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David Royce
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Travis (Podcast Host)
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's a mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, I'm talking to a new friend of mine, David Royce. David is a four time founder and serial entrepreneur who built and exited three companies companies for over $178 million. In his 30s. He then founded and scaled Aptiv Environmental to more than $500 million in annual revenue, putting it on track to become the first unicorn in its industry. He grew Aptiv into the third largest residential pest control company in North America, employing over 6,500 people across 5,000 cities in 34 states before exiting in 2025. He's an expert in scaling overlooked unsexy industries where most operators are leaving money on. David, what's up dude? Welcome to the show.
David Royce
Hey, thanks for the opportunity. Appreciate you being here.
Travis (Podcast Host)
So four companies that you exited for almost $200 million enterprise value in your 30s before you started the one of the most successful pest control companies in the entire country. Where do you attribute the entrepreneurial gene in your life to? Was there a moment, a story, a period in time? Or is this sort of just something that was always in your DNA?
David Royce
Yeah, I don't think it was something out of necessity. When I was in college, I was a broke college student and was working a minimum wage job trying to pay my way through school and I went or I had a friend that came to me and said, hey, I made $25,000 in a summer selling pest control services door to door. I really had no idea what pest control was. I just said I'm in whatever that is because that's a lot better than you made. How much? Eight, nine Bucks per hour. Right. That I'm making. So I drove 10 hours out to Sacramento, California and I was horrible at sales. The first five days I sold zero. And everybody else around me selling one to four per day, you know, and I'm getting like just free cardio out of it. Yeah.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Wage job doesn't look too bad when, when you're out there working for free.
David Royce
Yeah. But, you know, I. I went to a bookstore that weekend. I got about half a dozen books and I just committed to myself. I'm gonna read, you know, every day, about 90 minutes a day, and just train, train, train, because this is my best opportunity. It's the best thing I'd ever heard of. And by the end of that summer, I was the top rookie in sales for the whole company out of about 200 people. Wow. And it wasn't like, because I was great at sales, clearly, initially, but I was just too stubborn to go home. Hit admit, I fail. So I stuck with it. The next summer I went back, became a sales manager. We did so well on our team that the individual who was running the company put me over the entire company. All their sales program actually gave me a cut off everybody. He said, I want you to develop the sales program because your team did so much better. You know, I wrote a sales training manual, created training videos. And then it was when I went to go, I asked him for a letter of recommendation. After my fourth summer, I was leading, I was going to go on to investment banking in New York. And he goes, what are you doing, man? Like, you should go start your own company. Invest control. You're so good at this. So it was actually him. It's a total random thing. I had no intention of getting into it. So I'm so somewhat of an accident, Right. That I even thought about getting into this industry.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Was this, was this in Utah? You were going to college?
David Royce
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Travis (Podcast Host)
It's my, I can, I can feel my producer's eyes rolling into the back of his skull right now. Because I find a lot of different ways to work door to door sales into a lot of conversations because that's how I started as well. Yeah. Solar. Started selling solar back in college and then did alarms for a little bit and then did water purification before I ended up moving into the podcasting space. But, man, it is, it is one of those industries. The thing that I love about it is that it provides opportunity to anybody who's willing to put in the work. It doesn't matter what your degree is, doesn't matter how much money Your family has, everybody is equal playing ground as soon as you knock that first door. And like you said, even if you don't have sort of this natural propensity to be really good at it, and you're not selling six deals your first day, you can get better at it. And the volume that's required to do the work is also the volume that allows you to put in the reps to get good at it, you know, and the income that you can gain from that and the life that you can create around it is, is, you know, fairly unmatched compared to other opportunities.
David Royce
It's a beautiful thing to be able to get real feedback on a daily basis and then to be able to actually have the control to improve your life, you know, to make more sales by training, reading more. I mean, we have guys at the company that will make hundreds of thousands. There's a few that'll make a million dollars a year doing this.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Selling pest control door to door. Yeah. Honestly, dude, I've had this conversation with several people where I was like, the one thing that I never sold on doors that I wish that I would have is pest control. Because like, I, you know, when you start selling stuff to door, you're kind of like, I was, I was commission hunting, you know, like, looking for who's going to pay me more, who's going to pay me better, what's the biggest chunk of commission I can make. And there's so much more to the psychology that goes behind the ability to continue knocking and getting rejected all the time that I feel like something like pest control is actually probably one of the better industries, even though commissions are obviously significantly less there than they would be in something like solar or something adjacent to that. It's the fact that you get wins basically every day you're on the doors, you get to clock in like little wins along the way and you can go out and sell three deals, five deals, 10 deals in a day, rather than having to wait four days to get this monster deal in through the door. You know what I mean?
