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

I'm Andy Wittmann. I'm the senior research analyst that covers facility services here at Baird. I'm really happy to have the Rollins team back with us this year. Ken Krause is the company's CFO; and Lyndsey Burton in IR. I just met Brady. Brady is the Treasurer, and we're really happy to have him. We're going to do this one as kind of a hybrid fireside chat and formal presentation. Ken is going to get us going with the presentation and going through some of the slides. I'll have this iPad, which is [email protected] to monitor questions from the audience. I have some written down here as well. So we're looking forward to hear from you.

Great. No, thanks for having us. Good to be here. Again, I'm Ken Krause, CFO, as he had mentioned, of Rollins. I've been CFO since 2022, so 3 years, and it's been a phenomenal run. I've been able to hire great people like Lyndsey, the head up my IR function; and then Brady, of course, my Treasurer and both been really important to the things that we've done. We recently just did our second equity deal in 2 years. We've sold our largest shareholder down on Monday by $1.2 billion. And earlier in the year, we did our first ever bond offering in February, investment-grade rating. I think the statistic is only 8% of companies less than $4 billion have investment-grade ratings, but we have one, and I'll show you a little bit why we have one. Here on the legal disclaimer here, I'll obviously call that out for you, the presenters here. But really, when you think about the business; one, we operate in an incredibly attractive market. I would argue and it would be really hard to find a market that is as attractive as our market and the growth profile, the opportunities for M&A, a number of different things that just make it so compelling, all the secular tailwinds that we have in it. It's large, fragmented and it's growing. And we're the leader. We're a leader in our markets. I call us the growth leader because we really set the mark when it comes to organic growth across our business. It's large and fragmented. It has over 30,000 competitors with less than $50 million in annual revenues. There are over 18 that are over $100 million in annual revenues. So you've got tons and a significant supply of opportunities to grow the business through M&A. And we continue to have this modernization, continuous improvement mindset. I'll talk a little bit about some of the things we've done on that slide here -- on that point here in a few slides. Third quarter results marked another really good business, a really good quarter for us. 12% revenue growth, 20% plus earnings growth and 30% plus cash flow growth. Exceptional performance, double-digit growth across all of our major service lines, organic growth that was above 7%. We target 7% to 8% organic growth, and we continue to deliver that. Incremental margins were 35% and cash flow continues to compound very nicely. Looking at the business over the long-term. So when we think about our business, we think about it over the short term, but also the long-term. When you look at our business since 2000, our revenues have been compounding at 7%. Our EBITDA has been compounding at 14%. Our operating cash flow, 18% and our average annual TSR is over 20%. If I look at these numbers the last 3 or so years, our revenue growth is 10-plus percent. Our earnings growth are in line with the 14% that we see there. Our cash flow is in that 15% to 20% range, and our returns have continued to be exceptional. Something that if you follow us the last 3 years since I joined, what you'll hear me talk about and Jerry quite consistently is our modernization efforts. And we've done a tremendous -- we've made a tremendous amount of progress with respect to our modernization efforts on a number of fronts. I mean, our Board looks completely different today than it did back in 2022. Our -- we executed significant restructuring. Today, Brady and Lyndsey are with me. None of us were here 3 or 4 years ago. We're all new to the business, but we're bringing new ideas and a new focus. Our Investor Relations program here, we just, as I said, just finished our second follow-on. We've sold the company, a large shareholder down by over $3 billion. And so we've issued over -- roughly $3 billion of equity in the market since '23. When I joined, they were selling down through 144s and blocks and for a CFO, that's a really tough thing to manage when you have that excess supply hitting the market. So we put together a shelf filing. We registered the shares. We went through and sold their first tranche in '23. I