Pros
Company truck, gas card, supplies are paid for. Schedule is somewhat malleable, with many notable exceptions. Lots of other nice little perks in theory, not really in practice.
Cons
Where, oh where do I begin? This is not my first job in the industry. Ecolab plays up this huge game of how awesome they are compared to everyone else in the market, which they miss no opportunity to inform you of. Every meeting has a brainwash-y vibe to it, with some amount of nitpicking about some service detail or another, and the other 90% of the meeting consisting of talking about all the bigger and better things coming down the line to try and sell us how awesome Ecolab is. It's quite patronizing honestly. The pay. Oh my, the pay. If you aren't familiar with how pay is usually done in most pest control jobs, you have a revenue quota of sorts per hour that you must meet, which affects your pay. Ergo, more revenue per hour, more pay. This model is usually quite efficient in most companies, but in the area I worked, my route covered an area more than 120 miles across, meaning that I'm about an hour down the tubes before I even got to my first stop of the day, which results in spending the rest of the day trying to catch up. In other companies I'm familiar with, they adjust your hourly quota to accommodate for this. Not here. When you make your goal, you make the low end of the typical industry pay. When you don't, you make worse than fast food fry cook money. To make things worse, you have a throttled amount of sales with most clients, which further limits your potential income. Management. I feel like I was deceived by management before I even signed on to the company. Ecolab gives off a lot of MLM vibes, where the management are all raving about how awesome the company is, while you're in the trenches trying to make more than a Chik-Fil-A employee. Just like with any company, there are good managers, and there are bad ones. My most recent one was somewhere in the middle. He'd give off the impression that he cared about your earnings, and tell you he'd try to work on some of the concerns that you have, then immediately turn around and start berating you over something completely unrelated. Honestly, and it's a little creepy, he seemed to enjoy the prospect of misfortune befalling other employees. I'm not calling him sadistic or anything, but there was definitely some sort of glimmer in his eyes, and a different tone of voice when he'd talk about something like employees potentially getting laid off as a result of losing a client, or everyone having to take a revenue cut because a large client went with the competition, etc. Your mileage may vary with management, but from the ones I know, it's nothing to get excited about. Other issues. Before signing on, I asked what the typical first year pay is, since it's a variable pay rate, and I was given a number. I placed in the top 5 of volume sales in the district, and still made $10,000 less than that number. I was told that my route would have plenty of work available, and that I'd have so much to do, I might need help to finish out my route every month. I routinely went out of state to help other districts for the last week of the month, because I ran out of work to do after 3 weeks every month. You're on call every day, 12 hours a day. It doesn't matter what hours you work, or how large your route is, if you have a client with a 4-hours on site policy in the contract, and they call you in those 12 hours, you have to go. I wasn't told this at the beginning of employment. The policies and protocols are inconsistent, and change CONSTANTLY. I was told no fewer than 4 times to change what my go-to product to spray in a particular situation was, because the protocol changed, and that information wasn't disseminated directly to the people applying products. Technology. The app on your company phone that you do work with (pestpak. but worse) is always on the fritz. There was a solid 2 weeks where we couldn't enter any comments for our clients. I had numerous days where I couldn't print a report. There's always SOMETHING wrong. And let me cap it off. I am resigning the day after I write this. I obtained a new job offer recently, and I insisted to my new employer out of professional courtesy, that my start date be two weeks after receiving my offer letter, so as to give my current employer my two weeks notice. I sent an email to my management team, informing them of my imminent contract termination, and 2 hours later, they call me, and tell me that they've "expedited" my resignation, and will be coming to my house tomorrow morning to pick up all their stuff. At this point, I don't care, I'm just glad to be away from ecolab, but that's just unprofessional to the highest degree.
