Arnold Katz

Fifty years in the trade

Arnold Katz has worked in pest control since 1975, when he entered the trade as a student at SUNY Farmingdale. He completed his B.S. in Entomology at the University of Georgia in 1978, writing his thesis on the bed bug at a time when the insect had all but disappeared from American homes and almost no one in the industry was studying it. He founded Graduate Pest Control in 1983.

Five decades in the field covers nearly every major shift the industry has been through. Arnold began working in the broad-spectrum chemical era, when the standard answer to a pest problem was to treat the space and move on. He built his practice on a different premise: find the source, understand the structure, and correct the conditions that allow an infestation to establish. Graduate has operated that way since 1983, years before the industry adopted integrated pest management as a named discipline. It was never a change in approach here, only a change in what the rest of the field called it.

Where the method came from

What separates his work is where it came from. A degree in entomology teaches the biology of an organism. It does not teach you how a rat moves through a party wall, what thirty years of settlement does to a slab edge, or how to shape a piece of galvanized steel so a rodent cannot work an edge loose. Arnold took the discipline of the science and turned it on the buildings themselves. He became an observational scientist in the field, testing, failing, adjusting, and testing again on real structures. The metal work and exclusion techniques he developed that way were not taught to him by anyone. Several have since become standard practice in this industry.

What an entomologist on the job site changes

That methodology is still the backbone of the company. Arnold remains active in the field as senior technician and staff entomologist, working accounts rather than overseeing them from a desk. On complex jobs he provides entomological identification and diagnostic support, which means species determinations are made on physical evidence instead of assumption. Correct identification is the foundation of every recommendation that follows. It is the difference between a targeted correction and a broadcast treatment, and it is the reason a degreed entomologist on a job site matters.

Who trains the technicians

He also trains the technicians. Every person who works under the Graduate name is trained by Arnold and Ryan Katz directly, so the standard set in 1983 is the standard applied on the next inspection.

Still a student of the trade

After fifty years he is still a student of the trade. Insects and rodents are his life’s work, and he is still refining the craft on the job in front of him. Graduate has grown almost entirely by word of mouth over four decades, and the firm’s first client is still a client today. That has less to do with marketing than with a founder who never accepted that a pest problem was solved until the building was.