David Royce, a serial entrepreneur (Aptive Environmental) recounts his journey from a broke college door-to-door rookie to scaling a pest-control startup into a $500 million national leader—and why he’s now taking a well-earned sabbatical.Key Discussion PointsThe Rookie Summer: How a disastrous first week of door-to-door sales prompted David’s self-education marathon in sales books.Systems Over Spark: Building replicable training, manuals, and processes that delivered 2× results and launched him into leadership.Scaling Pains: Why hyper-growth nearly bankrupted his first venture and how he raised capital to keep pace.Leveling Up: Swapping his original exec team for seasoned billion-dollar operators to navigate the jump from regional to national scale.Entrepreneurial Highs & Lows: The dopamine rush of the early years, the burnout of success, and the intentional one-year pause to rediscover purpose.Investor IQ: Why proven operators attract funding, and the difference between a slick pitch deck and a battle-tested team.Sabbatical Mindset: Lessons on stepping back, letting others lead, and treating entrepreneurship like a lifelong sport you can pause and replay.Key TakeawaysMaster your craft first: hands-on experience de-risks your startup journey.Build playbooks, not personalities: systems scale; individuals stall.Growth capital is a double-edged sword—raise just enough to stay nimble.Only the paranoid survive: swap in fresh talent as your needs evolve.Sabbaticals can reboot your passion—sometimes stepping off the gas is the smartest move.Closing Thoughts Tune in to learn how David Royce became an accidental CEO, why he sold his own dream once (and why he’ll do it again), and how even the fastest-growing entrepreneurs need time off to stay in the game.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com
Chapter 1: Who is David Royce and why is he on sabbatical?
Building a company with $500 million in revenue, fastest company in America many times, buying companies, exit companies, and now you're on sabbatical as an entrepreneur, which I think it's almost the dream of everyone. I think every entrepreneur dreams of one day doing that and you've achieved it. So I can't wait to dive into every learning, every experience you've had.
But first, David, what was the spark for entrepreneurship and then why that specific industry?
Chapter 2: What sparked David Royce's journey into entrepreneurship?
Yeah. So it goes all the way back to college. I was a starving student working my way through college, trying to figure out how to pay for college. And I had a friend come to me and say, hey, what are you doing this summer? I went out last summer to Northern California and I sold pest control services door to door and I made about 25 grand. And that's about 24, 25 years ago.
So that's about $50,000 in today's money. And I thought, dang, for a college student, that sounds amazing. Yeah. And, um, so when I had no idea what I was getting myself into, went out, drove out to Sacramento, California, and I was horrible as a salesperson. When I started, it was, it was a disaster. I didn't sell anything for the whole first week.
Chapter 3: How did David Royce transition from rookie to top performer in sales?
Other people are selling, you know, one to four sales a day. And I got really worried. Um, I went to a Barnes and Noble, you know, for those that don't know, it's a bookstore. Yeah. I bought maybe half a dozen sales books. And I just started reading for about an hour and a half every single day to try to figure out how to do this. And something clicked.
And by the end of the summer, I was the top rookie in the entire company. And then the next year, I went back again because I was so successful. I managed a sales team. And I went to work for a smaller company. And the smaller company didn't have a training manual. And so I actually asked the boss, I said, hey, do you mind if I write a training manual? I want my team members to do really well.
And he was super impressed with that. And by the end of the summer, our sales team had sold about twice as much as the other sales teams that he had. And at the end of the summer, he goes, Hey, why don't, how would you feel about becoming like the director of our sales program?
Like becoming like a vice president of sales, you create all the training and I'll give you a cut off every single person in the company. If you get them to sell, you know, similar to how you guys sold at the, you know, that previous summer. Yeah. And so I was like, yeah, that's, that's amazing. By the end of my college career, I did it for another couple summers. I was made, I made 225 grand.
So it's like almost half a million dollars in today's money. Like that's how much I was making per year doing this job. I had about a hundred salespeople that I recruited, trained or oversell the management of. And, um, So then I go to my boss and I'm like, hey, I want to get into investment banking. I've been studying finance in college. I'm about to graduate.
And he just looks at me and goes, what are you doing? Why on earth would you go work 80, 100 hour weeks for somebody else? Like, you're so good at this. You should go start your own business. And it hadn't even crossed my mind before. I thought, well, it's not as sophisticated. I've been studying. I'm a college graduate.
Investment banking was the thing to go do if you could get that job in business right out of school. It paid the most. It was a total grind. But yeah, it took me a while to come around to it. It was a complete 180 from what I thought I was going to do. But I realized I had learned the business really well. And he was actually selling his company. I'm going to take some time off.
