Murph || Building blue collar hiring funnels

What value do you get from asking if it’s their first time hiring a cleaner? I’ve seen a lot of people ask customers this and I’ve always wondered what you do differently based on that information

Official ranking of male professions: 1) Finance Bro — Makes like $500K. Every West Village girl wants him. Barely needs to text back. 2) Unemployed DJ — $37 to his name. Sleeps with more women than the entire list combined. 3) Bartender — Has already slept with your girlfriend. Makes six figures pouring vodka sodas. 4) Firefighter — Women love him. Works 2 24 hour shifts a week. Has 3 situationships. 5) Doctor — Every Jewish mother's dream. Loses his girlfriend to the bartender tho, but bangs his hot PA. 6) Tech Sales — Makes $200K doing absolutely nothing. Personality revolves around golf and cocaine. 7) Lawyer — highest salary. Bald at 29 tho. Wife is secretly on Raya and cheating on him with ⬇️. 8) Personal Trainer — Broke, but with abs & arms. Knows your wife better than you do. Has fun. 9) Real Estate Agent — Hasn't sold a house in 8 months. Instagram bio says CEO. Lives in NJ, but bio says NYC. 10) Consultant — Makes PowerPoints for a living. Thinks flying Delta is a personality trait. 11) Engineer — Makes $180K. Hasn't spoken to a woman outside of work since 2022. 12) Accountant — 5'7, balding, 820 credit score, maxed 401(k). Pays for her dinners while she texts the unemployed DJ. Future stepdad.

