Rollins, Inc. - Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call - ROLLINS INC

Greetings. Welcome to the Rollins, Inc. Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Lindsay Burton. Thank you, Lindsay. You may begin. Thank you, Sam, 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-GAP reconciliations are available in the appendix of today's presentation, as well as in our earnings release. The company's earnings release and presentation contain certain forward-looking statements and discuss the business outlook. These particular forward-thinking 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 the cautionary statements in yesterday's press release, today's presentation, and the company's SEC filings, including the risk factor section of our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2025, and subsequent filings. On the line with me today and speaking are Jerry Galoff, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Will Harkins, 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, Lindsay. Good morning, everyone. I want to begin with saying that our third quarter performance did not meet our expectations, and we are not satisfied with these results. The primary challenge continues to be pressure on residential customer acquisition. We now have a clearer understanding of what is driving this pressure and are working with urgency to address it. The pattern has become clear. AI and LLM-driven search are meaningfully changing the way customers discover service providers. With additional data through the third quarter, we clearly see the impact of the changing search landscape, which drove continued deceleration in digital lead flow. Ultimately, LOMs are recommending a wider range of pest control providers. Unlike with traditional search, these recommendations vary significantly across platforms, markets, and can even yield different results for the same search run on different days. The result is a more fragmented, variable, and dynamic customer discovery environment. Importantly, moderating organic growth trends have not been broad-based across our portfolio. Brands that utilize relationship-driven customer acquisition channels, including direct sales, door-to-door marketing, and home builder partnerships, delivered stronger organic growth. Home Team and Fox, for example, continued to perform well, leveraging their door-to-door sales forces to deliver growth well above the overall company. These results highlight the strength of our diversified, multi-brand approach and the benefits of having multiple channels to reach customers. Additionally, our recurring residential customer base is healthy, with customer count continuing to grow in the third quarter and retention remaining strong. The relationships our frontline teammates build with customers are an important source of resilience, creating loyalty, and increasing retention over time. This underscores our confidence that pest control continues to be a large, growing, and highly attractive market, and we believe that the current pressure is a customer acquisition and discovery challenge, not a deterioration in underlying demand for our services. While the slowdown was most pronounced in residential customer acquisition, we also experienced softer performance in portions of our termite ancillary and commercial businesses. The impact on our commercial businesses was fairly isolated to non-Orkin brands and timing of certain one-time business. That being said, Orkin's commercial business continued to grow high single digits, reflecting the investments we have made there and expanding our commercial capabilities. In our termite ancillary business growth was impacted to some degree by lower acquisition of new residential customers as these customers provide a source of future cross-sell opportunities within termite ancillaries categories. We also face staffing and capacity constraints in certain markets that limited our ability to fully capitalize on available opportunities. We have a large and attractive base of existing customers that provides runway for continued cross-sell within these categories. We're also taking targeted steps to address staffing and capacity constraints in affected markets so that we can better capitalize on those opportunities over time. We remain confident in the underlying demand and growth potential of these services. We're focused on controlling what we can control and are taking concrete steps to optimize our approach with respect to digital customer acquisition. Our plan is centered around three priorities. First, we're ensuring our brands show up where customers are looking. This starts with evaluating how our brands are surfaced across traditional and LLM-driven search and identifying opportunities to strengthen our presence by market and service category. We're strengthening our visibility across traditional search and AI-driven discovery by expanding locally relevant content, improving local business listings and customer reviews, and strengthening our presence in the sources LOM platforms use to generate recommendations. This targeted, data-driven approach enables us to translate the strength of our national brands into greater local visibility, more qualified leads, and ultimately, new customers. Second, we are making it easier for customers to understand what differentiates us and ultimately choose our brands. We are improving local content, increasing pricing transparency, and more clearly highlighting the service attributes that make Rollins brand stand out, including same-day and next-day availability and the quality of our customer service. We are also working to ensure customers receive accurate, relevant information about our services whenever and wherever they are searching. And third, we are continuously testing, learning, and reallocating resources accordingly. We are improving lead attribution, testing different approaches, and shifting investment toward the channel and tactics that generate qualified leads, convert them into new customers, and deliver the strongest returns. Importantly, this is not simply about spending more, but continuously evaluating where our marketing dollars generate the strongest returns, and investing behind those opportunities. For example, we've begun taking advantage of new paid advertising opportunities on AI search platforms, including ChatGPT and Google Gemini, to improve our visibility. In this highly dynamic environment, our ability to be nimble and shift resources to keep pace with change is an important source of strength. We believe the companies that will be most successful in this changing environment are those with the resources, expertise, and organizational agility to continuously