Greetings, and welcome to the Rollins Inc. Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Lyndsey Burton, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. In addition to the earnings release that we issued yesterday, the company has also prepared a supporting slide presentation. The earnings release and presentation are available on our website at www.rollins.com. We have included certain non-GAAP financial measures as part of our discussion this morning. The non-GAAP reconciliations are available in the appendix of today's presentation as well as in our earnings release. The company's earnings release discusses the business outlook and contains certain forward-looking statements. These particular forward-looking statements and all other statements that have been made on this call, excluding historical facts, are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from any statement we make today. Please refer to yesterday's press release and the company's SEC filings, including the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023. On the line with me today and speaking are Jerry Gahlhoff, President and Chief Executive Officer and Ken Krause, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Management will make some opening remarks and then we'll open the line for your questions. Jerry, would you like to begin?

Thank you, Lyndsey. Good morning, everyone. We would like to begin our discussion today by offering our support and encouragement to all of those who have been impacted by the recent hurricanes. I'm proud of the way our team has worked together to support our teammates and the communities we serve in the aftermath of these disasters. The Rollins’ relief fund has processed over 250 emergency grants for teammates in need. And we continue to direct truckloads of food, water and other necessities to impacted areas. Our efforts will continue in the days, weeks and months ahead as these communities begin to recover. Turning to our financial results, our team delivered another solid quarter, reflecting consistent execution of our operating strategies and continuous improvement in our business. Our team delivered these results despite some operational disruption caused by Hurricane Helene, which occurred during the last week of the quarter. Our financial performance for the third quarter was highlighted by an increase in revenue of 9% to $916 million and we delivered healthy organic growth of 7.7% in the quarter. Overall, we continue to see solid revenue growth across all major service lines. We continue to invest in growing our business and adding to our customer base, as the markets we serve remain strong. We invested significantly in incremental sales staffing and marketing activities in Q3 and we're well-staffed to convert quality leads and sales efforts into new customer growth, which our results in the quarter reflect. On the commercial side of the business, we continue to make long-term investments to capitalize on the growth opportunities in a multi-billion dollar B2B market. Our commercial division continues to strategically add feet on the street to our sales force and we are leveraging data analytics and training to better enable their success. Investments to drive organic growth are complemented by strategic M&A. We closed 32 tuck-in deals in the first nine months of the year and the M&A pipeline remains healthy. We're actively evaluating acquisition opportunities both domestically and internationally and remain on track to deliver at least 2% of growth from M&A activity in 2024. Beyond growth, our dedication to operational efficiency and continuous improvement is an important part of our strategy and culture. Tim will discuss in more detail, but the investments we made to support long-term growth objectives did temper margins a bit in the quarter. But we remain on track to deliver healthy margin improvement and profitability for the year. In yesterday's release, we also announced a planned leadership transition at our board of directors. In accordance with the company's long-term leadership succession plan, Gary Rollins will transition from Executive Chairman to Executive Chairman Emeritus and John Wilson will succeed him as Executive Chairman of the Board. Gary was elected to a three-year term during our 2024 annual meeting and will continue to be an active and engaged member of our board. John has been with our company since 1996 in various positions of increasing responsibility. I've known John for 20 years and his experience and guidance have been invaluable to me as I have transitioned to the role of CEO over the last two years. I look forward to continuing to work with John, Gary and the rest of our board as we position our company for continued success in the future. In closing, we're excited about where our business stands today. Our markets are solid, staffing levels are healthy and our team is focused on driving continuous improvement and profitable growth. I want to thank each of our 20,000 plus teammates around the world for their ongoing commitment to our customers. I'll now turn the call over to Ken.

