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

All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us here on Day 2 of our investor conference. I'm glad to hosting Rollins with us. We have Ken Krause, CFO on my right; Lyndsey Burton, head of IR, and Will Harkins, Chief Accounting Officer joining us here as well. Than you all for your time.

Ken, maybe, obviously, since you guys just reported last week and the stock had quite the reaction, maybe let's just start there in terms of the results. There was the weather-related surprises. Can you just talk through that? Like when did you notice that weather was an impact and how you quantify that, I guess?

Sure. Well, thanks for having us again, Manav, and great to be here, and thank you all for your interest in Rollins. And It's, again, great to be back here again for a second or third year in a row. And -- but Rollins continues to perform. We are a portfolio of pest control brands, but our performance continues to be exceptional. And last year, for example, was our third, I believe, consecutive year of double-digit revenue, double-digit earnings and double-digit cash flow growth. It also marks our 24th consecutive year of annual revenue growth and our 97th quarter, consecutive quarter of revenue growth. So it continues to be an exceptional performer. And when you look at the business, I think the thing that is interesting about Rollins is that 75% of our business is under some form of contract. So it's recurring in nature. Roughly 10% of our business is in what we call ancillary, but that's a business with existing customers for the most part. And then the other 15% is more of what we call onetime. And so when we look at the fourth quarter and we really analyze what happened, I think our business, our recurring business continued to hold in there, continue to be very healthy. In fact, it was slightly improved in terms of growth rate from Q3 to Q4 despite coming off of such strong growth a year ago. The ancillary business, which is our 9 shots on goal around the house to do business with existing customers was still growing at 15%, 16-plus percent, good growth year-to-date growth was about 20%, a little bit lower in Q4 just because we couldn't get out onto roofs. We couldn't get into homes. We couldn't get our technicians safely to the customer site because weather -- and our other business, our onetime business is really where we felt the pain of the weather conditions. That business, I believe, for the first 9 months was growing something like 4% and normally, we'll be a 1% to 2% grower, we actually saw a decline in that business. Again, we weren't getting the calls because the weather just wasn't cooperating. In fact, we saw challenging weather in the Midwest and the Northeast, the eastern half of the United States, starting back in November, we were in Chicago in early November, and there was already significant amount of snowfall on the ground. We were seeing temperatures in the single digits. And then it got warm and then it got cold again. So it was very erratic, and we just didn't have enough time to make up for that. I think if we would have -- if we would have seen less challenges in weather in December, I feel like we could have probably made up for that. But come the middle part of December, we faced the really challenging weather conditions again. So we really feel like, one, business is intact, continue to be positioned to deliver strong double-digit growth, the growth across the P&L and the cash flow statement. And then we continue to see -- have a great amount of optimism on our ability to deliver that 7% to 8% organic growth, as we think about the future.

Got it. And just to help, I think the audience visualize this. Can you just give us a few examples of these onetime in residential and commercial, just to visualize why weather is such a big factor?

Yes, certainly. So what you'll have is -- so if you have an existing contract with us and you call us because you have bees or hornets or wasps, we'll often sometimes come out, and it will be a very small charge, if anything, because it might be covered by the existing contract. But if you have this issue and you call us one-off and we come out, we'll charge different amounts depending on the extensiveness of the service. But oftentimes, those amounts are higher because you're going to cancel, you're going to call us and you're having us take care of a unique issue for you. And we're not coming back after that. And so it's very much onetime. It's wasps, hornets, rodents, often times we see this. Also, bedbugs and a number of different things certainly has a way of impacting it. But it's generally those things that are outside of that normal contract 1 or 2, there for the most part, new customers or customers that aren't part of an existing work arrangement.

Got it. And then when you look at 1Q, obviously, I think one of the reasons I think a lot of us are surprised by the 4Q print was, we didn't think the weather was that bad in 4Q. Obviously, you pointed out the regions it was, but 1Q looks really bad. So I think you said in December, you could have made up for it. Like I guess the question is, how should we think about 1Q? And how quickly can you make up some of these onetime things?

