Rollins, Inc. Price & Performance (ROL)

The non GAAP reconciliations are available in the appendix of today's presentation 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 ks for the year ended December 31, 2024 which will be filed later today.

On the line with me today and speaking are Jerry Galoff, 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, Lindsay.

Good morning, everyone. Fiscal twenty twenty four was another solid year for Rollins Rollins. As we achieved a milestone of $3,400,000,000 in revenue. Our business Rollins healthy on all fronts as demand Rollins strong throughout the year across all major service offerings. As full year revenue increased 10.3% versus last year, grew earnings by 7.9% by 11.2%. Organic growth for the year of 7.9% was bolstered by strong execution of our operating strategies continued investment in people, and staffing to meet the continued demand in our markets. We strategically allocated resources to the commercial side of our business as we opened a dedicated commercial division within Orkin. Through this focus, we grew our sales force by more than 15% in the last and invested in support, training and tools to help new sales professionals get up to speed quickly and effectively. As Kim will discuss, these investments support long term growth objectives did temper incremental margins a bit in the second half of the year. But we are confident in our ability to yield a strong return on these investments as we head five. Our service quality is high. Our offerings are customized and we believe that we are well positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities within a multibillion dollar B2B market.

Investments to drive organic growth are complemented by strategic M and A. And in 2024, we closed 44 tuck in deals. We have a robust M and A pipeline with a number of opportunities that we are active evaluating to drive additional growth. Operationally, we remain committed to hiring and developing top talent. The hiring environment was healthy in 2024 as we put significant energy into onboarding the right people, in both support functions as well as the customer facing side of our business. Effective sales and service staffing levels and deliver solid results for the year. We're proud of the tenure and experience of our team. As well as their engagement level and commitment to both our company and our customers.

While overall teammate retention has been consistently healthy, there's opportunity for improved retention of our newer teammates, specifically those who are with us made positive strides in this area throughout 2024. By updating our training and onboarding programs to better address key milestones in the early days that a new team member is with us.

Another important part of our culture is our dedication to continuous improvement. And our focus on safety is a key element of this. There's nothing more important than ensuring our mates make it home safely at the end of the day. And in 2024, implemented several new programs to continue building our safety culture here at Rollins. Our newly revamped onboarding program also includes enhanced safety training intended to equip our drivers with the technical skills awareness, and courtesy needed to uphold the driver safety standards we expect. While we are proud of the progress we have made, there is a long tail associated with safety claims that we continue to work through. This is evidenced by our insurance and claims experience in the fourth quarter which Ken will discuss in more detail. Improving a safety culture isn't something that's done overnight. But we are committed to reducing our claims pipeline over time. Through ongoing safety efforts. As we look ahead to 2025, we're encouraged by the opportunities that are in front of us across all aspects of our business. Momentum is strong as we finish 2024 with the highest quarterly organic growth rate that we saw all year. Our residential business also had its best quarter of the year, growing 6.5% organically.

We have meaningfully grown our commercial sales force under the banner of a new Orkin commercial division to better align the management of these resources and drive results. Our modernization efforts are progressing well. But we are still early in our journey and see a multitude of areas to drive incremental change.

As Kim will discuss, Fitch and S and P have recently announced investment grade corporate credit ratings for our company that will provide us with another important access point to the capital markets as we execute our growth strategy. Most importantly, we remain committed to providing our customers with the best customer experience, and investing meaningfully in our team to drive growth both organically well as through disciplined acquisitions. We're pleased with where our business stands today. What lies ahead of us in 2025. I want to thank each of our 20,000 plus teammates around the world for their efforts and contribution to our success. In 2024. I'll now turn the call over to Ken. Thanks, Sherry, and good morning, everyone. Our results for the quarter and the year reflect continued strong execution by the Rollins team And let me begin with a few highlights for 2024.

