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Welcome again to the Volunteer Rid-A-Pest podcast with your host Mike Stewart, and guest pest expert Erik Gardner. How are you doing, Erik?
Doing great, Mike.
We’re in some crazy times right now, Erik, and I know a lot of people are concerned about health and wellbeing of their homes and their family. So, we can’t help but have some information and your take on how you and your company, Volunteer Rid-A-Pest, are helping customers, and keeping them safe, and keeping their homes safe and pest-free during this COVID-19 or the coronavirus pandemic that has affected our world here in April of 2020. So Erik, I want to give you the floor to tell folks what you want them to know about what Volunteer Rid-A-Pest is doing, will continue to do, and how you can protect homes concerning this pandemic.
Well, we’re kind of in a unique position. We’ve been declared an essential business, so we are allowed to stay open and continue to do business. But we’ve got to be very careful with our employees, with our customers, because we go from house, to house, to house throughout the day. So, we definitely don’t want to go in one house, pick up the virus, and then carry it and expose someone else, so we have to be very careful. So the number one thing we’re doing is, we’re trying to just do exterior only treatments during this time, and we hope it’s going to be brief. If our customer has an active problem inside their home, if they have ants, or roaches, or whatever, we will go inside. But we’ve issued all our guys the N-95 masks. We’ve got nitrite gloves. We’ve got hand sanitizer. We’ve got instant soap and water we take with us, and we just try to stay as clean and germ-free as we can.
When we come out of a home, we dispose of the gloves and the mask, use the hand sanitizer before getting back in our truck. So we’re trying to take every precaution we can not to transmit anything, but still do our job. Because here’s the thing, you can’t just shut down everything because of the virus, because the reason were deemed an essential service is because we’re part of the public health system. If it weren’t for us, roaches, ants, all these different insects carry disease, germs, and bacteria. And flying insects, like mosquitoes, do as well. And then rodents, or ants and mice carry all kinds of disease, and they can contaminate our food supplies. So it’s essential that we do our job to keep our customers from having these problems.
Well, that’s obviously something that’s real important to homeowners in the Chattanooga area. I know one thing that you’ve added to your website recently, which is your COVID-19 policy, and I encourage everyone to go to any of your websites, ChattanoogaTermiteAndPestControl.com, or VolunteerRidAPest.com, and you can see that COVID-19 policy. Anything you want to comment about the policy and the information that folks can get there online at your website?
I mean, we want to give our customers some assurance that we are taking this seriously, and we’re going to make sure that we take every precaution we can not to cause them to get sick. Again, I’ve got a number of employees. We don’t want any of those guys to get sick. We don’t want them taking it home to their families, and we don’t want to bring it from one customer to another, and cause your family to get ill. So far, so good. Everything is moving along. None of the guys are ill. Everybody is working, and we hope to keep that up until this thing passes.
Well, I know you’re doing a great service for all the homeowners, and your customers there in Chattanooga when it comes to pest control. So, thanks again. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast, share it with your friends, because Erik Gardner and Volunteer Rid-A-Pes, and ChattanoogaTermiteAndPestControl.com, they are the experts at making sure you have a pest-free home. We’ll see you next time on the Volunteer Rid-A-Pest podcast.