Thank you, Jerry, and good morning, everyone. We are now nine months into 2024 and we've delivered solid financial results. Year-to-date, we've delivered double-digit improvement across all major P&L metrics year-over-year and EBITDA margin improvement of 50 basis points, despite making significant investments in the business here in Q3. Cash flow continues to be strong, with free cash flow growing nearly 12% year-to-date, enabling a 10% increase to our dividend which we announced earlier this week. With this increase, we have raised our regular dividend by approximately 65% since the beginning of 2022, while continuing to meaningfully invest in the growth of our business. This is a reflection of our disciplined and balanced approach to capital allocation, our ongoing commitment to return capital to shareholders and the confidence we have in our future. Looking closer at the third quarter, our team executed exceptionally well and delivered Q3 revenue growth of 9% year-over-year, with organic growth of 7.7% at the high end of the 7% to 8% range we've discussed this year. We delivered good growth across each of our service offerings. In the third quarter, residential revenues increased 6.4%, commercial pest control rose 9.4%, and termite and ancillary increased by 14.5%. Organic growth was also healthy across the portfolio with growth of 4.9% in residential, 8.1% in commercial and 13.7% in the termite and ancillary area of our business. Turning to profitability, our gross margins were 54%, up 20 basis points versus last year. We continue to be positive on the price cost equation. Pressures from incremental people investments were offset by leverage in materials and supplies as well as fleet. Quarterly adjusted SG&A cost as a percentage of revenue increased by 100 basis points versus last year. This was primarily driven by incremental investments in people to support our growth initiatives and the uptick in advertising spend that we expected and previously discussed during our Q2 earnings call. Third quarter GAAP operating income was $192 million, up 8.3% year-over-year. Operating margins were 20.9%, down 20 basis points year-over-year. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA was $219 million, up over 5% and representing a 24% margin. Margins were down 80 basis points versus last year. And adjusted incremental EBITDA margins were 15.1% in the quarter, reflecting incremental investments in people and growth programs during the quarter. The effective tax rate was approximately 26.1% in the quarter, and we continue to expect an ETR of approximately 26% for the year, which implies a rate that is just over 27% for the fourth quarter. Quarterly GAAP net income was $137 million or $0.28 per share, increasing 7.7% from $0.26 per share in the same period a year ago. Accounting for certain non-GAAP adjustments, adjusted net income for the quarter was $140 million or $0.29 per share, increasing nearly 4% from the same period a year ago, despite a higher level of interest costs and the investments we are making in growth-oriented initiatives. We remain on track to deliver healthy profitability for the full year, driven by solid growth and an improving margin profile. We continue to focus on driving further improvements, while investing in our business and capturing growth in our very attractive end markets. Turning to cash flow and the balance sheet. Quarterly cash flow was $139 million, up a very healthy 16% versus last year. Free cash flow conversion was 102% for the quarter and 110% year-to-date. We made acquisitions totaling $24 million and we paid $73 million in dividends in the quarter. Year-to-date, we have made acquisitions of $106 million and returned $218 million to shareholders through our dividend. Additionally, we had just announced a 10% increase to our dividend earlier this week. This represents over two decades of consecutive increases in annual dividend payments. Debt to EBITDA leverage is well below one-time on a gross and net level. Our balance sheet is healthy and we are well positioned and committed to continue to maintain our balanced approach to capital allocation. In closing, we continue to focus on investing for growth, while executing on our continuous improvement and modernization initiatives. We are starting the last quarter of the year with healthy organic demand and we remain committed to investing in our people and providing our customers with the best customer experience. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Jerry.

Thank you, Ken. We're happy to take any questions at this time.

We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from the line of Tim Mulrooney with William Blair.

So residential organic, I wanted to ask about that. It's, I guess, 5% year-to-date, still indicative of a healthy market. I recognize that, but maybe slightly below what we've seen over the last several years. So I'm just curious, how would you characterize the health of the consumer today? And could you maybe break that growth down between your recurring revenue stream and one-time sales?

We appreciate that. When we dive in and we look at the overall growth of the business, we continue to remain very optimistic, very confident in our outlook. We talked about 7% to 8%. We delivered 7.7% here in the quarter and 7.7% organic growth year-to-date. When you look closer at the residential business, it's an area that we're also pretty pleased with the performance, especially when we look at the recurring revenue in the business. Back in September, we spoke on a public webcast and talked about the fact that we were seeing 6% plus recurring revenue growth coming through the residential sector. And that's where we finished. That's where we've been for the better part of the year. And so, we're pretty pleased with that level of recurring revenue growth, especially in the residential sector. When I look at the business in the quarter, Jerry pointed out the fact that, unfortunately, we all had to deal with the effects of the hurricane late in the quarter. But if you set that aside and you look at what happened as a result of that hurricane, it probably had about a $2 million or so impact on revenue growth. And so we would have probably delivered organic growth that would have been slightly higher than the 7.7%, closer to the high end, the 8% that we have talked about in the business. So overall, we remain very pleased with the performance. The team is doing an exceptional job at delivering yet another quarter.