First, we delivered robust revenue growth of 10.3% for the year with strong growth across each of our service offerings. It was encouraging to see organic growth of 7.9% for the year while acquisitions continued to be a meaningful part of our growth profile. Second, we made progress on profitability improvement in 2024 while also making significant long term investments to support the business. The pricing environment remains healthy and we continue to focus on investing in future growth while delivering margin improvement. Growth investments and pressure from developments on legacy auto claims that materialized in December both weighed on incremental margins for the quarter and the year. When you isolate the impact of these two factors, the incremental margin that was generated by our underlying operations for the year is solidly in the 30% range.

And finally, we delivered operating cash flow of $6.00 $8,000,000 and free cash flow of $580,000,000 up 1517% respectively, versus last year. Our strong cash flow performance enabled us to execute a balanced capital allocation strategy deploying almost $500,000,000 of capital in 2024, with a focus on investing for growth, while returning cash to shareholders through a growing dividend. Turning to our fourth quarter performance, the team delivered a strong quarter with revenue up 10.4% and our strongest or organic growth rate of the year, at 8.5%. It was certainly encouraging to see the strong improvement in organic revenue growth in the second half of the year. In the fourth quarter, residential revenue increased 8.4% Commercial pest control increased 9.2% and termite and ancillary related services was up 16.6% Organic growth was healthy across the portfolio with growth of 6.5% in residential 7.2% in commercial and 14.9% in termite and ancillary. Our demand creation efforts and investments in customer facing resources are paying off with stronger organic growth in our portfolio. Gross margin improved 40 basis points to 51.3% in the quarter And looking at our four major buckets of service costs, people, fleet, materials and supplies, as well as insurance and claims.

We saw improvements in margins associated with materials and supplies, as well as people cost. Despite healthy staffing levels needed to support strong underlying demand trends. Fleet was neutral to margin in the quarter, while insurance and claims were a headwind driven by developments on legacy auto claims that we previously mentioned. Quarterly SG and A cost as a percentage of revenue increased by 50 basis points We continue to see leverage in administrative people costs which somewhat offset deleverage from selling and marketing expenses associated with growth initiatives. Unpacking this further, we have consistently talked about our intent to reinvest savings from administrative costs in the sales and marketing initiatives. And since the end of twenty twenty two, we have seen 50 basis points of leverage in administrative employees expenses and have invested that back into selling and marketing expenses. Going forward, we do see an opportunity to continue to leverage our administrative costs to drive further investment as well as margin expansion. Fourth quarter GAAP operating income was $151,000,000 up 8.3% year over year and adjusted operating income was $155,000,000 up 7.3% versus last year. Quarterly adjusted EBITDA was $181,000,000 and EBITDA margin was 21.8%. While we saw nice leverage with respect to gross profit, EBITDA margins were negatively impacted by growth investments and our claims experience in the quarter.

The effective tax rate was 27.3% for the quarter and 26% for the full year. For 2025, we are expecting an effective tax rate of approximately 26%. Quarterly GAAP net income was $106,000,000 or $0.22 per share. For the fourth quarter, we had non GAAP pre tax adjustments associated with FOXAC related items [indiscernible] approximately $4,000,000 of pre tax expense in the And so considering these adjustments, adjusted net income for the fourth quarter was $109,000,000 or $23 per share. Increasing just under 10% from the same period a year ago.

Turning to cash flow and the balance sheet. Operating cash flow increased 23% in the quarter to $188,000,000 Cash flow did benefit from a disaster relief measure granted to those with operations impacted by Hurricane Helene that allowed us to defer an estimated $32,000,000 fourth quarter tax payment. This payment would have occurred in Q4 and will now be paid in the second quarter of twenty twenty five. Cash flow conversion, the percent of income that was converted into operating cash was approximately 144% for the quarter adjusting for the positive impact of the deferred tax We generated $184,000,000 of free cash flow and $106,000,000 of earnings a 30% increase versus last year. As Jerry mentioned, I wanted to take a moment to highlight the assignment of investment grade corporate credit ratings from Fitch and S and P. The agencies have announced public credit ratings for the company with Fitch issuing a BBB plus rating and S and P a BBB rating.

Today, we are also announcing that our Board has approved a $1,000,000,000 commercial paper program backstopped by our existing $1,000,000,000 revolving credit facility.