David Royce
Exactly.
Travis (Podcast Host)
So those first few companies, was this all in the pest control space before you started active?
David Royce
Yeah. So I had four companies that I did in pest control.
Travis (Podcast Host)
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David Royce
And I actually had a fist here than I did in solar.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Oh really?
David Royce
Yeah.
Travis (Podcast Host)
No way. How did you like that?
David Royce
We got in a little bit late to be honest. So we, we grew up for about three plus years. We got up to about 80 million in revenue and then Trump did the big beautiful bill, just, you know, ripped all that out and then, you know, interest rates had gone up, you know, previous year and a half and just immediately. 80 million. David.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Yeah, what? I know, what a failure.
David Royce
We, we, we sold, we sold that one for about 37, $38 million and we, we're really happy just to be done with it.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Yeah. What, what year did you get into solar?
David Royce
It was probably 2022, 2023 somewhere there.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's again one of my, well, I, I, I've used the word regret lightly because I just don't fully believe in regretting things that much because there's not much you can do about it. But when I started knocking for Solar, it was 2011, 2012 I think when I first started. But I was so commission minded. I was just, I was just a sales guy, you know, I, I did not think about it at all from the potential opportunity of being an entrepreneur. And I didn't know how much money I was leaving on the table by moving into a different field at that time because the commissions were so tight at that time it was like the deal cycle was like six weeks and then you get paid half on contract, you get paid half on install and then, oh, there's a problem with permitting, that's going to kick back the timeline and then permit falls through, customer changes their mind, somebody else snipes the deal and now I get a charge back on the first half of my commission and I'm only getting paid like 1100 bucks for this deal anyway, not realizing that like the total contract value that the company was making was like 8, $500 and they were paying me 1100 bucks of it. You know what I mean? So I wish, I wish I would have thought a little bit more entrepreneurially at that time and just started my own solar company and worked out my own you distribution deal. But yeah, it is what it is. You live and learn. But pest control has been pretty good to you. What was the difference? Was there a difference in mindset when you started Aptiv versus when you started these other companies that, that, that had you, like, have a different vision in mind. This goal that obviously, I mean, you can't go anywhere without seeing Aptif trucks, man, they're all over the place. And you guys, obviously, you know, third largest residential pest control company in all of North America is nothing to bat an eye about. So was there, was there a difference in vision, a difference in culture, what, what you attribute the massive difference in sales revenue to?
David Royce
Yeah. So the secret was that I would build companies and about every four years I would sell them to Terminex, was that company that ultimately bought them from us.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Okay.
David Royce
And so hire for all of them? Well, for the first three, and then the fourth one, we ended up selling in private equity.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Wow.
David Royce
But Terminix, what they like to do is they just like to buy a book of business. So it would be, we called it an asset deal. So we would just sell off, we go to them. So we have, you know, our customers and we have the technicians that are servicing these customers and we will sell you this, but we're not going to sell you the growth engine, which is, you know, the sales force. Yeah, the executive team, you know, a key operator in each location. We're going to keep the golden goose. But if you guys want to buy this, you can buy it from us for a certain price. And what's nice about that is the larger companies like Terminix and Orchid, they grow by probably at 50% to 2/3 of their growth is M and A. And so they need to buy customers to keep growing. They kind of maxed out their marketing and everything else across the country. And so we were able to sell to them. And then I wanted to take all that money and throw it into the next company. We just literally put a different logo on it, same training manuals, same, you know, people, sales teams.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Yeah, you basically swapped out the Polo. Yeah.