So, yeah, I ultimately decided to go for it and started my first company in Southern California.
Fascinating story. It's like an accidental entrepreneur. No intention to do so. How important do you feel it is then for people to work at a job or work in some sort of industry and then become an entrepreneur? Because we have both.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did David Royce face in scaling his first business?
We have some people that worked, then became some people that never even had a job that are like, I only want to be a business owner, but I am a big proponent of working for a company and learning skills. But how important was that for you?
I'm 100% behind you. Absolutely. I don't think there's any substitute for real world experience, especially in an industry. I know I would be much more willing to invest in a company where the entrepreneur had already worked in that industry because they already know what they're doing. You're not paying for them to learn on your dime per se. Here's a good example.
80% of businesses, I think, fail in five years. That's typically the stats I hear. But franchises, right? It's like those numbers flip. Only 10% to 20% of franchises fail. And the reason is they already have their best practices set up. They already have financial targets. They already have the key metrics that you're supposed to be following from an operations perspective. And it totally...
de-risk the business. And so if somebody has experience, especially if they go out and they become really great at that industry, the transition is not that hard to go start a new business. See, I totally 100% agree with you.
So you start this company or you buy this. Did you buy the company from him?
No, no. What I did initially, he tried to get me to go just start my own company. And I was definitely worried. I was concerned because I knew the statistics of the likelihood of success in starting your own business. And so then he said, well, what if I invest into you as a silent investor? Then I said, okay, that's great. I could grow faster and make more money.
And then he said, when he sold his business, he just sold off the assets. So he actually kept his company name and he sold off really just the customer base and the technician base. And he said, hey, if you want to even take the company name, you can license the company name from me and go start it that way. So I used his company name and then used his money to go start my own company.
What a unique approach. I really like that. It really is the accidental entrepreneur. So fast forward to you starting to see success. When you get to that $1 million, let's say one to two or $3 million in revenue, what did you have to change to get to that point?
You know, for us, because I already had the model, I mean, we hit two or three million the first year. Like we were running super, super fast. And that was one of the reasons I realized, initially I realized I needed growth capital. But then we almost went bankrupt the first year because we grew too fast. But we have to pay out commissions in advance of all the revenue coming in.
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Chapter 5: How important is industry experience before starting a business?
The thing I had to understand was how to take the foot off the gas a little bit to make sure that we didn't ultimately go bankrupt, that we could grow in a solid and steady manner. Then how do you find the capital to continue to do that? But that first company is very much like working in a lab too, right? You're learning the operations. You're totally involved in the day-to-day.
You're still working, training the salespeople, right? But I was also very cautious not to be too engaged in the day-to-day. I wanted to kind of be overseeing it all, learning it, trying new things. I worked at the bigger company that I first worked at was a $100 company. And so I had that experience in my background. And then I worked at the smaller company. And then I asked my boss, too.
I said, tell me all the things you would change or work on. Tell me all your problems so that I can go make the bottle better. And with those different things, and then also with my finance degree, I felt like I had a really great advantage to get a head start in the industry. And it gave me that confidence to build multiple companies and continue to scale.
Do you think a big part of your success was humility? I don't know if you can, you know, a lot of people, they may not listen to others, even those that are more successful, because maybe they think they know everything. But it sounds like you were very open to feedback, to understanding. You were open to asking the right questions.
Do you think that played a big part into the continued success you had?
Yeah, I definitely do in the sense that I think only the paranoid survive. Bill Gates used to say that a lot. And there's always somebody out there with a better business model, making more money than you, smarter, greater IQ than you have.
And so I think you got to be, you got to stay calm, you know, and, and stay humble, continually be looking for new ways to improve the business, no matter what business you are. You know, I've heard the saying that, you know, there's, there's three different, three different stages of business. There's a startup, there's a scale up and there's a screw up.
And it's like, how do you make sure that you never get to that screw up phase? And the way you do it is you continually to evolve. I love the phrase, if you're not growing, you're dying. And if you think about it, like the Fortune 500 list, I think it was created in 1955.
And of all those 500 companies that are on there today, you know, 70 years later or whatever, there's only 10% of the companies are still on that list. And so to me, that's like a real testament of you've got to stay on your toes. You have to stay on your game.
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Chapter 6: Why did David Royce replace his executive team during scaling?
Um, and just like, you know what? Like I'm not really learning that much. I'm going to get myself even further out of the day to day and spend more time with my family. I'm going to take some chips off the table. I'm going to have plenty of money to be able to grow the next business. And I'm going to put my, um, a CEO in place to be able to run that.
