Ryan Katz

What is Ryan Katz licensed and registered to do in New York?

Two separate things, held by two separate entities, and it is worth knowing the difference before you check anyone’s paperwork.

Graduate Pest Control, Inc. holds New York pesticide business registration 03298. That is the company’s registration to operate as a pesticide business in the state.

Ryan Katz holds New York certified applicator C1822141, in categories 7A, 7F and 8. That is a personal certification held by an individual, not by a company, and it is the one that governs what he may actually do at your property.

The categories describe scope. 7A is structural and rodent control, which is most of the practice. 7F is food-processing environments, which is the plant and warehouse work. 8 is public health pest control, and that one is worth pausing on, because it is the least visible of the three and it does real work here rather than sitting on the list making up numbers.

Category 8 is what covers pests that are a health matter rather than a nuisance, and in this market that means mosquitoes above all. It is the certification behind mosquito management, and it is what makes that work lawful for hire — including the minimum-risk 25(b) exempt materials the program uses, which New York still requires a certified applicator to apply commercially and still requires daily use records for. Holding 8 is also the reason the mosquito work is framed as public health rather than as landscaping, which is a distinction the trade blurs constantly and the department does not. The state register is the authority on what any given code permits, and the New York applicator requirements page explains how to look one up and what to ask for when you do.

It is worth saying what is not on that list. Ryan does not hold 3A, which the department defines as the maintenance and production of ornamental and shade trees, shrubs, flowers and turf. Graduate therefore does not take ornamental planting work, turf programs or commercial grounds contracts, and will decline them rather than route them somewhere and stay quiet about it. That line is now clean rather than cautious: mosquito work yes, under 8, with exempt materials and a source-reduction program; plantings, lawn and grounds no, because they need 3A. Declining work that falls outside a certification is straightforward. Explaining it afterwards to the department is not.

Both numbers are printed here on purpose. Anyone can put a row of badges on a website, and the industry does. A number you can check against a state register is a different kind of claim, and it costs nothing to publish except the ability to be vague. If you are comparing firms, the contractor verification page sets out exactly what to ask for and where to confirm it. Every other certification held here, what each one demanded before it was awarded and where an outside party can check it, is laid out on credentials and licenses.

Does Ryan Katz have a degree in entomology?

No. He does not hold a degree, and this page will not imply one.

The degree in this family belongs to Arnold Katz, who took a B.S. in Entomology at the University of Georgia and founded Graduate Pest Control in 1983. The company’s name came from that. It was a statement about method at a time when much of the trade ran on a schedule, a product and a perimeter, and it has never been decoration.

What Ryan has instead is worth setting out precisely, because the honest version is more useful than a vague one.

Every entomology class SUNY Farmingdale offered. Not a program with a certificate at the end of it — the courses, taken because the subject was the work.

Professional rodent academies over 25 years, including the Bobby Corrigan Rodent Academy. Rodent work is where the technical ceiling in this trade actually sits, and the academies are where practitioners go to keep raising it. Attending one is unremarkable. Attending them for a quarter of a century, and then being invited to teach the subject, is a different pattern.

Ongoing training through Purdue’s pest management conference and PestWorld. The conference circuit is where new research and failed field practice both surface, usually a few years before either reaches the average route technician.

Twenty-five years of field experience, raised in the business by a practicing entomologist. This is the part that does not have a certificate. Growing up around a working entomologist means absorbing the vocabulary of buildings and the habit of identification before you understand why either matters, and then spending a long time catching the reasoning up to the instinct.

Years spent studying insects and rodents directly. Specimens, behavior, and the enormous gap between what a species is supposed to do according to a text and what it is actually doing in the wall in front of you.

The reason to state all of this rather than round it up to something more impressive is that credential inflation is endemic in this industry, and a client who discovers a soft claim stops believing the hard ones. The numbers above are checkable. The training is describable. The degree is Arnold’s, and saying so costs nothing.

Is Arnold Katz still involved, or is he a name on a founding date?

He is still in the field. This is a present-tense fact and it gets stated in the present tense.