David Royce
So although it's, you know, we were in business for eight years or whatever with Aptif, really it was like a. Almost 20 year play where, you know, same organization, same people growing it. But yeah, and it's funny too, because you look back and you think, gosh, Terminx, like, why didn't you do that? Right? You just built the third biggest pest control company. You're one of your biggest competitors. But I think a lot of public companies that do things, you know, for the short term, you know, hit certain quarterly needs, you know, to satisfy the markets. And it's just funny, it's not a long term strategy.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Yeah, they want a good, they want a good story to tell their shareholders in Their next meeting basically.
David Royce
Exactly. Yeah.
Travis (Podcast Host)
But I mean good on you for like taking advantage of that and see, you know, because I think, I think some people are so busy playing their game of business that they don't realize that there are other games that other people are playing. And especially when you get up into these upper echelons of business where these billion dollar companies and multi billion dollar private equity funds, their goals are so wildly different and they take, and they can make moves that are, are on a surface level seem ridiculous where it's like, why would you pay me this money to do this? That doesn't make any sense. And they just, so they just assume that it's something that's never going to be done rather than going like, well I wonder how we could be a part of that to some degree. I wonder, I wonder how that could potentially work for us. So, so it wasn't necessari in any, you know, direction or anything like this one you just held on to for a longer period of time.
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David Royce
And we didn't need as much money at that point. So the first One I have NDAs, but Forbes said I sold the first one for 13 million, next one for 30 million, one after that for 135 million. And so we just had more and more money. It was really the growth engine. The first year I almost bankrupt the company because we're growing too fast and I didn't have the cash flow right. You're paying out a certain amount of money, a bigger commission than you're actually making up front because you're paying it on the course of the year. But you know, the customer might stick with it for say five years. And so there's a little bit of a cash flow issue there and I didn't have enough saved up. So I realized, you know, you can be killing it and dying at the same time. I thought okay, well we better start saving up cash. And how can I get access to cash? I thought, well if we sell, yeah, we gotta change the company name.
Travis (Podcast Host)
But if we can keep all the
David Royce
key, you know, if we keep the growth, great. But you know, we learned things every time we sold then we had a lot more money to invest into the company. So like by the time we got to our third company, you know, we, I started studying Google and Meta and looking at all these different company headquarters zappos and thinking, okay, what are all the cool things we could bring back? So we, you know, put an NCAA basketball court and you know, golf simulator and movie room, ping pong, foosball that kind of stuff. We had like headquarters. People walked in, they thought it was like a tech company, you know, and it was more just. I think it's really great. It helps you stand out. It gets people in the door. It's not necessarily the meat or the protein. It's more like perks or sugar for the most part. But the thing that was really great about the company is our sales engine, the sales program, our sales reps. If somebody came and sold for us, they sold 70% more than the previous pest control company that they'd worked at. And so it was really like, hey, we really had the data and the proof. We're very transparent about what our numbers are. And yeah, we're always trying new things. We did like really crazy company retreats. We started out going to Hawaii. You were doing skydiving and diving down with sharks and cliff jumping and all this stuff. Yeah, because you get a lot of college kids. Just sort of fun. It's really about creating a fun culture and memories and then celebrating our success.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Was your marketing and sales channel always and exclusively door to door and sales reps or did you play with other things like D2C or ads or Google or some of these other platforms?
David Royce
Yeah, we experiment with everything from direct mail to, you know, just referrals to clover leaving where technicians would leave, you know, flyers and the doors of the nearest four people to a customer. But digital marketing was like our, our, our key door to door.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Yeah.
David Royce
About 20% of our sales worth are digital and. And that's growing every year, getting bigger.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Is that digital Google meta or something else I'm not thinking about?
David Royce
Yeah, yeah, Google meta.
Travis (Podcast Host)
From a, from a organizational perspective, when you're getting these leads in the door, are there, are there different sales reps that are assigned to take leads versus door to door crews who are going out and generating business? Is it like, how do you.
David Royce
Yeah, it's totally acceptable.
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David Royce
like an inside sales group and that was totally different from our door to door program.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Got it. Okay. But the majority of revenue is from door to door Cruise.
David Royce
Yeah, it was initially it was like pretty much all of it. And then little by little we just gotten better. Better at diversifying that portfolio.
Travis (Podcast Host)
David, didn't anybody tell you that door to door is dead?
