Founder's Story - Goodbye Grind, Hello Leisure: How David Royce Built Four Businesses on Repeat | Ep 215 with David Royce Founder of Aptive Environmental

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

 David Royce, a serial founder (Aptive Environmental et al.) 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 Notion: https://notion.com/founders* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com* Check out Square: https://square.com/go/founderAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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See website for full details, restrictions and important safety information. Everyone welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have a special guest because it's the first time that this person is entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur on sabbatical. David Royce, I mean you've done incredible things, 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 is 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?

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. 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.

That's about 24, 25 years ago. That's about $50,000 in today's money. I thought, dang, for a college student, that sounds amazing. And so I went out, 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 a disaster. I didn't sell anything for the whole first week. Other people are selling one to four sales a day.. I got really worried. I went to a Barnes and Noble, for those that don't know, it's a bookstore. 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. Something clicked. By the end of the summer, I was the top rookie in the entire company. 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. 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, 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 of the company if you get them to sell, you know, similar to how you guys sold at the, you know, that previous summer. And so I was like, yeah, that's amazing. By the end of my college career, I did it for another couple summers. 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 guess what 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 he 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. It was just, I thought, well, it's just, it's not as sophisticated. You know, I've been studying, I'm a college graduate. You know, investment making was like the thing to go do if you could get that job in business right out of school, paid the most, you know, 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, and it takes 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. We have some people that worked, then became some people that never even had a job that are like, I only wanna 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 a hundred percent behind you. Absolutely. Like there's no, I don't think there's any substitute for real world experience, especially in an industry. I mean, I know like 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. Like 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 finding years. That's typically the stats I hear. But franchises, 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-risked 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 use his company name and then use 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 $2 or $3 million in revenue, what did you have to change to get to that point?

For us, because I already had the model, we hit $2 or $3 million the first year. We were running super, super fast. 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. We have to pay out commissions in advance of all the revenue coming in. And I actually had to go to some of my top salespeople and say, hey, can I hold off a couple of months to pay you? I'll pay you 10% interest on your money, but I need a little bit of time to be able to get that to you. Otherwise, we just did a lot better than we had anticipated originally.

Money is so key in growth, right? And it's one of the reasons why that first business, I realized I had to sell the business in order to get the money to grow even faster, or at least keep up with the same rate of growth and to de-risk any potential danger of going bankrupt again. Wow. Our first business was e-commerce and no matter how big we grew, it looked great from the outside, but all of our money was tied up in the inventory and the,

all these different things and it was very stressful. So what were those moments for you in terms of as you growing and, and as you started to learn the financials, because I think a lot of companies, like the 80%, many times they're going out of business because of something related to finance. Yeah, I'd say that I had a unique advantage in my specific industry.

Pest control is not a very sexy industry. I always joke that there's not a lot of NBAs running into pest control. And having a finance degree was very unique for somebody in that particular blue collar industry. And so having finance, I understood it. 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? 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. 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 hundred dollar company. And so I had that experience in my background. And then I worked at the smaller 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, 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, um, I think only the paranoid survive. You know, I know Bill Gates used to say that a lot and there's always somebody out there, you know, with a better business model, making more money than you smarter, you know, greater IQ than you have. And so I think you got to be, you got to stay calm and stay humble, continually be looking for new ways to improve the business. No matter what business you are. I've heard this saying that there's three different stages of business. There's a startup, there's a scale up, and there's a screw up. And it's a screw up. 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 evolve. I love the phrase, if you're not growing, you're dying. And if you think about it, the Fortune 500 list, I think it was created in 1955. And of all those 500 companies that are on there today, 70 years later or whatever, 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. You can't just rest on your laurels no matter how big you get.

Because ultimately you don't want to fall into that screw up phase, become a dinosaur or potentially go out of business. Yeah, you mentioned the bookstore. I was driving by, I was in my hometown recently, and I drove by where they used to have the video stores. And I had the laugh. I'm like, Oh my gosh, like, look at all this whole places. None of these big corporations exist anymore. None of the retail stores, they're all gone. And I was really fascinated by like that only the paranoid will survive. So when you look, when you became, you know, a hundred million, three, four, five hundred

million dollars, what had to change within you and then what had to change within the organization? Yeah, so I'd say like when we were going from kind of a regional company in that hundred million, two hundred million dollar range and you're trying to become a real national player, the hardest thing was looking for really smart people to join the organization. And the most difficult thing I ever had to do was to switch out my original executive team and level up to experienced executives who had worked at billion dollar companies to come in and then help us go, okay, how do you scale at this level? Yeah,

