Here after lunch. Thanks to everyone coming back here. And the first session here, we have Rollins. I have Ken Krause, the CFO. He'll be talking a little bit on the company, and let's start out, I guess, just maybe just give a quick kind of overview of Rollins. I mean, this is...
Sure
... a wide, wide group of investors. Kind of quick overview, and then maybe we'll talk about kind of trends in the market.
Certainly. Great to be here again this year, representing Rollins. Business continues to be very strong. We continue to operate and compete in an incredibly attractive, a very large, growing and fragmented market space, and our strategy is certainly working. We continue to see robust levels of organic growth. We're continuing to be very acquisitive. As I said earlier, the market is incredibly fragmented, so it enables us to be very acquisitive and add a few points of growth just about every year. And so we're continuing to target additional M&A opportunities to bring into this model that continues to compound revenue at a very healthy clip. Earnings continue to grow at a much higher rate than our revenue.
Earnings, or I'm sorry, cash flow, also is exceptionally strong with negative working capital, 'cause customers oftentimes pay us in advance for our service, and very strong returns. So, again, a strong market, strategy's working, focused on execution, and making a tremendous amount of positive change across the organization.
When you think about maybe the start of this year and kind of the seasonality that you normally see, let's talk. You know, first quarter was warmer than expected. How has that played into the second quarter when you think about, was anything pulled into the first quarter from the second quarter? How's the seasonal ramp-up to, you know, the busy periods kind of working out?
Certainly. You know, you started the year pretty slow. January was a tough month. We had tough weather conditions in areas across the South Central region of the country, where we were shutting branches down because of the weather pattern that we were seeing, and that's challenging. We saw improvement in February and in March, and so very strong improvement across those months. April was a very healthy month for us, continues to give us confidence in our ability to deliver 7%-8% organic growth in the business here again in 2024. So the markets continue to be very healthy. Weather patterns are relatively favorable for us. It's been pretty warm in Florida. I was just in Florida not too long ago, and it was exceptionally warm there. It took a little bit of time, though.
It's interesting. In April, Georgia and Florida took a little bit of time to really come online. But they've since come online, and we're seeing some pretty good results coming through the Southeastern market of the country. Our brands are positioned well, and we're seeing good results across the portfolio.
When you think about the different, I guess, segments across in that kind of benefiting of, or the seasonal difference-
Mm-hmm
... maybe talk about just residential, commercial-
Sure
... termite, you know, what's the impact?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. You know, it's interesting on the resi business. It continues to be pretty healthy. You know, it's a choppy market in some of our one-time business. It's been choppy for a while. But overall, we're positioned well on the resi market. The termite market's healthy. We're seeing pretty good results, actually, in some of the new housing markets with our Home Team business. Our partnership with new home builders and large home builders actually is seeing some nice improvement here as we started 2024. And the ancillary business is following on very much what we saw last year and the year that preceded that, where we're seeing good demand for that ancillary business.
You know, the house ultimately has nine opportunities for us to do business with a homeowner. And not just your traditional pest control, but your mosquito, your ticks, your Ridge-Guard, your insulation, your encapsulation of your crawl space. We're seeing good demand for all of those services. As people stay in their homes longer, they want to take care of their homes, and we're seeing good demand there. And on the commercial side, you know, at our recent Investor Day, we talked about commercial as a really big focus of ours, when we think about the future, and we've seen good demand there. I think the first quarter, we had 10% organic growth in commercial, and that was followed after. That was following on 2023, that also had really robust levels of organic growth.
We're starting to do more around the commercial business. We've set up a focus, have a strong focus on setting up and standing up our commercial enterprise. We've been in commercial for a long time, but oftentimes, commercial's been part of our residential branches. And so we've started to pull that commercial business out, splitting that out, providing management and leadership and accountability on the commercial area, while investing in new sales resources and efforts to drive demand, and it's having a positive impact. So all in all, it's a pretty good market we're in currently.
