose from about 10 stops to 14 as route templates and scheduling became more flexible. Dan Farah, the company's chief administrative officer, identified the trip to the home as the operation's central cost constraint.
This is where Edgington's role comes into focus, even without a theatrical founder mythology. A CEO of a route-based service business is responsible for the coherence of many small systems. Sales should not outrun staffing. Staffing should not outrun training. Routes should not eat the margin. Automation should remove repetition without removing care. The business lives in coordination.
03 / CultureA sales season needs a memory
In March 2022, Edgington, Bird and Wilde sat together for a 63-minute episode of RIDD's Rally Room podcast. The subject was the approaching summer: projections, preparation and how representatives could succeed once they hit the doors. The appearance is a useful snapshot of the company at an earlier stage. Leadership was not speaking from a distant corporate balcony. It was addressing the field rhythm that supplied the business with customers.
The podcast's larger brief is door-to-door sales and self-development. That pairing reveals something about the culture RIDD chose to cultivate. Direct sales turns resilience into a job requirement, then surrounds it with targets, rituals and stories. For a growing home-services company, media can preserve those stories after a summer team scatters. It gives a seasonal workforce a common vocabulary and lets experienced sellers teach without fitting everyone into the same room.
RIDD's motto, “Service Above All,” pushes in the opposite direction from a sales culture that might otherwise worship the close. A contract is only the opening scene. The technician who arrives on time, explains the work and respects the home has to redeem what the rep promised. The customer does not care which internal team won the argument. The customer cares that the wasps are gone and the appointment was painless.
A recurring service company compounds whatever it repeats: trust, friction or both.
04 / ExpansionLocal density, national ambition
By 2025, RIDD's footprint included Utah and five Southeastern states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Its listed operation included 40 technicians, 30 office staff and roughly 200 sales representatives. Those figures describe a peculiar shape. The demand engine can swell in summer, while the service engine must keep turning all year.
Expansion does not make pest control less local. It makes local knowledge repeat across more places. A technician in coastal South Carolina faces a different mix of pressure than one working along Utah's Wasatch Front. The company markets tailored plans and locally based professionals, which means scale cannot become sameness. The central system must be consistent enough to schedule, communicate and bill, while the work at the property stays specific.
One branch also became a transaction. In May 2024, Massey Services acquired RIDD Pest Control of Miami, a South Florida operation serving residential pest, termite, mosquito and rodent customers. The public announcement concerned that branch, not RIDD as a whole. For an operator, the distinction matters. A route, a customer book and a local team can form a transferable asset inside a wider company.
Edgington's public profile remains focused on RIDD rather than on a sprawling personal brand. The company supplies the evidence: the launch year, the co-founders, the numbers, the markets and the systems installed as growth exposed their need. It is an appropriately practical record for a practical business. Bugs do not applaud vision statements. They return through the same crack.
05 / The lessonBuild for the second visit
The useful idea in RIDD's story is not limited to pest control. Many service businesses begin when someone can sell the work. They become durable when someone can make the work recur without making the customer feel processed. Edgington and his co-founders started with distribution, then had to add the less visible disciplines: routing, automation, training, communication and market-by-market execution.
There is a sharp distinction between recurring billing and a recurring relationship. The first is a payment setting. The second is earned each time the company enters a customer's orbit. A missed appointment, a confusing message or a hurried visit can spend trust faster than a promotion creates it. RIDD's operating work matters because prevention is experienced as a sequence, not a single dramatic rescue. The company has to be present enough to feel dependable and quiet enough to let the homeowner forget about the bugs.
That order is messy, but honest. Young companies rarely build the complete machine before demand arrives. Demand reveals which gear is missing. At RIDD, a rising customer count exposed the burden of manual messages. More technicians exposed the economics of drive time. More states exposed the need to combine centralized systems with local judgment. Each constraint arrived dressed as an operational nuisance and carrying a management lesson.
The porch still matters. It is where RIDD's early advantage became visible, one conversation at a time. But the company Edgington leads now lives beyond the knock. It lives in the quiet moment when a reminder goes out by itself, a route saves twenty miles and a technician reaches the next home on schedule. Growth may begin with persuasion. It survives on follow-through.