more than anything, that was really it. I think a lot of scaling is just, it's funny, it's so simple in my mind because it's taking all your best practices that made you great as a single location and it's wrapping them into beautiful policy and procedure manuals, great training videos, having a culture that you build out. But otherwise it's just, for us, it was just a bunch of trucks and equipment, chemicals and computers or whatever. So yeah, I guess I'm trying to remember where I'm even going with that. But the scaling part's not so bad. It's really like the people, that's the most important asset you have in the

business, having grave wins around around you for from other people Successful as well like yourself that the people that got you here are not the people that are gonna get you there And that's many times the changes they need to make when you look at happiness and you go back to You know just out of college. What made you happy then when you know, you saw success in your business What had what made you happy then and then saw success in your business? What made you happy then? And then now you're on sabbatical. What makes you happy now? And what do you think changed when it came to what makes you happy?

It's a really good question. There's so many different stages in a business in terms of growing it. Right. And in many ways, I was probably happiest in the early days when I didn't know a lot. And I was trying to figure out solutions to all these different problems and building and really seeing massive change.

Because a lot of the change later, it becomes more incremental, because you've really got your business model already dialed in. But it's almost like that thrill. It's kind of like when a basketball game is really close versus one team, it's a total blowout and the other team's killing them by 30. And you're like, all right, it's almost like that thrill. It's kind of like when a basketball game is really close versus one team, it's a total blowout and the other team's killing them by 30 and you're like, all right, it's almost

boring, right? You're going to go home early before the game's even over. We got to that phase. And so I think the most fun part is it's those early years that it's exciting. Do you think that a lot of entrepreneurs, we get addicted to the dopamine hits? It's like doing lots of things, like working crazy 14, 60 hour days. I loved it. It was so much fun. For me, it's like a sport. That's my sport of choice was business. But when you stop, every time I stopped, sold a company and then had a gap in between the next one, although I may have been starting to ramp up the next company,

I definitely felt like a loss and I was bored and not as happy. I've had, in fact, when I would take vacations, even when I was working, I had to, I couldn't like slow down. Like in the mornings, I'd have to wake up and work three or four hours. Part of it was feeling like I had to set the example to other people, even when they weren't around. But I did realize too, it's just like you get addicted to the dokemy and feeling like you're productive. And eventually you kind of have to pull your self-worth out of that. Like you got to take your ego out of the business

and go, hey, I can just like, it's a good thing to be able to relax and just sit on a beach and read a book and be totally comfortable doing that. And so it took me time and I'm much better off now. I'm not going to your massive withdrawals. I do have the excitement of, okay, I'm curious about what's next. I've told myself I'm going to take at least one year off to really be intentional about it, think about it, and no rush. I've heard this before from people as well. When they sell the company,

they really get depressed and they you think that would be the happiest moment that they hit success they're financially free but yet they they get quite depressed. I also like when you said almost ignorance is bliss it's almost better to not know what to expect when you're younger when you're the, like if you knew how hard things were gonna be in the company you may not have done it from the start. I'm really interested to burn out. There's a whole topic now around can an entrepreneur be really successful and really navigate not working too much? Is it even possible? Some say yes you can do that now with technology or outsourcing or whatever.

And then others say, absolutely not. If you really wanna see a huge level of success, you are gonna have to grind 24 seven. Yeah, you know, I would say I never got burnt out because of the work. I loved to work. In fact, the only reason I started to slow down was to start out a family and start having children. And my wife really needed somebody else there. It's like,

hey, can you come home a little earlier than nine or 10 o'clock at night? We had this really crazy lifestyle where we got married pretty young and we were married for 10 and a half years before we had children. And she was a securities fraud litigator. She went to law school and then was a lawyer for a bunch of years and I was working, building companies. And so it worked out perfect where we could both really focus on our careers and then we'd come home late at night, be together. And then once we had kids, like threw it all up in there, it was a whole different ball game.

So I think you can, the thing where I probably got burnt out the most, it was certainly around after my third business, I just felt like I wasn't learning anything new. So we had expanded into maybe 2000 plus cities. And I was just like, you know what? I'm not really learning that much. I'm going to get myself even further out of the day to day. I'm going to 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. I'm going to put my 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 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 you know hoping that they 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? You know, I really enjoy investing in entrepreneurs who already have a track record.

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 in the very top at what I did there. I can transfer that into a business. I just need the capital. I already have best practices and that sort of thing. That made me much more likely to do that. I think anybody can create a slide deck. you know, sexy high tech, and we're going to make this much. But the reality is, as you've been in people, you know, not just best, you know, not just a business model, because I think there's millions of ideas.

