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Duane Baumgartner
Founder & CEO
Duane Baumgartner is the founder and CEO of City Ranked, a U.S. digital marketing agency for home services businesses, with pest control at its core. He has marketed pest control companies since 2004 and founded City Ranked in 2011. Under his leadership, City Ranked has managed digital marketing for 500+ pest control brands, integrated 400+ acquired brands into platform companies, and made the Inc. 5000 in 2023 and 2024.
About Duane
Before advertising, Duane worked on the acquiring due-diligence side of one of the largest consolidations in U.S. services, at Pinkerton through its purchase by Securitas. Today he works with independent operators building toward a sale, and with the platform companies that buy them.
Point of view
What Duane believes
“For most home services companies, the majority of new customer leads flow through a single source: Google. That dependency is a structural risk most owners have never had to confront. Marketing technology is the new frontier for engaging and closing new revenue, and recurring revenue engines are the new growth strategy.”
Duane Baumgartner
Ranking on Google used to be a revenue strategy. Now it’s the price of entry.
Leads from Google aren’t going away. What’s dead is the idea that ranking alone produces revenue. Home services owners now win on the experience they deliver at every touchpoint: what AI says about them, what their website shows, and how quickly and well they engage a prospect through to the booked job. Marketing technology is how that experience is delivered at scale.
Clean attribution is part of what a buyer pays for.
Acquirers pay more for revenue they can trace from first click to closed invoice. A documented, attributable revenue system grows a business while the owner holds it, and raises what it sells for.
Work the leads you already paid for before you buy more.
The cheapest revenue in most service businesses sits in leads that called once and never booked. Re-engaging them comes before buying the next click.
Enterprise scale
Building platform brands through acquisition
City Ranked manages digital marketing for some of the largest pest control operations in the country, including PCT Top 20 companies. Under Duane’s leadership it has integrated 400+ acquired brands into platform companies, protecting the rankings, reviews and lead flow each acquisition was bought for. For one PCT Top 20 platform alone, City Ranked has rolled 30+ acquired brands into the platform brand, with two still operating under their own names.
The work runs on City Ranked’s One-Team model: one dedicated team, deployed the same way across every brand a platform owns. One of the nation’s largest pest control operators replaced nine agencies with it.
- Pre-purchase digital diligence. Before a deal closes, City Ranked assesses the target’s website, local search presence, reviews and paid media history, and what each means for the platform brand.
- Tuck-in or transition. Smaller brands with little local equity move into the platform brand quickly. Larger brands keep operating as a foothold until the platform can take on their customers without losing them.
Duane learned this work on the buyer’s side first, on Securitas’s acquisition team in the late 1990s (see Career).
Track record
Clients who went on to sell
Below are a very small sample of City Ranked clients that have been acquired or sold, to national pest control companies, private equity platforms and, in one case, minority shareholders. In each case City Ranked was the company’s digital marketing partner in the years before the sale.
| Company | Industry | Years with City Ranked | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Pest Solutions (Seattle area) | Pest control | 10+ | Acquired by PestCo Holdings, 2024 |
| Boulder Falls Landscape | Landscape | 8 | Sold through IAG M&A Advisors, 2022 |
| C.H. Kruse Plumbing (SW Washington) | Plumbing | 6 | Acquired by Lovett Inc., 2021 |
| Pioneer Pest Management (Portland/Vancouver) | Pest control | 6 | Acquired by Certus, 2020 |
| D&F Plumbing, Heating & Cooling (Portland/Vancouver) | Plumbing and HVAC | 10 | Acquired by its minority shareholders, 2018 |
| Enviro Safe Pest Control (Las Vegas) | Pest control | 5 | Acquired by Rentokil Steritech |
| Heinz Mechanical Industries | Commercial HVAC | 5 | Sold to private. |
Case in point
One pest control company, three eras of marketing
In 2004, Pioneer Pest Management was one of Duane’s first Yellow Pages accounts at Verizon. He sold and managed its directory advertising, then its early superpages.com and Google pay-per-click campaigns.
In 2014, Pioneer became a City Ranked client. Over the next six years City Ranked ran its website, SEO, local search, social media, paid search and app development.
On January 31, 2020, Certus acquired Pioneer. Certus described it as one of the fastest-growing companies in its market over the previous five years, and all 38 employees stayed on. It is one company, followed from the phone book to its sale.
Innovation
Systems Duane built
Duane designs the systems City Ranked runs on; the team builds and runs them.
| System | What it solved | Duane’s role |
|---|---|---|
| GPS-SEO (2012) | Service-area businesses were opening fake or virtual offices to rank in nearby towns. GPS-SEO ranks a business across its service area without that risk, backed by two studies and three years of data. | Created it |
| Skout and Skout IVR (2022–2023) | Agencies counted wrong numbers and existing customers as leads. Skout IVR qualifies every call, and that verified data trains ad-platform bidding. | Designed it |
| The Digital Ramp and the 10 Levers | Results stalled when work had no fixed order or a client-side manager overrode the plan. The Ramp sets the order, so the foundations are in place before money goes into growth. | Co-developed with Elmer Bensinger, CEO of Eden Advanced Pest Technologies, and Timothy Schroder, VP of Marketing at a 100+ territory franchise brand; tested with pest control industry insiders |
| Outcomes-based pricing | Hourly retainers paid for activity, not results. Pricing now tracks completed work and results achieved. | Introduced it at City Ranked |
Built by the City Ranked team under Duane’s leadership: the One-Team model (2017), custom app development for pest control clients, and the Ascent Toolkit of AI voice and chat agents for pest control (2025–2026).