David Royce
You know, it is. It's very old school. You know what's, what's funny is that the original founder of Orkin started out door to door. And so pest control originally started. You go back a hundred years ago, that's how they originally marketed it. And then it's just. It kind of went away for a long time. By the time I got into it. There's very, there's only like maybe three companies who are really doing it, but they, and they've been around for maybe 10 years or so doing the door door thing. But maybe there's 500 people total in the end in the door to door side of it. And today there's tens of thousands of people doing door to door. Yeah.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Yeah.
David Royce
So I was lucky in the sense that that side of pest control was still early on and I didn't invent it, but I was able to really develop it into really great training and systematize it.
Travis (Podcast Host)
What's the, what's your philosophy on the development of sales reps internally inside of the organization? Because I know that there's. Is Eco Shield. Is that the name of, of one of the other big ones. I feel like there's a couple of them that are more. They, they. They sort of act more like Kirby where like Kirby Vacuums, where like you start out as a rep and you go at this group and then the, the bigger you get, you can basically sort of like buy your own region or buy your own office where you basically are running sales distribution. But the company still takes care of fulfillment and things like that. It sounds like you like really were developing more of this internal Corporate structure. What, what's your overarching philosophy on that? Is one way better than the other way? If not, why did you choose this way? Just tell me more about that.
David Royce
You know, we just, we like control, we like controlling the message, making sure things were done the very best they could be done. And we're really good at it. It was one of our core competitive advantages. We're able to bring people in, train them, we're get them, we're able to get them to work really, really hard. And by the end of the summer, you know, we're just. The numbers were so much better than everybody else's and I just figured over time, you know, it's one thing to like have a lot of hype around your company or it's another thing to go get an NCAA basketball court. But if the program is better and people are making more, then they'll want to keep coming back year after year. We're just able to grow at, you know, 35 to 50% a year that way. How? Yeah, like internal.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Is that, is that your strategy for retention on reps? I know that's a big thing in the door to door space where like warring. It's almost like, it's almost like drug turf wars. In door to door people are recruiting each other's people and taking money, you know what I mean? Doing these, these signing bonus deals to bring this whole team of 150 people over to this new company. How did you combat that?
David Royce
I think the best thing is if your numbers are there, it doesn't really matter whether someone's going to throw out a signing bonus or whatever. If somebody's desperate for money, they might want to take a signing bonus. But if, if your program, if they know that the average sales rep is going to sell X, even if the pay the pay plan, if the percentage that we're going to pay them less, it's like, well multiply how many sales you're going to get in the summer times each percentage. How much are you going to make with us compared to them? If you make, if we're doing 70% more than over there, how do you even compete? It's just, yeah, just do the math. You know, being transparent, I found was the best, best thing if you've got a really great program.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Because that's the thing about sales reps, right? Is like largely depending on your revenue coming from independent salespeople is salespeople are emotional and fickle and difficult to keep in line. Sometimes just the traditional salesperson personality can kind of be Hard to corral and push toward a single common goal or vision. And I think some people can get wrapped up in like, well, this company is going to pay me, you know, 20% more per deal. And in their mind they go, well, that means that I don't have to sell as many deals for this other company, but then they go to that other company and then their sales performance plummets. Because it's not, you find out that it's not really about the additional 20%. It's more about being able to continue doing this for a longer period of time. And to your point, like some of these other, you know, having a full size basketball court or taking teams to Hawaii or things like that, it's like those aren't, those aren't just things that are great for creating lifetime memories and experiences, but it also actively increases overall retention because you're building, you're building a community inside of the organization that's built to make sure that these people are happy, fulfilled, and that they're able to have a light at the end of the tunnel for all of the inevitable rejection that they will come across on a daily basis. And sometimes people just need that.
David Royce
Yeah, I found that a lot of the individuals, it was hard if you just because the company maybe offered you more money to go work somewhere else, if the other individual, other individuals around you weren't really committed to working a schedule or working additional hours to be able to achieve like the highest potential that they could. It's really hard for you to want to go do that too. We're kind of the, you know, the average of our five closest friends or whoever else on the sales team that all that stuff really rubs off. And so that was our. We try to get each team to have, you know, a certain amount of experience reps, you know, and balance that with first year reps. There was kind of like a recipe for that to make sure that the team was going to be able to produce a certain amount of sales average compared to other companies.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Are there any other companies that you look at where you go, man, this would crush door to door companies or industries in industries more than companies? Yeah, that's a good question.