Yes, you can make up for them pretty quickly. It's -- but you can't -- where we find the biggest challenge is, if a hurricane, for example, impacts the business and it's late September. You just don't have those days to make up for it. Or for example, in Q4, we had December weather really hard to make up for it when you go into the holiday season. We had a tough January, certainly didn't. We've talked about that. But again, that was very early on in the quarter. And quite frankly, we have a busy season, we call it, or peak season that starts middle part of February to end of March. So we think that we have an opportunity to continue to make progress here as we go throughout the quarter. What I'll do is I'll continue to give you an update as we go through the quarter. We've got a number of different webcasts planned here in March and hopefully be able to give you a sense as to how things are shaping up for us as we go throughout the first quarter. But we remain really confident in our outlook. We remain confident in our ability to grow organically 7% to 8%, get 2% to 3% M&A and then deliver very healthy earnings and margins.

And just 1 last question on this on the margin front. I mean can you talk about the margin profile of this onetime business? And so when things come back, I guess, that starts looking better as well.

Certainly. So the onetime business is profitable because we know we're going out. We know that it's not going to recur and we price for it. We're doing something that's out of the ordinary for us. It's not necessarily core to our processes. So we're going to charge an appropriate price for that. And oftentimes, that might be multiples of the cost of the recurring service. But the cost doesn't really change all that much. So the margins are actually very healthy. Jerry and I were looking at that as we prepared for the call and what we were looking at in determining was that onetime business could have a 70-plus percent sort of gross margin associated with it. And as a result, your incremental margin on that and the EBITDA line is much higher than the targets that we've talked about consistently.

Got it. Okay. Putting that to the side, let's talk about kind of the long-term growth rates that are similar to what you've guided to this year as well. And more around process improvement or modernization, like you guys call it, you talked about the Rollins way in December. But maybe just taking it in different pieces. So maybe let's start with revenue first. Can you just talk about some of the modernization initiatives you have in there and why you think you can maintain 7% to 8%, maybe even do better than that somewhere down the road?

I mean we're really confident in our ability to deliver because there's not 1 initiative that we're dependent upon. We have a number of initiatives to enable growth. So when I think about the revenue growth opportunities, 1 opportunity that comes to mind is our opportunity to collaborate across our brands. When you look at our business, we've got a collection of brands that we go to market with. But at times, we're not collaborating. So for example, our ancillary business, the business I spoke about previously, that's growing 15, 20-plus percent for us, that growth primarily is coming out of Orkin. It's not -- we're not seeing as much of that growth because we haven't placed enough focus on that growth in our brands. We're starting to collaborate and use resources to share best practices across the portfolio that will enable us to see some more meaningful growth from that coming out of our brands, not to mention in Orkin those ancillary businesses -- that ancillary business represents a very small portion of our customers. So I would estimate that less than well below 5% of our customers in Orkin are actually using that ancillary service. So tremendous amount of untapped area and opportunity to continue to reflect improved growth on the ancillary side. When we get calls, another area of growth opportunity. We get calls into a call center in Orkin. Oftentimes, we'll get calls on wildlife. Orkin doesn't do wildlife services, but we do have a brand that does wildlife services. So how do we start to turn the response away from "no, we don't do that service" to, "yes, we don't do it at Orkin, but we have a brand, Wildlife that can provide the service that you need", and that will pick up additional opportunity. Last area of growth opportunity that comes to mind immediately is the opportunity around churn. I mean we all lose customers every day, and we're disappointed by that. But what we're looking at is how do we share those losses with other brands. So when a customer turns away from Orkin for whatever reason it might be, how do we point them or how do we provide another brand an opportunity to go after that business. Right now, we're not doing that. And that's a great opportunity to reduce churn out of the portfolio of brands and improve revenue growth for us.

So it sounds like this multi-brand opportunity that's been a great boon for our business also has a lot of inefficiencies. And so how do you solve for this? How long or how hard is a system installation? Or is it an ERP? I don't know what the answer there is.

No. I think there's not 1 -- very much like the growth opportunity, there's not 1 solution to these problems but it starts with sharing. And for example, a key sales leader at Donahue for us, spent a tremendous amount of time in Orkin, has developed best practices when it comes to selling ancillary services, when it comes to using our Rollins Acceptance Corp. to extend credit to our customer base. And so he's actually -- we've taken him and he's agreed to move over into our brand portfolio to share those best practices. So a lot of sharing of best practice is one. Two, we are putting together process improvements and technology improvements in some of the back office as well that will enable us to be able to share this more meaningfully across the business. Renee Pearson's doing an excellent job with respect to that. And so we're seeing good results coming out from that. So there's a number of different things we're doing to enable that sharing, enable that collaboration, which will then in turn enable more meaningful growth in the business.