I think our business world is littered with, um, good ideas executed poorly. Right. And so it's the team ultimately that you're investing in, not really the product or service sector. 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 that 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. But what would you say are some traits that you see that most successful people have besides being crazy enough to think of or being crazy enough to do something. Remove that one. Anything else that you think. Yeah. You got to be a lifelong learner, right? So reading is key. And I have ADHD. So to be honest, I audible everything. Every once in a while I'll find a book that I can't actually audible, but

I usually consume at least two books a month. And for honestly about 15 years, the only books I read were business books. So I read hundreds, maybe a thousand plus books at this point. Business is always changing, right? Technology is changing. Now we have AI getting integrated into everybody's business model, like softwares in the world, they say. Um, but there's always new techniques and that's why you've always got to be evolving. So it's part of that philosophy of, you know, evolve or die.

Got, you've got to find ways to, to keep growing, to keep learning. And I don't know if you have that attitude, I think that talent is directly proportional to desire. And so if you're continually passionate to continue to read or about your business or whatever, I think you can learn a lot of those skills. That's a big question. I know Andreessen Horowitz, for example, likes to really invest in entrepreneurs and try to teach them leadership skills so they can continue to actually run the business because they believe that the founders are the best people who run the business because they know it, you know, six ways till Sunday.

So yeah, I think there's a lot. I don't think everybody can do it. I think some people maybe lose their passion or just get like the throng. You ever get stuck at checkout and suddenly feel like you're back in 2003? I was in this coffee shop the other day. Their system froze when I went to pay. Staff panicked. I ended up walking out empty handed.

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College was really frustrating for me. And honestly, all education was really frustrating for me until I got in my business classes. It was, you know, it's just really tough to like go to class and be excited to learn because it didn't understand how it transferred to the business world or how to make money in life. Um, 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. They don't have passion for something. I think it's pointless. I feel sad for everybody who goes to school or college, they drop out earlier, 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. That was me, David. I dropped out.

My wife made me go back. Cause she said she wouldn't marry me unless I had a college degree. I just only put no degree. I wanted a license plate that said no degree on a Lamborghini or Ferrari Now that was my goal in life. That's all I wanted just to prove the point, but I am with you I took two things away. They're really important desire Desire is so important. How much are you willing? Yeah, how much do you want to win or how much do you want to succeed?

Reminds me of if you look at like the most successful athletes, they typically have more desire to win than the ones because their skills might be the same. But how much do you want it? That's amazing. This has been great, by the way. One last question for you is this. You have a class, you're at college. And the reason why I bring this up too is you mentioned college. I'm glad you bring that up. I'm glad you bring up college because there's I think a lot of Gen Z, I'm not sure if they want to go to college anymore but if they can go to college and take the right courses it makes sense but you're sitting there, you're a professor

right now, a business professor, you have these college students in front of you and you have to tell them one takeaway that you think would be critical for them in their life, what would it be? I would say don't let anybody label you. Don't think that whatever job you take the first time has to be what you're going to do for the rest of your life. You know, there's like this trajectory,

people come out of college, or they take a major and then they decide, okay, I'm gonna go get into this. But people have different passions and passions change as we evolve over life and we grow. And so 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 have friends who have sold or have got, they went through maybe three companies and failed all three of them.

And then there 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 be aware 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. You know, so pass control, I was passionate about it initially, but because I got in the top 1% of 1% in sales, then I got really excited about it. And then I learned how to leverage that skillset and go build something

really big. But be aware of passion too, because there's so many industries out there, I call them passion industries. That might be anything from just like even the restaurant business, which has really tough margins or Hollywood, you know, or music or whatever else. And unless you're really, really good, you gotta be the same thing, top 1% of 1% in those industries.

It's really, really hard to make money. Especially if you're paying for college, you know, 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. That, I really, really like that. I think that's great. I think a lot of young people need to hear that

and 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 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 part of 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? Yeah, just resale me on LinkedIn. Easy. There it is. David Royce, this has been great. I learned a lot. I got a lot of soundbites today, a lot of quotes that I'm going to quote you on, but

I really appreciate your time. And thank you so much for joining us on Founder's Story. Yeah, happy to help. Thanks so much for the invite, Daniel. If you're looking for legit ways to make extra money, you've got to check out the Side Hustle Show with hundreds of actionable episodes to choose from, you'll learn what's working now from real people making real money, like the Utah mom who built a six-figure business playing video games, or the guy earning $3,000 a month renting out mobility scooters. Online or offline,

from Amazon to your own hometown, from YouTube to vending machines, The Side Hustle Show has you and your wallet covered. Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show has you and your wallet covered. Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show wherever you're listening to this podcast and increase your earning power today. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed? Can I make my side softer? Can I make my side firmer? Can we sleep cooler?

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