PPC124 | MEET THE MEMBER
Brothers Carl and Craig Hoult are the team behind Suffolk-based Reaper Bird Control. They talk to PPC magazine about falling into pest management, taking the leap into their own business, learning to live with quiet months and why bird work is as much about people as it is pigeons.
The Hoult brothers take flight
PPC Let’s go right back to the beginning. Craig, how did you get into pest management?
Cr Not at all by design. I’m a proud Lowestoft lad, and I worked on the docklands for about 13 years. Carl and our former boss at Abate Pest Control had been trying to get me into pest control for years.
Then I got made redundant and ended up flitting around between jobs, basically just keeping a roof over my head. Carl approached me again, and I finally went for it.
I got sent down to London as a foot technician. You never knew what you were going to be doing. You’d have ten or 15 jobs, hit the Underground and go from German cockroaches to bed bugs, fleas and urban foxes.
It was during Covid too, so sometimes there were maybe another two people on the entire Underground. It was surreal.
I’ve now been in pest management about six years, and I’m Operations Director, which I still can’t really get my head around. It’s been a wild ride. Carl really did put me back on a path.
PPC Carl, your route was fairly unconventional too.
Ca I moved back to England as an ex-diver with no idea what to do with myself. Craig and I started working on Lowestoft Docks, painting boats and doing handyman work. We ended up running a kickboxing club together.
One of the students was a service manager for a pest control company and asked if I wanted to do a bit of cash-in-hand work checking containers for cockroaches. The rest is history.
I just loved it. It was an instant fascination. I thought, “I’ve got to get away from teaching kids karate and kickboxing.”
I was done with kids. They’re the top of the pest level.
Funny enough, I spent my first couple of months in bird management. I hadn’t even seen a rat. I think that’s where the love for bird management came from. It’s niche and you can see what you’ve left behind. It’s about leaving a mark.
Leaving the nest
PPC What made you decide to set up Reaper?
Ca We were spoiled in our first company. It was family-run and a cut above the rest service-wise.
It was home for a very long time. Then bigger companies came in and bought up the business, and we just didn’t have the mentality for the corporate side.
We knew we had the skills and wanted to carry on doing the work, but we were in the wrong environment. So we took the jump.
Cr Carl came to me a few months before we left and said, “If things don’t improve, how would you feel about us going off and doing our own thing?”
I think, to his complete surprise, I basically said, “Yep. Sign me up. I’m ready to go now.”
It was a massive leap. If it wasn’t for Carl, I’d probably still be an employee. What I love now is tackling problems. We get handed jobs other people aren’t prepared to tackle. We can work with the customer and solve them rather than just saying, “Here’s a price. Go for it.”
Ca The big thing was taking responsibility for the whole process. If something goes wrong on our terms, it’s my fault, and I’ll sort it. That might sound like a nightmare to some people, but we just work harder not to make the mistakes.
No winging it
PPC Was starting the business frightening?
Ca My worst-case scenario was going back to being an employee. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if Reaper went wrong, the worst thing that could happen was I’d go back to where I was two years earlier.
A lot of companies spend time trying to sell an idea. We’d rather ask, “What do you want?” If they say, “We just want that,” fine. Let’s work with that.
PPC The first 18 months went pretty well. Surely something went wrong?
Ca Last year went too smoothly. Then January arrived.
We had about £80,000 worth of purchase orders in December, with a lot of indoor work ready for January. Then nobody got back to us. We’d sold the jobs, we were ready to go, and we didn’t work until 27 January.
Some people might think a month off sounds great. For two workaholics, it really sucked.
We used the time to improve our safe systems of work, RAMS, policies and processes. Now we’re roof to roof again, and I sometimes think, “I wish we had that time.”
Bird work changes how you look at the pipeline too.
One job might last four weeks. If a builder suddenly puts that project back by two months, it can leave a massive hole.
Head for heights
PPC What makes bird management such a good fit?
Ca For me it’s the technical side. I’m very process-driven. You’ve got legislation, engineering, access, safety, animal welfare and customer expectations all tied together.
And, tongue in cheek, it’s nice being all the way up there when annoying customers can be all the way down there. That is a joke, by the way.
PPC Working at height must make recruitment interesting.
Ca Number one question. Do you like heights?
We’ve had people interested in working with us. You explain all the crazy stuff we get into, they talk for an hour and then go, “But I’m scared of heights.”
And you’re thinking, what are we going to do? Chicken control? Kiwi? Dodo? Ground bird management?
I don’t think anyone has ever thought, “Bird control is so good I will overcome my fear of heights for this job.”
Even if you’re comfortable, you can be in a cherry picker, and it starts rocking gently. The person on the ground says, “It wasn’t moving that much.” No, not down there it wasn’t.
Building a flock, not an empire
PPC Reaper has a very personal brand. Was that deliberate?
Cr I think the family side has done us wonders. When we first started, it was “the Hoult brothers” this and “the Hoult brothers” that. We were probably known more for that than Reaper at first.
Ca People compliment our social media, and when I look at it, it’s basically thousands of selfies of me and Craig. Here’s us on a job. Here are our ugly mugs again.
But people know it’s us. We’re not trying to convince anyone we’re a gigantic organisation.
Bigger isn’t always better. We want to stay small enough that we can control the quality. We have fewer resources than bigger companies, and we’re honest about that. It’s about expectations.
PPC You’re both pretty involved with BPCA too. Why?
Ca I was dragged into it. I didn’t actively seek it. Years ago, Martin Cobbald [BPCA Executive Board member] from Dealey told me, “Sit down, shut up, listen and be an observer, and you’ll get it.”
Then you realise people are discussing the future of the industry. It gets addictive. You work on something, and then other people use what you’ve helped build.
PPC Finally, where do you want to take Reaper next?
Ca I don’t think we need to be much bigger. We’re working to the standard we want, and I’d rather keep the quality controlled, even if it takes us a little longer. For us it’s about continuously striving to be better.
Cr Six years into pest management, I still absolutely love every bit of it. Hopefully we’ll be here for a lot longer.
One Reaper job in Lowestoft involved a building used by the town’s kittiwakes. Rather than designing the bird management work in isolation, Carl and Craig approached the local groups involved with the birds.
Working with the kittiwakes
They were really pleased that, as a pest industry, we actually wanted to let them have their say on what we were going to do.
There were a few options, including spiking and netting. They didn’t want those, so we listened and took them off the table. We went with high-grade PVC slopes instead. It was much more expensive, but the welfare of the birds was the most important thing.
There was a local music festival afterwards, and the kittiwake group had its own stand. Our mum was walking past and heard them talking about how well the pest control had been done with the protected birds.
That little bit of education and talking to the right people meant people who could easily have been against the bird management were actually promoting the work we’d done.
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