Jim Waldrop said he loves that every day at Jim’s Pest Control is different, even after 45 years in business.
“It’s a different challenge every day,” Jim said, “You never know what you’re going to find.”
The company sprays for all indoor pests along with anything undesirable found in a lawn, trees or shrubs. The business also removes larger unwanted visitors, such as snakes and raccoons.
“One of the strangest things that ever happened was when a raccoon got loose in a house and we ran him into a closet,” Jim said. “I went in after him and closed the door to catch him—we had a little war.”
Jim has plenty of stories—he said once a man discovered a raccoon perching on the vanity in his bathroom. The raccoon had been living in the man’s attic and using a hole in the roof to get in and out. When the hole was patched, the raccoon came into the house via a stone in the fireplace.
Most healthy animals are released in a nature preserve, and AJ said they have been feeding a baby raccoon found on a service call.[/caption]“The guy called everybody he could think of,” Jim said. “The police department referred him to us. It probably didn’t even take us 2 minutes to get that raccoon out of there.”
Last year Jim’s son AJ quit his banking and finance career to join the family business.
“It was this really crazy change,” AJ said. “I got burned out with the corporate world, so I joined my dad and had him start showing me the ropes.”
Any large, healthy animals caught by Jim’s Pest Control are typically taken to a nature preserve and released. AJ said he and Jim have even been bottle-feeding an abandoned baby raccoon found on one of their calls.
Jim said he has removed many ringtail cats, a small, nocturnal mammal that many locals do not know exists. At 3 or 4 pounds, it has a fox- and cat-like face, large ears, and a ringtail and often gets into attics.
Scorpions are the pest Jim and AJ deal with most often, and Jim said they are also one of the toughest to control.
“If we keep them out, we keep everything else out as a byproduct,” he said.
Jim and AJ take about 10 calls a day between the two of them. Jim’s daughter does bookkeeping, and his wife manages the office. Both Jim and his wife come from families that have been in Leander for generations.
AJ plans to continue running the family business into the future.
“In 45 years, [Jim] has built such a solid, reputable business,” AJ said. “I can continue that as far as being honest, trustworthy and dependable goes and not lose the quality of service. We’ll do some advertising and modernize more, but with all the development going on out here I don’t see a way I could fail.”