Got it. All right. Let's move to margins. So maybe some of the modernization efforts there, maybe starting with potential opportunities on the gross margin side?

Yes. I mean, when you look at it, it's interesting. You're going down the P&L from growth from revenue and you look at gross margin, 66% or 2/3 of our cost of service is people. And in that people line is an opportunity that is reflective of our challenges with short-term turnover. It's a tough job. And people oftentimes will sign up for the job not really fully appreciating what it takes. And unfortunately, we lose way too many people in that first 6 months or first 9 months. And so how do we improve upon that? We're spending tens of millions of dollars with turnover in the short-term area. And that -- those dollars are the cost of onboarding associates and teammates. When we bring people into the organization, we're investing in that relationship immediately. And if somebody elects to leave us in a short-term period, those are costs that we just can't -- we can't recoup and recover. And so that's a great opportunity. We've seen some improvement in that area in 2025. We estimate that we saved $5 million to $10 million in that area in 2025, but there's so much more opportunity to come with respect to that. Moving down through the other areas of cost of services, our materials and leveraging our supply chains, we have all these various brands, but we don't have a consistent approach to procurement and that's an opportunity. Because the [ CentraCom ] we're using in Northwest or in Clark or any of our brands is probably the same [ CentraCom ] that we're using over in Orkin. And there's an opportunity to leverage that spend more meaningfully and then in fleet, we continue to do a great job on the fleet side, but it represents an opportunity as we move forward as well.

Just to appreciate the labor aspect that you described, like how many field people do you have? How many are you hiring every year?

Yes. When we look at it, I mean, we estimate we have over 22,000 teammates across our business. And oftentimes, when you look at it, you have at least 2/3 to 75% of those employees that are servicing customers. And so if you look at that, you have roughly probably close to 15,000-plus techs and you're -- when we think about techs, it's not unreasonable to think that you're hiring 5,000 to 6,000 techs a year that you're bringing in. And we're losing way too many of those in that first year. And so when you size that, that turns into tens of millions of dollars opportunity for us as we think about reducing churn and improving retention.

Yes. And we significantly improved that this year, right? I mean we talked about probably roughly 600 people that we hired -- fewer people that we hired this year versus last year in terms of not hiring the same person from multiple jobs.

600 people is just a small dent. It's a small fraction. And I mean, if you're spending $15,000 on an average onboarding, that represents almost 900 -- or $9 million and so when you think about -- if you save 1,000 or 2,000, that turns into a very meaningful number in the P&L.

And I think once they pass year 1, the attrition rate drops meaning, so as you described, I mean, it is a tough job. It's not the most attractive job. So why do you retain so much better?

Because once you get in and you understand the job, you become part of our culture, and you become part of a larger family. We are able to provide -- it's interesting, I was in our home team meeting yesterday in Orlando, and I was presenting to the team, and I kicked the meeting off and I asked, "how many of you are shareholders?" and 95% of the room's hands went up. And so the benefits that they're seeing from being shareholders is just -- it's incredible. And to think about how we're changing lives with the financial performance or how we're changing lives by creating these relationships across the business, I think that's what people get, but it takes a little bit of time. When you change jobs or you change locations, it takes a while to get what we call our sea legs under us. And so our people take some time to really understand and appreciate the impact they're having and then the impact they're having on their families. And so I think that earmark certainly is that time where people start to realize that they can build a career. It's not just a job but they're building a career with Rollins.

Let's move down the line on the SG&A side. I think you've called out there's some structural room for improvement. Can you just talk about that?

Certainly. We spent 30% of sales in SG&A each year, of which roughly 60% of the spend is general and administrative. So we're spending roughly 12% on selling and marketing. The opportunity is in at 18% and when we look at that, there's opportunities to leverage our corporate functions more effectively, to improve the efficiency of those corporate functions. We have spent a lot of time in the last 3 or 4 years. My entire team is new; Lyndsey's new, Will's new, my tax leader's new, Andrew and my Treasurer. We've made a significant amount of progress with bringing in, attracting, hiring and retaining really top talent and that's having an impact. And Will is with us today, and one area that Will is working on in the back office is modernizing our financial systems. And so maybe Will, maybe you could just talk a little bit about the opportunity that we have with some of the modernization when it comes to the financial systems we have at Rollins?