Arnold works as senior technician and staff entomologist, and provides entomological identification and diagnostic support on complex accounts. On a difficult job that means a specimen goes to someone who has been keying insects out since 1983, and the identification comes back before anyone commits to a plan.

That matters more than it sounds. Species determines behavior, and behavior determines where the animal is when you cannot see it. A large black ant in a kitchen and a black carpenter ant in a kitchen are two entirely different jobs with two entirely different price tags, and mistaking one for the other at the start makes everything downstream of it confident and wrong. The difference between an odorous house ant trailing along a countertop and a satellite colony working in a wet band joist is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight.

Arnold also built the thing this company runs on, which is a method rather than a product list: find the source, read the structure, and correct the condition rather than the symptom. He was doing that in 1983. The industry named the practice integrated pest management about fifteen years ago and now sells it as modern. It has been the house method here since the first year.

The practical effect for a client is that two generations look at a hard account. One of them can identify anything that arrives in a vial. The other reads buildings for a living. On the accounts where the answer has been missed by three previous contractors, that combination is usually what finds it.

Why does he teach rodent exclusion to professional bodies abroad?

Because national associations ask him to, and because teaching is the fastest way to find the holes in your own method.

Mexico. Ryan speaks and teaches on rodent work and exclusion for the Mexican pest management association, including at ACPUB’s Congreso Regional in Querétaro. The audience is professionals — operators and technicians who do this for a living and who will tell you immediately if a technique does not survive contact with their buildings.

Nigeria. He speaks and teaches for the PestInsight Initiative, on the same subject. Same discipline, different construction, different pressure, and a professional audience again.

United States. He is an invited speaker on rodent exclusion domestically.

That is a short list and it deserves an explanation rather than a badge. Very few operators in the New York market are teaching rodent exclusion to professional bodies in other countries. It is not a marketing position; it is a peer judgment, made by people who could have asked anyone.

There is also a direct benefit to clients here, which is why it appears on this page instead of on a biography nobody reads. Teaching forces a method to become explicit. When you have to hand a technique to a room of two hundred practitioners who work on buildings you have never seen, you cannot lean on intuition or on twenty-five years of pattern recognition. You have to say what the principle is, why it holds, what substrate it fails on and how to check it afterwards. Every time that happens, the parts of the method that were really just habit get exposed, and the parts that are genuinely transferable get sharper.

The material that goes into those sessions is the same material used on a cellar in Manhattan or a crawlspace in Huntington: how rodents actually move through and under a structure, why the standard bait-station program flattens a population without ending it, and what a seal has to be made of to still be a seal in five years.

What does a rodent safari teach that a lecture cannot?

How to read a site, which is the one part of this work that does not transfer through slides.

In Querétaro, Ryan helped set up and run a rodent safari for the association — taking more than 100 members into the field for hands-on instruction rather than sitting them in a lecture hall. That is a logistical undertaking before it is a teaching one: you need sites that will actually show the group something, a sequence that builds, and enough structure that a hundred people do not simply trample the evidence they came to look at.

The reason to do it that way is straightforward. You can describe a rub mark in a presentation and every person in the room will nod. Put the same people in front of a joist with a genuine mark running along it and perhaps a fifth of them will spot which direction the traffic is going. Reading evidence is a perceptual skill, and perceptual skills are trained in front of the thing, not in front of a photograph of the thing.

The field curriculum on that kind of day covers what practitioners get wrong most consistently. Burrow systems and what the spoil at the entrance tells you about whether it is active. Runs through groundcover, which are obvious once you have been shown one and invisible before. The difference between a station a rodent is using and a station a rodent is walking past, which is not a subtle distinction but is missed constantly. Where a structure meets grade, and why nearly every serious rodent program fails at that junction. And the honest lesson underneath all of it: a population that is being managed rather than excluded will still be there next year, in every country, in every construction type.

The barn and hay-bale photographs that appear in Graduate’s field-training material come from that program in Mexico. They are not local job photos and are never presented as any.

Why does he come at exclusion from the construction side?

