Rollins, Inc. (ROL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning. Welcome to the UBS Investor Conference. I'm Josh Chan, business services analyst here. We're pleased to have Rollins, would kick us off today. They are a $20 billion market cap provider of pest control and termite protection services for residential and commercial customers. With us from Rollins today is Ken Krause, CFO. And I think he has a presentation prepared and after that, we'll have some time for Q&A. So feel free to send in your questions, and I'll be able to pass them along on the iPad here. But with that, I'll turn it over to Ken.

Thanks, Josh. I appreciate that. I'll spend the first maybe half of the discussion here with some prepared slides, and then we'll certainly open it up for Q&A that you might have, as we through the next 40 or so minutes. As Josh said, I'm Ken Krause, I'm the CFO. I've been with Rollins since last fall. I joined last September. Early September was when I joined the company. I came from MSA Safety, a global manufacturer of safety products. I was with MSA Safety as the Chief Financial Officer for about 7 years. Before I start today, I just want to highlight the safe harbor here that we're all very familiar with in terms of all the forward-looking statements and the risks that are involved in those forward-looking statements. Also want to recognize the non-GAAP measures that I'll discuss today. There's a number of non-GAAP measures as well as GAAP measures, but we do provide a reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures on our website as well as in the appendice of this presentation. Great to be here with you. As I start the conversation with Rollins, two things I want to point out. And two things I think that you'll see as a common thread through the presentation. One is consistency and the second is continuous improvement. Consistency when it comes to business performance. We've continued to grow our business for well over the last 15 to 20 years. We've continued to see robust levels of growth. We've also seen robust levels of cash flow. We've grown through all cycles, whether it be the Great Recession, the Industrial Recession or more recently, COVID. And our cash flow performance has been exceptional. We really don't prepare -- we don't compare ourselves to median level companies. We try to compare ourselves to top quartile and top decile companies. We recognize or realize just under $3 billion of revenues through the end of last year. We've got an EBITDA margin that is north of 20%. As I said, cash flow has been very strong and has consistently been -- the conversion of free cash flow has been consistently above 100% of net income. And we employ over 18 -- almost 18,000 individuals across the world. 80% of our business is what we consider recurring. It's under contract. And that's a really important point of the business that we'll talk about here as we go throughout the slides. Well diversified across residential, commercial as well as termite and ancillary markets. When we look at the market that we compete in, it's about a $20 billion global market. Roughly half of the market, 40% to 50% of the overall market is here in the United States. It's a growing market. We continue to see robust levels of growth both over the near and long term. And that growth is really enabled by a number of secular growth opportunities. Today, the importance of health and safety has never been any more important coming out of COVID, protecting our customers' health, protecting their properties and protecting their brands is paramount and it's certainly a tailwind in the markets that we compete. Population migration. We all read the headlines around the state of Florida, Georgia, Texas, people moving away from colder climates and into more warmer climates. That's very favorable for our business at Rollins. Weather change is certainly also important to us. We just come out of a winter where we saw record warm and above-average temperatures across many of the parts of the U.S. as well as across the world. Rising urbanization, more dense population centers, and remote work certainly is a catalyst to our business. Being at home, what we found was our customers being at home saw the issue and they want to take care of the issue. And we were there to help take care of it. So there's a number of attractive secular trends that continues to drive robust levels of market growth across our business. Not only do we compete in a very attractive market, but we continue to execute very well. When we look at our revenue performance, we just closed out the first quarter. We had north of 11% total revenue growth, of which 9% of that was organic growth, so pretty robust levels of growth across the commercial, residential as well as the termite and ancillary business. We've been very active on the acquisition front going back a number of years. But more recently, in April, we closed on the second largest transaction in the history of our company with Fox Pest Control. I'll speak about that here in just a bit. Our