Decent Money - If You're Willing to Give Up Your Life
Pros
If you work hard and treat your customers well, you can build up a big route with great customers, make lots of sales, and make a good living. The training is great and the ongoing education can be interesting.
Cons
The weekly meetings are a waste of everybody's time, and are typically scheduled during hours you could be out working on your route - so they make you get hours behind for no reason. Bad employees are allowed to do whatever they want as long as they don't get too many complaints, and even then they will just make the good employees deal with their complaints instead of holding anybody accountable. Residential technicians are given much bigger work loads and work longer hours, while commercial technicians make more money for doing almost nothing. Corporate is using technology to make their technicians jobs harder to do, not easier. The hours can be insane, and I was asked to work late every single day that I worked at Orkin. Summer time hours can easily reach 14+ hours a day, six days a week. You are not paid for $0 services (call backs, complaints, inspections) and management will throw them on you all of the time, even if your schedule is already full. The admin support team will field calls and add stops to your schedule even if you are nowhere near the area and do not have time to do it. Upper management will come down once a year or so to pretend to listen to concerns, but usually ends up just defending their policies that are already in place.