And the health of the residential consumer does appear still strong to us. We see good growth in termite and ancillary, a good acceptance of our cross-sell campaigns and other things. So if there's anything that's been more inconsistent, it's the one-time piece. And the residential recurring, that's what we're really investing in with marketing, trying to drive quality leads. That's what we invest in with door-to-door and any other type of channel that we go to, is to try to create recurring revenue streams. And the investments we made in the third quarter will pay off for us in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of next year as our customer base is bigger as we head into the back end of the year.

That's a lot of helpful color. I'm just going to switch gears really quickly because, Ken, I think I remember having a conversation with you a couple of months ago about really like when you're looking at incremental margins, you're really trying to hit that in that target range, not any particular quarter but more, like, if you look at it on an LTM basis, right? So that's kind of how we're analyzing the business, thinking about it from that standpoint. So I guess my question is, if we look at incremental margins on an LTM basis, do you expect them to be essentially in line with your target range for the full year this year? Or might that be different given the incremental investments?

We continue to remain confident in our outlook on incremental margins. With a business that's generating gross margins of 54%, we feel like the contribution or the incremental margins should be approximating that 30% level. And in fact, when you look at the quarter and you peel back the performance, you unpack the performance a little bit and look at it a little bit closer, what you see is that we spent more in selling and marketing. We saw an opportunity in a very attractive growth market to invest and grow our businesses, and just alluding to what Jerry just spoke about. So we spent a little bit more there. If you set that aside, along with some of the investments we made on the tech side to accelerate the start rate that we have in our business, you'd see an incremental margin that would be right around 30% here in the quarter. So we continue to remain confident in our ability to deliver 30% plus incremental margins longer term.

Yes, this quarter is more of a timing issue more than anything as we indicated at the end of Q2.

Our next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley.

I also wanted to ask about margin. You mentioned the growth investments in hiring more people. Should we expect further investment in future quarters? Or was this more of a catch-up to where you want to be? And just if you could talk about which segments you're investing in and would be the best.

Certainly. When we consider our investments, we're operating in a growth business and market with significant growth opportunities ahead. Therefore, we plan to keep investing in the business. Looking back at the investments made this quarter, I would highlight a couple of key areas. First, we focused on our service side and our technicians. We recognize how crucial it is to convert our leads into actual starts, so we've invested in this part of the business, which has resulted in approximately a 30 basis point impact on gross margins for the quarter. The second area of investment is in our sales team and sales efforts. We have acknowledged that our commercial business is vital, alongside our residential segment. Consequently, we've disproportionately invested in sales, alongside an increase in our advertising spend this quarter, totaling around 100 basis points. While we may not maintain this level of investment every quarter, we intend to continue investing in our business according to the strategic initiatives we discussed during our Investor Day in May.

Looking back at the third quarter of 2023 compared to 2024 regarding our staffing levels, we're analyzing the commercial side to determine where we have sufficient coverage based on market conditions, and we will continue to invest in those opportunities. If scaling becomes challenging or if we don't have the necessary penetration in certain areas or the right people in key positions, that could slow our growth. We will rely on the data and our operational scalability to guide our decisions. On the residential side, we are seeing significant staffing increases in termite sales, cross-selling, and ancillary services, much like we are on the commercial side, as we persist in our investments. The demand from consumers for our services is evident in our results, and we see this as a valuable investment that we will maintain as long as the market conditions allow.

And I wanted to ask about pricing as we approach the end of the year and thinking about your strategy into next year. I think we've been in a little bit of a unique environment in the last couple of years in terms of we had the inflation and then it's been cooling. So I know we've been a little bit on the higher side on price in the past couple of years. Do you see that sort of higher-than-normal price level of increases continuing into 2025 when you're looking at your data and stuff like that? Just how are you thinking about it?