Right. I mean, you talked about that on your Investor Day, kind of that sixth commercial division-
Mm-hmm
... and piecing that out. When you think about the commercial, you talked on residential, you talked about nine kind of, like, services.
Yeah.
How does that look in commercial? And when you talk about maybe the penetration of services to the commercial, and how does that evolve under the new kind of commercial division?
Yeah, we have multiple services. We don't certainly have nine services to offer a commercial enterprise, but we have multiple services that we oftentimes offer a commercial enterprise. And not only are we offering multiple services, but we also, very similar to residential, we've got different types of pests that we're certainly helping customers respond to. Whether it be your traditional pests, your rodents, your bedbugs, other sorts of pests that we certainly see from time to time. So we're certainly very active there. The thing that is interesting about commercial is, it's a really important purchase by our customers.
When you think about protecting the brand, there's nothing that will destroy the brand faster than when a customer comes into a restaurant setting and sees a pest, or opens up the box that they just received at their home, and there's a pest in the home. Or I'm sorry, in the box. So it's really important for when we're in the market at least, when we're dealing with our commercial customers, what they say to us is, "We want a strong brand that we can get behind. We want a strong brand that'll help protect our brand." And so that makes it a very attractive market for companies that are, they're well-established with very strong brand profiles. We're seeing good demand for that, and so we continue to double down and invest disproportionately in that commercial area of the business, as we think about the future.
Right. Culture and brand was a big piece of the Investor Day as well. Maybe we could just kind of, you know, I guess, review some of that in the perspective of, how does culture and brand really kind of help you outgrow, you know, the, the competition when you think about, you know, growth rates within the segments?
Certainly. When you look at the culture, when we think about acquisitions, we've been very acquisitive over the course of the last five to ten years. Especially the last five to six years, we've done more and more acquisitions, like Northwest and Clark and others. But you know, when we go out and look at an acquisition, the first question we ask ourselves at times is, "Does the culture fit? Are we buying a similar culture?" And if we check the box on that, it gives us the confidence to move forward.
And that culture needs to be built on what we call the servant leadership. We're in a customer service market and industry. We've got to have, we've got to have a business, and our brands need to focus on serving our customers. Our people need to be focused on serving our customers. And so that's a really important part of the M&A equation when we go after and acquire some of these businesses. But the culture is certainly paramount.
And how, I guess, how different is that from a lot of your competition? Whether it be larger ones or smaller, I mean, is it hard to find a lot of smaller acquisitions or M&A that kind of fit that mantra? 'Cause it seems somewhat of a unique structure.
Mm-hmm. No, you know, it's interesting. As you see data on our market and our industry, you see that it's a very long tail of competitors, a very large market, continues to grow. The thing that we do different at Rollins that maybe you don't see as often at other companies is the relationships that we have across the industry. It's not just Ken or Jerry that's going out and identifying opportunities. We're seeing opportunities flow from the ground up.
So people know these businesses, and they've known these businesses for a long period of time, and they know how they're built. And so getting in early and developing those relationships, and getting those relationships from the ground up, is a really big part of the reason why we're so successful in acquiring.
So it hasn't been a challenge, it hasn't been difficult for us to find those opportunities. And oftentimes, people come to us because they know our reputation for acquiring. We take care of people, we take care of brands. Where there's a value in the brand, we're gonna make sure that brand stays intact. And so people sell to us because they know they can still live in that community, because the people that they employed previously are being taken care of.
They can still be active and see their brand in the community. It gives them a sense of, and a source of pride, and as a result, we're oftentimes that acquirer of choice, where others maybe take a different or more aggressive approach. So oftentimes we'll see where we might be the only party at the table with a potential seller, because the seller equation that they have, it disproportionately really values the employee and the brand side.
Right. And I was gonna say, when you acquire, how often do you keep on, like, the management and...
