FOUR GENERATIONS LATER, RELIABLE EXTERMINATORS IS STILL FAMILY-OWNED

Andrea Patrie grew up cleaning the office of her family’s pest control company — taking out the trash, scrubbing the toilets, filing papers one summer when there was nothing else to do.

She went to college, moved to Seattle and fully intended to stay. She is now in her 15th year running Reliable Exterminators, the 90-year-old Lafayette institution her great-uncle founded and her grandmother stewarded for 40 years on paper ledgers and personal relationships.

Then came the calculations that most transplants eventually run: the cost of living, the distance from family, the oftentimes lonely work of building a life far from home.

By 2011, she was back in Lafayette, taking over for her 77-year-old grandmother who was retiring.

What kept Patrie — and what has made Reliable Exterminators worth paying attention to — is a good deal more complicated.

Patrie returned to an industry being remade by money. National consolidators and private equity-backed platforms have absorbed small, family-owned companies at a pace that has transformed who shows up at American doors with a sprayer.

According to CT Acquisitions, Rollins, the Atlanta-based giant that operates Orkin, has averaged 12 to 18 disclosed acquisitions per year. Rentokil, the British multinational that finalized its acquisition of Terminix in October 2022, completed more than 50 pest control acquisitions globally in 2023 alone, according to the same tracker.

Data from The Deal Sheet show the U.S. market is now valued at roughly $26 billion, growing at more than 6% annually, and the investment thesis is: acquire route density, centralize operations, layer in technology, expand margins. Bugs aren’t going anywhere. Indiana’s humid summers accelerate insect breeding cycles, and subterranean termites — which thrive in the state’s soil and climate — swarm every spring, typically between March and May, looking for new structures to colonize. Climate change is making them worse. Homeowners will always pay someone else to deal with them.

For a family owner of a certain generation, the math is hard to argue with. Pest Control Technology found that selling may be more lucrative than what an owner and heirs can earn by working the business over the next 20 years.

“There used to be a lot of small family-owned companies that would just service a couple of counties,” Patrie said. “In the last 20 years, a lot of those family owners are selling. We’re becoming more and more rare.”

Reliable has remained in the same family since 1936 and is now operated by a fourth generation. To understand why, it helps to know where the company came from.

The history requires a family tree to follow. Charles Partlow — “Uncle Charlie,” in the company’s lore — graduated from Purdue’s entomology program in 1936, one of a handful of students to come out of the university’s innovative urban pest control curriculum, and saw a gap in the local market.

That Purdue connection was not incidental. The university, which sits just across the Wabash River in West Lafayette, has long anchored the region’s relationship with pest science — its Office of Indiana State Chemist, housed on campus, remains the regulatory body that licenses and oversees every commercial pesticide applicator in the state.

Charles and his wife Gertrude formed Reliable Exterminating Company in Lafayette, eventually constructing a small office building west of the Main Street bridge, only the second building on that side of the span.

During World War II, Partlow flew missions in Burma; at home, a manager named Harry Cochnower kept the business running. Partlow returned, expanded the company, helped found both the National Pest Control Association and its Indiana counterpart, and eventually handed the operation to his nephew, Jim Hanstra, in 1957. When Jim died, his widow Phyllis and their son Bob ran Reliable for the next four decades. Bob’s daughter Andrea took over when Phyllis finally retired.

Patrie now runs the company alongside her husband Philip, who joined a few years after she did, and her brother Tony, who came on after that. Three co-owners. One phone number. A service area spanning 14 Indiana counties, from Tippecanoe south through Fountain and Montgomery, east through Clinton and Boone and north through Carroll and Jasper. Technicians who average 10 to 15 years with the company, and sometimes retire from it.

“Customers have had us at their house for decades,” Patrie said. “I’m just continuing on a business that existed way before my time.”

The work itself turned out to be different from what she had expected. Patrie studied business and came to Reliable with skills in administration and scheduling. What she had not anticipated was how much of the job would be, in the most unromantic sense, pastoral.

The call that stays with her is the bed bug call. Bed bugs produce a specific kind of distress in a homeowner — a panic that is partly practical and partly something more visceral, the horror of an invisible infestation in the most intimate spaces of a home.

“They don’t know what to do,” she said. “They just need a lot of help.”

What Reliable offers in those moments is not merely a technician but a voice on the phone willing to walk customers through preparation, treatment options and the full arc of remediation, at whatever pace they need.

“People are grateful that we sent a technician out, and it works, and we helped them through a really difficult time.”

She reached, unprompted, for a larger frame.

“I realized it’s a service business, and I like helping people.”

The distinction she is drawing is between a transaction and a relationship. The national chains are not bad at transactions; they are, by design, optimized for them. What they are less optimized for is the kind of longitudinal trust that accumulates when the same company shows up at your house decade after decade, when your call is answered by someone who can tell you exactly what a termite looks like and why it ends up in your basement in March.

Staffing for that kind of work presents its own challenges. A good technician has to be comfortable working independently, at ease with strangers in their homes and willing to get dirty, a combination that narrows the field considerably.

“It takes a few times to find the right person,” Patrie said. But when Reliable does, they tend to stay.

The company Patrie runs today is not the one her grandmother managed on paper and pen. Reliable has adopted scheduling software and office technology that have significantly improved efficiency without requiring the company to expand its headcount.

Pesticide formulations have evolved, too — today’s products are more targeted, require smaller volumes and carry lower environmental burdens than what Charles Partlow applied in the 1940s.

“We can use less in more efficient ways,” Patrie said, “and that’s better for everybody.”

What has not changed is the basic model: a family name, a local address, a phone answered by a person. There is also, adding a different kind of pressure, the matter of door-to-door sales teams dispatched from Indianapolis and other cities, canvassing neighborhoods and knocking on the doors of Reliable’s existing customers.

Patrie’s response is equanimity bordering on amusement. “Most people just have those sales guys go away,” she said.

Reliable Exterminators turns 90 years old this year and marked the occasion with a Greater Lafayette Commerce-powered ribbon cutting ceremony.

“Small, family-owned businesses are the backbone of Greater Lafayette’s economy, and Reliable Exterminators is one of the best examples of what that looks like over the long haul. Ninety years of showing up, knowing your customers and staying independent — that kind of commitment to community is worth celebrating,” said Mikel Berger, president and CEO of Greater Lafayette Commerce, the region’s leading chamber of commerce and economic development organization.

Charles Partlow’s original office building is gone. Phyllis Hanstra, who ran the place for four decades, has retired. The fourth generation — Andrea, Philip, Tony — manages the routes, trains the technicians and shows up. There is a version of this story in which the arc bends, eventually, toward a sale. That is the arc the industry has been bending toward for two decades, and the pressures behind it are not going away.

Patrie did not say that wouldn’t happen. She didn’t say much about the future at all. What she said, near the end of the conversation, was simpler and older than any of it: “We’re just grateful that customers choose us, and they trust us to come in their homes, and they let us come back year after year.”

The industry has spent a generation learning to scale that sentiment out of existence. Reliable Exterminators is still, stubbornly, trying to mean it.