test, learn, and adapt as these technologies evolve. This is not about finding a single solution and moving on. It requires ongoing optimization, and our scale, diversified portfolio and financial flexibility position us particularly well to navigate these changes over time. At the same time, we are always focused on providing exceptional service to our existing customers and maintaining the strong relationships that underpin our recurring business. We are seeing some early but encouraging signs of progress from our efforts as we close the quarter. That said, we have not reached stabilization, and there is more work ahead to translate improving search visibility into new customers and sustained growth. We recognize that the customer discovery landscape may be changing structurally, and we are not assuming a return to historical patterns. We are moving quickly to adapt, and our resources, scale, and flexibility will give us multiple ways to respond as the environment evolves. Our long-term confidence in Rollins has not changed. Our highly recurring business model, strong customer relationships, diversified portfolio, and experienced and committed team position us well to navigate evolving market conditions and drive long- term success. We've faced challenges before, and our team has consistently demonstrated the ability to adapt, execute, and emerge stronger. I have every confidence in our ability to rise to this challenge as well. I'd like to thank our 20,000-plus teammates around the world for their hard work and dedication to serving our customers every day. I'll now turn the call over to Will. Thanks, Jerry, and good morning, everyone. I'll walk through our third quarter financial results and discuss the key drivers of performance, along with our priorities for improvement. Total revenue increased 6.2%, including organic growth of 4.4%, which was below our expectations for the quarter. As Jerry discussed, continued pressure on residential customer acquisition was the primary challenge during the quarter We also experienced softer performance in portions of our termite and ancillary businesses, as well as our commercial business Performance was affected by fewer new residential customers entering the cross-sell pipeline along with staffing and capacity constraints in certain markets that limited conversion of available demand. In the third quarter, residential revenues increased 4.9 percent, commercial pest control increased 7.7 percent, and termite and ancillary increased 6.5 percent. Organic growth across the portfolio was 2.3 percent in residential, 6.6 percent in commercial, and 5.3% in termite and ancillary. Turning to profitability, we continue to focus on managing factors within our control, taking steps to align our cost structure with current demand while continuing to invest in the people and capabilities that support service quality and long-term growth. In an environment where customer acquisition trends remain dynamic, maintaining an appropriately aligned cost structure is particularly important. We are focused not only on restoring stronger organic growth, but also on ensuring that our operating expenses reflect current business volumes, allowing us to protect profitability while preserving the flexibility to invest over the long term. Gross margin was 53.5%, a decrease of 90 basis points year over year, primarily reflecting higher insurance and claims costs, as well as fuel-related headwinds. Following the lower volumes in the second quarter, we took proactive steps to better align staffing with demand. resulting in a 30 basis point year-over-year improvement in employee expenses. Materials and supplies contributed an additional 10 basis points of leverage. Insurance and claims costs drove 100 basis points of deleverage, primarily reflecting higher claims costs against a favorable prior year comparison. And fleet costs represented 40 basis points of headwind, driven primarily by fuel and lower gains on vehicles. Fuel costs represented approximately 1.9% of sales in the third quarter, and we continue to expect fuel costs to remain below 2% of sales for 2026. Customer response to our recent price increase has been favorable, and we expect to be positive on price cost for the year. Quarterly SG&A costs as a percentage of revenue increased 60 basis points compared with the prior year, as higher insurance and fuel costs were partially offset by our continued focus on cost management and improvements in employee expenses. We saw 10 basis points of leverage in selling and marketing expenses, and administrative employee expenses also improved by 10 basis point. Insurance and claim costs represented a 60 basis point headwind, primarily reflecting higher claims expenses against a favorable prior year comparison, while higher fleet costs contributed and additional 20 basis points. Third quarter GAAP operating income was $223 million, a decrease of 1% year-over-year. Adjusted operating income was $231 million,a decrease of 0.6% compared with the prior year. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA was $257 million, a decrease of 0.7% versus last year, representing a margin of 23.5%. Our adjusted incremental EBITDA margin was negative 2.8%. Normalizing for the benefit we saw in insurance and claims in the third quarter of last year and the unfavorable impact this quarter, the company's incremental margin would have exceeded 25%. The effective tax rate was 25.7 percent in the quarter, compared with 24.8 percent last year. Despite the slight increase in the quarter, we continue to expect our full-year ETR to come in under 25% for the year, down approximately 100 basis points from historical levels. Quarterly GAAP net income was $158 million, or $0.33 per share. For the third quarter,we had non-GAAP pre-tax adjustments associated with acquisition-related costs and other items, totaling approximately $7.3 million of pre-tax expenses in the quarter. Accounting for these expenses, adjusted net income for the quarter was $163 million, or $0.34 per share, a decrease of 2.9% from the same period a year ago. Turning to cash flow in the balance sheet, we generated operating cash flow of $242 million and free cash flow at $235 million. Cash flow performance during the quarter did benefit from the receipt of a $63 million tax refund that is associated with our tax credit planning strategy, which continues to provide meaningful cash flow and tax rate benefits. Free cash flow conversion, measured as the percentage of income converted into cash flow, was 149% for the quarter. Excluding the $63 billion tax benefit during the quarterly, free cash flow would have been 109%. This reflects our strength in cash generation and gives us flexibility to continue investing