profitability is a focus and profitability improvements is certainly on the horizon and on the radar when we think about our focus areas. We first quarter -- we finished the first quarter with EBITDA growth of just about 20%. Margin improvement was north of 100 coming in at 130 basis points. And really, it's been enabled by strategic pricing. We provide an essential service. And that essential service is a very low portion of our customers' budget. So those are two really important attributes when I think about this business when it comes to pricing, and we continue to be very aggressive and very, very responsible, I would say, when it comes to pricing the services for our customers. Driving a cost-conscious culture. And are driving a focus on managing each and every investment, each and every spend that we're making. Today, SG&A is just about 30% of sales. I do think there's an opportunity over the next several years to see improvements in that SG&A number as we make changes across the footprint of our business. And then accretive acquisitions. When we think about acquisitions, the margin profile, the growth profile, the churn profile are all things that we want to make sure are accretive to our business when we buy these businesses and bring them into the fold. Capital allocation is certainly a focus for us as well. We've maintained a very balanced approach to capital allocation. Over the last 5 years, we've deployed $2 billion of capital, of which approximately half of that $2 billion has been invested in M&A. The other half, roughly, about 45% of that is in dividends. And as you can see, we're a very low capital-intensive business with only 5% of our free cash flow over that time being invested in CapEx. During the first -- more recent first quarter, we saw an improvement of 15% in operating cash flow. We exited the first quarter with relatively low levels of debt with 0.5x debt to EBITDA at March 31. And our cash flow conversion, I'll talk about that here in a bit, continue to be strong in the first quarter with well over 100% cash flow conversion, which is enabling this approach to the dividend. Last year, we increased the dividend. We placed a priority on the regular dividend last November. After I joined, we looked at our dividend, we had a special dividend that we were using from time to time actually pretty consistently. And I made the case to really prioritize the regular dividend. So we raised the regular dividend last November by 30%. Currently, it's $0.13 per share. But you can see over the last 2 to 3 and even longer, we've continued to place an emphasis on increasing the dividend as we drive improvements in free cash flow. A little bit on the Fox acquisition. We closed that in April. We're really excited about the Fox acquisition. It provides us a very attractive financial profile. It opens up some new opportunities for us to partner with our home team business. And there's a real clear value creation path when it comes to the Fox acquisition. When we think about the combination that we have with Home Team. We spent about $350 million. That's inclusive of about $32 million of contingent consideration. So excluding that, we spent $318 million for this acquisition. We expect it to provide about $90 million to $100 million of revenue. This year, LTM revenue is around $120 million. But for this year, we expect it to provide for the period that we own it from April through December, we expect it to provide about $90 million to $100 million of sales and about $18 million to $22 million of EBITDA. We expect it to be accretive to earnings and cash flow in the first full year. And as I said on the first quarter call, much of that will come during the fourth quarter of ownership as we bring it in, as we make the changes, as we move out of that first couple of quarters, if you will, of cost that we oftentimes incur. And we expect it to really be a valuable part of our business going forward. We financed it on our most recent revolver. We announced the revolver increase back in the first quarter. We used our revolver as well as some cash on hand. Again, nominal increase in leverage. Today, that leverage ratio is very, very low and very manageable. And really, we continue to focus on realizing the synergies across all the brands. This acquisition, there's certainly a value creation road map that we're excited about, and we look forward to executing upon. Speaking a little bit more around the consistency you can see on this slide, we've consistently grown our revenue. Over 20-plus years of revenue growth. Over the last 5 years, we've seen 10% CAGR over that 20-year time period. I think that number is closer to 7%. More recently, we've seen more robust levels of growth coming through our business. It's interesting, when I look at the Great Recession, we grew roughly 5%. When I look at the Industrial Recession of '15 to '16, we grew at about 6%. And then during COVID, we grew about 7%. So we continue to grow through all cycles. Our focus is really making the right investments in our organic business