Orkin's parent company, Rollins, told investors in September that leads had been falling by double digits since May. Its CEO's best guess is that at least half of that drop comes from the shift to AI search. So we went through all 461 of Orkin's U.S. Google profiles, every review they got in the last 30 days, the map results in 15 big metros and the whole website. (Bookmark this) 1. What Rollins told investors Orkin is the flagship brand at Rollins, a public company that did $3.76 billion in revenue last year. Orkin alone has more than 350 company-owned branches in the U.S. In May, Orkin's VP of marketing, citing recent reporting, told investors that Orkin had the number one share of AI visibility among pest control brands. In September, at a J.P. Morgan conference, Rollins CEO Jerry Gahlhoff described double-digit lead declines and said that if he had to name it, "at least 50 to 60% of what we experienced is probably related to this shift in the LLMs." He also explained what changed. In the old search world, "Google ratings, or your Google reviews, were the key driver of a lot of that search." Now, "Chat's not going to use Google's reviews, they're going to use someone else, and they partnered with Yelp." And about the company's own websites, "We have 400 branch web pages that all have to make sure we have the local feel." Rollins' October earnings deck lays out the fix, including "optimizing business listings and reviews," "expanding locally relevant content," "greater price transparency" and "same- and next-day availability." It also says Orkin showed "early but encouraging signs of progress" by the end of the quarter. That's the list we checked Orkin against. 2. How Orkin's local setup works The foundation is clean, and it's more than most home service companies have. > Nearly every office has its own Google profile, its own local phone number and its own page on orkin.com, and the profile and the page almost always match. The numbers are assigned in blocks, like 786-868-1001, 1002 and 1003 for three Miami-area offices. > 449 of the 461 profiles send the website click to that office's page, and 444 of those links carry the same tracking tags (utm_source=local, utm_medium=local and a campaign code that's usually specific to the office). That's how Orkin can see what each profile brings in. > 448 of the 461 profiles are named just "Orkin," with no service or town in the name. Ten of the others belong to its insulation business and are named "Orkin Therm" or "Orkin Insulation," and a few of those sit at the same address as a pest control office. The website follows the same structure. There are 49 state pages, about 1,600 town pages and 469 branch records. Each office page sits under the town it's in, and most town pages are for towns without an office. Each of those names the office that serves it, so the Temple, GA page points to the Carrollton office. The office pages we checked name the branch manager and say "Call Before Noon for Same-Day Service." Residential calls, commercial calls and customer service each get their own toll-free number. The homepage runs a different promo code (50OFF) than the estimate page (APPLY75), which is a simple way to see which page drove the first job. There's also a quote tool that asks for your address, bedrooms, bathrooms and yard size. Part of why it's all so consistent is ownership. Orkin started franchising in 1994, mainly for smaller markets, and its filings describe a contract option to buy franchises back at a formula price. Today it has nearly 50 U.S. franchises against more than 350 company branches, and on the website, you can't tell which locations are franchises. 3. The reviews In the last 30 days, all 461 profiles got 3,339 new reviews combined. That's about 7 per profile, and the median is 6. 72 profiles got zero, and about 7 in 10 got fewer than 10. Only 19 got 20 or more, and only 2 got 30 or more: Sterling Heights, MI with 32 and Indianapolis with 30. For comparison, when we pulled A1 Garage Door last month, it got 3,806 new reviews in 30 days across 111 profiles. That's about 34 per profile, almost 5 times Orkin's pace. Big review totals don't mean the reviews are still coming in. Orkin's most-reviewed profile, in Crestwood, IL, has 4,391 reviews and got 1 this month. Cherry Hill, NJ (3,693), Long Beach, CA (3,372) and San Antonio (2,934) got none. Across all 461 profiles, there's almost no link between how many reviews a profile has and how many it got this month. One pattern stood out. In 14 cities, Orkin has a big profile that stopped getting reviews and a smaller profile in the same city that's getting them. In Charlotte, the profile with 2,470 reviews got 0 this month, and the one with 307 got 17. In Jacksonville, the profile with 2,072 got 1, and the one with 579 got 22. Both profiles in each city are live branches with their own pages on orkin(dot)com, and from the outside, there's no way to tell why. Two more details. A third of the new reviews (1,079 of 3,339) are star ratings with no text, so they don't mention the service or the town. And 83% came in Monday through Friday, with almost half landing between noon and 5 p.m. Eastern, which fits techs asking on the job. 4. Where Orkin shows up on the map, and where it doesn't We searched "pest control" and "exterminator" in 15 big metros and pulled the top 10 local results for each. Orkin showed up in 16 of the 30 result sets. It didn't show up for either search in Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, New York, Seattle or Boston. In four of those six (Dallas, Chicago, Seattle and Boston), Orkin doesn't have a profile with an address in the city. Its Dallas town page lists offices in Forney, Wylie and Carrollton. In the Chicago area, Orkin has 14 profiles and none in the city. The Crestwood profile has more reviews than any company that showed up for Chicago, and it still didn't make the list. It's 17 miles from downtown. New York shows it isn't only distance. Orkin's