participated through the buyback at Rollins. We bought back $300 million of that offering, and they locked their shares up for a year. So 2 years later, they entered the market again. They sold down 1 billion, 1.2 billion with the green shoe and with really no discount. When you look at what happened on Monday, we closed at $58.56, and we opened up the next day, and we offered 1.2 billion shares. And so that's a testament for all the things that the company and Lyndsey and the team are doing on the Investor Relations side with expanding sell-side coverage and expanding our transparency around our financials. And the capital structure, we -- since I joined, we've upgraded the revolver, brought in a lot of new banks. We're now investment-grade credit rating. We have a commercial paper program that we use to buy back shares on Monday, over roughly $200 million of our shares. And we issued our first bond back in February. And capital allocation, our dividend is up over 80% over the last 3 years. When I came in, I prioritized the regular dividend. And as a result, we've increased the dividend recently by 11%, but over 3 years, it's up 82%. And so really good performance there, coupled with the ability to grow the business. When you look at our valuation since 2022, we've created about $12 billion or $13 billion of value for our shareholders. And really, it's been about growing the business, getting better, getting bigger, but also getting better. And so really high-quality earnings. The financial performance here, you've probably seen this chart before, but if you follow us, you'll see that we grew during the great financial crisis, the industrial slowdown and then more recently in COVID. And we continue to see accelerated growth more recently. As I mentioned, from '22 to '25 LTM, we're growing at 12%. And so that's really good performance to continue to see come through the model. The secondary offering in '23, as I mentioned there earlier, we've increased our sell-side coverage, but also our float and our volume continues to expand. We -- when I joined, we were trading about 1 million shares a day. It's increased to 2 million, and I imagine that's going to increase even more with the recent sell-down that we had. So providing ample levels of liquidity and the performance. As you see there, the stock, not only is the dividend up 82.5-or-so percent, but the stock is up almost 70% over the same time period. So really maintaining the premium valuation that we're known for and really excited for the future. As a result, that supported the repurchase that we just made on Monday. We invested $200 million to buy back our stock at $57.50. At that time, it was a 1.8% discount. But when we opened up the next day, we were flat to up slightly. So the discount went away almost immediately. We think about the future, really, our focus is continuing to compound revenue at double digits, earnings at a faster rate than revenues and cash flow at 15% to 20%. And that's enabled through all of our competitive advantages, our people. We're a people business. It's all about our people. It's about the Rollins way; how do we create this heroic impact for our customers? How do we focus on being remarkable for our customers, ensuring that our teammates all know how essential they are together. Maintaining the balance in the capital allocation, the dividend, the share repurchase, the M&A, a tremendous amount of M&A opportunity with a focus on being an acquirer of choice. We have an experienced team. Although I don't have a lot of experience in pest control, Jerry Gahlhoff grew up in pest control, our CEO. My peers on the ELT all have decades of experience in pest control. I'm learning about pest control, but what I'm trying to bring is a modernization sort of focus to the business. And I really do think it's paying off, and we're seeing the results. But the one thing that I would point out here as I close this out, I think what makes us really special as a company is the diversification in our brand portfolio. We've got all types of different brands to service all types of different customers. And not only that, we offer -- having the diversification in the brand portfolio offers us a unique position when we go and acquire new customers. We're not solely focused on digital. We have door knocking. We have billboards. We have relationships with homebuilders. We have cross-sell from technicians. And then we also have the digital footprint. But that really, I think, is what helps set us apart and enables the financial compounding that we continue to see across our business. With that, I'll open it up to your questions.