We will start to work to put this in place in the coming weeks, help and more efficient shorter term liquidity options. We have made considerable progress in modernizing our back office and capital structure over the last several years. A key goal of this effort has been to ensure access to the most efficient capital to further enable our balanced and disciplined approach to capital allocation. Of our top priorities has been to achieve investment grade ratings. These ratings represent a big step forward ensuring our ability to grow using the most cost efficient capital. We've also recently welcomed Brady Knudson as our new Treasurer. Brady has been working alongside many of our team members and helping guide us through the ratings It is great to have Brady on the team. Throughout our history, we have managed this business through an investment grade lens and we will continue to do so in the future. We are committed to maintaining a strong investment grade rating with leverage well under two times supported by healthy cash flow generation and disciplined capital allocation. Going forward, we have updated our definition of leverage to better align with the rating agencies, which results in a more conservative view A reconciliation can be found in our press release, but using this definition of our leverage, our leverage calculation currently would stand at 0.8 times.

As we look to 2025, we remain encouraged by the strength of our markets and the execution by our teams. We are focused on delivering another year of robust growth and healthy incremental margins. Further complemented by a strategic and disciplined approach to M and A. Continue to expect organic growth in the range of 7% to 8% with additional growth 2% to 3%.

Additionally, are focused on improving our incremental margin profile while investing in growth opportunities. We anticipate that cash flow will continue to convert at a rate that is above again in 2025.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to Jerry.

Thank you, Everett. Everyone. We're happy to take any questions you have at this time.

Thank you. We first question comes from Tim Mulrooney with William Blair. [indiscernible] Congrats on a nice quarter. But my first question is about your residential business, which I know the organic growth up 6.5% in the fourth quarter. I think that was better than what we were expecting and certainly better than what The Street was expecting. I think The Street was a little concerned based on some web traffic data and credit card data and other things that floating out there, but there really doesn't seem to be much of a correlation there at all. Can you talk about what drove this better than expected result? Was there a big surge in one time sales or surge in lead flow? Just any color would be helpful.

Yes. Tim, this is Jerry.

It's interesting to me, we often see a lot of the reports with the data the website data and the visitors. And as we as we see those items come up, Sometimes it confuses us because what we what those reports say aren't necessarily aligned with what we're seeing day to day in the market. So there's there's a time or two where it ties, but I would say more often than not some of those data just don't tie out. We've seen this time and time again with credit card processing data, etcetera. And it's rarely tied out. Or at least it's fairly uncommon. Our residential business was strong in the fourth quarter. Our customer base is larger. That we carried into the fourth quarter. That was helpful. We did see also especially rodents in November and December.

The The population of rodents particularly rats and mice, really had a late in the year And there's a recent article out there University of Richmond study that talks about how in most of these very urban markets, these these rodent populations, especially rats are just thriving. And we're certainly seeing that opportunity in the business as well. So we had very strong lead demand, a lot of call volume coming into the business. That may not necessarily have been aligned with what some of the data others are seeing out there. Are publishing.

Okay. That's That's really helpful. Thank you. For my follow-up, I actually want to switch gears and marketing.

I appreciate the the extra disclosure. That you gave for your different expense buckets And the press release, where I noticed that sales and marketing expense really jumped up about 70 basis points in the fourth quarter, I think 40 basis points in 2024.

Now a skeptical investor might look at that and say you're just having to spend more on leads. Your cost per lead is going up. I'm curious what would be your response to that? What data can you share to prove that the increased spend is more about growth your tack is going up. Thank you.

Yes. So when you look at the S part of the SG and A, the sales which could include marketing it's our people costs. It's the investments we're making in sales staffing, not that we're spending irrationally into the market to drive the phone calls to our business. We have not seen that. And As I've stated repeatedly over the last couple of years, we still spend as a percent of revenue very similar amounts in investing our business to drive new leads into our business, both direct allocated leads that come in as well as our mass media advertising that say an Orkin brand would do, we still spend at the same percent of revenue that we've historically spent at. The investments are made in our people. And that's where you see that many of those people, especially say in the fourth quarter, are both on the commercial side and then also on our termite ancillary business is heavily cross sell. And you see the organic growth rates that's not having to drive leads into the business. Those are creative sales opportunities that are coming from cross selling to our existing customer base, not by just irrationally spending into the market.