and complementing that with strategic acquisition. It's a very fragmented market. It provides a number of M&A opportunities. As I said earlier, there's a number of attractive secular growth trends that we benefit from in the markets that we compete. And we think about -- when we think about some of the opportunities going forward, there are certainly opportunities to continue to enhance and drive above average growth, but there's also opportunities on the margin front whether it be strategic pricing, supply chain or even the accretive acquisitions that we're making. From an SG&A perspective, we're focused on shared services, we're focused on talent management and a number of other initiatives to drive improvements in our margin profile. Looking at the cash flow dynamics here. Since 2001, we've grown cash flow at north of 15%. We've been compounding cash flow at north of 15% over the last 20-plus years. Over the last 5 years, we've consistently grown cash flow at a very similar ratio. The benefit here is our incremental margin, it drives above-average realization of profitability. And our business, as I said earlier, is not capital intensive. So there's very little spend on working capital. There's very little spend on CapEx. That allows us to generate meaningful levels of free cash flow. And you can see here cash flow generation, cash flow conversion on the right-hand side of the slide has consistently been 100% of -- above 100% of net income. When we think about modernization, some of the things that we're focused on here at Rollins, when we think about -- I joined the company back in the fall of last year. Jerry Gahlhoff took the CEO helm earlier this year, late last year. And we're really focused on modernizing this organization. If you look at some of the steps we've taken over the last 9 or so months, as I said earlier, we prioritized the regular dividend. We increased it by 30% in November of last year. We then went into our revolver in January. We refinanced our revolver taking it from $175 million and two banks up to $1 billion in eight banks, provides us investment grade flexibility that we feel like we deserve as a $20 billion market cap business with very strong cash flow dynamics. We made a change in our auditor. After 19 years with Grant Thornton, we pivoted and transitioned that relationship to Deloitte in the first quarter of this year. And we continue to make hiring a priority. We're making significant changes in the organization, bringing new talent in and really driving changes across the footprint. And the other thing that's not on this slide is last night, we filed a shelf facility with the SEC. That shelf facility is a universal shelf facility. It has two aspects. There's a primary aspect as well as a secondary aspect. The primary aspect is about -- we'll provide, once approved, approximately $1.5 billion of additional financial capital and flexibility to the company. It also includes a secondary component. That secondary component is a registering of the entire family position. If you follow Rollins, you know that we're a controlled organization, roughly 50-plus percent of our stock is owned by the Rollins family. And by filing the shelf facility, we're able to register that entire family position. It allows us to really modernize, allows us to really work closely with the family when we think about that major position that they're holding. And quite frankly, I was surprised when I looked at the business early on, I was surprised that this wasn't a step that was taken already. It's very rare to have a family position of this size that's not registered. And so we took the steps in -- last evening to file the shelf facility and register those shares. And in turn, with registering those shares, we also entered into a registration rights agreement that allows the company to work more closely with the family office to provide a more -- provide better alignment and a more systematic approach when it comes to that position. And so we're looking forward to working with the family as we move forward with respect to that registration rights agreement. So why invest in Rollins? Well, there's a couple of things. One, as I spoke earlier, we've consistently grown through all economic cycles. 20-plus years of consistent growth, not only in revenue but also in cash flow. We're competing and executing in a very attractive market with a number of opportunities from an M&A standpoint, but also a number of secular growth opportunities. We have robust margin opportunities across the business. Our incremental margins have consistently been above 30%. And so we feel like there's an opportunity to continue to drive margins as we grow our business in addition to make some structural changes in our business as we think about the future. We've consistently generated cash flow of 15-plus percent over the short and long term. And we have a very healthy balance sheet and a very balanced approach to capital allocation. With that, Josh, I'll turn it over to you for any questions you might want to walk through.

