Termite Swarms: The Good, Unhealthy and Ugly – PCT

Termite control continues to be an evolving market. For many years, PMPs used products that created a repellent barrier around homes and commercial structures. Then termite baits entered the picture, and they changed the business model completely. Non-repellent termitcides soon followed and shook up the market again. With so many changes, some pest management professionals packed up and left the termite business altogether. But on April 1, 2000, Aventis launched Termidor (active ingredient fipronil) and changed the termite market for many PMPs.

Since its launch, Termidor has protected more than 8 million U.S. homes. And BASF continues to innovate, introducing higher-efficiency application systems and different formulations, which provide a variety of options for PMPs’ toolboxes.

PCT recently interviewed several PMPs who have used Termidor over the years. Here are their thoughts on how Termidor changed how they do business.

Dixon Pest Services, Thomasville, Ga.

Dixon Pest Services has been providing commercial and residential pest control in southern Georgia and northern Florida since 1964. Today, the firm’s services include pest control, termite control, fire ant control, mosquito protection and more. But that wasn’t always the case. In the early 1990s, owner Charles Dixon took a long, hard look at the challenges of effectively treating termite infestations and at his treatment options. He ultimately decided to pull out of the termite business.

Although he wasn’t taking on new termite clients, he kept his finger on the pulse of the industry. He said when he started seeing the success PMPs were having with Termidor, he started to look at providing termite services again. After talking with his insurance company and performing the necessary due diligence, he reentered the market slowly and used Termidor.

“Over those eight or nine years that we weren’t treating, we kept up with our termite warranties to the best of our ability,” Dixon said. “We got back into the business by visiting those customers.”

And he said he saw great results. Now, termite treatments make up 25 percent of Dixon’s business. “That was a big chunk of business that we didn’t have,” he said.

Dixon has six or seven technicians dedicated to termite work, primarily using the Termidor HP II High Precision Injection System. He said business is booming.

Action Pest Control, Evansville, Ind.

For Scott Robbins, technical services manager at Action Pest Control, which provides residential and commercial pest control services in Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois, the key to termite treatments was efficacy.

When the products of the late ’90s weren’t providing reliable control in a timely manner, Robbins said Action looked for another solution. “Our founder, Kevin Pass, asked himself what he would want protecting his house, and the answer was Termidor,” Robbins said.

Action Pest Control has been applying Termidor in one form or another since the product’s introduction. “Action did not have a service failure in our first three years. Then, through reductions in retreatments, labor savings and better renewal retention, we started to enjoy a significant increase in profitability,” Robbins said. “To say we were fans would be an understatement. Termidor simply made us better at termite control through the forgiveness of non-repellency, transfer and long residual.”

With the success in treatments — and an increase in profitability — it only made sense to adopt the newest Termidor innovations as they hit the market. Action was one of the first companies to trial and adopt the Exterior Perimeter/Localized Interior (EP/LI) application methods, which Robbins said resulted in even more labor savings, without any significant change in product performance.

“As the Termidor products we apply have evolved, we continue to enjoy more technician efficiency and increased productivity. This started with EP/LI, then came Termidor HE termiticide and a reduction in product volume, trench size, drilling, etc. The change to HE from Termidor 80 WG termiticide/insecticide made our technicians 40 percent more productive,” he said. “Now we are using Termidor HP II and the High Precision Injection System and, wouldn’t you know it, we gained another 40 percent in productivity. Now we have HP units at six branch locations.”

With HP II, Robbins said the application is fast, minimally invasive and still provides the expected efficacy Action has come to know and trust.

Although Robbins said most of the firm’s work is done with HP II, Action also uses Termidor SC for ant management, Termidor Foam for some interior gallery treatments and Termidor HE for some conventional applications when Termidor HP II treatments are not an option, like a post construction treatment with uneven final grade.

Massey Services, Orlando, Fla.

“We began using Termidor as soon as the label was approved in Florida, and have used it ever since,” said Adam Jones, vice president of quality assurance for Massey Services.