Because a hole is a symptom of how a building was assembled, and if you only know how to find and seal holes you will keep sealing the same building forever.

Ryan’s framing of it is that he understands how a structure is actually built, rather than knowing where to look for a gap. Those sound similar and are not. Knowing where to look is a checklist, and a competent technician can be handed one. Knowing how the building went together tells you where the gap will be before you have found it, and — more usefully — tells you which gaps connect to something and which ones lead nowhere.

The specific knowledge that matters here is how services run through a structure. Plumbing and electrical do not stay in one room; they run vertically and horizontally through the whole building, and everywhere they change direction or pass through an assembly they make a penetration. Supply lines through bottom plates. Waste stacks through every floor of a riser. Cable and conduit punched through top plates into the ceiling void. Line sets through an exterior wall behind a condenser. Every one of those is a deliberate hole made by a trade whose job was to get the service to the fixture, not to close the assembly behind it.

Those penetrations become highways between spaces. That is the whole insight, and it is why the same building keeps producing mice after four years of somebody’s quarterly service. An animal that gets into a chase in the cellar has access to every floor the chase passes, and the person treating apartment 4C is treating one of the exits.

The practical difference shows up in how a survey runs. Instead of walking the perimeter looking for daylight, the question becomes: where does the water come in, where does the waste go out, where is the panel, where is the meter, where does the gas enter, where did the HVAC contractor get his line set through, and what was cut when this kitchen was renovated. Renovation is the single best predictor that a stable building is about to have a new problem, because renovation is when penetrations get made and almost never when they get closed.

It also changes what gets specified. Someone who has watched buildings go up knows that a sleeve is oversized on purpose to allow movement, so the annulus around a pipe is not a defect to be blamed on a plumber but a permanent feature that has to be packed and sealed as a detail in its own right. That is the reasoning behind the exclusion consulting work, where the same knowledge is applied to a building before it is finished rather than after.

What does working New York City buildings for over 25 years actually teach?

That in a shared building, the problem is rarely inside the four walls of the person who called.

Working throughout New York City for over 25 years produces a specific kind of knowledge: the inner workings of shared walls, shared spaces and shared sewer systems. Not the theory of them — the actual behavior. What a party wall between two brownstones does at the joist pockets. Where a chase is open at the floor line and where it was firestopped properly in 1962. How a cellar drain line fails, and why a building with what looks like a street-level rat problem frequently has an interior break in a drain as the real source. What a compactor room does to the whole stack above it. How a sidewalk vault connects to a cellar that nobody has surveyed in twenty years.

This is the reason Graduate gets called into buildings that other companies have serviced for years without resolving anything. Those companies are not incompetent and the work is usually done properly. The problem is that a unit-based service model cannot see a building-wide pathway, and a technician who visits apartment 4C on a schedule has no mandate to open a chase in the cellar. The population is not in the apartment. The apartment is where it comes out.

Once you accept that, the work becomes building work: sealing pathways at every floor rather than treating symptoms floor by floor, repairing the drain line, closing the joist pockets, dealing with the boundary in an attached building so the shared routes stop terminating in one apartment. The client for that work is the board or the managing agent, never the resident who noticed it, which is why so much of this practice sits under commercial pest management and specifically under co-op and condo work.

The Long Island half of the practice inverts it. A detached house is a single envelope with its own foundation, roofline and perimeter, and the fix belongs entirely to the owner. Same reasoning, different surfaces and different ownership. Both halves are described under our service area, with the two regions broken out at Long Island and New York City.

What do TWIC, HUET and Tier 1 offshore have to do with pest control?

They are access and safety credentials for the environments this work sometimes happens in, and they say something about the accounts as much as about the man.

TWIC — the Transportation Worker Identification Credential, issued by the TSA and the Coast Guard. It is required for unescorted access to secure port and maritime facilities. Without it, a contractor at a secure terminal has to be walked everywhere by staff, which most facilities will not resource and which makes real inspection work impossible.

HUET — Helicopter Underwater Escape Training. It is required before offshore helicopter transport to platforms and rigs. If the account is offshore, you get there by helicopter over water, and nobody is permitted on that aircraft without it.