So I think it's really important to know how you're feeling and not get completely burnt out to the point where you're just like, I don't want to do this anymore. But, um, How can I still continue on with the business, put people in those positions to do the work maybe that I don't want to do if it's no longer helping me grow?
You mentioned earlier about if you were to invest in someone, you would hope that they would be, let's say, working in their industry. Let's say you now are at a point where people might be coming to you or maybe they already are because they want, hoping that you would invest into their company. For those people that are trying to get an investor,
What do they need to know from an investor's perspective? Is it the right pitch deck? Is it proving the right thing? What specifically would you say are the things that you look for if you are going to invest in someone?
I really enjoy investing in entrepreneurs who already have a track record. So that makes it hard for brand new entrepreneurs that maybe haven't done something. But if they have worked in an industry and they're like, hey, I want to go start this company. I was at the very top of what I did there. I can transfer that into a business. I just need the capital.
I already see best practices and that sort of thing. That made me much more likely to do that. I think anybody can create a slide deck. Yeah. high tech and we're going to make this much. But the reality is, is you've been in people, you know, not just best, you know, not just a business model because it's, I think there's millions of ideas.
I think our business world is littered with good ideas executed poorly, right? And so it's the team ultimately that you're investing in, not really the product or service aspect. I think there's a lot of products or services out there right now that they weren't the very best product or service, but they had the best go-to-market strategy or the best team behind them and they made it work.
Looking at yourself, thinking about other people that you know that have been successful in business, is there a trait or a few traits that you say, okay, really successful entrepreneurs typically have these traits? And also the reason why I say this is I am not the firm believer that everyone can be a successful entrepreneur. I think anyone can start a business for sure.
But I really do feel like I wouldn't even say that I'm necessarily a successful entrepreneur. I always say my wife is just because I have a lot of hard times with dealing with some of the mental game in business. I'm just not really cut out for everything.
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Chapter 7: What changes in personal happiness has David Royce experienced over his career?
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Fatale too early, but that was never my mentality. It's just like this obsession to continue, to keep going, to keep learning. And if it's fun, you're not going to stop. College was really frustrating for me. And honestly, education was really frustrating for me. Until I got into my business classes, it was, you know...
It's just really tough to go to class and be excited to learn because I didn't understand how it transferred to the business world or how to make money in life. But when I got in my business classes, my economics classes, my business law classes, I couldn't get enough of it. It was great.
I wish I'd taken just four or five years of straight business because I feel like I would have been a better entrepreneur. I don't think you can judge people if they don't have passion for something. It's I think it's pointless. So I feel sad for everybody who goes to school or college, they drop out early, like this isn't me. And maybe just didn't find what you're passionate about.
I think we need more flexibility to be able to learn what we want to learn.
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Chapter 8: What does David Royce think about the entrepreneurial dopamine rush?
But people have different passions and passions change as we evolve over life and we grow, you know? And so if, especially if we're going to become an entrepreneur, maybe you choose a field and it doesn't go well, but you go start another business. I know I have friends who have sold or have got, you know, they went through maybe three companies and failed all three of them.
And it was the fourth one that hit or the fifth one. And then they built a billion dollar company. So, yeah, just because whatever you do right out of college, like be willing to change, be willing to move around if needed to find what you're, you can be really good at, you know, and beware of passion.
Sometimes I think it's important to have passion and you think you can build passion around something that you're good at. Um, you know, so pest control, I wasn't passionate about it initially, but because I got in the top 1% of 1% in sales and I got really excited about it.
Um, and then I could, I learned how to leverage, you know, that skillset and go, you know, build something really big, but be aware of passion too, because, you know, there's so many industries out there.
I call them, um, passion industries, like, you know, that might be anything from just like even the restaurant business, which has really tough margins, um, or Hollywood, you know, or music or whatever else. And, um, Unless you're really, really good. You got to be the same thing. Top 1% of 1% in those industries.
It's really hard to make money, especially if you're paying for college with a degree in that specific field. Yeah, really, really tough to pay off your college loans.
That's exactly why I will never open a restaurant. I really, really like that. I think that's great. I think a lot of young people need to hear that. They need to understand that just because you go to school for one thing doesn't mean you need to do that. Plus, like you, look at that. Your finance... helped you and all these other courses helped you.
It's like Steve Jobs, you know, with his, he didn't go to college, but he did classes and that helped him do different things. So it's like how you, how you can apply certain learnings and certain courses into business. You know, sounds like that. That's been an incredible part of your, your journey. This has been great. I really enjoyed the conversation.
I don't know if you want people to reach out to you, but if you would want people to reach out to you, maybe they can help you figure out what you're going to do after sabbatical. How can they do so?
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