in the business while returning capital to shareholders. During the third quarter, we completed seven acquisitions totaling $27 million, paid $87 million in dividends, and repurchased $120 million of shares. Our financial flexibility and conviction in the intrinsic value of our business supported more meaningful share repurchase activity in the quarter, and we will continue to evaluate future share repurchases given the health of our balance sheet our leverage ratios stand at one times and our balance sheets remain strong our capital allocation priorities are clear investing in the business through accretive m a continuing to grow our dividend and opportunistically repurchasing shares earlier this week we announced another 10 increase in our quarterly cash dividend with this increase we have doubled our regular dividend since the beginning of 2022 our healthy balance sheet provides us the flexibility to pursue all these priorities when appropriate while also investing in organic growth opportunities we are approaching the balance of the year with discipline transparency and a clear focus on the actions that will improve performance given our performance through the first nine months of the year and the visibility we have today we are updating our full year outlook we We now expect organic growth of 4 to 6% for the year and corresponding incremental margins ranging from slightly positive to 10% for 2026. This is a highly dynamic environment and this updated organic growth range reflects that. We want to be as clear as possible with you while being mindful about how the environment could evolve. When we provided our 6% organic growth outlook in Q2, we assumed residential lead declines would remain broadly consistent with the levels we were experiencing at that time, with neither meaningful improvement nor further deterioration. Instead, volatility persisted throughout Q3, and lead volumes weakened further from Q2 levels. As a result, our updated guidance reflects a range of outcomes based on how lead trends could evolve for the remainder of the year. The midpoint of approximately 5% growth assumes lead volumes remain below the prior year, but stabilize at Q3 levels, while the low end of 4% assumes lead trends further from Q3 level, and the high end of 6% assumes that lead volumes meaningfully improve from Q3 levels. We also recognize that we are entering a seasonally lower volume period, particularly in November and December, when our short-cycle residential business can be more sensitive to changes in demand and weather-related disruptions. updated range is intended to reflect that uncertainty and provide a transparent view of the range of potential outcomes based on the trends we are seeing today. Our expectation for two to three percent of growth from acquisitions as well as our expectations that cash flow will continue to convert at a rate above 100 percent remain unchanged for the year. Given the current landscape we are going to hold off on sharing any thinking on 2027. We are currently focused on taking concrete steps to strengthen residential customer acquisition and we will discuss 2027 when we release our Q4 and full year results. Importantly, the revision to our 2026 expectations reflects our current assessment of near-term operating conditions rather than any change in our confidence in the long-term growth potential of our business. Our immediate priority is taking the right steps to successfully navigate through this dynamic environment and establishing a more stable foundation for customer acquisition. As we make progress towards that, we continue to believe the business has the potential to return to the organic growth algorithm of 7% to 8% as outlined at our investor day. In addition, we are confident in the operational opportunities that underpin our longer-term margin framework, and we believe the бизнес has potential to achieve incremental margins in the 30% to 35% range over time. We recognize that our results have fallen short of expectations, and we are taking steps to improve performance through disciplined execution and a focus on the factors within our control. As Jerry outlined, we have a clear path to strengthen residential customer acquisition, centered on three priorities. One, making sure our brands show up where customers are looking. Two, making it easier for customers to choose Rollins' brands. And three, determining what works and investing behind it. At the same time, we remain focused on improving productivity, aligning costs with current demand, and continuing to invest in our people and capabilities that support long-term growth. We remain confident in Rollins' long- term growth opportunity. Our scale, financial flexibility, and focus on disciplined execution position us well to adapt to changes in customer discovery while continuing to invest in the capabilities that supports long- term growth. We believe the actions we are taking, together with the growth and productivity initiatives outlined at our May Investor Day, position us to deliver profitable growth and attractive shareholder returns that have been the hallmark of our financial performance for decades. I look forward to updating you on our progress in the quarters ahead. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Jerry. Thank you, Will. take any questions at this time. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys one moment please while we pull for questions our first question is from Tim Mulroney with William Blair please proceed with your question yeah Jerry well good morning I've got a couple questions here good morning so So first on, unsurprisingly, on lead flow, can you talk about how residential lead flow trended through the quarter? One of your competitors this morning said that resi lead flow actually improved in September. So I'm wondering how that compares to what you saw. Will, in your prepared remarks, I think you said lead flow deteriorated in the third quarter. I'm wondering, you know, was September worse than August? Was August worse than July? Or was it more just a continuation of what you saw in the back half of last quarter? Just any comments on trends would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah, so thanks, Tim, for your question. So coming out of Q2 and early Q3, you know, we saw some signs of improvement. They really weren't as consistent as we would have liked. We had a lot of data in front of us in those early days, and we just have a much clearer view now. So as we think about that change from Q2 and Q3, you have an April that was a fairly normalized April in the quarter, basically a third of the second quarter was fairly normal. Then it began to deteriorate. The big difference was, for us, Q3 was