Sounds great. Thank you for all of that. Yes. So I guess I wanted to start just with the modernization efforts because I think in the last few years, that's something that's really noticeable. You talked about kind of people and some of the process you did with the banks on the finance side, that's kind of where you live. I'm just kind of curious, in the business on the operations, there's also been investments over the years. Can you maybe go over through some of the more recent investments...

Yes.

To help make your teams more productive in the field.

Sure. There's a number of things we're doing. If you just start at the pricing side, our focus on CPI plus pricing. And we talked about pricing for a long time, but we never really talked about it through the lens of CPI plus. What's that mean? Well, that means that when we think about the pricing in our services, we start with the base rate. The base rate for us is consumer price inflation. And then we add a layer on top of that because we believe, and our customers tell us that this service is essential. It's highly valued, and they're willing to pay a premium for the service above the level of CPI. So that certainly is something that we're doing. When we look across the spectrum of different areas, I can't help but start with the back office, our finance and accounting team, a new Chief Accounting Officer, a new Tax Director, a new Investor Relations Director, a new Treasurer, and they're all enabling opportunities. For example, on the tax side, you may have seen in Q3, we announced a significant improvement in our tax rate, probably not -- probably a big surprise for a lot of people. But what we were able to do is take advantage of a number of credits and put together a program that will create a sustainable improvement in our effective tax rate as we think about the future. And so, Andrew, our Head of Tax, is doing an exceptional job at driving a sustainable level of improvement in our effective tax rate. And I'm hopeful that as we go into '26, we'll be able to talk about that more. When we think about the other back-office areas, we're implementing shared services. We're looking at things more consistently where we can. We don't want to lose sight of the fact that the decentralized nature of our business is a differentiator. But what we want to do is we want to complement that with some new processes that will enable us to be a better acquirer. So when we bring people into the fold, we're able to provide them a better ability to procure their materials, improving the closing process, getting more laser and more focused on the key performance indicators that we're managing our business to. And so there's a number of things. Even on the AI side, we're doing more on AI. When we think about our call center and how we're helping train our call center attendants and ensuring they're focused on doing the best job at securing new customers, but retaining customers also that are looking to leave. The service technician side is another front. When we look at service technicians, we lose way too many people too quickly. So what we're doing is trying to focus on that population of employees to try to improve that because what that will do is reduce the cost of turnover.

Yes, that's an important thing. Experience techs are way more productive and...

Yes.

Gosh, and the customer service NPS scores that fall out of an experience test really. I mean this is -- what about -- in the routes, any new software for the fleets or anything that's happening there?

We've made significant investments in our BOSS system over the years...

Yes.

And that's what we use across Orkin. We also use a hybrid portfolio of softwares across the brands. We're bringing them in. We're doing more to standardize. I imagine as we think about the next 3 to 5 years, you'll start to see us do even more on that front. But to date, it's been a difference maker for us. I mean what we have is working. It's certainly enabling a lot of success. But we're looking at that through a lens of continuous improvement as well because there's a lot of things that are changing in the environment and on the macro level that should be opportunities for us to improve.

Yes. I don't know in a route-based business, if you're ever fully optimized or ever done optimizing your routes and leveraging your technology and software better. So we're looking at that.

Yes. And you said BOSS is only for Orkin. It's not rolled out in your other.

Boss is an Orkin-focused software. And so we may have a few others that are on it, but primarily, Orkin is the user of that software.

Interesting. It seems like an opportunity to stand in...

Yes, it is an opportunity. But there's also leverage -- there's -- BOSS was built for Orkin and Orkin is not Northwest, and it's not Clark, and it's not HomeTeam. And so as a result, there's things that are -- there's nuances and differences between the various brands that may not make it as useful for some of those brands. But we're evaluating that as we go forward.

Interesting. I guess the next thing I wanted to kind of dig into is just the fragmentation of your industry and your consolidation of it. I don't know who wants to take this one. But I just was -- what's the right way for investors to think about the amount of capital you should be deploying or can be deploying on average each year for this?

Do you want to talk about the industry or the fragmentation?

Sure. It is an incredibly fragmented industry with relatively low barriers to entry for new players. It's an attractive industry. The pipeline of potential M&A opportunities seemingly is endless. In a lot of ways, it gets refreshed in a pretty evergreen way. So we enjoy a favorable position as an acquirer of choice in this industry. I think that differentiates us in a meaningful way. We have a reputation for being great stewards of businesses when people come to us to sell their business when they're ready. Many times, these are multigenerational family businesses that are, for one reason or another, find themselves in a place where they're ready to transact. And we have long-standing relationships throughout this industry that bring really high-quality businesses to us. So we're -- it's a favorable position to be in. And certainly, the pipeline is very, very healthy.

Brady, do you want to talk about our credit profile and ratios and things that we manage ourselves to?