And those are these are sustainable ways to drive long term organic growth through investments in our people and investments in our staffing. And [indiscernible] confuse some people, but we monitor cost per lead, especially in businesses like Orkin. Very, very carefully, very closely. And we we are committed to not spending irrationally and just trying to buy business. The one thing I would add to Jerry's comment there is, I would point you back to I think an important thing to think about is our investment meeting, investor conference last May, where we showcased the diversity in the approach to acquiring customers. And you could see it's not solely focused on digital, it's not solely focused on one Avenue to our customer. It's a very broad based approach.

And And Jerry is spot on. When we look at the investments that we made in the last, say, they're very heavily tilted towards people. That's helped us drive demand across the business not just in one sector, but across the business. But talking about the resi area a little bit closer, what gives us some optimism there is the recurring growth is stepping up. Therefore, a while we were talking about it approaching 6%. It's solidly in that 6% to 7% here. So it's not like it's one time business driving that resi area. It's really up nice recurring revenue that's coming through that's providing some wind in our sales.

The next question comes from George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Hi, thanks. Good morning. Good morning. In detail, [indiscernible] Can you detail how much auto claims activity impacted EBITDA margins in the quarter?

Certainly, George. If you look at it, there were two buckets of of claims experience that came through. We lost about 40 basis points of leverage across the P and L. 20 basis points of that leverage was or loss leverage was within gross margin. The other 20 basis points was in SG and A. And it's one of those areas that that we're dealing with, we continue to deal with. These claims are legacy claims from years ago. That we work that we're working through. But we're doing a nice job at really making investments in a number of safety programs to ensure our workforce gets home safely each and every day. Our safety systems in our trucks, the scoring systems that we're monitoring, and a number of other measures that we're taking to really improve the current performance and the safety, most importantly, the safety of our folks that are out on the highways.

Got it.

That's helpful context. And then in your commercial business, the growth there would be accelerated a bit in the quarter despite easier comps. Can you elaborate on trends you're seeing there that may be driving that?

Yes. So looking at the at the fourth quarter, we're still really really optimistic about what's going on in the commercial side. The Orkin business, Orkin Commercial, keep in mind not all of our all commercial businesses at Orkin, we have other brands that also perform commercial business. So the fourth quarter was a little was a little bit softer, but don't think it's indicative of anything, especially as we've started the year already that business is really strong. Sometimes in the commercial space, you have some large one time jobs. You could have some large BERT bird jobs, you can have some commodity fumigations that occur especially around the holidays that may not reoccur in the same cycle the following year. So we have there's some of that type of activity that lapped that that affects the commercial number. But the commercial business is still really strong. It's been strong out of the gates here already in January and and nothing that certainly nothing that I'm at all concerned about.

Got it.

Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you.

Next question comes from Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning. This is Ronan Kennedy on for Manav. Thank you for taking my questions. Can I just confirm in response to the question posed by George on the auto claims, Does that imply that there's potential for this to continue versus it being a a one time event? Can you give some further insight there?

It's always hard. Thanks for the question. It's always hard to predict these sorts of things. We've been dealing with it. If you go back several years, we've been dealing with some volatility associated with this. We have so many folks that are out on the road And what we saw as we came out of COVID, was you just saw an uptick in claims experience and the cost of claims activity.

And so we saw that happen as we came came out of COVID. So we've been dealing with it for some time, but we've been putting a number of measures in place to mitigate exposures going forward. A lot of safety measures in our trucks, taking advantage of the technologies that are out there.