It's very common. I mean, one of the questions we ask in the due diligence phase is, "What do you intend to do after we buy you?" You know, "Do you intend to stay involved? Do you want to phase out of the business?" And we've been accommodative in a number of different scenarios to different approaches. But we really do like to buy businesses where people want to stay in it, and they want to partner with us to grow that business. Northwest is a great example. We bought Northwest in 2017. We paid over $100 million, $150 million roughly for that business. We bought about $50 million in revenue. The Phillips family owned that business for a long time.
The father was ready to phase out, and the sons were gonna stay in the business, Stanford and Steve Phillips. They still are in the business seven years later. In fact, Stanford Phillips was just promoted to a role at Rollins that's more broad. And we've provided growth capital to it that it didn't have coming into the fold. So we've grown it from $50 million-$150 million in seven years. Half of that $100 million of growth is M&A. The other half is organic growth. And so having that balance is important, and that's a great- that Northwest example is an example I use all the time for how we buy businesses. There's some people that phase out, there's some people that stay in, and we provide growth capital to help it reach its full potential.
Right, and I guess, I mean, growth capital may be, is a good segue into, you know, when you think about... You talked about, again, on Investor Day, digital and the investments that are being made in digital. I mean, how much, one, just digital, let's talk about what's that doing for Rollins?
Mm-hmm.
But how much of that is an opportunity in that M&A that you can do exactly like the Northwest, where many smaller players, is that a big hurdle for them to overcome, putting in a digital platform and those kind of things, that you can then help with?
Yeah, it can be. It can be a barrier, and... but the digital platform that we talked about so much at Investor Day was related to our commercial business. And in the commercial business, we've got a digital platform where we interact with our commercial customers. It's kind of a rule of the game. And so in order to be successful in that space, you've got to have that way to interact with that customer set. We have it. So that creates a little bit of a barrier for smaller players to enter that commercial area and compete more extensively with people like ourselves. And so we certainly see an advantage there. And coming into the fold, people benefit from having access to that digital footprint that we have.
Right, and has that helped M&A on the commercial side?
Certainly. I mean, well, I don't know that it's helped the M&A. It's helped us... it's helped us fuel our growth. I don't know that it's necessarily been a big part of the reason why we've been successful in M&A, but it certainly has helped grow our business. Once we get businesses into the fold, it's helped us reach the growth potential that we otherwise didn't have in the business. This doesn't necessarily apply to that specific question, but when talking about growth in the realm of M&A, we acquired Fox a year or so ago, Fox Pest Control. We paid a healthy valuation for it. 13.4x is what I think we paid for it, and a year in, we're trading at 9.7x of multiple, a multiple of EBITDA.
So you saw a really big improvement in that multiple in year one. Big reason why we improved so much is 'cause we've seen so much growth. That business is continuing to grow. We're fueling more growth. We're putting more feet on the street. We're fueling the door-knocking. We're really putting some support behind it. It's partnering with our Home Team business. The onboarding and integration work is led by Brady Camp, who heads up Home Team , and when you spend more time and understand Home Team , you'd see the benefit of the door-knocking with the Home Team business. So we're starting to do and continuing to do more on that side of it.
So, I guess it's interesting, like, just kind of growth on a broader picture, but when you think about acquiring companies, and let's say they're growing kind of at the market growth rate, you know, how much can you accelerate that when you pick them up, and you're able to kind of put the Rollins process behind it? I mean, what's kind of the typical gain you think about organic? I mean—
Yeah
... obviously, maybe an exact number is not out there, but-
Yeah
... clearly, there's something above the, you know, the just you know, the cost savings and, and-
Yeah
... the integration. There, there's definitely a revenue growth opportunity.
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm glad you mentioned that because it's not really today, at least, it hasn't been really a cost takeout program. It's really a growth mindset. It's really buy these businesses, invest in them, and grow them. Because those incremental margins on that growth is, are very attractive. And so it's been. And the market's growing, and it's attractive, and there's opportunities to grow. And so it's really been that angle. And when we buy-