So Ken and I just recently spent hours in a room together reviewing those data from our price increase results this year, and there's nothing in there that - in the data from what we see and what we understand about the consumer that scares us off of continuing to get a fair price for our service. And if we're doing a good job, we should be rewarded for that, and our technicians in the field should be rewarded for that as well. So we've not seen anything in the data that would cause us to change course from anything that we've already indicated to you.

Both internally but also externally. When you look at CPI, we've consistently talked about CPI plus level of pricing. And CPI coming back roughly 2.5% recently gives us no reason to step back on the pricing and pare that back. We feel like this is an essential service and we should be able to be rewarded. And we should be able to reward our service technicians with the pricing that we've seen in the last couple of years.

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Haas with Wells Fargo.

This is Aude Ashkar on for Jason Hass. I wanted to ask on the commercial side. Just any update there in terms of the strategy around splitting the brands and adding to the sales force? I think there's eventual plans to create a second division. And can you just remind us there of the margin opportunity of being able to capitalize on multiple branches across a single digital media channel?

We still have a significant opportunity on the commercial side regarding how we structure the business and open new branches. In response to your question about creating another division, we are likely only in the early stages of exploring what's possible in the commercial space, and we intend to keep investing in these opportunities. The commercial side is likely to foster a more loyal customer base and presents an attractive margin opportunity as well. We are optimistic about the future of our commercial strategy and are still very much in the initial phases.

And then just if you can maybe talk about the trends you're seeing in commercial between the national accounts and the SMEs. And just wondering of your take on advertising for SMEs relative to the residential side of the business, maybe differences or similarities that you would call out there?

I don't believe there has been any significant change in that area from a competitive perspective. We are making a more focused effort, particularly with the Orkin brand, to prioritize the commercial sector in our marketing strategy. We have also invested more resources into the commercial space to support that. However, I haven't noticed any major changes in the competitive landscape or in advertising strategies as we move to market.

The team continues to do well. Scott Weaver is heading up our business in Orkin in the commercial side and we're seeing nice results there. But also I was just talking to our business leader, Rob Quinn yesterday up in Canada, and he's talking about the good performance we're seeing coming out of our Canadian commercial business.

Mostly a commercial business.

Substantially all commercial. And so really good results across both of those markets.

Our next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets.

This is David Paige speaking for Ashish. Congratulations on the impressive results. I have a question regarding the potential in the residential space, particularly concerning termite and other possibly untapped opportunities that the company is aiming to pursue beyond your current operations.

We are always exploring new services and opportunities around the home to expand our offerings. Some of these opportunities depend on geographic factors, construction types, or specific pests. While we haven't identified anything groundbreaking recently, we continue to add more sales staff to grow our customer base for multiple services. This strategy has been effective, especially as we integrate home sales inspectors to provide additional services. There's also significant potential in promoting recurring termite services, as many customers who use pest control don't yet have termite protection. We can continue to market and sell this service effectively. We are focused on leveraging what works and are committed to investing in and growing this segment of our business.

And just a follow-up on in terms of inorganic investment, given the robust free cash generation, the low debt leverage. Anything we should keep in mind for there in terms of verticals or geographies that you'd be targeting?

No, nothing noteworthy there other than we're going to continue to deploy capital and M&A. We continue to have a focus on delivering 2% to 3% of revenue growth from M&A each year. Markets remain very healthy, an incredibly attractive market, so you certainly do have competition from time to time. But we've been able to separate ourselves by how we treat the acquisitions that we bring into the fold and how we treat the teams and the brands. And that's a meaningful difference for us in our markets. But in terms of new markets, we see so much opportunity. It's such a fragmented, such a large and growing market, the pest control market that we're going to continue to remain committed to that area.

Our next question comes from the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs.

You mentioned seeing disruptions to operations from Hurricane Helene during the last week of the quarter. Can you discuss which parts of the business this impacted the most and whether you expect any spillover effect in 4Q?