To help improve the safety experience of our technicians on the highway. Okay. Thank you. And for my follow-up, please. Could I just touch on this to a certain extent, but an assessment of the progress made and the modernization of back office and the centralizing of services and processes. So I think the intent there is amongst the benefits be a better acquirer of businesses, but also the ability to fund sales and marketing investments. I think you referenced 50 bps of leverage there. Since 2022 from takeout of those admin costs. Costs. To what extent is that happening now and when can we expect to see that ramp?

Sure. Great question and thank you for it. When you look at the business, if you go back to 2022, for example, and that's when this really started to occur. Between 2022 and year end 2024, what you'll see is the savings from administrative costs of about 50 basis points is completely offset the selling and marketing increase over that same time period. And so we certainly are taking costs out and we're helping fund those activities. It may not be a one for one match every single quarter, but generally over the long term, that's the focus is try to try to redeploy those investments into customer facing demand creation sort of investments. When we think about the other steps we're taking, I think we're still very early on. We've made a ton of progress with our capital structure and a number of other measures with bringing a lot of new folks on board.

And also with respect to the credit ratings we announced earlier today, So we made a ton of progress I think across those areas. But we certainly have a lot ahead of us and a lot of opportunity. To continue to be a better acquirer and a better, quite frankly, integrator of some of these businesses that we're acquiring along the way.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

The next question comes from Ashish Sawadrock with RBC Capital. Please proceed.

Thanks for taking my question. I had a question on the pricing increases in 2025.

A number of business services companies are talking about normalization of price increases. I was just wondering if you could comment on your ability to continue to drive 3% to 4% growth increase in 2025 on the consumer side. But also if you could comment on the pricing trends within the commercial business?

Thank you for the question on pricing. When we look at pricing, we've always talked about CPI plus level pricing. I think we all saw the CPI print yesterday. It still remains at a relatively elevated level.

I think we still have an opportunity to get above CPU level of pricing here in 2025, probably similar to the pricing that we got in the last year or two.

And so there's no reason for us to take our foot off the gas when it comes to the pricing. We feel like feel like we're providing a very essential service to our customers Our customers see the value of the service and we price it slightly ahead of what CPI is coming in at. So we feel pretty good about our position with pricing in the marketplace.

That's great color. And then maybe just switching here about the growth investments. Obviously, how do we think about those investments going into 2025 You guided to roughly 30% incremental margins, but I was just curious if you could provide some color on the quarterly cadence there. How should we think about the timing of those investments?

Thanks. Thanks for the question on the growth investments. When we look at the growth investments, we think the first half, you'll see a slightly elevated level of year over year of growth investments. And so we continue to invest We started to really ramp up the investments in the second half of last year. So you'll start to lap that as you get into the second half of twenty twenty five.

But I think for the first half, it will be a more challenging comp for us.

The other area that we're looking at and as we go into 2025 is to fleet cost. The cost of vehicles compared to what we bought or what we leased two, three years ago, those are coming back in. We're replacing them.

So the costs are going up slightly in those areas as well. But our pricing, we feel very good about. We feel very good about the ability to get gross margin leverage with that 3% to 4% price increase.

Very helpful color and congrats on such a strong top line momentum.

Thank you.

The next question comes from Jason Haas with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning and thanks for taking my questions.

I was curious if you could comment on what you're seeing from an organic growth perspective so far this year. And then we've heard some concern in the industry that there was pretty severe cold weather January that essentially I guess killed off the eggs and larvae from some of the pests. And I guess, I don't know, the rodent populations as well in January. So there's a concern that we could see a muted spring selling season. So I'm curious if that's a dynamic that you're seeing and if you agree with that? Jason, this is Jerry.

I don't I don't necessarily think that we've seen that. In January, we're off to a pretty strong start. It's interesting. You think about insects and related pests they're all very adaptive. A lot of mechanisms to survive difficult conditions. You think about one example I'll give you is I think about mosquitoes in Minnesota. Mosquitoes in Minnesota can be really bad once you get to spring or summer. And guess what, they'll probably be really those mosquitoes are able to overwinter in immature stages able to overwinter and they do just fine because they're back.

