Robiar Smith recently shared how she built her pest control business with rolling out after leaving behind a successful career in IT and higher education. Following in her parents’ footsteps, the south side native has built a thriving organization that boasts several retail locations and a line of pest control products.
Tell me about your background in IT.
When you start in IT, there are various positions…such as help desk support and network admin. From there, I started teaching IT courses, getting students ready for the IT profession, whether they wanted to go off and be business analysts or project managers. As I started teaching those classes, I also started teaching business and entrepreneur classes, and eventually, it got to a point where I knew the books and the curriculum in the back of my head.
How has your background in IT helped you grow and build your business?
It helped me tremendously because I knew the IT structure and several different aspects of business, like the business structure, organizational chart, how to build your business, a business plan, a business summary, and how to put all that together. In addition to IT and business structure, looking at your target market and having creative visions and missions are all things that I was teaching and helping other entrepreneurs with. It then became a matter of sitting myself down and implementing those things in my own business. From there, that’s how RB Pest Solutions was born. I thank my education for helping guide me along the way because I did not have the money initially. I was able to sit there and build my business cards, graphics, and website from scratch, which helped me tremendously when I did not have the funds for outsourcing.
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