Great. Yes. Thanks, Ken. And yes, if anybody has any questions, feel free send them to the iPad here. Maybe I'll ask you a couple of questions on management and kind of your perspective. So you've been CFO for 9 months or so now. And I guess relative to your initial expectations, any surprises one way or the other? And now that you've had time to sort of dig into the company, where -- how would you rank sort of your -- the opportunities that you see on the horizon?

Sure. Thanks for that question. It's interesting. When I think about that question, there are 2 or 3 things that come to mind. First, when I think about that question, I think about the growth profile of the business. Outside looking in, we -- I was able to read all the public filings and get a better understanding of the business. But as I look at the business, and my initial impression was there's opportunities on M&A. There's opportunities for organic growth. But as I get closer into the business, I'm really realizing how important this business is to our customers. It's an essential service. It's a service that helps protect our customers' brands. It helps protect our customers' property and it helps protect their health. And that's a really important couple of areas to be partnering with our customers on. The other thing that has been really interesting to me is the M&A landscape. I'm very impressed with the pipeline that we have at Rollins. The opportunities to continue to come to market in this space is certainly exciting when we think about growth. When we think about margins, outside in when I was evaluating the opportunity, one thing that I quickly noticed was the strong gross margin. 50-plus percent gross margin. I also noticed that we have very attractive EBITDA margins. But as I learned more, I thought we're spending almost 30% of SG&A -- of sales and SG&A. So very similar to a playbook that I executed in my past, it looks like an opportunity to really up -- modernize and make changes across the footprint when it comes to SG&A and maybe drive even more improvements as we move forward. So I think that's -- those are some of the things that really hit the radar in the first 9 or so months. But I'm excited to be here. It's a great business with a lot of great people focused on driving exceptional customer service.

Great. And if we can zero in on your SG&A comment deal. So I guess 30%, where do you see that trending over time? And where can you see the earliest types of opportunities? What are you working?

So when I look at the SG&A opportunities, Josh, I oftentimes start in corporate office. And so oftentimes, I'll look at finance and HR and IT and legal and those sorts of spends and challenge whether we can do things more efficiently. And the one thing that I think that I've observed is the opportunity to partner better with the business through a shared service model with respect to some of those back-office functions. So we're starting to actively recruit and actively bring on new talent that will execute a number of these initiatives as we move forward. But certainly, the shared service focus is real, not only for our organic business. When we think about acquisitions, when you bring an acquisition into the fold, one of the first things you should be focused on are those back office corporate cost. We want to help our acquisition companies, our brands that we're bringing in the portfolio to focus on providing exceptional customer service, not necessarily exceptional accounting, right? So we want to really provide that service from the corporate office, the shared service office so that they can go in and drive growth across their business. I think that's an opportunity when we think about the future with respect to acquisitions and synergy capture across the portfolio.

I've got a question here from the audience. Could you talk about kind of demand and any differences between residential and commercial that you see both in the shorter term and then over the longer-term runway?

Yes. That's -- so it's interesting. We finished last year. The slowest area of growth for our business last year was in the resi market. And that had a lot of people scratching their head. But then as we finish -- as we started the year this year, we saw that residential number pop up to just about 9% of organic growth. And I'll tell you, the resi market is an important market. It's a very large market. It's a growing market. There are a number of people that are potential customers that are entering that market today that weren't in that market several years ago. And so there's a lot of opportunity to grow in that market, not only from new customers, but cross-selling. When we think about cross-selling, oftentimes, a customer will come to us just through a termite controlled contract and a termite prevention contract when they build a new home. And the key is to grow that business from just one single service to multiple services. And so there's a real opportunity to continue to invest in and grow the share of wallet with our customers. It's interesting when we look at it, the other thing that I didn't speak about earlier from the growth profile perspective was with warmer climates and as weather changes, pests change. And so one pest that certainly continues to see a lot of demand for preventing is mosquitoes. Mosquitoes is a growing area. We've seen robust levels of growth over a sustained period of time. And so we continue to see that come through. And that's really a great market for us. So it's really a broad-based level of growth. We did see some slowdown last year in resi, but we feel like that we're very much back on track when it comes to the resi market.

Kind of dovetailing on that question a little bit. Do you have a sense on what percentage of the residential, I guess, homes out there or commercial businesses out there use pest control? And is there an ability to kind of expand usage to drive growth over time?