Our strong presence in the Southeast United States, especially in the coastal areas of Florida with brands like Orkin and HomeTeam, was significantly affected by the storm that hit. There were numerous tornadoes in the southeastern and central parts of Florida, leading to the closure of many branches for several days. We work hard to prepare for such storms and ensure our team is ready, as proper preparation allows us to respond quickly and resume operations more effectively. After dealing with Hurricane Helene, we faced another storm that created even greater challenges. Fortunately, since this occurred early in the fourth quarter, we have ample time to respond and recover. While we anticipate some customer losses along the immediate coast, we believe they won't be significant enough to hinder our recovery. Looking ahead to October and beyond, we don't see any troubling indicators in the Southeast U.S. that would make us concerned about the fourth quarter.

No, not the outlook. Not really impacting the outlook all that much. But the quarter, you look at Southeast, it was probably one of the slower growing regions in the quarter because of the hurricane impact late in the quarter. To the earlier question we had on the call, I do think that if we did not have the impact of that hurricane the last couple of days, we probably would have seen organic growth even stronger coming through as opposed to the 7.7%. So it did impact us. But as we think about the outlook, we feel like, as Jerry said, we have enough time here left in this quarter to make up for what we had in October.

And then as it relates to your growth investments, can you elaborate on what you saw this quarter that prompted you to step up the spend? How would you assess the possibility that growth investments will remain elevated at 3Q levels going forward if market conditions support it?

I think what gave us the most hope was seeing 8% organic growth. The leads were strong and the market was very healthy. This has given Jerry, Pat, Stanford, and me the confidence to invest. While we’re not investing in every brand at the same pace, we have identified specific areas for more significant investments. As for the outlook and next steps, we cannot specify the pace of our investments right now, but we do plan to continue investing. We strongly believe this is a growth market and a growth opportunity, and to be successful, we need to invest in our people and attract additional customers.

I believe part of the strategy involves acquiring customers in the second and third quarters to build your base. The volume of inquiries decreases in the fourth quarter and the first quarter compared to peak seasons. Therefore, Q2 and Q3 are crucial for expanding your recurring customer base, which will be essential as you enter the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2025, allowing you to serve a significantly larger customer base. This perspective gives me confidence in the outlook, knowing that the customer base remains healthy and robust.

Our next question comes from the line of Aadit Shrestha with Stifel.

Just going back to sort of the price. How did price cost spread trend in 3Q '24 versus, let's say, 2Q '24? And on a recurring basis, what sort of margin expansion would you expect from just that spread alone? And would you expect a similar trend in FY'25?

Hard to say what 2025 will be at this point just yet in terms of margin opportunity and spread. But when you're getting 3% to 4% price increase in this business, you should see margins improve. If I look at the quarter and I unpack the quarter, we had 20 basis points of improvement in gross margin. But we invested 30 basis points in our service area. So when you set that aside, you had about 50 basis points of leverage coming through in the quarter in gross margin. It was good to see. And we're hopeful that we'll be able to continue to deliver that pace of improvement going forward. But you know as well as I do that from a quarter-to-quarter basis, things can shift.

And just a follow-up. Commercial growth has been pretty strong because of the investments you've been making. And do you see this sort of as high single-digit organic growth in 2025 as well, just because of what you've done already, and the sales and sort of ad spend that you've been investing into that business?

I think to answer that question, we would look at what we communicated at Investor Day back in May. And really our plan and our hope is to see commercial business grow at a faster rate than our overall business. You might see residential a little bit slower from time to time, but your overall commercial business should be accretive to the overall organic growth profile of the business as we think about the near-term and the investments we're making.

Our next question comes from the line of Josh Chan with UBS.

Jerry Kanlindsey here. In terms of your decision to hire people at this juncture of the year, could you just talk about the timing? Were you trying to address a little bit of a shortage? Or are you trying to get people time to ramp up for next season? Just maybe unpack the timing of the hiring that would be great.

Yes. When you consider sales staffing, are you referring more to the sales team or the technicians?

Yes. It sounds like you invested in both, so would be curious your thoughts on kind of hiring people in the third quarter as opposed to maybe in the spring, something like that.

