More on the business

A former garbage truck driver and certified aromatherapist, Mucci has sold 12 Lice Squad franchises in Ontario and envisions a national empire. "This morning I heard from a lady in Montreal: 40 out of 198 private school students were sent home with lice. And then there's the West! Every urban centre has lice." New franchises cost about $25,000, but she estimates that between home visits and school checks, a busy nitpicker can make $90,000 a year. Mucci herself charges $55 an hour.
Yet money isn't why she loves her job. "I like being able to help. Most of the people who call have been struggling for months, and have tried five or six over-the-counter treatments. It's not the plague, or bird flu. But it is bugs. On your head. People are generally very happy to see me," she says, stopping in front of a tidy brick house where a man waited anxiously on the front lawn. "That'll be the dad."
The dad greeted her with the reverential mixture of gratitude and desperation usually reserved for a top surgeon, cautioning that the atmosphere in the house was, well, "Stressful. My wife is going a little crazy."
Mucci, a willowy 36-year-old with long, sandy blond hair, marched in with a large black rolling suitcase and surveyed the scene. Two little boys, one with a newly shaved head, sat cross-legged on furniture covered in bedsheets, while their mother pointed sadly at the bare floors. "We've rolled up all our rugs. I'm doing laundry night and day and picking through everyone's hair one strand at a time. Then I find a bug on my pillow," she said. "I can't stop crying."