Dan Croce, 28, planned on being an electrician. That was until he started doing it.
"It was the same thing everyday," he says now. "It didn't challenge me enough."
So, what was the next logical choice? Pest control.
"I didn't really expect to take to it at all," he said. "It just kind of happened."
Croce, a Gloucester native, started Advantage Pest Control in 2006 — and he's been as busy as a colony of carpenter ants ever since.
"It's never boring, that's for sure," Croce said from his business headquarters at 19 Desmond Ave. in Gloucester. "You can go to 20 ant jobs in a row, and they're all different. There's something new to learn each day."
A story Croce often uses to illustrate his point is about when he was called to a home one day by a family that were "100 percent sure" they had squirrels in their crawl space attic. Croce made the trek through the closet into the two-foot-tall attic, only to discover not a group of bushy-tailed rodents, but a family of cornered raccoons! Needless to say, Croce backed out of the attic and devised a one-way door mechanism for the masked family to make their escape to a different home.
"There's so much more to this business than killing bugs," Croce said. "You can bump into three different raccoons, and they will react in three different ways. One may try to kill you, one may try to hug you and one may try to look at you."
One key to things, Croce said, is understanding the pests' mindset.
"We're building our homes in their natural habitat," Croce said. "Pests are looking for shelter. I know exactly what they're trying to do. I can stay one step ahead of them."
But outthinking his multilegged prey is only the icing on Croce's cake. His favorite part of the job is what he provides for his fellow humans. "Making people happy. That's the satisfaction for me." Take those carpenter ants, for instance. "People panic because a carpenter told them it was termites. Within two weeks, problem solved. They go from being miserable to the complete opposite."
While his wife, Courtney, keeps things afloat on the paperwork side of things, Croce rolls his truck as early as 2:30 a.m. serving commercial and residential properties in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, with a particular focus on the North Shore.
With the busy season just beginning, things look to be far from boring for a long time to come.
"There's millions of possibilities when it comes to pests," he said.