Yes, absolutely. So prior to my joining earlier this year, the company did not had a public credit rating. And so we went to the agencies, got an investment-grade credit rating, which gave us access to not only the bond markets where we did our debut bond offering in February, but also to the commercial paper markets. So we have that ability to raise capital very cheaply, efficiently, quickly to be able to invest in the business.

And in terms of from M&A, you kind of asked a question of what you can expect in any given year. I would say from a top line revenue standpoint, 2% to 3% is kind of what we talk about from an M&A standpoint that you should expect. There's years when we'll do larger deals such as this year, where we acquired Saela in April of this year. So we talked about M&A growth of 3% to 4% this year, probably closer to that 4% range. But 2% to 3% kind of in any given year is what we're looking for.

And so, Ken, how does that break down if you think about the capital allocation pie, investments in the business, M&A, return of capital, like what is the...

Yes. I mean if you look at the last 3 years, we've generated $2.5 billion of cash flow. And we have used about $1 billion of that for dividends. We've used about $1 billion of that for growth investments, M&A, and we've bought back $300 million, now $500 million of stock. And so I think that's the kind of balance that we're thinking about. I've raised the dividend over the last 3 years by 82%, but it's still less than 50% of our cash flow. So I want to continue to make sure that we're around that sort of level of dividend profile. We don't have any CapEx. It's really very capital-light business. If you look at it over a very long time. It's a very capital-light, very low amount of working capital. So you can devote that portion of the cash flow to the dividend, while still buying businesses back without incurring significant amounts of debt and cost of financing. With that said, we have stepped up the leverage. We've increased the amount of leverage we have on the business. over the last 3 years. And I imagine that will continue to evolve as we think about the future. It's a great business. It's very predictable, a lot of recurring revenue. And so as a result, there's an opportunity to continue to use leverage in the business.

Just kind of curious right now, what you're seeing in terms of the level of competition. Your growth rate, I think you said in the last 3 years compared to the 20 years was a little faster now I think in recent times. Is that a reflection of the competitive environment getting a little bit less competitive? Or what do you attribute that?

That's a good question. I don't know that I think its competitive environment related. It's a couple of things. One, I think pricing. We're getting more pricing than we got a few years ago. There's more inflation in the economy, so we better be getting more pricing. We're getting more cross-sell. That termite and ancillary business, the cross-sell we're seeing on installation and exclusion work, it's exceptional. And it's still a very low portion of our customer base. And so we've got a lot of cross-sell coming through the business. So there's a number of different things, I think, that are enabling that growth in addition to the M&A. I mean we've been more acquisitive. We bought more businesses. We've held ourselves to that 2% to 3% revenue growth. This year, it's 4%. 2 years ago, it was more like 5%. And so because of the Fox deal that we brought on, if my memory serves me correctly. But it's acquisitions, cross-sell, pricing, all of that is paying off with higher levels of revenue growth.

I want to double-click on the cross-sell one. I mean this is a thing that's totally in your control, right? You know how many customers you have.

Right.

You know what they're taking. Can you bring that and make it tangible for me to quantify or put a box around what the opportunity is there?

You want to cover it, Lyndsey?

Yes, sure. At this point today, your average customer has less than 2 services with you. So we know there's runway. And we talk about kind of 9 shots on goal that we have, and this is just more pertaining to the residential side, but 9 different opportunities, broadly speaking, to expand the relationship with the customer. And we have made a lot of progress. Ken talked about the ancillary business, which has been a really solid double-digit grower with a lot of runway in front of us. But it has been a focus, and I think it's something that we've made great traction on. But I think that ancillary business is a great proxy for our ability to expand the relationship with our customer, but so are things like our mosquito services.

That's right.

It seems like mosquito is one of those categories that forever kind of lived on the fringe like kind of a nice to have.

Yes.

Is it becoming more of a need to have for people because they saw that their neighbor has it now and...

Certainly, in Atlanta.

Or that was great. Yes.

