From 13 Weeks of Downtime to Year-Round Growth: Seasonal Business Lessons From Matthew Efird
Every seasonal business owner knows the math. Matthew Efird’s outdoor pest control company, a Mosquito Joe franchise outside Atlanta, ran hard from spring through early fall, then faced twelve to thirteen weeks of winter downtime. His expenses did not take the winter off, and neither did his team’s. That gap is the reason thousands of home service companies churn through seasonal staff every year, and it is the problem Efird solved so thoroughly that the solution became its own company.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, Efird traced the whole arc: leaving corporate America in 2016, making roughly one hundred exploratory calls before buying his Mosquito Joe franchise, hanging Christmas lights to bridge the off season, and watching that side project double and triple year over year until it became Lighting Pros, a full outdoor lighting company that now franchises nationally.
Efird, a University of Georgia business graduate, husband to his high school sweetheart, and father of four boys, is quick to say none of it went according to plan. The lessons he shared, about diligence, brand discipline, delegation, and a personal loss that reshaped how he leads, apply to any owner trying to grow past themselves.
The Real Cost of a Seasonal Business
Before buying his franchise, Efird did something most prospective owners never do. He skipped the brokers, called Mosquito Joe corporate directly, and then reached out to roughly one hundred franchise owners around the country. About seventy responded, and more than half gave him significant time. He wanted the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the bad came back with remarkable consistency: “We don’t know what to do with staff in the off season.”
The downtime problem is bigger than lost revenue. Efird refused to run a seasonal or lifestyle business because he knew hiring seasonally would gut his ability to build a cohesive team. Good people need year-round paychecks. Two franchisees, one in Texas and one in Kentucky, mentioned they were experimenting with Christmas lights. Efird is direct about the origin story: the idea was not his. He simply took the advice and ran harder with it than anyone.
“It was a way for us to keep our employees engaged year round. I didn’t like the perspective of a seasonal business or a lifestyle business. Neither one of those fit with me.” – Matthew Efird
The lights collapsed twelve to thirteen weeks of downtime into roughly ten days. Then the side project outgrew the bridge. The lighting business, with crews of four spending a week on a property instead of one technician spending twenty minutes, demanded its own model, its own leadership, and eventually its own brand.
The Mistakes He Owns
A Dumper, Not a Delegator
Ten years into entrepreneurship, Efird still has a board of advisors that challenges him to delegate one more thing every quarter. Early on, he admits, he did two things poorly. He never honestly assessed his own strengths, so he managed the finances himself, a mismatch that caused real cash flow problems until he put better people in those seats. And he confused dumping with delegating. He handed projects to team members the way he likes to receive them, with no playbook and no check for understanding, then lost patience when they could not read his mind. “That’s a pretty poor way to lead,” he says now, and he credits it as one reason good people came and went in the early years.
Saying Yes to Everything
A self-described salesman at heart, Efird loved chasing revenue, and for years his answer to “can you also do blank” was always yes. The projects got figured out, painfully and unprofitably. The discipline came later: if a custom job cannot become profitable, systematic, and reproducible, the company does not want it, and it definitely does not want photos of it on the website attracting more of the same. Lighting Pros said no to landscape lighting requests for two and a half years, from day one, until the team could deliver it under control. The permanent holiday lighting line got the same rigor: three and a half years of testing, more than twenty brands installed and uninstalled, before settling on the product they trust.
What Is Working Now: Two Brands, Zero Confusion
When the Christmas lights took off, Efird had a contractual reason to separate the businesses: his franchise agreement limited the Mosquito Joe brand to outdoor pest control. But a decade later, he calls the forced separation an unexpected blessing, and he warns other home service owners against the common alternative.
“What happens is now it’s MM’s Landscaping that’s doing Christmas lights. So there’s a confusion of the brands ultimately.” – Matthew Efird
A landscaping company that hangs lights in the winter is still a landscaping company in the customer’s mind. A dedicated lighting brand gets invited into different rooms as an outdoor lighting expert. Today Lighting Pros runs about eighty percent commercial, serving cities, hospital systems, hotel chains, and restaurant operators, with permanent color-changing lighting that businesses treat as a marketing expense: team colors for Friday night football, themed nights that signal a promotion, holiday displays that pull eyes to the building all year.
Notably, Efird never cross-sold the two customer bases, even though both companies visit the same kinds of properties. Mosquito Joe runs 95 percent residential; Lighting Pros runs mostly commercial. He built each business for its own market instead of assuming a captive audience, a restraint Todd Baldwin pointed out that many multi-service owners never manage, and one that protects both brands when something goes wrong in one.
The Season That Changed How He Leads
In September 2019, Efird learned that his second son, Noah, had trisomy 13, a genetic disorder that is almost always fatal in infancy. He gathered his small team, told them plainly what his family was facing, and handed them the playbook the company had spent years building. For six months he pulled back, met with the team weekly, and backed their decisions. Noah was born on March 7, 2020, and passed away two days later in his father’s arms.
What Efird discovered in that season became the foundation of everything he teaches now. “There are actually some really good leaders out there that are not named Matthew Efird,” he says. Given real authority, his people wanted to lead, and they could. Months later, the leadership team sat down and formally defined the company’s vision, mission, and five core values, the non-negotiables they now hire, fire, and train against.
The culture runs on rhythms. Once a month, the whole staff gathers for personal development, professional development, and a culture celebration where every manager shares a moment they caught someone living a core value. New hires are told on day one that their time with the company will eventually end, and that the CEO’s job is to make sure they leave better than they arrived. Four years almost to the day after Noah passed, Efird stood on the fifty yard line at the University of Georgia accepting recognition as one of the ten fastest-growing businesses founded or managed by a UGA alum. He draws a straight line between the hospital room and that field, and he now speaks nationally and wrote a book, Even Though We Will, on grief and what he calls the superpower of empathetic leadership.
The Lesson: Year-Round Businesses Need Year-Round Visibility
Efird’s playbook for beating seasonality has three moves: find the complementary service that fills the calendar, give it its own brand so customers never get confused, and build each brand for its own market instead of leaning on cross-selling. Every one of those moves has a marketing consequence. Two brands means two websites, two review profiles, two local SEO footprints, and two sets of campaigns timed to completely different buying seasons.
That is the work the team at Everyday Media Group does for home service businesses every day: positioning each brand clearly, capturing demand when the season peaks, and keeping the pipeline warm when it does not. Efird chose the franchise route partly for its marketing support, because he knew what he did not know. Independent operators solving the same seasonality problem need the same machinery, from search visibility to lead tracking, so the winter business is not starting from zero every November.
Key Takeaways From Matthew Efird
- Do the diligence nobody else does. One hundred calls to franchise owners surfaced both the opportunity and the industry’s universal weakness, seasonal downtime, before he spent a dollar.
- Separate brands, separate markets. A dedicated lighting brand opened commercial doors a pest control company never could, and refusing to cross-sell protected both customer bases.
- Empathy scales. “It is my failure and it’s our success.” Handing the team real authority during his family’s hardest season revealed leaders he did not know he had.
About Matthew Efird
Matthew Efird is the owner of Lighting Pros, a commercial and residential outdoor lighting company serving the greater Atlanta area, a Mosquito Joe franchisee, and the founder of the Lighting Pros franchise organization. A University of Georgia business graduate, author of Even Though We Will, and national speaker on empathetic leadership, he lives in Georgia with his wife and four sons. Learn more at thelightingpros.com.
Ready to Make Your Business a Year-Round Business?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses stay visible in every season with SEO, Google Ads, review generation, and brand-clear websites for single and multi-brand operators. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the owners behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation or connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