consistently weak, steadily weak, even though once in a while we'd get some high spots, but the way it ended each month was pretty similar throughout the entire third quarter. However, that said, we did see some signs of life, so to speak, when you look in September when we saw year-over-year decline in our organic website traffic had been 13% decline in August that moved to only a 4% decline. client in September. And that, as you know, that organic website traffic is a great predictor or indicator of leads that can come into the business. And also we saw in September our organic search leads in the organic channel improved 5% since July. So we saw some of that in September as well. However, I want to caution you. We've said this is dynamic. In the second quarter, we saw positive signs of life. That's where our outlook reflects that we don't know if the things that we saw in September, improvements that we thought, is that going to sustain us through the rest of the year. We're just really cautious in how we're speaking about this at this time. Understood, Jerry. It sounds like you're being appropriately conservative given the uncertainty in the situation. And thanks for the detail on the lead flow. So it sounds like it did improve in September. Could you also comment on how lead flow trended across your specialty brands in residential? I know you have Orkin, you have your specialty brand, the specialty brands given their lower dependence on the digital channel. I'm curious about the performance there. Thank you. So, generally speaking, and I think this is where, you know, that question, when we talk about it going to a wide variety of pest control companies, I wouldn't necessarily, our smaller, more localized brands didn't appear to be some major benefactor, just as they weren't necessarily hurt by these shifts as much as, say, an Orkin was, because they go to market different and they don't spend as much of their time and attention in the digital channel. So I would say, if anything, it was probably more of a neutral type of impact on our non-Orkin brands compared to anything else. Our next question is from Manav Patnik with Barclays. Please proceed with your question. Hi. Good morning. This is Roni Kennedy. I'm from Manov. Thank you for taking our questions. Kind of a follow-up to the – good morning. Thank you. As a follow up to some of the points discussed on Tim, but also go back at a more high level, you repeatedly referenced early but encouraging signs of progress, but all said the business has not yet reached stabilization and continue to describe this as transitory disruption in a permanently changed environment. What specifically is improving today? How far are you from the level that can make you conclude that customer acquisition trends have truly stabilized? And what makes you confident that the adaptation and your priorities ultimately restore growth rather than simply make the disruption more manageable? Well, look, there's a lot of lead indicators that we can look at. There's many lead sources and many sources of driving the residential business. We'll continue to monitor those lead indicators to tell us where we should invest, where we should put our dollars, and as we begin to see the lag indicator, which would be actual lead volumes increasing as a result of those that that's when we'll know that things are things have adjusted and things are are stabilizing but let me go back and say that the world has completely changed in this space this is going to be to say somehow that three months from now we think we've arrived we have to adjust and every single day going forward So some idea that we've somehow solved this problem six months from now and everything's back to normal, I don't want to give anybody the impression that that's exactly how this will shape out. It's just going to be a constant test, learn, adjust, going back and doing that over and over and over again and trying to be as nimble as we can as we go. And, Jerry, I think the team that's got, you know, the most resources, has the most agility, is able to really win at the end of the day, and we're best prepared for that. That's right. We've done this before. Yeah. All right, thank you. And then as a follow-up, with the laid-out four-to-six range as a function of three scenarios, is there a way to think of probability weighting those three scenarios based on the answer to the questions thus far and the data we're seeing so far. And then, you know, how should we think of potential implications for the revenue base for 27? Cognizant, you commented you're not specifically going to be guiding, but, you know, at a high level, how shall we think about implications for revenue base for 27. Thanks, Ronan. I, you know, I'll just let me reiterate a little bit about how we got to the four to six outlook range. And so essentially, remember that when we issued 6% back at the end of Q2, we said that we assumed that really we were not going to see further deterioration in the business or any improvement in the бизнес. It was just going to stay steady. And so that's how we really got to the full year 6% number. And then as we've gone through the quarter, the third quarter, we did see that continue to deteriorate. So, you know, our assumptions now, what's underlying that range, is that, you know, if things continue in the fourth quarter just as they did in the third quarter, we will be in the 5%, the midpoint of that range. If things meaningfully improve, we're going to, you know, we still 6% is on the table. And if things deteriorate even further, that's when the 4% to 5% range comes into the mix. So that's how the Q4 outlook is. And I'll tell you, that that's where we're putting the most focus. We just want to make sure we finish this year strong, but it's really too early for us to talk about anything in 2027 until we see how we finish G4. And, Ronan, coming back to your questions related to the customer base, 2027, how we start, as I mentioned, our customer base is growing. So across our organization in total, our consumer base is going. It's healthy. and at the same time we're working hard while all this is going on we're also working hard at improving our customer retention and we're beginning to make those improvements we're seeing positivity there I expect that to continue with the intense focus that we're putting on that and that's another lever that we have to pull on that as well Got it, thank you both very much greatly appreciate it Thanks Ronan Our next question is from Greg Parrish with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question. Hey, everyone. Good morning. Good morning, good morning. So you talked about the need for being nimble. I just wanted to ask, so how long does