Tier 1 offshore is also held, and Graduate’s offshore and industrial compliance credentials are verified through the RelyOn platform, which is how the operators check them.

The point of listing these on a page a homeowner might read is not to be exotic. It is that a rig, a port terminal and an audited food plant all share one characteristic that a house does not: there is no tolerance for improvisation. Access is controlled, work is documented, materials are logged, and the corrective action from last quarter is checked before you are allowed to start this one. Working under those conditions for years changes what you consider normal.

That standard then arrives at the residential work unchanged. The commercial and industrial accounts are the proof; the houses are where most people meet the company. The argument for a homeowner is not complicated: the firm running programs for audited food facilities is the same firm, with the same method, looking at your crawlspace.

What do PCQI, HACCP and SQF mean on a food account?

They mean Graduate can sit on the plant’s side of the table rather than waiting outside it.

PCQI — Preventive Controls Qualified Individual, the individual credential that sits behind a facility’s preventive controls food safety plan. HACCP — hazard analysis and critical control points, the framework the whole food-safety world is built on. SQF credentialed — the Safe Quality Food scheme, and Graduate services SQF-audited food manufacturing facilities under contract.

What that changes in practice is the conversation. A pest contractor who holds none of these turns up, services devices, leaves a report and has no view on where pest control sits inside the plant’s food safety plan. A contractor who holds them can talk to a quality manager about hazard analysis, about why a monitoring device is placed where it is placed in terms the plan already uses, and about what an auditor will actually do with the trend data when they ask for eighteen months of it.

There is history behind that fit rather than a certificate chase. Graduate built a food-safety pest program in the mid-1990s that turned out to be almost exactly what SQF later required, unchanged. That is less impressive than it sounds and more useful: the standard codified good practice, and the good practice was already the house method. The detail of that work is set out under food facility programs and, for the front-of-house version, restaurant pest control.

How does he arrive at a diagnosis?

By settling four questions in a fixed order, and by resisting the urge to skip ahead when the answer looks obvious from the doorway.

What is it, precisely. Species, life stage where the life stage changes anything, and whether what is in front of you is evidence of something resident or something that wandered in and died. That distinction closes a surprising number of calls with no work sold at all. One ant on a counter in May walked in. A pile of coarse frass under a joint has a gallery above it.

Where it lives. Not where it was seen — where it goes when the lights are on. This is the part clients find odd to watch, because it involves following things: a rub mark along a joist to establish which way the traffic runs, droppings that thin out at one end of a run, gnawing that is pale and fresh here and weathered a foot away. Rodents are creatures of habit and they leave a map. Follow the map in both directions and it terminates in the two places worth touching: the way in at one end, the nest at the other. The species profiles for the house mouse and the Norway rat go through what each one leaves behind.

How it gets in and out. Every population has a route, and in a detached house the route is nearly always on a short list: the sill plate junction, the soffit returns, and the corner where a garage door seal has stopped meeting the jamb. In an apartment building the route is internal and vertical, and the honest answer is frequently that the route does not belong to whoever called.

What sustains it. Water first, then food, then harborage. If a crawlspace stays wet through the season, the return visit is already scheduled — not out of pessimism but arithmetic. Wet wood is soft wood, soft wood is excavatable, and a condition that attracted one colony is equally attractive to the next thing that finds it.

Only after those four is there anything worth saying about treatment. Get them wrong and the treatment plan becomes a well-organized way of being wrong on a schedule.

Why does he ask when the problem came back rather than what came back?

Because the timing separates three different problems that the species does not.

A problem returning on a short and roughly regular interval is an open pathway. The population is being replenished from outside at a steady rate, each treatment resets the count, and the length of the interval is a rough measure of the size of the opening and the pressure on the other side of it. That is a physical job with a permanent fix, described under structural exclusion.

A problem returning in the same weeks every year is a condition rather than a hole — something that becomes favorable when the weather turns. Autumn rodent pressure is the obvious case. Spring carpenter ant activity is another, and it is usually the same colony becoming visible rather than a new one arriving.