Astoria profile is in Queens, Queens companies showed up in the New York results, and Astoria didn't. It has 341 reviews and a 4.1 rating. Phoenix has a different problem. Orkin's Phoenix office has 392 reviews, while Moxie has 7,503. Orkin's biggest profile in the Phoenix area is in Peoria, with 2,254 reviews, and it got zero new ones this month. In 11 of the 15 metros, a smaller competitor has more reviews than Orkin's most-reviewed profile anywhere in that metro: > Houston: Kindred has 11,394, and Orkin's top profile has 2,327 > Phoenix: Moxie has 7,503, and Orkin's has 2,254 > Seattle: Insight has 7,361, and Orkin's has 2,632 > Atlanta: Hawx has 6,786, and Orkin's has 3,152 > Denver: Berrett has 6,443, and Orkin's has 2,559 > Charlotte: ClearDefense has 6,381, and Orkin's has 2,470 > Nashville: EcoShield has 6,035, and Orkin's has 1,330 Every Orkin profile that did show up has an address in the city that was searched. Its best showings were first for "exterminator" in Denver, second in Miami and second for "pest control" in Los Angeles. My read is that the map comes down to distance and reviews, and a famous name doesn't override either one. 5. The website is wide, but thin Most of Orkin's roughly 1,600 town pages are one template with the town name swapped in. Lines like "Proudly serving [town] and the surrounding areas" and "Most [town] customers get same-day or next-day service" repeat from page to page. The part written for the town is usually a sentence or two, like "Forney, Texas, is known as the Antique Capital of Texas." None of the 21 town pages we sampled showed a review. Atlanta's page asks "How much is pest control in Atlanta?" and answers that costs "can vary depending on the service, frequency of service required, and the size of the area affected." Meanwhile, Orkin publishes real price ranges in a cost guide elsewhere on the site, like $120 to $441 for ants, spiders or roaches and $1,000 to $2,300 for termite baiting. There are cracks in the structure too. The California and Texas state pages stop at exactly 100 town links, so pages like San Diego and San Francisco aren't linked from them. The towns each office serves are listed as plain text instead of links. And the San Diego commercial office page says Orkin's "commercial pest control services in Doral can help." Doral is in Florida. That lines up with what the CEO said about all 400 branch pages needing "the local feel." The strongest part of the site is the pest library. It covers 59 pests across at least 300 pages, plus 321 "Ask Orkin" question pages, and most of them link to the matching service, the quote form and the branch finder. 6. The Top 50 lists Four times a year, Orkin ranks the 50 worst cities for termites, mosquitoes, bed bugs or rats, based on its own treatment data. Local TV stations and news sites pick them up, and the bed bug list has been running since at least 2010. The miss is that each 2026 list links only 1 to 12 of its 50 cities to Orkin's own town pages. Any home service company can do its own version, like the towns where you replaced the most water heaters this year or found the most hail damage. Link every town on it to that town's page. 7. The multi-brand play Rollins keeps the brands it buys under their own names. It paid about $137 million for HomeTeam in 2008, about $400 million for Clark starting in 2019, $350 million for Fox in 2023 and $207 million for Saela in 2025, and none of them became Orkin. Its CFO told investors in May that the approach "enables multiple bites at the apple with potential customers." You can see it in Denver. For "exterminator Denver," Orkin came up first out of 9 results, and two Saela Pest Control profiles came up fifth and ninth. That's one parent company in 3 of the 9 spots. The Englewood Saela profile has 3,817 reviews, more than Orkin Denver's 2,236. The home service version is a separate, real brand with its own location, like a plumbing brand alongside your HVAC brand. It isn't the same office listed twice, which Google doesn't allow. 8. What I'd copy > Give every office its own profile, its own page and its own local number, and point the profile at that office's page. > Tag every profile link so you can see what each one sends you. > Build a page for every town you serve, even where you don't have an office, and name the office that serves it. > Put the manager's name and a same-day promise on every office page. > Publish real price ranges, and put them on your town and service pages too. > Turn your own job data into a yearly list that local news can pick up. > Use different phone numbers and promo codes by line of business and by page. 9. Where a local company has the edge > Get more new reviews every month than the Orkin office closest to you. The median Orkin profile got 6 this month. > Put a real office where your customers are. Orkin has no office address in Dallas, Chicago, Seattle or Boston, and it didn't show up in any of them. > Use a real DBA with the service and the town in the name. 448 of Orkin's 461 profiles are named just "Orkin." > Ask customers to mention the job and the town in their reviews. A third of Orkin's new reviews have no text. > Build town pages with reviews, prices, real photos and local detail. None of the 21 Orkin town pages we sampled showed a review or a price. > Grow your reviews on Yelp and the BBB, not just Google. Rollins' own CEO pointed out that ChatGPT doesn't use Google's reviews. Our ramp for a new Google profile targets 40 to 45 reviews a month by month four. Orkin's best profile got 32 this month...

The part nobody posts: the reviews got answered, the reminders went out, the hours stayed current. The MRR is just the receipt for the boring work.

My life got way better when I poured as much effort into the hiring funnel as I did in the sales funnel. Shoutout @AccountantMurph I personally hated my 1099s and love my current team. But there are guys way bigger than me on here proving either model can work.