it take to really drive change in how your brands show up in AI search? Adding reviews on different sites, localizing all of your sites, sites, Orkin sites nationally. It seems like it could take time. So maybe just help us understand the dynamic and your ability to be nimble here and how you show up. I'll give you a great example of how nimble and in some ways how easy this can be. So for example, at Orkin, Orkun typically wanted someone, we wanted you to engage with us through a web lead or somehow engage with us on the phone through our call center and that's where we typically would talk about price these days and very quickly we were able to add pricing transparency that was not being picked up on the LLMs a few months ago that is being picked up today so really quick easy types of adjustments that you could make where working a few months ago wasn't even seen as being relevant if someone especially if someone was curious about price and then when you what we learned is that when you don't talk about price in price and give some some price ranges people the the LLMs don't give you any credit and they assume the worse and they may go to other sources that aren't accurate about your price so doing something as simple as that has made a big impact in it in it we were able to do that literally in weeks so that's an example of what we can do so but but that's also constantly changing constantly evolving and that's again where tests learn reallocate resources adjust test learn re-allocate resources adjust that's just going to be the the norm going forward okay that's helpful color then maybe just to touch on marketing just giving the changing customer acquisition landscape you know how are you viewing marketing spend sort of at a holistic level and you know maybe more granular i mean it seems like you might have to you might have more areas to attack here and spread your dollars out so just how are you thinking about that into 2027 greg we're from that perspective you know it's really not about us spending more in our mind it is truly about you know jerry's just talking about testing different things we are going to follow you know, put our money where we see the greatest returns. And so it really is about reallocating based on where we See, you know our returns improving. And so there's a lot of tests that we're doing. We are certainly, you know, not being shy about putting money where we need to but but I would not assume that we are going to spend more in this environment. It is truly just making sure that we were seeing where we're getting the greatest benefit. Greg, importantly here, we have choices. We have a lot of choices we can make across our portfolio of brands, that's the advantage of our model. That's where our multi-brand approach, especially in residential, which is where a lot of our other brands are heavily engaged in the residential space, is really such an advantage for us. That's just a strong suit of ours. Great. Thank you very much. Yes. Our next question is from Curtis Nagel with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question. Great. Thanks very much. I just wanted to maybe quickly go through just some of the puts and takes on the implied 4Q or guide. Low-end, it seems to imply, I think, kind of zero growth. Is that wholly based in RSI? Could that, I guess, potentially turn negative? And I guess what are you assuming in terms of kind of the ranges for commercial and termite and ancillary? Curtis I would say from from all of our everything that we've done is we evaluated and we you know based our assumptions for that guide it was that things continue exactly as you see them in q3 to get to that 5% growth rate so I you know I would just say if we continue in the same trajectory you're at 5% if that goes down you're going to be a 4% and it's got a meaningfully improved to get to to that five to six percent range so that that is how we built the guide and then that's really all we're you know all I can tell you now okay fair enough and then just maybe focusing on termite and ancillary just in terms of like what specifically was driving those we hear customer acquisition trends is it you know I guess proliferation of LLM impact and then I guess on some of these I think labor shortages just sort of what's driving that when that could that be resolved yeah so the certainly as we mentioned the slower residential customer volumes did reduce some of the opportunities to some degree but some of the challenges there were really impacted more by staffing and capacity constraints in some markets where we had to get the work done we exited the quarter with backlog that was at our high watermark for the year which that's both good and bad. So that tells us there's plenty of work to be done, but we just didn't get it all completed in the third quarter. And some of that staffing capacity could be related to adjustments that we made in the business. It could also be just some markets are more challenged from a labor environment or various things happen, and that comes back to leadership and strong operational execution that we tend to be pretty strong in. But our struggle was really towards the end of the quarter. We had termite and ancillary was really strong in the first part of Q3, and it was September that was really disappointing. Again, we have strong backlog there, and there's plenty of work for us to get done in the fourth quarter. So I'm not overly concerned about that. We really remain quite confident in the underlying demand and the need for these services. Our customers see a great deal of value in it, and we still see that there's meaningful opportunities to drive growth through that large customer base that we have. Thank you. Our next question is from Tomo Sano with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your question. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Tomo. Thank you, Tomo, for your question, Tom. Could you decompose the quarter's organic growth into price versus volumes, if you could give us any color overall and then by segment? And then also, as LLM-driven search increases pricing transparency and simplifies comparisons, has your view of CPI-plus price realization changed in any way? Tom, you know, when we think about the price versus volume equation, what I would tell you is that we do continue to see ourselves as a CPI plus business. We're an essential business, and so that is going to be in the two to three percent range of, or three to four percent range for pricing. You know, and that's the only thing I want to make sure that you have color there is that that is across the entire portfolio. talk about that three to four of pricing that's across the full portfolio that is more heavily weighted towards commercial than residential so it doesn't apply evenly across everything but we we do still see that being um you know kind of where we will play in this space and so and we don't see any indications that that is creating trouble i mean we are regularly evaluating our pricing uh we we meet um we just met two weeks ago actually about this topic and So we don't see any meaningful change in the number of customers that are either trying to, you know, roll their prices back, that are canceling with us. So we feel like we still have room to go there. And then your second question, I feel like there was, was there another part to your question, Tomo? Yeah, that's a good answer. Thank you, Will. And just one follow-up to Jelly, if I may, on a customer acquisition landscape change, the AI LLM search simplified price with the local providers. How do you assess the risk that the YPAY premium value message, like such a service quality and guarantees and reliability that gets diluted? yeah and that's where uh i i think you have to be careful in this space because uh you you cannot stop spending on your brand and your brand messaging and who you are and what you're all about um so you know this you know there's idea that we should just uh stop spending and building our brand and their reputation and the mind of a consumer is silly the best thing The main thing we want you to do, instead of going to an LLM and asking about pest control, we want to you to type in Orkin.com, and we want you to just think Orkin or one of our brands as a top of mind investment. We have to continue to send the messaging on our website and all of our content about the value of our service and ensure that our service quality is strong and the value proposition and the things that our customers are asking about when they are in the LLMs, that content is there on our website that they can see the clear value in using us compared to anyone else. Thank you, Jerry. Thanks, Jamal. Our next question is from Seth Weber with BNP Paribus. Please proceed with your question. Hi, good morning. This is Christina the tank on for Seth. Thanks for taking our questions. So I guess first up for me is over the summer, the FTC actually brought a large case, Jens Rollins, over the use of non-compete clauses across its workforce. And we were kind of wondering if this has any impact on competition and, additionally, if this could actually be contributing to the local competition that's kind of been weighing on lead flow and residential growth. No, that is a – I think we've talked about this in the past to some degree. That has been pretty much a non-issue across our industry, in fact. If you look back at the details of that, we had some pieces and parts of our business where our non-solicit agreements that are designed to discourage people from taking customers or recruiting our people were extended into non-competes. And all we did was roll those non-conpetes back in the parts of our business that still had those in there. um at the end of the day these were these were agreements that were never enforced or very rarely enforced to begin with so it was really a non-event in our business so we have had if you think about the fact that there are 19,000 estimated 19, 000 pest control companies uh and the people i know in the industry had started it usually the family tree goes somewhere back to Orkin or Terminex or somewhere back in the day, there's a reason for that is because people have freely moved for many, many years from, you know, between and amongst companies. So we don't really see that as any sort of a change in the environment at all. Okay. Thank you so much. That's super helpful. And then I guess back at the investor day that you guys hosted in May, you guys framed that the pest control market was growing around 6% a year. And I know at a recent conference, you guys said that lead declines were fairly proportional across all income bands, which kind of suggested that consumer health wasn't the main driver. Is this still the case? And given what you've seen up until this point, do you think that industry growth has changed at all? Or do you Think it's more of a ball and specific shift in how customers find you? Thanks. When we think about the consumer health, I think what we're really saying is we're, an essential service if you need if you have a problem you're going to want to solve it i think from a consumer standpoint the consumer is trying to make sure that what if they are going to spend their money they're getting the value and they're choosing the right provider and that that goes back to i think to tomo's question about ensuring that price and value responsiveness and reliability all those factors that that drive value are more important so you know I there's lots of data out there about the consumer and it certainly is something that we've dug into I just think at this point in time we have a more discerning concern consumer but we certainly have a consumer that is willing to spend the money on pest control services perfect thank you so much our next question is from Connor Cerniglia with Bernstein please proceed with your question great thank you for having me heading into this quarter third-party data suggests organic trapping for Orkin was down pretty materially year-on-year it paints a very similar picture for customer for Macy Very similar picture for Active. Terminix seemed to be the outlier, which was actually up on the quarter, but for the top four players, organic traffic was down more than double digits, so corroborating your claim that LLMs seemed to me the issue. And I guess that one competitor was more of an outlier than the trend. Can you talk about the early findings in your process to adapting to LLMS? Has the biggest success so far been third-party content? Is it improving business reviews? any color on that would be really helpful initially beginning to appear better was some easy steps like the ones that example I gave you early on pricing transparency helped tremendously when we start talking about service offerings and our ability to respond and and offering same-day next-day service windows and and how we communicate that things that we've always done we've just never put put it in words and and it's not been key in our messaging but those types of things that that talk about the value that talk about how we can quickly fulfill customer needs seem to get picked up a lot a lot faster and a lot easier and then you think about local content where we have while we're a national company we have national locations we have local people that understand local needs and taking that information in I give you a great example is here in Atlanta there's this spider called the Joro