David Royce
I think that there's a lot more industries out there that could be done that way. There's not like so much off the top of my head. It would actually be fun to just go experiment and try different things. You know, going door to door and being like, hey, can you do this? The question I think though becomes the industries that are out there are really Tried and true. And then the question is, can you make more as a commission? Right. If you're going to offer it, you know, you may not be going to, you know, all your Utah kids and trying to recruit them to come work for you, but you might be in a different state and they don't know about door to door and maybe they're not going to make as much over the course of the summer, but it's still incredible money, right? So yeah, you got to find a product that pays a lot. Sometimes you can sell a lot of them. Maybe there's a product instead of saying selling maybe two or three per day in pest control on average, you know, you might be able to sell 10 per day. Yeah, right. And although the amount, maybe you're only making 20 bucks a sale, but, or you know, 50 bucks a sale or something like that. But it's like, hey, 50 times 10, that's, that's 500. That's a good day. A lot of money for, you know, maybe people who aren't as good at sales or something.
Travis (Podcast Host)
What about compensation plans? Do you have any hard and fast rules when it comes to setting up a compensation plan that is both profitable for the company where you can have strong cash flow and not have to worry about running out at the end of the quarter when you're making payroll, but then also strong enough and aggressive enough for the salesperson to actually want to get involved and push that company forward? Do you have any sort of, you know, factors that you look at that somebody can take and apply into their own business?
David Royce
Yeah, I think about maybe a third up front, you know, and then maybe a third in six months or so, and maybe a third and a few more months after that is solid, you know, something. Or it could be four to six months. You're spreading it out, but it's like you're just trying to make sure that it's a win win for everybody. It's a win for the customer, number one. But it's a win for the sales rep, but it's also a win for the company. And so trying to figure out cash flow and all that sort of thing, like we as we got bigger, we didn't have to be, you know, as diversified across. We could pay more upfront to have like a competitive advantage just because we had more money. But you know, if you're smaller too and you have more loyalty that way, sometimes if a manager or an owner is very close to all the salespeople and is there and he's really good at sales and he's able to help train them. So it's a way where you don't have to pay out people all upfront. You might just be very loyal because you've got one of the best sales trainers in the room and that's also a competitive advantage.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Well, you've made an incredible career out of accidentally falling into door to door pest control, David. And now ending with the acquisition of APTIV last year, 2025. What's next? What's on the horizon? Another pest control company. Are you done building businesses for a while? You're doing podcasts, writing books? What are you doing now?
David Royce
Yeah, I'm just, I'm taking time off. I took a whole year off, so. Not going to do anything. I just want to be intentional about whatever the next thing is. I'm done with pest control. I moved on after doing it for 20 years and expanding into 5,000 cities and 34 states. I'm like, I think I got myself
Travis (Podcast Host)
good to accomplish in that world. Yeah.
David Royce
And it was getting tricky too, because we were getting so big. On the next round, you know, the company will probably be sold to private equity, but we may have to go public. And I just thought, gosh, if we go public, I'm not going to be able to get out of it. Like, I'm. They're going to have to keep my money in. It's really bad, you know, if a founder wants to take all his money out all at once. Yeah. So I thought, I thought it was really good timing. We had a really good executive team in place. I felt like the company is really stable and I found a buyer and yeah, that was it for me. I don't know. I think the next thing is probably something more creative or something more philanthropic. It doesn't have to be about the money for me anymore. Like, I've. I've got enough to live the rest of my life and live very well. So, yeah, I think it. You have different questions when it's not just about the money. Right. It's like, what would you do? Maybe it's something more artistic, more philanthropic. So we'll see. I keep dying rabbit holes. Yeah. Yeah, no kidding.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Anything that's particularly interesting or fun to you, obviously, like, you're going on podcasts and talking about this kind of stuff. You know what, Is there anything that's sort of like catching your attention that you're like, ooh, that could be interesting?