Yes. If you have the right growth and manage route splits and branch openings effectively while keeping the right balance of customers on a technician's route, we will continue to add staff. This typically happens towards the end of the season, particularly in the third quarter, when we implement route splits. That's an optimal time to increase our technician numbers. On the sales front, we have maintained year-round hiring over the past several years. We are mindful of how quickly we can scale and train the right number of people. Our goal is to take a balanced approach rather than hiring frequently throughout the year and struggling to train a large number of new employees. It's more effective to train smaller groups in multiple classes throughout the year than to hire a large group all at once and risk a lower success rate. We aim to onboard strategically and will continue hiring throughout the year. However, generally speaking, in the fourth quarter, especially for residential home sales inspectors, hiring tends to decrease significantly and typically resumes around January or February before the busy season. In comparison, hiring on the commercial side is more consistent throughout the year.

It's interesting you mention that, Jerry, because looking at the quarter, we gained leverage in those areas in September. Most of our significant investments were made in July and August, and we didn't see as much investment coming through in September compared to earlier in the third quarter.

That's a good point, Ken, because a lot of that in the quarter was very front-end loaded in the early part of Q3. And then we kind of wind it down.

And then on the advertising spending, do you track kind of the returns on advertising? Some returns metric related to advertising spend? And could you talk about whether those metrics have kind of changed over the last, call it, 6 to 12 months or so?

Yes, we measure return on ad spend, which is a key metric. This is especially important in the digital channel. In Q2, we reduced our spending as we evaluated the market and the costs of generating leads in the digital space, making necessary adjustments. There may have been local competitors taking action, prompting us to hold back for a while until the situation stabilizes. Later in the season and into the third quarter, we plan to invest more when we can achieve a lower cost of customer acquisition and a better return on our ad spend. We are continually focused on this, managing our costs effectively. We remain disciplined in our advertising expenditure, maintaining a consistent percentage of revenue for the Orkin brand, similar to what we have committed to over the years, although the dollar amount may increase as the business grows. To achieve this, we have to continually strive to acquire customers at a lower cost. Return on that spend is a critical metric that our team prioritizes when making decisions.

Our next question comes from the line of Stephanie Moore with Jefferies.

This is Peter Sullvian calling for Stephanie Moore. I was just curious, I know you guys talked a little bit about modernization of SG&A expenses, specifically M&A expenses in 2Q. I'm curious if you could give a little bit more context on how those cost-cutting initiatives are developing and the progress you guys are making.

Yes, we are making solid progress. In the earnings presentation, you'll notice that the administrative side continues to improve, showing slight enhancements as a percentage of sales. We are quite satisfied with this performance. We are also exploring ways to invest in modernizing our business. Overall, we are happy with the returns from the restructuring dollars we invested a little over a year ago.

Our next question comes from the line of Oliver Davies with Redburn Atlantic.

Just thinking into next year, and I guess given the investments you've made, would it be fair to assume you'd expect organic growth to kind of accelerate from the 7% to 8% range? Or is it kind of becoming more costly to maintain those above-market growth rates?

I'm not sure if this is a question or a comment. From the perspective of our organic growth of 7% to 8%, we are quite satisfied with that level of growth, particularly considering that we are trending closer to 8% rather than 7% this quarter. I'm pleased with the returns we are experiencing. However, I don't think we are prepared to commit to an expectation of increased growth for next year. Nonetheless, we are content with the current pace of growth in our business.

And I wouldn't think that achieving those levels of growth should cost us more to drive that growth. I don't see that there's some sort of increase in advertising or selling expense that we would anticipate at this point that would need to be invested in the business in order to maintain those rates.

And then just following on, you mentioned the kind of investment eased in the back end of the quarter. I guess, is that true on both the sales and sort of digital advertising side?

Yes, that is true. What we saw, just looking at the numbers here and checking that. But what we saw is generally across the board, you saw in September more leverage come through the model than what you saw in July and August. And that's the big reason why when we were on our public webcast in mid-September, we talked about the fact that we were investing. We might see more investment come through. A big reason why is because of what we saw in July and August.

Thank you. And we have no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back to the management for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in our company and look forward to speaking with you on our fourth quarter earnings call early next year.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.