I joined about a year ago, coming up next month. And I'll tell you 1 of the best things, Manav, that I've seen at Rollins is the fact that there is an appetite to invest where there is going to be a great return on investment. And we look at our systems, when I first got there, our systems are quite antiquated. I mean we are really good despite some of the things we have -- the processes that we have today. But we just recently signed with Workday. So we are studying an EPM journey. So at the top of the house to make sure that we are able to provide Ken and Jerry with better information that's going to allow them to make better decisions for our future. And so we've got a lot of data at our fingertips. I mean all of our brands have a lot of data in those ERPs. We are -- everybody is on a different ERP today, but they've got all the data we need. We just need to be able to synthesize that. And so to think about what the future will look like in a year when we do have that ability, that's exciting from Chief Accounting Officers role. And then also just being able to have better controls in place and better -- I mean it's just -- it's going to take us to a different level from a back office.

Got it. And just magnitude, pace of change because usually when you say ERP, new EPM, there's always this questions, how long, could there be hiccups along the way, execution risk, just...

So what we've tried to do is we've tried to take a risk appropriate course here and start with EPM. EPM doesn't really impact the customer. ERP impacts the customer, impacts your supply chain, and it's much more disruptive, whereas EPM is something we can control in-house. We think it will be a 12- to 18-month exercise on EPM. And I think it will unpack and identify a tremendous amount of opportunities as we look at the business in a different way. When you're looking at your business consistently for such a long time, sometimes you miss the obvious opportunities. Whereas if you start to look at it and slice and dice it in a different way, I think it allows you to unlock new ideas and also maybe even challenge the way that we're allocating capital. And so really looking forward to all the work that Will, his team and our broader organization is working on.

Got it. I think we covered most of the margins, I don't know if you're missing anything, but the next one I want to touch to is you talked about hiring a new tax head. I think you improved that this year. More room?

Yes. It's great progress. Andrew is doing a great job there. When I joined the company 3 or 4 years ago, there's been a lot of change, a lot of modernization, but I saw an opportunity working with my team to really take a few step, positive steps forward on the tax rate. We were paying roughly an effective rate -- recognizing an effective rate of 26% and as we looked at it, we saw a number of planning opportunities to reduce that meaningfully. And last year, we reduced that by 100 basis points. So we're now under 25%. We're looking at ways that we can further optimize that. And so there might be more opportunity there, but certainly really proud of the 100-plus basis points of sustained improvement that we expect coming through the effective tax rate line.

Got it. I guess that takes us to capital allocation then. You guide to 2% to 3% of M&A a year. Last 2 years have been above that. Can you just talk about the -- like the 2% to 3%, I think, assumes 50-plus deals a year, but just the pipeline of some of these larger Fox or Sala-type deals, can that surprise us more?

I certainly believe it could provide some upside. We're not ready to sign up for that just yet. But we've got a new fresh approach to M&A. And that includes not only some of the work we're doing in our corporate functions, but also some of the work we're doing in the field. We're putting incentives in place that we're rolling out across the company that are creating a lot of alignment down through the company with bringing new ideas to the table. The last 3 or 4 years, we've done over 100 acquisitions. Fox and Sala certainly are noteworthy, and it's been really good to see those teammates coming into the fore. But we've got a tremendous amount of opportunity ahead of us. We meet every other week on deals and looking at our pipeline. And you're right, to get 2% to 3%, you oftentimes will have to do 50 deals unless you're doing a larger deal like last year, we did 25 deals plus the Sala acquisition. But we feel like there's runway left. To do 50 deals, you probably have to look at 150 deals and there's 30,000 competitors in our space. So that means we have to look at less than 1% of the population of companies in pest control each year to be able to deliver on that. We have a lot of confidence in our ability to do that. And we think we're positioned well as the acquirer of choice. When people sell to us, they know they're going to get paid a fair price, but they also know we're taking care of their teammates, we're investing in their teams, and we're taking a long-term oriented approach with the business. And so really excited about what we can do there. A lot of opportunity left and really confident in what we can deliver.

You talked about how the brands don't really share information with each other. Optimally, you talked about you got to have systems in the back office. So is the M&A engine also running manually, is there room for improvement there?