Duane has built on WordPress since 2012, when he left drag-and-drop site builders behind and took a WordPress class at Clark College (ClarkWP interview, 2014). City Ranked now builds its own WordPress plugins for client sites.
His working rule for AI in an agency: 10% human strategy, 80% AI execution, 10% human creative.
Career
Thirty years inside route-based service businesses
Before marketing route-based service businesses, Duane ran a branch of one: recurring contracts, technicians in vehicles, response times and customer retention. His career since 1996 has stayed inside that model.
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1996–2004
Area Coordinator, then Branch Manager, Pacific Northwest
Pinkerton, acquired by Securitas in 1999
Worked with the Regional President and Area Vice President on pre-purchase due diligence of acquired companies’ patrol and response accounts, then ran armed officers and the patrol and response business through the move from Pinkerton to Pinkerton-Burns to Securitas.
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2004–2011
Marketing Consultant
Verizon Information Services, later Idearc and SuperMedia
Sold Yellow Pages, superpages.com and Google pay-per-click advertising to thousands of local businesses, Pioneer Pest Management among the first.
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2011–present
Founder & CEO
City Ranked (side project from 2010)
Built a U.S. agency for home services and pest control, from referrals to two Inc. 5000 listings.
In the industry
Speaking, interviews and recognition
| Date | Where | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 25–27, 2027 | Pacific Northwest Pest Management Conference, Hood River, OR | Speaker: how smaller pest control companies use AI and marketing automation to grow |
| May 2026 | RevenueFlow | Running an agency in the AI era |
| Jan 2026 | Global Skills Podcast | From SEO to skills strategy |
| Oct 2024 | The Blox, Season 14 | Business competition series; reached the finale |
| 2024 | Inc. 5000 | City Ranked ranked No. 4,238 |
| May 2024 | Business Success Tips Podcast | SEO and PPC strategy for contractors |
| 2023 | Inc. 5000 | City Ranked ranked No. 4,543 |
| Dec 2014 | ClarkWP WordPress Magazine | Interview: building City Ranked on WordPress |
Watch Duane on The Blox
Writing
Latest writing
New here? Start with The Agency Dating Game, Duane’s name for the cycle of hiring an agency, firing it a year later and starting over, and Does GPS-SEO Still Work?
- How to Claim Your Business on ChatGPT: A Step-by-Step Guide for Home Service Companies
- Does GPS-SEO Still Work? What Two Studies and Three Years of Data Show
- The Agency Dating Game: Manage Your Marketing, or Partner With Someone Who Builds Growth Systems?
- The Leads You Already Paid For Are Worth More Than the Ones You’re Chasing
- 6 Things Your Service Business Has to Fix After Google’s May 19th Announcement
- What Is Review Manipulation and Why Does It Matter?
Questions and answers
About Duane, in short
- Who is Duane Baumgartner?
- Duane Baumgartner is the founder and CEO of City Ranked, a U.S. digital marketing agency for home services businesses, with pest control at its core. He has marketed pest control companies since 2004 and founded City Ranked in 2011.
- What does City Ranked specialize in?
- Revenue systems for independent home services operators, and brand integration for platform companies that grow through acquisition. City Ranked has managed digital marketing for 500+ pest control brands and integrated 400+ acquired brands.
- Has Duane worked with pest control companies that were later acquired?
- Yes. City Ranked clients Pioneer Pest Management (acquired by Certus in 2020), United Pest Solutions (acquired by PestCo Holdings in 2024) and Enviro Safe Pest Control (acquired by Rentokil Steritech) were all acquired after working with City Ranked. These are just a few of the many businesses that have gone on to successful exits after working with City Ranked.
- What is GPS-SEO?
- A local search method Duane created in 2012. It helps service-area businesses rank across the towns they serve without opening fake or virtual offices.
- What happens to an acquired brand’s website and reviews after a deal?
- Under City Ranked’s One-Team model, smaller brands move into the platform brand quickly. Larger brands with real local equity keep operating until the platform can take on their customers without losing them.
Outside work
Duane is the father of two daughters. His favorite season is summer, when they head to the Oregon dunes for motorcycling and camping. He also enjoys travel, concerts (any Depeche Mode fans out there?) and rehabbing old houses.
Meet the rest of the team.
Duane leads a team of 25 marketers, developers and automation specialists, all U.S.-based employees, working alongside AI and automation.