According to Jones, Massey struggled when it came to successfully controlling termites through the 1990s, even though he and his team started looking at termite treatments differently beginning in 1993.

“We embarked on an intense training regimen to teach our team members about home construction,” he said. “We adopted an aggressive approach towards utilization of every treatment specification allowed by the label to ensure that we were getting the termiticide into all of the potential access points of the home.”

But treatment failures were still high.

“Customer satisfaction was low and the industry was rife with litigation due to damages caused by termites. While we were able to effectively manage our damage claims, the cost of these damage claims and the accompanied stress on our management teams was causing serious doubt about continuing to provide guaranteed termite protection to our customers,” Jones said. “Termidor changed all of that. We finally had a product that was effective at controlling existing infestations, even under problematic construction practices and conducive conditions.”

With the adoption of Termidor, Jones said Massey’s retreatments plummeted to nearly zero, and to this day less than one-tenth of one percent of Massey customers experience a termite re-infestation.

Not only are technicians not dedicating time and materials to retreatments, but management is no longer bogged down with damage claims, he said.

The author is an Ohio-based writer.

Selling Termidor: New Opportunities

The introduction of Termidor changed how many pest management professionals treat for termites, but they weren’t the only ones in the industry that knew this new product was something different.

BASF has rolled out a variety of Termidor formulations for different termite control situations.

“In 2000, the year of the launch, I was selling for a different manufacturer in the industry,” said Todd Brown, BASF sales representative. “I had a coworker that went to Aventis (Environmental Science) to help launch Termidor. Within a week he called me and said, ‘Todd, this is going to be big, really big, you need to come join us.’”

Within days Brown flew to New Jersey to join the team. “The buzz around the launch was deafening, the research was coming out that this would be a game changer,” he said.

Meanwhile, Warren Vannest was watching the product roll out too.

“I was, years ago, a Velsicol chlordane salesperson and from the time it left the U.S. market up until Termidor, there had been no real termiticide that had held up like chlordane,” said Vannest, a BASF sales representative for the past 10 years. “Retreat rates had gotten up as high as 30 percent with products that were not working. Once Termidor hit the scene it was a new ball game.”

And as their first pitch, the Termidor sales team was ready to tell the story about how the new non-repellent liquid termiticide would work.

“We explained the impact Termidor can have on termites impacting a structure. Termidor is a non-repellent chemistry that is undetectable to termites,” Brown said. “It can be transfered by termites to other termites that do not enter treated soil. This causes extensive killing of termites, drops the termite pressure on property, eliminates termites from the structure and most importantly provides structural protection. This Transfer Effect with a liquid material is something we had never seen in our industry. We shared strong university data that showed amazing results in the lab and in field trials. We held some high-profile events with customers from all over the country to share details of Termidor right out of the gate.”

Brown added the company also worked with universities to develop the data to back up Termidor’s high-flying claims. “We held many, many certification meetings in 2000 to certify PMPs and tell our story,” said Brown. “I remember telling my customers in year one, ‘If this stuff is half as good as I am telling you it is, you will be blown away.’”

Some customers shied away from the price, said Karen Boniface, a BASF sales representative who began working with Aventis in 2003. But after talking through the number of retreats they serviced, and challenging the PMPs to treat difficult properties with the product, trying it was a no-brainer, she said.

It didn’t hurt that Termidor also offered a five-year pledge (now a 10-year pledge), in which the company pledged that if a PMP had a retreat in the first five years, Termidor would pay for the labor and materials to retreat the property. “We put our money where our mouth was and mitigated some of the risk the PMP might see in moving to Termidor,” Brown said.

Boniface added that technicians were concerned not to see an immediate kill, like the majority of termite products popular at that time. Although the product was slower acting, it didn’t take long for technicians to see how effective it was. Soon, stories of control began streaming in. Customers saw the Transfer Effect in action, and they also saw a sharp decline in their retreat rates, she added.

In the past 20 years, the product has continued to evolve. BASF has grown the product line to include Termidor SC, Termidor 80 WG, Termidor HE, Termidor Dry, Termidor HP and HP II, and Termidor Foam.