Massey Services Brand Guidelines: Walker Chemical in 1985 & an Orlando Family Firm

A 1985 purchase in Orlando, renamed for its new owner.

Massey Services traces its start to February 1985, when Harvey L. Massey left his job at Terminix in Memphis, took on bank loans and bought Walker Chemical, an Orlando company, and then changed its name to Massey. That account comes from a company post summarising an Orlando Sentinel article published for the firm’s 30th anniversary, on 20 February 2015; in it the founder remarked that things always seemed to happen for him in February. The company’s own pages give 1985 as its founding year, and its copyright line still runs from 1985.

The business stayed in Orlando, where its corporate headquarters remains. By 2015 it had about 1,600 team members and roughly 120 service centres, operating in Florida, Georgia, Texas and Louisiana, according to the same anniversary post, which also said the company had grown every year since the purchase. One of its larger steps was the 2009 purchase of Middleton Pest Control, a rival that Sunair Services had bought in 2005; the anniversary article said the two firms had once ranked twelfth and thirteenth among the largest pest-control companies in the country.

The company kept expanding by buying regional firms. In October 2021 it announced the purchase of Insight Pest Solutions in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Virginia Beach, Virginia, saying the Virginia Beach office took Massey into Virginia for the first time. At that point its own press material described about 2,500 team members and a fleet of some 2,300 vehicles.

Family ownership is central to how the company presents itself, and outside sources repeat it. In September 2021 Florida Trend reported the company’s announcement that Tony Massey, the founder’s son, had been promoted to president and chief executive, and described Massey Services, citing that announcement, as the fifth-largest pest management company in the industry and the largest family-owned one. Tony Massey had joined in 1989 after graduating from the University of Alabama and had been president since 2006. His company biography says he first worked in the trade at sixteen, as a termite technician for Terminix International, and began at Massey as a manager trainee.

Pest, termite, commercial and landscape — and a written rule about image.

The company describes itself as more than a pest control, termite control and landscape business: “We’re a people company,” its About page says. Its services fall into a few named groups: pest control, including mosquito and flea and tick work; termite services, sold with a termite guarantee; commercial work, including multi-family communities; and landscape services, covering lawn fertilisation, aeration, landscape lighting and irrigation. It says it serves nearly a million customers from service centres in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Appearance is written into its values. The company’s mission statement lists “our company’s image” among the things it values and says that “the public perception of our team members, vehicles, equipment, and materials is essential to our success.” In the 2015 anniversary article the founder made the same point about hiring: team members enter thousands of homes each day, he said, so they need “the right image and attitude.”

Sport is one public face of the brand. In September 2024 the Tampa Bay Buccaneers announced a partnership that made Massey Services the team’s exclusive partner for pest services and the sponsor of its “Get Loud” fan prompt, with LED ribbon-board signage in the stadium and offers for season-pass members. The team’s release called Massey “one of the nation’s largest family-owned pest management companies,” headquartered in Orlando, and its chief commercial officer described a multi-generational family business.

The company also points to work within its industry. It says its senior leaders have led or sit on the boards of associations including the National Pest Management Association, the Florida Pest Management Association and QualityPro, and that its environmental work has earned stewardship awards from the U.S. EPA and the Council for Sustainable Florida; those are the company’s own statements. Tony Massey’s biography says Pest Control Technology magazine gave him its Crown Leadership Award in 2012.

How the category presents itself.

A pest-control brand is mostly met in working places rather than in shops: on the side of a service van, on a technician’s shirt, on a branch sign, on a service agreement and on an invoice. When Rentokil Initial bought Western Exterminator in 2012, the seller’s president told the Orange County Register that customers would “still see our trucks” and the same people at the door. The companies themselves publish these vehicles, uniforms and branch pages as the public face of the business, so a guide to the category starts there.

Some of the older American firms lean on a character or a family name. Western Exterminator’s little man with a big hammer has been in use long enough to be parodied on The Simpsons in 1995, according to English Wikipedia, while Ehrlich still carries the surname of the man who started it in Reading in 1928.

Service plans are the other naming layer. A company that sells recurring visits gives its plans names, and those names sit beside the company name on websites, quotes and contracts; they have to read clearly in small type and stay consistent with the main mark. This guide looks at names, marks and colour as the companies present them, and does not reproduce any logo, livery or uniform.

Behind many local names sits a larger owner. Rentokil Initial’s 2012 annual report lists Ehrlich, Presto-X and Western as “country-specific” brands under one shared brand essence, and its 2025 report describes keeping 30 pest brands, national, regional and local, in North America. Corporate pages on owners, acquisitions and branch networks are therefore part of how these brands present themselves, and each guide notes who owns the name today.

A family name, spelled out in a phone number.

Leadership has stayed in the family. Alongside Tony Massey as president and chief executive, the company’s leadership page lists Andrea Massey-Farrell as senior vice president for community relations and as head of the Harvey & Carol Massey Foundation, the family’s charitable foundation. The 2015 anniversary post had already set out the succession, naming the founder’s son, then president and chief operating officer, as the next chief executive; the change took effect in 2021, Florida Trend reported.

The name itself does most of the brand work. The company trades simply as Massey Services, and even its customer line is spelled out as 1-888-2-MASSEY. When it bought Insight Pest Solutions in 2021, Tony Massey said the company looks for firms “built on the values we share” and with a culture similar to its own, and the release welcomed their team members and customers “to the Massey Services organization.”

For a design guide, Massey Services shows how a family name and a written commitment to the look of its people and vehicles can anchor a regional service brand across ten states. Compare Terminix, where the founder worked before 1985 and where his son began in the trade, and Arrow Exterminators, another family-owned pest-control company in the American South-east. For this guide we use a deep green, a leaf green and sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Massey Services’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.