David Royce
I don't know, I just keep being amazed with AI and all the different things that are coming up, the different Potential solutions. I think it's a really great time to be interested in that. I also see things I'm fascinated about are kind of this silver tsunami that's happening where all the baby boomers are retiring and you have all these blue collar businesses that a lot of people don't want in theory. And it's like there's a great opportunity there to roll a bunch of companies up and get a higher multiple, play the arbitrage game. I don't know that I have that in me anymore. I've kind of done, you know, my 20 years of grinding and I'll probably do something different. But I do advise. I love advising other people. I love the strategy behind business. You know, I probably have a call with different people every week about different business ideas that are things that they're working on and just, I'll give advice away for free. It's just been fun to like help other people. And I've enjoyed doing podcasts and just giving back. I was always really grateful for Tony Shea from Zappos. He used to allow people to come to the company and tour the company. In fact, you could go on a tour in Vegas. They had a tour every hour, go through the business and learn about all their customer service secrets. And he also had a company conference that was really cool that you could go in for three days as a cultural conference. You'd learn about all of their cultural values and all their little secrets to success that help their, you know, their KPIs be really incredible. And I asked him once, I said, okay, so I love that you're doing this, but why? Like, you're giving away all your best competitive advantages. Yeah, it gives you the obvious answer. It's like, well, I just think the world would be a better place if everybody operated this way. And for me, I'm like, I'm just selfish. It's me. I need to start giving back more. So I started getting involved more with my alma mater and judging business competitions and helping guys out in the incubators in the summertime and, and yeah, now it's like I can be an open book. I don't have anything to hide. Yeah, it's been fun going biggie back. If I can just inspire a few, a few people to be entrepreneurs and, you know, have an amazing life, help other people, serve others. Makes me happy.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Well, I'll be looking forward to listening to podcasts that you start one day reading the book that you write, one day watching a speech that you give. I'm eager, eager to see you out there on the circuit, man. You know, you have developed an amazing bank of knowledge. So I look forward to you sharing that more with the world. And I appreciate you for taking the time to come on our show and share a little bit with our listeners today. Where can people go to continue connecting with you and getting more from you?
David Royce
Yeah. Great to be here.
Travis (Podcast Host)
Thanks, Travis.
David Royce
Appreciate it.
Travis (Podcast Host)
What, what, what's. What's a good place online where people can find, like, are you putting stuff out anywhere? Where can people follow you or. Or learn more from you?
David Royce
You know, I'm just on LinkedIn.com you know, and if somebody's interested, like, if they got inspired by the sales, to talk about sales and making a bunch of money, if they're young or they're trying to. I've always found that entrepreneurship, they are amazing salespeople. Right? Like, you're selling your vision, you're selling your story every day. And so I think it's a great place to cut your teeth if you're thinking about being an entrepreneur. So if anyone's interested, interested, you can
Travis (Podcast Host)
go to aptiverecruiting.com activerecruiting.com guys, door to door is one of the best educations you could possibly give yourself, especially in
Sponsor Voice 2
a world where AI is going to
Travis (Podcast Host)
be automating a lot of tasks. I think these soft skills of communication and sales and overcoming rejection and learning how to communicate with people from all walks of life and cultures and backgrounds and persuade and influence, I think a lot of these skills are going to be the. The. The skills that win over the next decade or two. So, David, I appreciate you very much for taking the time to come on the show. I know you're a busy guy. Do not take your time for granted. Everybody else that is listening, tuning in. Remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's easier to solve the rest of your problems with money in the bank. So let's solve that one first here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.
David Royce
Thanks, J.
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Host: Travis Chappell
Guest: David Royce (Serial Entrepreneur, Founder of Aptiv Environmental)
Date: March 26, 2026
In this episode, Travis Chappell sits down with David Royce, a prolific entrepreneur who made his fortune in what most would call "unsexy" industries—specifically, pest control. Royce shares his journey from broke college student to orchestrating exits totaling over $178 million and building Aptiv Environmental into a $500M+ revenue business, ultimately becoming one of the nation's largest residential pest control companies. The discussion highlights the massive, overlooked financial opportunities in conventional businesses, the value of sales skills, and practical strategies for scaling.
“Door to door is one of the best educations you could possibly give yourself, especially in a world where AI is going to be automating a lot of tasks.” – Travis Chappell (31:30)