Yes. It's interesting, one thing that I had mentioned in the secular growth opportunities is the rising middle class. As the middle class gets stronger, the demand for these types of services gets larger. And so I think there's certainly an opportunity to grow that footprint with customers that aren't using the service today, whether it be through a rising middle class or whether it be through a more warmer climate. And so, for example, in the north, you saw of the -- northern part of the United States this year, you saw a warmer winter. And so that oftentimes will spawn different types of pests and in turn, drives the demand for our services where the customer didn't have a demand previously. And so there's certainly an opportunity to do just that. But there's also a tremendous opportunity to focus on growing the share of wallet with the existing customer, but also managing churn across the portfolio. Churns are really important attribute to be -- to evaluate and continue to focus on. And the way that we feel like it's -- best way to reduce churn is to drive higher employee engagement, better training of our employees to make them better -- to provide better customer service for our customers. And so that's really a big focus area for us.

And on the geographic cue, I guess, do you see that in your business? Are the warmer states growing faster, certainly more intense usage, I would think, but what do you see?

Yes, it's interesting. We certainly do see robust levels of growth in the Southeast and in Texas. It's interesting, the first quarter, California was probably one of our biggest areas of challenge. Those who might be familiar with the winter in California, it was incredibly wet, incredible amounts of precipitation and it was a really challenging market for us. So we had a really tough first quarter in that market. But we are seeing that rebound going into the second quarter as that market comes back online. But we definitely are seeing robust levels of growth in those warmer climates. Those are areas that we're seeing above average levels of growth. But we're also seeing as I said earlier, the Midwest and the Northeast and those areas as well. With warmer climates, brings more opportunities for our -- and more demand for our services. And so we're seeing I would say, broad-based growth across all the markets we're in.

Okay. All right. There is a question from the audience on M&A. It looks like. So how much runway is there to continue consolidating the pest control industry? And are there potentially larger deals on the horizon given the lower leverage profile that you have?

Sure. So when we look at the business, I would think I mentioned the statistic that there's 20,000 competitors in the industry. And there certainly is a robust level of opportunity to continue to grow through acquisitions. When we look at it, there's acquisitions from $5 million to $10 million to $100 million to $1 billion. And so there's really a broad-based population of potential acquisitions. I'll tell you, our focus is to continue to execute the strategy that's worked for us. I don't see a need in the next 12 to 18 months to go out and deploy $1 billion to $2 billion of capital. It's just not necessary. There are enough opportunities in the lower end of the market that are appealing to us that we're going to go after and continue to consolidate as we think about the near term and even the medium term.

Okay. And on M&A, how do you create value with the companies that you acquire, right? Like what makes that company more valuable in the Rollins portfolio than they were before?

So scale matters in the business and being part of a larger organization oftentimes unlocks a number of areas. It's interesting, depending on the acquisition and the size of the acquisition, oftentimes, sellers will come to Rollins because of family planning opportunities, legacy transition or transition and family ownership. And depending on where they are in the evolution, oftentimes, we provide an opportunity to grow at a more accelerated pace. Sometimes companies get to a point where it's almost a ceiling. And once they sell, we're able to provide capital to grow that business and make additional acquisition. So for example, Northwest is a great example. Great business in Atlanta. If you've ever been to Atlanta, you'll see Northwest billboards all over the place. What we've been able to do is provide the Northwest brand with capital to go after and acquire other businesses to bring it into that platform across the Southeast. So that's a really important part of the acquisition strategy. How can we continue to grow that platform? How do we continue to grow that business and make investments in growth? The other thing that is an opportunity for us is with respect to -- and it's kind of how I started with scale and leveraging our spend on fleet, helping them with the fleet management, helping them from materials and supplies perspective. I think that's all really important and allows us to recognize synergies. The last area of synergy capture and is -- with respect to how I started the conversation, the shared services. How can we be better providers of finance, accounting, HR, legal, IT areas to that acquisition because really, that's not their core competency. Their core competency is servicing their customer, going after and taking care of the customer's issue. We want to help them do that in a more efficient manner. And by leveraging shared services, they can do just that.

All right. Maybe I'll ask one more on acquisitions. How do you think about the strategic criteria for acquisitions? And then also with the CFO hat, what -- any financial metrics that you kind of focus on?

