Fractional QA and fractional BCE

The problem this solves

A pest management company reaches a size where the founder can no longer personally inspect every job, and the next hire that would actually help is one the company cannot yet justify: a full-time quality manager, or a credentialed entomologist on staff. The work still needs doing. Technicians need a standard to execute. Commercial accounts increasingly ask who is technically accountable for the program. Bids into regulated sectors ask for a credential the company does not have in-house.

Fractional QA

Building the quality system a growing company needs, and then running it at whatever cadence the company can absorb:

• Written service standards that a technician can execute on a route, in a building the author has never seen — the difference between a standard that works and a standard that reads well.
• Quality inspection program: what gets checked, on what sample, by whom, and what happens when it fails.
• Documentation design so that what the technician records is what the customer's regulator will later ask for. Most service tickets are built for billing; in regulated accounts they are evidence.
• Technical training on identification, inspection method, and the reasoning behind the standard rather than the steps alone.
• Root-cause review of callbacks and complaints, which is where a quality system either earns its keep or does not.

Fractional BCE

A named Board Certified Entomologist available to the company and, where appropriate, to its customers:

• Technical authority on program design, thresholds, material selection, and the difficult identification.
• Credentialed review and sign-off on programs written for regulated accounts.
• Bid and proposal support where a prospect's specification asks for entomological credentials the company does not hold internally.
• Escalation support on the accounts that are not going well, before they become a lost customer or a claim.
• Standing behind the work in front of a customer's compliance officer, which is often the actual ask.

What it is not

It is not a license-holder-for-hire arrangement, and it is not a way to place a credential on marketing material that nobody stands behind. The engagement is real technical accountability: if the credential appears on a company's program documents, the work behind those documents has been reviewed.

Nor is it a route to the company's customers. The practice does not solicit consulting engagements from the accounts of a fractional client.

The boundary with facility work

The rest of this site sells to the buyer on the other side of the table: hospitals, districts, agencies, and portfolio owners retaining an entomologist to assess the program their pest management vendor executes. Those engagements and these are kept separate. The practice does not accept a facility engagement assessing a program built under a current fractional client, or the reverse, without disclosure to both and agreement from both.

Trenton S. Frazer operates a pest management company himself. The standards described on this page were built in one, under the ordinary constraints of hiring, turnover, and route economics — not designed in the abstract. See about.