Three months of cockroach activity in the same corner of the warehouse, and the instinct is the one most facility managers reach for: put out more bait. It makes sense. If the problem hasn’t gone away, the obvious move is to do more of the thing that’s supposed to fix it. So the question follows naturally — why isn’t Sprague spraying more?
It’s a fair question. It’s just not quite the right one.
The better question is why they’re returning to that corner at all. Until someone answers that, more bait doesn’t end the problem — it just resets the clock on it.
That gap — between what a customer notices and what actually determines whether a program is working — matters more than it looks. Most people judge pest control by what they can see happen. The people managing the account judge it by the decisions behind it.
The Question Behind the Question
Ashley Roden, Sprague’s Technical Director, hears a real question underneath “why aren’t you spraying more”: is anyone actually paying attention to my facility, or am I just getting a scheduled visit?
That instinct deserves to be taken seriously — it’s just aimed at the wrong evidence. A Route Manager who reaches for more product without asking why the cockroaches are showing up isn’t demonstrating closer attention. They’re just applying more of it. The real attention shows up earlier: in everything that gets looked at before a single treatment decision gets made.
What a Route Manager Is Actually Evaluating
How these programs actually work starts well before anyone opens a sprayer. Here’s roughly how that plays out at a warehouse like the one above — the same questions, in the same order, every time.
The first question is whether this is a pattern or a single sighting. A single cockroach sighting is a look in the rearview mirror — useful, but it only shows what already happened. A trend, tracked across several visits, works more like radar: it shows what’s building before it turns into a real problem. That’s what actually gets reviewed first — not just that cockroaches showed up in that corner, but how the sightings line up over time, and where else they’re turning up.
That evidence points to the monitoring devices next — and to what they don’t show, which matters just as much. A cluster of activity on one device tells you where something is happening. It doesn’t automatically tell you why — that hotspot might be a travel corridor, not the nest itself, which is exactly why it gets compared against the rest of the facility before anyone decides what to do about it.
Before any treatment decision gets made, the questions shift to the facility itself — the ones that have nothing to do with pesticide at all. Has anything changed near that corner: employee personal items stored in the area, a shift in where cleaning tools are kept (cockroaches will hitchhike around a facility on them), a new supplier’s pallets with stowaways stuck behind the plastic wrap? Sanitation, exclusion, and client practices all get evaluated before treatment does — closing a gap or drying up a moisture source removes the food and water a pest depends on.
More bait never will.
Only then does the treatment history get checked — so an approach that isn’t working doesn’t get repeated out of habit. Pests are opportunistic. Give them the same conditions and the same response long enough, unchanged, and eventually they’ll find the advantage in it.
None of it shows up as visible pesticide. All of it is the actual work of managing a program — which is exactly what makes it easy for a customer to miss, and easy for a less careful provider to skip.
A Field Story
The same reasoning played out recently at one of our accounts — different pest, same process.
One of our Route Managers noticed unusually high captures in the insect light traps at a facility on his route. It would have been easy to treat more aggressively. Instead, the team reviewed the trend data first.
That led to a couple of added monitoring devices, to confirm where the activity was concentrated. It led to sealing several exclusion gaps — including a worn door seal near the receiving area. And it led to a conversation with the facility about specific employee practices, including a rear door that had started getting propped open during a run of hot afternoons.
Captures declined over the following visits — not because more product went out, but because the actual causes got addressed. The product is often just the Band-Aid. Permanent exclusion is what actually solves it.
When Quiet Is the Point
Back at that warehouse: if the sightings in that corner start to disappear over the next few visits, it’s worth asking what the quiet actually means. A program that’s working should, over time, produce fewer signs of pests — not more visible treatment. That’s harder to feel confident about than watching someone spray. It’s also the actual goal.
This is where a lot of the “why do pests keep coming back” feeling comes from, too. Often the pests never really left. The root cause never got addressed, so the same conditions keep producing the same result, on a loop. Fixing the condition — not just responding to the next sighting — is what breaks it.
Questions Worth Asking Your Provider
None of this requires taking anyone’s word for it. A program built on evidence should be able to answer direct questions about how it’s run — from Sprague, or from anyone else managing your account:
- Are there facility conditions contributing to pest pressure we should address together?
- What are you looking at when you decide whether to treat,monitor, or wait?
- What would need to change for you to recommend a different approach?
- What doour monitoring and trend reportsshow over the last few months?
- If a product or method changes,what’sdriving that decision?
A provider who can answer these clearly — not just tell you how much product went out on the last visit — is the one actually managing your program, not just servicing it.
The best pest management programs aren’t measured by how much pesticide went out on a given visit. They’re measured by whether the facility is still protected next month, and the month after that.
Most people judge a program by what they can see. The ones running it are asking a different question every time — not what happened, but what changed.
That’s the habit worth borrowing, whoever ends up managing your account.