Sure. You always ask yourself, are we a better owner of this business? That's the -- and when we think about better owner, can we provide the capital to grow the business? Are we a better owner of that business? Can we grow it at a faster rate? Can we partner it with other brands to enable a more accelerated growth profile? That's certainly a paramount when it comes to the strategic lenses of any acquisition. When I think about the attributes that I measure acquisitions through, there's five or so core attributes that I oftentimes will look at. The first attribute is growth. And is this business going to grow organically at a faster clip than our organic business? Is it going to be accretive to the organic growth? Or is it going to pull it back? And an attribute that goes into that is churn. When we buy a business or we're buying a business that's going to churn their customers at a higher rate than us or at a lower rate. And so that's a really important characteristic of the acquisition assessment. The second criteria would be margins. When we buy businesses, we don't want to water down our margins. We don't want to dilute our margins. We want to make our margins better. And what's the road map to enhancing the margin profile that we're acquiring. The third is earnings accretion. We want to be accretive to our earnings profile in the first 12 months. Return on capital is the fourth measure. When we think about return on capital, we want to hurdle our cost of capital by year 3. And oftentimes, we're doing it in a more accelerated fashion than the year 3. But year 3 is certainly an assessment criteria that we're actively utilizing today when evaluating acquisitions because we realize how important that return on capital metric is for our investors at Rollins. And last, but not least, when we think about cash flow. When we buy businesses, we want to make sure that they're no more capital intensive. They don't require a lot of working capital. They don't require a lot of capital to grow their business. And so that's the fifth measure that oftentimes I look at an acquisition through.

Thanks for the color there. There is a question on competition. So what does your research tell you are the top 2 or 3 reasons why you might lose business when an existing customer kind of switches to another provider?

Yes, it's interesting. It's all about customer service. And that starts with technicians that have a strong relationship with the customer. And in order to have a strong relationship, we've got to hire the right technicians. So it all kind of goes back to that hiring equation. And that's an area, quite frankly, we struggled with when we went through COVID. We weren't able to do ride alongs. You remember COVID, you couldn't get in a car with another individual. So it was very -- it was impossible to put a tech into a truck with another tech to go out and do a ride along. And that's a standard requirement in our business. Before a tech takes a job, we require that tech to get in the car and spend a day in the life of a tech to really understand what they're signing up for. The last thing we want to do is hire somebody, have them go in and do 1 day's worth of work and then never show up again because they just -- they're not interested in doing that kind of job. So having somebody come in and do a ride along is an important part of the training program that we invest in. And so it's really about how do we hire the right tech? How do we make sure that they know what they're signing up for? How do we then provide the training so that they're informed and can provide exceptional customer service? We monitor callbacks. We monitor when people are being called back for the second or third time. We're actively evaluating that because those are the things that really cause turnover from a customer. If we don't do the work, if we're not showing up, if we're causing pain in our customers' personal life or day-to-day life, they're going to fire us because there's options here. There are really good options out there in the market. We feel like we're the best option. But what we need to do is make sure our techs are trained up and are engaged with our customers so that they're providing that level of service. It's not -- it's interesting. It certainly is important to take care of the pest issue. But what we've found is taking care of the pest issue is important. But maybe what's even more paramount to that is the relationship that tech has with the customer. Because if the customer sees an issue, he'll pick up the phone and call that tech or call that brand and say, Hey, I still got this issue. Can you come back? And that's a whole different conversation than when a tech doesn't show up or is not taking care of responding to the customer's request.

Yes. Okay. Maybe I'll ask one more question on growth. So you mentioned sort of the resilience over recession. So if we were to enter a recession, how would you expect that to impact the company? Where would you see it? Where won't you see it?

It's interesting, we scenario plan all the time around recessions and slowdowns in economic cycles and this and that. But it's really hard to develop a scenario where you see a robust level of decline in our business associated with economic cycles. The biggest issue and the biggest driver of our business and in our markets is more so related to weather patterns -- weather cycles, the climate. That will have as large of an impact as an economic cycle does on our business. With that said, we certainly are subject to economic slowdowns. When people sit down and look at their spend, they certainly evaluate their spend level with their vendors and their pest control providers. But what we've consistently said is we're one of the last things that get cut. When you sit down across the table with your husband or your wife and you're going through a recession or a challenging economic time, you're probably going to cut the lawn service or you're going to cut the pool service, but it's going to be really hard to justify cutting the pest control service. When we think about commercial applications, the last thing you want to see when you walk into a restaurant is a bug or the last thing you wanted to see when you open up that box that you get from Amazon is a bug. And so how do we ensure that this remains an essential service. And if we can continue to make sure that this is an essential service, I feel like we can continue to navigate economic slowdown.

