Spotted Lanternfly Is Statewide Now. Your CRM Should Know That.

In February, the Ohio Department of Agriculture expanded its spotted lanternfly quarantine to all 88 counties, effective February 17, 2026. Before that, it covered 18. Allen County is now inside it, whatever the map looked like before.

For a pest control company in Lima, lanternfly isn't a one-call job. It runs on its own calendar. Adults feed and lay eggs into late fall. Egg masses sit on bark, fences and siding through the winter. Nymphs hatch in spring. A customer who calls about lanternfly in October is one you should hear from again in April, and probably again in July.

That's the problem worth solving. Another reminder app won't do it. A CRM built around how your work actually runs will.

Why an off-the-shelf CRM falls short here

Most generic CRMs think in contacts and deals. A pest control business thinks in properties, pests, treatments and seasons. One customer might own a house, a rental and a pole barn. One property has tree of heaven along the fence line, the lanternfly's preferred host. Another had egg masses on the back deck last November.

When that lives in a tech's memory or a free-text notes field, it gets lost once your customer list outgrows what one person can keep in their head. Quarterly perimeter sprays, termite renewals, mosquito season and now lanternfly follow-ups all land on the same calendar. Something slips, and it's usually the follow-up that would have earned you the next job.

What a lanternfly-ready custom CRM looks like

Here's the use case. When a tech finishes a visit, they log what they saw on that property in a structured way. The CRM handles the rest.

What Paglow delivers:

• A CRM spec that maps your real pipeline: inquiry, inspection, first treatment, recurring plan, seasonal follow-up, renewal. It's drawn from how your office and techs work today, not from a vendor template.
• A data model with the property at the center. Each property carries its host trees, its pest history by date and life stage (adults, egg masses, nymphs), the treatments applied and the service plan it's on.
• A build plan that puts the work in order: import your current customer list first, get techs logging sightings from their phones second, turn on automations third.

The automations are where it pays off. Log "egg masses observed" on a property in November, and the CRM queues an inspection for early spring, before hatch. OSU Extension notes that egg masses are usually about an inch and a half long and brown-gray, but they vary a lot, and old ones stay behind after the nymphs leave. That makes the spring visit a real service, not a sales call: check, scrape, and talk about a summer plan. Log "tree of heaven on site," and that property goes on a summer nymph-check list even if nobody has seen a bug there yet.

The same structure covers the work you already do. A quarterly customer whose next service is overdue shows up on a list. A termite contract nearing renewal alerts the office 30 days ahead. Nobody has to remember, because the record does.

It helps at the front desk too. When someone asks what lanternfly treatment costs, whoever picks up can see your service tiers and what similar properties were quoted. They can give a consistent answer in a minute instead of five.

Where to start this week

You don't need the full build to begin. Pull your customer list into one spreadsheet and add three columns: property type, host trees or conditions noted, and the last pest seen, with a date. Ask your techs to fill in what they know for your top 50 accounts.

That spreadsheet becomes the starting point for your data model. It will also show you quickly how much of your seasonal revenue depends on someone remembering to make a phone call.

The quarantine isn't going back to 18 counties. The companies that track lanternfly property by property are the ones customers will call back every spring.