The Importance Of Pest Control And How It Helps A Business

As a business owner, you want your customers to feel comfortable and safe. How would you like it if they were worried about being bitten by bugs? Pest control is not just for homes; businesses need pest control, too!

Pests can cause several problems in the workplace, from distracting employees to contaminating food products with bacteria. Learn more about how pest control protects your business and what you should be looking for when selecting an exterminator.

Valpas has created what appears to be the world's first connected bed bug prevention system that both improves the bottom line and the guest experience. And while technology is at the core of the product, the startup matches biological science with the IoT to build an affordable and reliable system to eliminate an expensive and stressful headache for hoteliers: bed bug infestations.

Valpas also has an interesting origin story. It developed as an off-shoot of an existing bed bug eradication service. The founders found the need for a hotel-specific system that not only eliminates the ghastly cost of eliminating bed bugs but also guarantees guests a bed-bug-free stay.

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The Importance Of Pest Control And How It Helps A Business | Martim Gois

We are here with Martim Gois, the CEO and Founder of Valpas, bringing hygiene to the hospitality sector. Martim is joining us from Europe. How is everything over there?

Thanks, Zain. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

This is going to be an exciting show because PropTech isn't about what goes on inside the building but sometimes what comes into the building. Why don't you tell us your background and specifically what I mean when I say coming into a building?

My mom's from Northern Europe, from Finland. My dad's from Portugal, Southern Europe. Since five months old, I have been traveling to opposite ends of Europe. During my years live spent, I have developed a passion for traveling. I'm a proud, passionate traveler. On one of my travels in 2013, I had the worst experience ever with my girlfriend in Indonesia. On a surf trip, we experienced bed bugs. Those small nasty parasites suck your blood and then infest your apartment.

We experienced them and got attacked. We brought them back to our flat in Helsinki. I became so frustrated with the way it was dealt with reactive pesticides. There was no other way back then. Out of that frustration, while still studying at university, we founded our company in 2013. At first, however, we were a bed bug killer company. We founded Northern Europe's first bed bug heat treatment business. That was innovative back then. We quickly scaled the company into an industry leader here in Finland and sold that first business.

This was a traditional vendor that any owner, landlord, or manager could call when they had a pest control problem. Did you focus specifically on bed bugs or treat a wide variety of related issues?

It was just for bed bugs.

After going through that experience, what types of things did you see? Give us a sense of the problem plaguing many owners and managers.

The real problem behind the rising global bedbug problem is that they spread like a virus, and there is no vaccine for them.

Through this first traditional extermination company, we understood the real problem behind the rising global bed bug problem. It's that bed bugs, they spread like a virus, but there is no vaccine for them. To land an analogy from COVID, they spread like a virus despite being tangible, and there is no vaccine for them.

There's a complete lack of prevention. This is the reason why they have been spreading exponentially year on year during the past many years. We saw that while no one can avoid picking up bed bugs and bringing them back home like we did, once you bring them into a bedroom inside a real estate, with early prevention, you could avoid those few bed bugs that tag along with you from becoming a problem.

Nobody else was doing this, and this was the answer, not just for travelers, the victims of bed bugs, but also for hospitality and the owners who are unwillingly in the middle of all this and experienced tons of reputation and financial damage due to them. Once we understood that this was the big question that needed to be solved, we wanted to fix it, and that's how the idea of Valpas was born.

How bad a problem is this, and what happens if you ignore the problem? Does it get worse, or does it stay at a certain point at a certain level? Is there any regulation or punishment for failing to provide a safe environment for your tenants or guests?

The problem is huge, and it's growing. To give you an idea, in the US, which is probably the most mature market for bed bugs, hospitality providers can even get sued for having a service failure related to bed bugs where guests are attacked and bring the problem back to their homes. The problem and the most misunderstood question in the whole industry is that hotels and hospitality providers feel it's their problem.