spider and if you're talking about the Jaro spider in the local content and and it's hot on people's minds here those are the cut if you and if you if your branch is here at, say, at work in the Atlanta area have local content about the Joro spider, that's going to get picked up. So those are the types of things that we're focused on that we find to be getting the bigger return on investment and their quick wins. Jerry, one of the other things that мы've actually seen here recently is you see chat, GPT, you see Google, they're starting to run pilots where they're allowing, you know, kind of the monetization of that platform where you can start to put some ads. And so we're starting to play in that space as well. It's early. We'll see what's going to happen as we go through the quarter, but at least we're started to see that they're playing in that space. A very helpful call. As a follow-up, I know we've talked about LLMs. ChatGPT is about 70% of the share, so I think that's probably the biggest maybe actually issue, but that's probably the most focused target should be. It seems like Yelp reviews are probably some clear low-hanging fruit here. ChatGPT uses Yelp as recommendation rates. You all have about 13 reviews per store, so about a baker's dozen. Your competitors have about 25, 30, and it seems just like companies have long ignored Yelp as a review platform, and part of the solution here is just refocusing efforts to improve Yelp recommendation rates Can you talk about any examples of steps you're taking to improve? Are there QR codes you can add to the side of your trucks, incentive cops to kind of get those business reviews up do you can you just give any examples on that front will be helpful yeah the the yelp model for reviews is a very different model of what they allow and and how that works compared to um compared to say google reviews where we have a very strong a much stronger presence um so yeah that's one that's the one of the areas that You have to, again, test, learn, decide whether or not and how much to reallocate resources to try to drive meaningful. Can you drive meaningful impact on that? We're very, we're acutely aware of that, but that is also something that will take a lot more time to be able to effectively impact. So you have to weigh those investments and say, hey, within, yeah, Yelp is weighted, but so are these other things within ChatGBT. How do I position this better on these other thing that are also going to get us more visibility there that I might be able to move faster? And so those are all the things that we're weighing and trying to make better decisions on. Great. Very helpful. Pass it on. Thank you. Thanks. Our next question is from George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question. Hi, thanks. Good morning. The digital lead pressure is greatest in residential, but can you also talk about the lead gen mix in your other segments, so ballpark, the new customer acquisition mix by channel across termite and commercial as well, and resi? so our our termite ancillary business as well as our commercial business is not heavily lead driven in terms of digital lead driven they are they get calls because that's again where the brand comes into uh top of mind and and say the orkin brand and commercial people are just going to call Orkin. And that is a very organic type of lead gen. And so we're not very reliant on digital customer acquisition, digital marketing, spend type of efforts in that space at all. Got it. And then as a follow-up, you still believe that the business can get back to 7% to 8% organic growth. Does getting back there require residential digital leads to return to prior levels, or can channel mix, conversion, and cross-selling offset a structurally more fragmented digital search environment? George, that's a good question. Our view is that we can absolutely get back to 7% or 8%. We don't know when that's going to happen. We've got to see this through. But certainly, we're able to get back there. And what we're focused on mostly now is how do you make sure that every one of those leads we do get, that we convert it, and that it turns into a sale. So there are a lot of things that we're able to do to affect that 7% to 8%. There are levers we can pull. And so there's no reason to think that the long-term guidance would, you know, that would need to come off of that. Generally speaking, I think for us to get to the 7% to 8% range, we are going to need to have residential healthy, commercial healthy, and termite and ancillary healthy. And I think there's some different algorithms within there how you get there. I think we have to do better on residential, obviously. But, again, that goes back to the multi-brand strategy, where we invest. the decisions that we have to make, moving resources around to get us back there. So certainly, as Will said, it's possible, but I believe we've really got to be executing on all those cylinders. Got it. Very helpful. Thank you. Our next question is from Stephanie Moore with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question. hi good morning thank you um first question here maybe just i'd love to get your opinion higher level higher level question here you talked about not necessarily ramping up marketing spend or changing that but i'd almost push back on that response why not just given the magnitude in which the industry and your go-to-market strategy has an effectiveness has changed why not use this period of time to step up marketing, to really solidify your position across kind of all go-to-market strategies, LLMs, for example, making sure that you're in the top position there, doubling down on door-to door. I mean, why not use this period of disruption to leverage your size, scale, and quite frankly, financial position to really tackle and take meaningful share? Just, again, high-level thought here. Yeah, I understand where you're coming from. are we are perhaps more disciplined than that is if I knew that I could invest rapidly in the marketing and I could accurately predict what return I would get on that in this dynamic environment where I don't know that a dollar what a dollar spend would necessarily yield I could do that but I could I would also probably be spending a lot of money irresponsibly and so our are we have leaned towards let's protect our margin let's right size our business let's do the right things and it and let's learn test be responsible about our decisions and adjust as we go but Because, you know, if we got some sort of a sugar high off of just going in and spending marketing dollars, you can do that. But that doesn't necessarily – it's not necessarily sustainable. And it could potentially change your business model and your