PPC120 | YOUR ASSOCIATION

PPC Editor Kat Shaw, took a trip to London in spring to visit Greg Fee, founder of Total IPM. 

While taking a tour of the Natural History Museum, a client of Total IPM, they talked about carrying out pest control in some of London’s most iconic and sensitive sites.

Back to the beginning

PPC Let’s talk about how you got started in pest control. Was it something you always planned?

GF I hadn’t exactly planned on a pest control career, but my path wasn’t that far out of the way in some respects. My roots lie in the countryside, with a background in agriculture and gamekeeping.

All my friends were farmers, and I went to agricultural college. After college I started doing some gamekeeping initially, but then my mum got sick.

I had to come back home to pay rent, and I saw a pest control job advertised. I knew a bit about it from the farms, so I applied.

PPC And that decision kickstarted a decades-long career in pest control! Which company was that first job with, and where did you go from there?

GF I started at Eagle Pest Control as a technician in Kent before the company was sold to Mitie.

From there, I moved over to Absolute Pest Control which was started by my former supervisor Rob Long and Roger Weeks, who were both also previously at Eagle, before taking a bit of a dramatic detour.

A year in the wild

GF Unfortunately, my father passed away, and I was left with some inheritance. I had a drive to do something different with it, so I signed up for an intensive course in South Africa to become a FGASA qualified field guide.

PPC You weren’t kidding about a big detour!

GF Yeah, haha. It was tough though, not for the faint hearted. I passed and spent a year as a guide, doing anti-poaching patrols, guided walks with rifles, and working with trackers.

My job was to keep guests safe in some of the most dangerous environments on earth. But probably not for the reasons you think! It was a dangerous place for kidnappings, robberies, and violent crime.

The main lodge had been held up at gunpoint the week before I got there. But the animals were feared by locals, so in a strange way, being with them was the safest place to be.

"My path took me from farms, to gamekeeping, to museums and heritage sites."

Building Total IPM

PPC But you obviously ended up back here, in the UK, and back into the world of pest control?

GF Yeah, after coming home in 2010 I joined Safeguard Pest Control, and I worked my way up from technician to surveyor over nearly a decade. It was there I met my wife – she was working in the sales department at the time.

From there I went to work for Total Support Services (TSS) as their Specialist Services Director, managing all their pest control subcontractors. However, we found that it was difficult to provide the level of service we wanted via subcontractors on the kind of sensitive sites that we had on the books. 

Added to this the importance of maintaining high standards of housekeeping in pest prevention and control, it just made a lot of sense to bring pest control into a business that also provides the cleaning services.

We risk-assessed everything and showed our clients the value of doing things in-house rather than subcontracting. And so Total IPM was born as a wholly-owned subsidiary of TSS: we come under their umbrella, but we’re a separate company.

Thanks to that relationship with TSS, we launched with prestigious contracts like the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and several Historic Royal Palaces already in place.

Over time, we added further sites that came from TSS and have since grown, offering the combined service on completely new contracts, like Wimbledon.

We also do work independently from TSS, such as Royal Museums Greenwich and more recently English Heritage, London Museum and Goldings Homes.

Specialising in the historic

PPC We’re at the Natural History Museum right now, one of my favourite buildings in London so this is very exciting to be shown behind the scenes. 

What goes into managing a pest control contract at such a complicated site?

GF It definitely isn’t standard pest control, there’s a lot more to be aware of and hoops to jump through.

Total IPM’s core focus is high-end commercial pest management, and because of the contracts we have with museums, heritage sites and listed buildings, we have a great understanding of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for sensitive environments.

At sites like the Natural History Museum, Tower of London and Greenwich Observatory, you can’t just block a hole with whatever material you fancy. There are procedures and permissions involved for any alterations, and a lot of hoops to jump through!

Exhibits and artifacts present unique challenges too. 

Many of these sites have dedicated IPM managers and conservators who we work alongside, who all know how to protect specimens and collections properly without causing damage. It’s not standard pest control – it’s its own field.

PPC The building we’re currently in is huge, is it an organisational challenge to monitor for pest activity and carry out work?

GF Definitely! We have over 600 rodent monitors on this site alone, all numbered and colour-coded by zone due to the sheer scale of the building. 

And that’s not even counting insect monitors. And if we have to carry out any work it has to be carefully executed; the museum is always busy, even at night when they have classrooms of kids doing sleepovers.

A growing team

PPC You mentioned that from the outset, Total IPM grew quickly?

GF Yes, in the first year I hired our first staff member and now, five years in, the company operates with two full-time technicians on foot and a mobile tech in London, and another in tech in Kent.

Plus, there’s myself and we also have operational staff in the background. As and when required we can also call on TSS resources. 

My philosophy is simple: if my guys are happy doing what they’re doing, then we don’t have staff turnover and we have fewer problems. If staff are happy, clients are happy, and I’m happy. We are very fortunate to have a fantastic team now, who are highly experienced.

Love me tender

PPC The contracts you mention can’t be easy to tender for, as they can be complex jobs. Do you find the tender process difficult?

GF Tendering can be tough; however we have the bonus of doing joint applications with TSS and that support and experience is invaluable. We also feel we now have a pretty unique service offering for our clients.

But once you have written a few tenders and understand the process and terminology it gets easier, and they don’t tend to differ too much.

Sometimes it’s tough though. There are some contracts where they expect you to register interest, submit a tender proposal and then start the contract within a month’s turnaround.

With larger contracts there’s always going to be a significant mobilisation period needed, for familiarisation of sites and recruitment (unless existing staff TUPE over). It simply can’t be done in the short timeframe they suggest. With tenders you have to pick your battles, and sometimes there’s just too much risk.

And finally…

PPC My last question, which I have to ask since you took us into the basement here today and it was spectacularly creepy: do you think any of the old sites you work on are haunted?

GF Haha, working in some of the UK's oldest buildings can come with a weird atmosphere. The Tower of London is definitely one of the creepiest, Luckily, we don’t have too much night work in there.

But being in the Natural History Museum galleries alone at night? That’s probably the spookiest in my opinion.

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Source: PPC120