No. Yes, I think so. You continue to see really strong growth coming out of that. I do think perhaps there's some of that neighbor trading of information and secrets. But yes, it's a solid category for us and a great area of additional sales opportunity.

I was going to say, I think -- and that's part of the beauty of the acquisition strategy of these brands that we're buying or these tuck-in acquisitions we're making, you're exposing that customer base to this other service that they may not have had before. And so it's a bit of a virtuous cycle.

Right.

What's the penetration opportunity look like on a -- from a tuck-in M&A, x dollars of revenue, but really you feel like in 5 years, you can make them x plus what? Like what is that? What's the embedded organic grow to some of those targets?

That's a great point. So I have 5 metrics that I use to measure M&A in our business. And probably one of the most important is when I buy a business, I want to buy the business that's going to grow faster than we are organically because in my opinion, the organic growth is a really important driver of our valuation. And so as a result, I'm focused on buying businesses that we can buy and make better or improve or are already growing faster than we're growing. Fox and Saela were great examples. They're accreting to our overall organic growth rate, and they're making a big difference. And so that's a really important point to remember. The other point that I just wanted to double-click on with respect to the ancillary side that Lyndsey was talking about is let's think about the ancillary business. It's 10% of our annual revenue. And it's roughly 10 to 12x the average ticket price of residential pest control. And so that tells you that on a customer base, it's a really small penetration rate. So very few customers are -- that we're tapping into for that service. And so that represents, I think -- I mean, I really do believe there's a runway -- there's a nice long runway on the ancillary side that exists for us in the future.

Talk about commercial pest for a second. I've always liked this business because customer retention rates tend to be even higher.

Yes.

You can really build the relationship and add value in different ways. Can you just talk about how you guys go-to-market in the commercial pest, how it might be different from some of your competitors?

Lyndsey?

Yes. I mean we've made a lot of investments in the commercial space, particularly with respect to Orkin over the last several years. Commercial is a place where certainly relative to residential, maybe less competition as you have a lot more scaled players. I think to be effective in the commercial space, your brand and reputation really matters for a commercial enterprise to put their faith in you to protect their brands. And so we've invested a lot over the last couple of years in standing up kind of a unique commercial division within Orkin to really drive focus and go after this opportunity in a meaningful way. And we've seen the results come in terms of an inflecting growth rate there. So it's -- we've added feet on the street. You have Scott Weaver, who is running that team in terms of the commercial division within Orkin and doing a fantastic job. And it is. It's a sticky customer base. They'll stay with you. Multiples relative to a residential pest control customer. So it's a great business, a great area of focus, and we see nice results.

Some of those customer locations are a lot bigger, and we're seeing some of your competitors going to digitizing some of their traps, so they don't have to look at them. I'm just wondering what your opinion on that is. Are you implementing similar things? Do you think that's an opportunity for your company? The idea here is that you're taking labor out by having connected devices tell you where to go and where not to go.

I don't think it's about taking labor out for us because we value the relationship that our technician has with the customer. But what we want to do is we want to make the job easier for the technician to do. And so if you can use some sort of technology-enabled trap that will allow folks to go to specific traps to service, they're going to be bending over less. And so they're not going to have as many back injuries. They're going to get through the site more effectively. It's really -- that's what for us, it's all about. How do we help our techs do their jobs safer and more efficient as opposed to having less labor in the workforce. That labor, this is a people business. You got to have the relationships. You got to have the techs out there interacting with the customers. We firmly believe that's important to us.

So this is stuff that you are doing today where worth it.

Yes.

Do you envision a day where this is the standard in the commercial pest industry?

I mean it could be. I don't know if it's standard. This industry is not a real fast-moving industry per se.

Just I'm asking.

It's a slow moving or a fast follower maybe is how I would describe it. And so it's hard to say that that's the standard. It's really hard to say.

Got it. All right. Well, unfortunately, we're basically out of time here. So I'm going to leave it there. I want to thank you all for coming, and please join me in thanking the Rollins team for their time.

Thank you.

Thank you.