disciplines that you bring to the business. It's just fundamentally not how we approach the business, but it's hard to underestimate how dynamic this environment is right now. And so it keeps changing. I mean, we talked about the fact that we've gone to external parties to help us through this from the marketing perspective, and they don't even necessarily always agree. Nobody has a silver bullet. So it's, you know, how much would you spend on, you Know, in this current environment? We don't know if that's some infinite number. And the other side of it is just spending marketing dollars doesn't necessarily create demand where demand isn't there. So you have to know the limit to which what you'd be willing to go. So, you know, our focus has been on making sure we right size our business. In my mind, those are actually tougher decisions than just going and spending more in marketing. We have hard choices that we have to make about how we structure our business, and I'm really proud of our team for what they've done in that regard. understood thank you one quick follow-up kind of along the the same the same lens here does this dynamic change your m&a strategy i mean is there a greater focus that you'll place on door-to-door just given that part of the business continues to hold well hold and strong thank you stephanie there's a we've got a you know great pipeline of of m&а opportunities that are still out there It does not change what we see in value as a good business that we want to go and purchase. We're going to continue to look for opportunities where it's accretive. Businesses are, quite frankly, better than ours, and that's what helps us continue to grow organically longer term. And so this does not – we've been in the door-to-door space. We've been into the traditional space. It doesn't change our philosophy. We're interested in lots of businesses that can help and be accretives to our growth. And we'll continue to take a balanced approach there. I still think this right now is hopefully a short-term dislocation, and we'll see how this pans out over time. But we'll consider this a short term dislocation. We'll continue the discipline in our acquisition and look for businesses that are a good fit for us and bring the right balance to us. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Stephanie. Our next question is from Peter Keith with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question. Peter Keith, Piper Sanler, Great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. On the follow-up on the door knocking question, within residential, you did cite that those areas of door knocking, direct sales home, they continue to outperform. I guess I'm curious, are those areas running in line with historical averages, or are those also outperforming but maybe seeing a little bit of weakness we've not seen any sign of weakness in those spaces they have they have just gone gangbusters so double-digit growth at Fox and you know so that that continues to be a great business growing it's very helpful to our overall overall growth profile in the residential space so we've seen any real softness there at all. Okay, good. And then I did want to pivot over to commercial. I think you had cited some weakness in one-time business. Maybe could you unpack that for me a little bit more on where the slowdown in commercial occurred? Yeah, so the softness in the commercial side was really driven by some timing related to fumigation services at non-Orkin brands. So as you go through the quarter, in the commercial space, there's a decent amount of commodity fumigation that goes on that can be cyclical, timing around holidays, things along those lines that just gets kind of dislocated from time to time. The good news in that is Orkin's commercial business, their core, grew, still grew over 8%, reflecting, or very reflective of the investments that we've made there and expanding on the commercial side. Not something I'm very concerned about. Okay, very good. Thank you very much. Our last question will be from Josh Chan with UBS. Please proceed with your question. Hi, good morning, Jerry and Will. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe on the residential side on the on the organic growth of 2.3 i know that within residential there's recurring and there's one-time business in there so i guess could you give some color in terms of whether the recurring business trended above or below the the total hey josh this is jerry and uh i hope you're having i heard you're at pet's world and uh i Hope you're Having a good time there with all of our all of Our friends meeting you're meeting some great people while you're there aren't you I am yes yes yeah so when we look at the organic growth in one time I would categorize those as being down very equal proportions very very similar but the recurring portion was was actually better so the organic we are still in line with what we have have seen historically from from a recurring perspective. But both have been in. That makes sense. Okay. All right. And then I guess on the customer acquisition side, do you feel like you have a handle on what tactics work and don't work and that you're just kind of focusing on executing to those tactics now? Or do you feel like we still need a better handle on exactly what tactics to use? I think we have a strong handle on some of the basics and some of the most fundamentals that we've been able to execute on. What's interesting in this space is you can ask five different experts and get five different answers. And so that's, again, what gives us that lack of clarity. Say, where do you invest? Which is why, again it sounds like a broken record when I say test, learn, reallocate, resources, adjust. That is what we're going to have to do. And so we're doing a lot of that with different agencies and specialists that are helping us navigate that. So again, that's why we describe this as this dynamic environment. And we don't know that the things we fix today are also going to be the right things that are most important three months from now, right? So that's when I say this world has changed probably forever in this space is so important. And we're just going to have to continue to test, learn, reallocate resources. But I don't think we'll ever be able to say we're done and we've arrived. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And thank you for the time, Jerry. Well, I appreciate it. Great. Thanks, Josh. We have reached the end of the question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Jerry for closing comments. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you again in our Q4 earnings call in February. This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.