There's definitely some room for improvement. We're putting systems in place. We actually have done a value stream mapping exercise with the M&A area over the last, say, 6 to 12 months. We've identified a lot of opportunities to improve that. And we're putting systems in place that will allow us to better manage that, but also potentially using AI to identify potential opportunities in the M&A landscape. So that's kind of a new area that we're exploring. But we feel like a lot of good opportunity to continue to deliver that 2% to 3%, which in turn will get us to that double-digit sort of revenue growth that we're all accustomed to seeing at Rollins.

Got it. Since you joined 3 years ago, and with the help of Lyndsey, you guys have definitely modernized the IR effort and approach. I mean, part of that was the big debt raise. In fact, I think last year, this conference was when you announced it. So because of that, actually, we often get the question, how are you guys gearing up to do a larger deal? Is that -- is there an appetite for that? Are there deals of that size? Any thoughts there?

Yes. We've done a lot of modernization in the company in the last 3 to 4 years and incredibly proud of all that work that the team is doing and all the opportunity ahead of us. But we do think we're not beholden to doing large deals, but we also are open to doing large deals. There's a model that we use around the company. It's getting better before we get bigger. And so we're focused on improving our processes and structure and improving the collaboration in the brands that will enable us to do larger deals as we think about the future. because they're going to be there. And we want to be able to participate in those as we think about the future because, quite frankly, we're really bullish in our market. We think there's a great amount of opportunity to continue to be focused on pest control, delivering for our customers with a focus on that and making further investments.

Got it. Just sticking on capital allocation. I mean, you obviously have a very resilient business. You're very bullish about the business, a lot of room for improvement. The question is more on the buyback front, which we often get. You bought back shares only during the last 2 secondaries. So the question is why not have a more regular buyback cadence if you're so optimistic about the business and you have such an underleveraged balance sheet, quite honestly?

Yes. Yes, it's interesting. We're evaluating that. I mean, over the last 3 or 4 years since I joined the company, we've raised the dividend by 85%, the stock has almost doubled and the dividend is up 85%. We priced in the special dividend and now have this regular recurring growth in the dividend. We have used more capital to buy back stock as part of those event-driven instances that you point out, the secondary offerings. And we're evaluating how we might be able to use that more effectively. Quite frankly, what I've said the last couple of days is -- and I've thought about the last couple of days is last Thursday on our earnings call would have been -- an earnings day would have been a great time to deploy capital. And I, quite frankly, if I'm being critical, I think there's a missed opportunity. And so I think we're setting programs up and processes that we should have in place and we will have in place to be able to do that on a more regular basis because, quite frankly, we're bullish. I mean we deployed $200 million back in November. Two years ago, we deployed $300 million at $34 a share. And so the returns are significant that we're seeing there, and we're open to doing that as we think about the future.

Got it. And then the last question to round all this up in the 2 minutes that we have left is, obviously, you're making a lot of change since you came. But just give us some perspective on -- this was obviously a family-run company for a long time. So I think people appreciate it takes a while to get things changing. But just 3 years later, just some more perspective on the family involvement, acceptance to change and these modernization efforts.

Family is 100% behind all of the modernization. They're a huge shareholder, and they understand the connection between the modernization and the fact that the stock is doing so well over the last couple of years. I said earlier, for 20-plus years, we've been growing, but we haven't seen double-digit revenue, earnings and cash flow growth like we've seen in the last 3 years. We've consistently delivered on those -- in those areas the last 3 or so years. The family is incredibly supportive. I imagine I don't have line of sight into their holding period and expectations there, but I imagine they're going to be a shareholder for a very long time, and we welcome that. We -- I think their interests are very well aligned with the investors across the ownership base. And I think that what we were able to do 2 or 3 years ago with registering their position, helping sell them down in a systematic way, remove that overhang and that concern that people were overly focused on with respect to them potentially selling down their shares. Their recent deal, they locked up for another year. The last deal, they locked up for a year and they were out of the market for over 2 years. And so my guess is they're going to continue to be very meaningful and be very supportive. I think you probably saw in our 10-K, we announced that Gary Rollins was stepping away from his active role as an actively engaged Board member. He's still going to be an observer in our Board meetings. He's 81 or 82 years old now. And so he's looking at staying involved and staying active and being a part of it, but he's also planning for the future. And so Tim, his nephew has just recently -- is standing for election here in the May proxy season. And him and Pam will be representatives of the Rollins family. And that's, by all account is very reasonable, owning over 35% of our company.

Got it. All right. I think we'll leave it right there. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

I appreciate it.