Arrow Exterminators began with termites in new Atlanta houses, and the Thomas family still runs it
Starkey and Jean Thomas built Arrow on termite work in Atlanta’s new houses in 1964, and their granddaughter runs a company that grew partly by buying other pest control firms.
Atlanta, GA
Arrow Exterminators began with termites and new houses. In 1964, during Atlanta’s housing boom, James S. “Starkey” Thomas Sr. and his wife, Imogene, known as Jean, started a company to protect freshly built homes from the insects that eat them. They aimed it squarely at the new construction market. The business grew fast, and Arrow became the largest privately held pest and termite control company in Georgia.
The company marked 60 years in 2024. That year it counted more than 3,300 team members and 179 offices, according to a timeline in the trade magazine Pest Management Professional. Its chief executive is the founders’ granddaughter, Emily Thomas Kendrick. Arrow is family-owned and has been privately held by the Thomas family since 1964.
What makes the company worth a closer look is how it got large. Arrow grew in good part by buying other owner-run pest control businesses and folding their people into what the company calls the Arrow family. On a 2021 episode of the industry podcast The Boardroom Buzz, Kendrick and Tim Pollard, the company’s president, took up the irony at the center of that approach: trying to stay small as you grow.
The second generation arrived in 1972. James “Joe” Thomas Jr., Starkey and Jean’s oldest son, joined the company after graduating from the University of Tennessee. In 1978, Starkey died at 67, and Joe took over as chief executive.
Joe and his brother Barry went on to lead the company together. Joe, known as “Chief,” got the credit on the podcast for building the company’s growth around divisions. Under his direction, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of fast expansion, both internally and through the purchase of other pest control companies in Georgia, Tennessee and Florida.
The first purchase came in 1988: Douglas Pest Control, in Fayetteville, Ga. The company’s own history describes the strategy behind those early deals as making the move into Arrow as smooth as possible for the owners, employees and customers of the businesses it bought, and says the approach has carried on since.
The industry noticed. In 2006, Pest Control Technology magazine gave Joe Thomas its Crown Leadership Excellence Award, citing his part in expanding the pest control industry and his ties to business leaders and customers in his community. In 2009, Pest Management Professional inducted him into its Hall of Fame.
Emily Thomas, Joe’s oldest daughter, joined the company in 1998 after graduating from Vanderbilt University. Over her career at Arrow she has worked in residential and commercial operations and sales, in information technology and in marketing. In 2002 she was named chief operating officer. She became president and COO in 2008 and president and chief executive in 2010.
On The Boardroom Buzz, she went back to the company’s humble beginnings and to her PawPaw. Recognition came quickly once she was running operations. Georgia Trend magazine named her to its 40 Under 40 list in 2008. The National Pest Management Association gave her its first Women of Excellence award in 2009. In 2011, Pest Control Technology gave her the same Crown Leadership Excellence Award her father had received five years earlier.
The family has brought in outside talent for the executive bench, much of it from the companies that make pest control products. Kevin Burns came to Arrow in 2004 as vice president of sales after marketing and sales jobs at The Dow Chemical Company and earlier work as a research chemist for Bayer AG. He later became chief development officer, leading the company’s acquisitions. Pollard started in the pest business at Dow in 1993 and spent 16 years there, ending as director of sales for Canada. He joined Arrow in 2009 as senior vice president of sales, became COO in 2012 and was named president and COO in May 2020.
On the podcast, Kendrick and Pollard credited Burns with laying the groundwork at a company being acquired, weeks before the two of them arrived.
The acquisitions read like a roll call of small businesses with long histories. In 2019, Arrow bought Econo Termite & Pest Control in Englewood, Fla. Owners Paul Bouvier and Joel Eisenberg had served customers from Boca Grande to Venice for more than 35 years. The Englewood office was to operate as Hughes Exterminators, a brand Arrow owns, and the deal gave the company 28 offices in Florida and 119 across the country.
Two years later, Arrow bought Valley Pest Control in Huntsville, Ala. Valley joined 13 other Arrow offices in the state and was to eventually operate under the Arrow name. Gary Phillips, who founded Valley, explained his reasoning in a 2021 announcement reported by the Huntsville Business Journal. “When we started thinking about finding a home for our employees and customers a few years ago, we knew we were looking for a company that treated people just like we have since I founded the company,” Phillips said. He was not going anywhere. “All of my employees, along with my wife and myself will continue working with Arrow Exterminators,” he said.
Pollard gave Arrow’s side in the same announcement. “We are continuously looking to merge with high quality companies who share our goals, principles and culture,” he said, as reported by the Huntsville Business Journal.
The count kept climbing. In 2021, the company had 2,736 team members in 144 service centers across 11 states, according to The Boardroom Buzz. By 2024, it had 179 offices.
The work still begins with an inspection. Arrow uses integrated pest management as part of what it calls its STEPS Total Protection System, a three-part method. A technician inspects the home and property to pinpoint the problem, identifies both the pest and what is really causing it, and then treats in the way the company considers most environmentally responsible, aiming to fix the current trouble and keep it from coming back.
Training runs through Arrow University, the company’s in-house program for new employees, managers and technicians. In 2007, Arrow earned QualityPro certification from the National Pest Management Association, which the company says assures customers that the service professional in their home has passed a background check and a drug screening.
The company’s vision statement talks about protecting the family culture and about hiring, training and keeping the people it calls rock stars. Kendrick and Pollard said on the podcast that they had reworked an older, more generic vision to put those people in the spotlight. In 2020, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution featured Arrow among its Top Workplaces and described it as the sixth-largest pest control company in the United States.
That article carried one more detail. Joe Thomas, the son who took over when his father died in 1978, was chairman of the board, working from an adjoining office at corporate headquarters.