What the Partnership Did
Meet Hunter, the Termite Detection Dog
Loyal's termite detection dog deserves his own paragraph. Hunter could sniff out termites in places technicians couldn't easily inspect, and he became one of the most recognizable parts of Loyal's identity. He's also a small piece of why this case study exists. Joe first noticed digital marketing because a competitor was using their own detection dog as the centerpiece of a website. He decided Loyal could do better.
Trying Things Most Small Businesses Wouldn't
What made the partnership productive was that Joe and Nick gave us room to experiment. Many small businesses in the late 1990s and early 2000s were cautious about digital spending. Loyal was the opposite. When something looked promising, they let us try it.
A few of the bigger bets along the way:
- Local SEO before Google existed. In the late 1990s, search meant Yahoo, AltaVista, and HotBot. We worked on getting loyalpest.com ranked in those, which built a foundation that paid off later when Google became the dominant search engine. Loyal held the top organic positions for "pest control Richmond VA" and similar searches for years.
- Google AdWords when paid search was unproven. In 2011, we set up Loyal's first Google AdWords campaigns. Most small operators weren't running paid search yet. The campaigns worked from the start and stayed in place for the rest of the partnership.
- Live chat in 2010. Loyal added a live chat option to the site so prospects could reach their staff in real time during business hours, alongside the phone line. Most pest control operators their size weren't offering it yet.
- Continuous website rebuilds. Loyal's website went through several full redesigns over the partnership, each one tuned to current search engine expectations, current user behavior, and current mobile usage. Treating the website as a living asset rather than a one-time project is part of why it kept producing leads.
The pattern across all of these was the same: Loyal was willing to try things before they were obvious. That willingness, more than any single tactic, is what compounded over 20 years.
The Results
What Loyal Built
Over roughly two decades, Loyal grew from 5 employees to more than 50, and from $500,000 in annual revenue in 1996 to $2.9 million by 2006. The business kept growing from there. By the time of the acquisition, Loyal was the largest independent pest management firm in the Richmond area.
In March 2020, Rentokil Steritech, part of Rentokil Initial and one of the largest pest control companies in the world, acquired Loyal. At the announcement, John Myers, then President and CEO of Rentokil North America, said:
Under the leadership of the Lupini family, Loyal Termite and Pest Control has earned a reputation as a trustworthy and reliable pest management provider in the Richmond market. The company's culture and customer-focused service ethic are completely aligned with ours.
That sentence is worth pausing on. Rentokil was not buying a marketing program. They were buying the culture Joe Lupini had spent 24 years building.
What the Lead Numbers Looked Like
The digital marketing side of the partnership produced a steady, growing pipeline of new business across two decades:
- 2007: The Loyal website was generating 15 to 20 sales leads per week. (At the time, that result was unusual enough that Nick wrote us a thank-you note. It's quoted below.)
- Peak years before acquisition: Loyal's full digital program (search ads, remarketing, local visibility, social media, and a continuously redesigned website) was generating roughly 300 sales leads per month, including more than 150 phone calls and 150 form submissions on a typical month.
The leads were only part of the story. Loyal's service reputation meant that the prospects who called were likely to stay. The marketing brought people to the door. The Lupini family's standards kept them.
What This Story Is Really About
Loyal's growth was not built on digital marketing. It was built on a family that ran a pest control company the right way, for the right reasons, for a long time.
What digital marketing did was make sure that the people who needed pest control in Central Virginia could find Loyal: first on Google, then on their phones, then everywhere customers happened to be looking. Loyal was willing to invest in that visibility early, when most of their competitors were still cutting checks to the phone book. That early bet, paired with a service operation that turned new customers into long-term ones, is what compounded into the business Rentokil eventually bought. We were proud to be the marketing partner along the way.