In the end, it's a traveler's problem because travelers are the ones who are afraid of them when they travel. Travelers are the ones who get attacked by them. They are the real victims who bring it back to their homes. Spending thousands of dollars on bed bug extermination and needing to throw everything out of your rooms is a big loss for you as a household or a traveler.

What we are doing with Valpas is enabling hospitality providers to be the solution. We empower hotels to inspire confidence with our new hygiene standard that collects and eliminates bed bugs on behalf of guests and stops them from coming home. We have over 60 top-rated hotels, everything from your 4 to 6-room boutique hotel to a 700-room hotel group using the standard and keeping guests safe and their operations.

If you don't do this, it's a recurring problem. Every single hotel faces it. It gets awful quick if you don't have these adequate means that Valpas is introducing to the market. At worst, you can see full hotels being refurbished and completely restructured due to bed bugs introduced into hotels that spread fast and caused damage, not to speak about reputation. According to Expedia.com and Booking.com, even one bed bug review affects the room rate at which the hotel can sell their room nights, not just for the next few days but even for the next six months. It's a huge problem.

There’s a funny anecdote about when I came to America. I may have a British accent, but I now live in America. When I came here, I was chasing the American dream and had no money. I stayed in some low-cost hotels in an area of San Francisco called the Tenderloin, where your average nightly rate was meager. It would sometimes be used as subsidized homeless from the shelters.

I remember I stayed in one place for a week. Three days in, we got a letter through the door, and I'm thinking, “Did we not pay a bill or anything?” The letter says, “It’s to notify you that we will need you to vacate earlier because we have an extermination company coming due to the bed bug problems we have had.” They had to put this letter under every single door.

I still remember that one experience. I didn't know there were bed bugs. I indeed checked out the moment I got that letter. I was horrified. I thought to myself, “This is great. I'm out of here. I'm good.” I didn't realize I was probably bringing the bed bugs with me to the next hotel, from hotel to hotel. The impact it has on a consumer, a tenant, or a guest in an apartment building is something that reminds you forever. It is something that we are horrified by. You only google bed bugs and see these horrific massive pictures of zoomed-in bed bugs, but they are small.

They are small, and you are not the only one googling. If you google hotel bed bug check depending on where you are in the world in which IP address, you'll get over 20 million hits. This depends a bit on where you are in the world, but 1 in every 3 frequent travelers has experienced bed bugs at least once. This is one of those things you never want to have again, especially when you experience it. You try to avoid it as you google hotel bed bug check, something we are making obsolete since you can now travel reassured. Even someone who has an experience like you, you’ve been watching from the sidelines or the neighboring flat. It's something you are now aware of and don't want to have.

In the US, let's say that 1 out of every 5 households has experienced a bed bug problem. That probably makes the pest control industry pretty safe with the number of recurring calls. It's not a cheap visit. Depending on the service used. In the US, the average was around $900 to $1,000 a visit. I'm sure it varies globally, but it’s a global problem. Also, when you look at the actual industry, it's made up of a lot of smaller groups. There's some consolidation happening. It's impossible to have complete the national reach because bed bugs are everywhere. If you take that stat 1 out of every 5, that means it's a perfect map of the world, but bed bugs could be wherever humans are.

It being a cash cow industry is one of the reasons why there hasn't been that much innovation either. Big pest control companies and small have been happily using pesticides to deal with them. Even though it's not a good solution for anyone, it accelerates the bed bugs.

I understand the standard treatment is insecticides. Nearly every pest control company will offer that, and then some offer other treatments, too.

Even further than just pesticides, everything is reactive. You are waiting for the fire to happen and then putting out the fire. It's like you would have the fire security industry. Everybody would sell a fire station, “Let's put a fire station near a block. When the fire happens or when something gets going, you'll be super close to us, and we'll get to you as fast as possible.” It’s completely neglected what people need, safety, and prevention. It's the vaccine.

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About Zain Jaffer:
Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle, after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780M.

His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as “Forbes 30 Under 30,” “Inc. Magazine’s 35 Under 35,” and the “SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award.” He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.