“People think it’s funny when I say that I counted mosquitoes for money,” says David Miller.
He means it literally. While he was in school finishing a degree, Miller took a seasonal job with a county health department that was collecting data on mosquitoes and ticks. He set traps, then counted the mosquitoes they caught. “I thought it was an interesting job,” he says. It was also his first real field experience, and it pointed him toward the work he does now as the owner of Pest Quest Solutions in Springfield, Pennsylvania.
Those trapping days show in how he handles mosquitoes for customers. His mosquito and tick page reads a little like field notes. It points out that a bottle cap of standing water is enough for mosquitoes to breed, and that ticks wait on the tips of tall grass for an animal to brush past. The program opens with a walk of the yard to find the clogged gutters, corrugated drain pipes and low spots that hold water. Then he treats shaded foliage, the undersides of decks and the first 10 to 15 feet of wooded edges, returning every 30 days through the season.
When the county job was about to end, Miller wanted to keep working, and he took a technician job at a pest control company. That was where the work clicked. “I loved all the face-to-face communication with customers, all the different places that you go, all the different puzzles that you can solve,” he says.
He put in long hours there until the company was acquired by a larger one and his job security was no longer a sure thing. He had already been planning to go out on his own. The sale pushed him to do it sooner. He formed the LLC in 2025 and announced the company’s launch on Instagram in 2026.
Pest Quest is a one-person operation. “I’m the main technician, so I’m a solo operator for now,” Miller says. He plans to hire eventually. He also still teaches high school, and the business describes itself as teacher-owned and family-operated. On his about page, Miller credits a background in biological science for his approach: watch carefully, and work out why pests behave the way they do before deciding how to deal with them.
His first trade was cooking. Miller spent about five years as a chef before he moved into education, and he carries that into restaurant work. He pitches it as pest control from someone who has worked in a kitchen and understands inspections, food-safety rules and the pressure to stay compliant. The service covers kitchens, prep areas, dining rooms and storage, with separate programs for cockroaches, flies and rodents working their way in from outside.
Homes are what he wants to be known for. “You get to interact with all kinds of people, hear all kinds of stories, and you’re in their space too,” he says.
His main residential plan, Stronghold 365, brings him to a house five times a year. Three visits are outside, with a barrier spray, an inspection and a sweep of webs and egg sacs from the eaves and windows. The other two come in the colder months and move indoors, where he checks and refills rodent bait stations and treats along the baseboards. The outdoor stations use black-light tracking to catch early signs of mice. If a covered pest comes back between visits, he returns once at no charge.
He takes single calls too: mice in an attic, a yellow jacket nest inside a wall, and a run of bald-faced hornet nests. After he took down one of those nests from high in a tree, the homeowner later wrote that Miller opened it up and walked the family through the stages of growth inside. It is the kind of thing a teacher would do.
He works out of Springfield across Delaware County and into Chester County and the Main Line, in towns from Havertown and Broomall to Newtown Square and West Chester. No two of those houses are alike, and he says that is the appeal. “It’s the same general process but it’s a different layout every time.”