Stephen Tsang owns a pest control company and a bookkeeping firm, logs 12-14 hour days, and built both businesses by treating a W2 job as a starting point, not a destination.
Stephen Tsang came to America with two suitcases and told his parents that he wasn't going back. That decision set off a career that doesn't follow any obvious arc: years in corporate finance and CFO roles, a bookkeeping firm built on the side while still working a W2 job, and now, 14 months into owning Pestmaster of Plano and McKinney, a pest control company he runs alongside the accounting business. He manages a team of about 25 people across both operations, homeschools his two boys, and logs 12 to 14-hour days most of the time. On paper, it reads like chaos. In practice, it's the result of a very deliberate philosophy about risk, skills, and what it actually means to own your time.
Mr. Tsang didn't leave corporate life in a dramatic leap of faith. He saw it coming. After a restructuring at his last company, his responsibilities got cut in half while his salary stayed above $150K. He was earning good money working 20 hours a week, and he knew exactly what that meant.
"You already kind of see the writing on the wall. I was like, am I just going to sit there and wait until the tsunami hits, or am I going to make a decision to make some adjustments?"
By the time he was let go, he already had eight bookkeeping clients lined up. He didn't lose 100 percent of his income overnight. That was the whole point.
His argument against the security of a W2 job is simple: when a company restructures, when the economy turns, when the decision gets made above your head, you lose everything at once. He started stacking income streams years before he left. He bought cars and leased them to Uber and Lyft drivers. He ran a small shipping operation between the US and Asia. He built the bookkeeping business quietly, using relationships from his corporate jobs. One of his longest-standing clients today was a vendor from a previous company. When that vendor started his own business, Mr. Tsang called him and said, here's what I do on the side, want to talk? Six years later, they're still a client.
The through-line isn't luck. It's that every role he held, he worked harder than what was required. His father's advice from a young age was that putting in more than you're paid for compounds. Owners notice. Responsibility follows. Pay follows that.
"For the first eight, ten years of my career, every single year I had a 20-plus percent raise. When your responsibility increases, it costs them a lot more to lose you."
The people who dismiss that as naive haven't watched it work for a decade.
When Mr. Tsang tells people he owns a pest control company, they assume he knows everything about bugs. He doesn't. He'll tell you directly: talk to him about chemicals and he'll fall asleep. What he actually runs is the backend of the business: bidding on government contracts, managing HR, handling cash flow, doing the networking that fills the pipeline.
I am not technical at all. Right now I can, at the bare minimum, make myself not sound like an idiot when I talk to a potential client.
What he brought to pest control was the same thing he brought to bookkeeping: the ability to read financials, manage people, build relationships, and spot a wave before it hits. The wave he saw in accounting was AI. He watched the industry discussions about automation eating into bookkeeping work and decided not to wait for it to arrive.
Accounting is still the bread and butter. But he saw the wave coming and used existing resources to find another way out before it hit.
So he diversified into a business that requires a human presence on-site. Pest control technicians have to physically show up. That's not going away. And within the pest control business, he does use AI, specifically for speech-to-text note-taking during property inspections and for drafting government contract proposals. He won a significant city contract this year. AI helped him get the proposal out faster.
Running two companies means the emotional stakes never fully go away. Mr. Tsang describes it as a daily roller coaster. The highs from landing a contract are real, but they're brief. What stays longer is the pressure of payroll, the question of where the cash comes from, and the awareness that 15 families depend on the business staying healthy.
"When you're on the high, don't forget the lows. When you're on the lows, don't forget that the lows are temporary."
Letting someone go is harder when you've taken them out to dinner before hiring them, when you know their spouse is dealing with a health crisis, when you've made it a point to care about the family behind the paycheck. Tsang does all of that deliberately. He takes candidates to lunch before offering a job. He prioritizes personality over skills in the hiring decision, on the theory that attitude can't be taught the way a technical skill can. He tells his team upfront that he doesn't expect anyone to stay forever. What he does expect is that they leave slightly better than they arrived.
He runs an open book with his team. He tells them where the cash stands, what the plan is, what the struggles are. Disagreements happen, and he doesn't treat that as a problem. The goal is alignment on where the company is going, not agreement on everything along the way.
Mr. Tsang's advice for teenagers interested in business is to start selling something now, anything. Mow a lawn. Set up a lemonade stand. Knock on doors in the neighborhood. He's already running a version of this with his own kids, who are four and six. Before Christmas, he had them walk the neighborhood handing out holiday cards to every neighbor. The first few doors were scary. By the end, they were competing over who got to knock next.
His point isn't about the money. It's about the skill of talking to strangers, of asking for something, of handling the moment when someone says no or doesn't answer. That skill transfers everywhere, and most adults have spent years avoiding building it.
The failure rate in a new business is high. Mr. Tsang says that plainly. But the team you build around your gaps is what determines whether you survive long enough to close them. The first few hires matter most. Get those right, give them a real reason to care about the outcome, and they'll carry the technical weight while you figure out the rest.
