Bobby Jenkins

What we talked about

Seven people, 1983

Bobby Jenkins arrived at ABC in Austin in 1983. Seven people worked there. He grew up in San Antonio in the pest control business, in a family where the company was part of the dinner conversation every night, and he says plainly that he may have been a little brainwashed into wanting to be there.

His approach to learning is the least glamorous thing he says and probably the most useful. He does not think of himself as an inventor. He wants whatever wheel somebody else already built, so he can tweak it and make it his. That is why he got involved with the national trade association early, and why he is unusually generous with his own story: he thinks businesses owe younger people examples, mentorship, and the good, the bad, and the ugly rather than a highlight reel.

“You’re either growing or you’re dying”

ABC’s core values, in his telling, are all built around growth, and his people have heard him say the growing-or-dying line a thousand times. But the version of growth he describes is not the one that gets celebrated. The business has never been a rocket ship. It grew step by step, every year, adding people and diversifying services so it could handle more of what a customer needed and build a deeper relationship in the process.

The reason he frames growth as an obligation rather than an ambition is worth sitting with. His argument is that his first job is to grow the business, because growth is what creates room above whoever just walked in the door. No ceiling, grow with us. If he stops pushing, promotions stop, new roles stop, and people stop being able to build careers. Growth, in that framing, is a staffing strategy.

He extends the same logic to individuals. The company puts a premium on advancement and certifications, on getting better at the trade, because that is the difference between having a job and having a career.

Why he still shows up

He could retire. It is not on the horizon. His role at ABC will change in a few years, but the reason he gets up is that he wants to.

Part of that is the work itself, and he takes it more seriously than the category suggests. Fire ants, mosquitoes, rodents: these are disease vectors, and solving them is public health. When ABC went into air conditioning, he learned that a broken unit in a Texas August is close to a life-safety issue. And for the services that are genuinely optional, the mowing and the pool cleaning, his framing is that ABC is selling time back to a family so they can make the soccer game. He can draw a line from every service to quality of life, and he says so without any apparent effort.

The other part is watching careers happen. He tells a long story about a technician who started two weeks before he did in 1983, at entry level, and retired last year after forty-two years running ABC’s largest book of business. What he emphasizes is not the promotion track but that the man was better with his team than anyone else. Somebody building a whole career at your company and retiring from it is, in his words, the formula you aspire to.

Doing good is good business

His civic resume is long enough that we joked about it reading like a bibliography, so the interesting question was what philanthropy actually taught him. His answer has two parts.

The first is the old truism that the more you give, the more you get, which he says you cannot really know until you have lived it. The second is more specific and more useful to any business owner watching: doing good is good business, and he can name where the returns land.

They land inside the company first. People want to work somewhere with purpose and want to feel pride in where they work. And his observation about volunteering is the sharpest thing in this section: coworkers who work together build a relationship, but coworkers who go volunteer together build one that is exponentially deeper. ABC reports its community engagement to the whole company every month, with numbers and photographs, and he treats that reporting as culture work rather than PR. The nonprofits benefit too, of course, and by his count there are more than seven thousand of them in the Austin area.

A family business, and a city he refuses to lament

What he took from his father was not a strategy. It was how you treat the people you work with. He says he felt like he knew his dad’s coworkers as a little boy because of the way his dad talked about them at the table, and the phrase that keeps coming back is the ABC family, used without irony.

On the balance question, whether you can build a business and be a good husband and father at the same time, he says yes, it is about priorities, and no, it is not easy. Then he turns it into a case for the city. He has been in Austin forty-three years, and he notices that a lot of people who have been here as long spend their time lamenting the old Austin. He does not. If the two metrics that matter to you are raising a family and building a business, he does not believe there is a better city in the country, and he thought so in 1983 too.