Owned by the people doing the work.

Why employee ownership matters to you

In a franchise, the technician at your door is often the lowest-paid person in the chain, working from a script designed to maximize ticket size. At Salish, the technician is an owner. That changes the incentives at the root:

• No commissioned upsells. Our employee-owners aren't paid to sell you services you don't need. Recommendations come from what the inspection actually found.
• Care in the work. When you own a piece of the company, cutting corners costs you — so corners don't get cut.
• Consistency. The person who inspects your home is the person (or their co-owner teammate) who treats it. No handoff to a stranger.
• Local accountability. We live in the communities we serve. Our reputation is our equity — literally.

Our commitments

• Free inspections, forever. The first step costs nothing and never will.
• Published pricing. Our full price list lives on this website. If it's not published, we don't charge it without a written quote you approve first.
• Honest scope. If a problem is DIY-able, we'll say so and tell you how.
• Responsible products. We start with the lowest-toxicity, label-compliant option that solves the problem — integrated pest management as a practice, not a marketing word.

Our story

Salish Pest Services started in a truck bed, on a job none of us wanted to do.

We were pest technicians — some of us with a decade or more in the trade — working for the big national pest control brands that blanket the Pacific Northwest with billboards and door hangers. The work itself was good work. The business around it wasn't.

Every week we saw the same thing. A customer would be quoted one price on the phone and handed another at the door — because pricing lived in a sales script, not on a price list. We were handed commission targets and a menu of "add-ons," and the pressure to sell was constant: upsell the quarterly plan to the grandmother with one ant trail, attach the mosquito package to the family who'd never asked about mosquitoes, mark the crawlspace "urgent" because the branch bonus depended on it. Customers could feel it. So could we.

And the money told the story. The bulk of every invoice left the region — up to a corporate office, out to shareholders, into marketing budgets and executive bonuses. The technicians doing the actual work, driving the actual roads from Port Townsend to Bremerton to Seattle, were paid the least of anyone in the chain, often barely a living wage, while carrying quotas for people who had never held a sprayer.

The honesty kept getting squeezed out from both ends: customers were sold services they didn't need, and technicians were denied the value they created. One of us finally said what all of us were thinking: "Why are we building someone else's company on our customers' trust?"

So we built our own — and we structured it so the problem can't come back. Salish Pest Services is employee-owned. There is no corporate office taking the margin; the people treating your home are the owners splitting what the business earns. There are no commissioned salespeople; nobody at Salish makes more by selling you something you don't need, because none of us get paid that way. And there is no hidden pricing: our full rate card is published on this website — minimums, pricing factors, warranties, and visit frequency — because if a price is fair, it can survive being printed.

The free inspection came from the same logic. In the old world, the "free quote" was the top of a sales funnel. Ours is a real diagnosis from a real expert: what pest you have, where it's coming from, what it costs to fix at published rates — and when a $12 tube of caulk will solve your problem, that's what we'll tell you. We'd rather earn your trust than your invoice.

We named the company for the Salish Sea because that's the region we live in and the region we answer to. Our crews work the Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas, Bainbridge Island, and Greater Seattle — and when you meet us at your door, you're meeting an owner.

[Team photos and owner names to be added before launch.]

Where we work

We're based in Port Townsend and serve the wider Salish Sea region: Jefferson County, Kitsap County (Poulsbo, Silverdale, Bremerton), Bainbridge Island, Kingston, and Greater Seattle. If you're nearby but not sure you're in range, ask — and if we can't serve you, we'll point you to someone who can.