A problem that never quite goes away and only dims is a source that has not been found, and often a source that is not on the property at all. Attached buildings, party walls with open joist pockets, a shared chase, a food tenant at grade, the structure next door. When that is the case it gets said directly, because the alternative is billing someone indefinitely for a problem this company cannot end from inside their walls.

So the first question after “it keeps coming back” is always about rhythm. Clients are usually surprised to be asked, and they almost always know the answer.

What will he not do?

Better to have this in writing than to discover it halfway through a proposal.

No recurring spray schedule sold as a remedy for a structural fault. If mice are entering under a bulkhead door, a quarterly application does not change that, and charging for it indefinitely while the cause sits untouched is not a business worth building.

No structural quote from photographs. It is what people would prefer and competitors do it. Reading evidence in person is the entire difference between sealing the four openings that matter and sealing forty that do not.

No sealing a building that still has an active population inside it. That does not remove them; it removes their way out and puts them in the wall voids instead of the kitchen. Reduce, seal, verify — in that order, every time.

No wildlife exclusion at a time of year when young could be sealed inside a structure. There is a season for that work and it is not a matter of opinion. Wildlife management is scheduled around it, and the removal itself goes to licensed nuisance wildlife partner firms — that half of the job is a separate state credential, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim this page exists to avoid making.

No foam. Not as a filler, not as backing behind something better, not as an air seal over it. Rodents chew straight through cured foam, and an opening filled with it stops being closed somewhere in the first year. It is the most common failure in the industry and it is not on the truck.

No ornamental or turf work, because the 3A category is not held. See above; it is a certification boundary, not a preference. Mosquito work is not caught by it — that sits under category 8, public health, which is held — but a lawn, a planting bed or a grounds contract is, and no version of the mosquito service quietly extends into one.

No barrier spray subscription and no fogging calendar. The mosquito program is source reduction, and the material behind it is a minimum-risk exempt product with a deliberately short life. Selling a monthly application instead would be easier, and it would leave the water exactly where it was in April.

No credential on this website that cannot be produced on request. No counts nobody counted, no outcomes nobody can stand behind, no badge row assembled because it fills space.

The first of those costs the most work, and it is worth saying without any edge in it: a client who wants somebody to apply material on a schedule and leave will be better served elsewhere, and plenty of firms do that competently. Establishing it on the first phone call is better for everyone than establishing it on the third invoice.

What does it cost to talk to him?

The consultation is free, and it is usually a phone call.

Most problems can be diagnosed that way, given a decent description: the age and construction type of the building, what was seen and where, how long it has been going on, whether it returns on a pattern, and what has already been tried. The interval between recurrences is the single most useful fact a caller can supply, for the reasons above.

A written proposal and plan carries a service fee, and the reason is plain. The documented plan — the openings identified, the substrates, the sequence, the details specified — is the deliverable, and it takes real work to produce. Proposals from this firm have been handed straight to the next contractor to underbid. Charging for the document ends that. If you proceed with the project, the fee comes off the cost of the work, so a client who actually wants the job done pays nothing extra for the thinking.

Canine detection inspections are billed per unit. No prices are published anywhere on this site, because a published figure for work that varies this much between a 1920s frame house and a twelve-unit pre-war walk-up is either meaningless or misleading.

Where should you start?

If a problem keeps returning after competent treatment, that pattern nearly always means the diagnosis stopped short of the cause, and something in the building has not been looked at. Start with the pest control overview if you are not sure which service applies.

If you are on a board, managing a portfolio, or running a facility with an inspection coming, the commercial side is where that work is described, and the answer in a shared building is almost always building-wide rather than unit-by-unit.

If you are planning construction or a gut renovation, the highest-value conversation is the one that happens before the walls close: rodent exclusion and pest-proofing consulting.

If you already know the problem is structural, structural exclusion is the work you are asking about, and rodent control is where most of it begins.

Otherwise, describe the building and what you are seeing and get in touch. The main page has the short version of what this company is and how it got that way.