Yes. And on that point, I think you made a few points about pricing earlier. Is there a bit of a shift in terms of your approach to pricing given the fact that it's a sense of service. You've had to raise price more aggressively in recent years just for inflation. So how do you think about pricing going forward?

Yes. Pricing is an important part of the equation here. We want to get paid for the value we're providing to our customers. And as I said a number of times, this is an essential service, and it's a service that represents a very low spend level of our customers. I've been responsible for leading very large restructuring programs that have taken significant amount of cost out of businesses. I can tell you, pest control never hits the radar when I look at restructuring and cutting spend. And so it's a very small portion of a budget and it's an incredibly essential service. So as a result, I think it's important for us to continue to be proactive when it comes to pricing. This year, we accelerated our price increase forward a month. We -- and we also were more consistent across all of our brands when it comes to price increase. We're going to continue to focus on price as we go forward with inflation, without inflation. We're really going to look at it through a value proposition lens and continue to be very proactive when it comes to the pricing front.

So I guess when you wrap up all the comments you have about margins, is there a certain incremental margin target that you're looking at over the next few years? How should we think about margin expansion as revenue?

Yes. When we look at the incrementals, we're going to spend a little bit more time here in the coming months and try to put a finer point on that. But what we have consistently said to date is 30% to 40% incrementals is not out of the question. And so with a 50-plus percent gross margin and with opportunities in SG&A, we certainly see opportunities to drive improved margins going forward. And the incremental profile of 30%, 35%, 40%, depending on the level of growth that we're seeing, it's certainly not out of the question. When we look at the SG&A and we try to size the SG&A, oftentimes, you'll look at that at 30%, and you might quickly get to a conclusion that says that number should be 22% or 23%. But what I would caution you with is we spend a lot of -- a large amount of investment in acquiring customers. And so advertising and investment and procuring a new customer is oftentimes expensive. With that said, I think there's an opportunity over the coming years to realize improvements of a couple of hundred basis point. When I benchmark the cost structure, I think the opportunity looks like a couple of hundred basis points over the next several years with respect to SG&A.

Good for you. One question from the audience. Your ability to find labor, I think you mentioned the importance of technicians. Is that getting any better compared to recent...

That's a great question. I'm glad you asked it because I was remiss in not mentioning it. But that was a big part of the reason why we were so successful in Q1. If you turn back the clock, the last year and you heard -- you listened to a few of our earnings calls, we talked about a significant amount of new applicants coming into the business. And so we had a lot of new applicants coming into the business. We made some good hiring decisions. We entered this year from a point of strength from a hiring perspective that enabled us to go after and realize such strong growth in Q1. And so the labor front is really important. It's a big focus for us. And we feel like we're staffed very well as we continue to execute in the busy seasons of 2023.

Maybe I'll ask one more question then. Any thoughts about portfolio longer term? Any businesses that you're not in that you want to be in? I don't assume that you want to get out of anything that you're already in now. So...

Yes. It's interesting, I think this -- what's incredibly exciting is that we've got opportunities in our core space. We've got opportunities in the markets that we know better than anybody. And so we're going to continue to deploy capital in those markets whether it be in the U.S. where we have one of the largest markets, and we have our strongest position or certain select international markets across the world. There's no reason why we need to pivot to the right or to the left away from pest control. Pest control is attractive. It's growing and it's got a tremendous amount of secular tailwinds in it. So we're going to continue to be investors in this space.

With that, I think we're out of time. Please join me in thanking Ken for being here at the conference. Thank you, and glad that you here.

Well, good to be here. Thank you.