Back in the late spring, they're back biting people and when you think about mosquitoes, one mosquito is too many mosquito. So that one mosquito bites you 10 times whether that's whether there's 10 mosquitoes or one mosquito, doesn't matter, one mosquito is too many, right? So I don't get too hung up on that. We see it as all those things are opportunities. You see right now in parts of the country, we're getting a lot of moisture and rain. You could also make the case that that excess of moisture is very good for certain insect populations. To me, if there's some insect or maybe something that doesn't do well surviving, the winter, maybe some invasive species that comes in and is in a climate that is not as well adapted to and populations collapse because it's in too cold of an area or something like that. I certainly see that. But for the primary pass that that recur in the same markets year after year, We've never seen any cycle of weather that has radically changed the pet populations, they still managed to come back in the spring just fine. It's interesting when you look at the start of the year, compared to the prior year with respect to weather, Oftentimes you might have a disparity in the weather patterns year over year.

However, last January in 2024, it was a tough weather comp too. So we did have some bad weather here in in January and I can attest to it from the snowfall that we saw in Atlanta. And so we certainly had some bad weather in January this year, but we had a similar experience a year ago Our growth continues to be very healthy. Second half of this year of 2024 was up versus the first half and that's the first time we've seen that in several years. And so we see a really nice trajectory of growth here as we start the New Year.

Got it. That's great to hear.

And then can you I just wanted to ask again on the incrementals. I think you had said that it was 40 basis point headwind from the auto claims. So I was getting like a little over $3,000,000 So excluding that in 4Q, I was getting incrementals of about 23% I guess the other piece that keep because I know you said the underlying business was approaching 30%. So I guess the other piece was the investments that you're making So can you just help us bridge to getting closer to the 30% incrementals for 2025 because it sounds like some of those investments maybe the auto claims don't all repeat, but it sounds like some of those investments will continue And then even more just like bigger picture, know the long term target is 30% to 35%. Can you help us bridge to that as well and what can increase the incremental margins over time.

Certainly, Jason. So when you look at the quarter, there was $4,000,000 to $5,000,000 of dollars of absolute dollars spent in those insurance and claims that were just unfortunately came through. And materialized late in the quarter. We had about, call it, $6,000,000 or so of of what we call sales and marketing people costs primarily. And then you had some about $2,000,000 of things that that shouldn't repeat. They were new and they shouldn't repeat in the quarter. So I mean you had 10% to $15,000,000 of things that we identified in the quarter.

As it came through.

If you take some of those things out and again, there's always going to be things that occur from time to time. But if you do adjust for some of those things, we were there. But more importantly, when I look at the business and what gives me confidence in our ability to get 30% to 40% is just look at the 30% to 40% of incremental margins You go back into 2023 in the third quarter, you had 35% to 40%. I mean this business is certainly capable of generating that type of incremental margin profile. And we feel good about it. When we think about the first half, you might see a slightly lower incremental margin to start the year, but we feel like it's temporary. We feel like we've got to to be able to go after and acquire customers that are going to be with us for four or five, six, sometimes even longer. The lifetime value of those customers is so great. And what you're seeing with the growth we're putting up right now is we're acquiring those customers. Those customers will pay off for us in future quarters, future years. And those are the reasons why we continue to grow through economic recessions pandemics, industrial slowdowns, those are the reasons we continue to do so well through all those various economic cycles is that we're taking a long term view on the business We're investing in it.

We're bringing new customers and we're growing our base.

Hi. Thank you. That's great to hear.

Our next question comes from Adit Sethra with Stifel. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions.

You mentioned outsized deal confirmation again in 2025, I think about 2% to 3%.

How much of that is already in hand from rollover from deals you already did in 2024 and what you've already done in 2025? Yes, it's approaching 2% in terms of carryover So we feel pretty good about our ability to get that 2% to 3%. And our pipeline we've got a number of opportunities in the pipeline.

That range from the small tuck in sort of level to those that look like Fox in terms of $200,000,000 to $400,000,000 of acquisition. So we're prepared and we're positioned extremely well to continue to deliver on that commitment.

Okay, great. And just as a follow-up, the investment Great. Rating in hand. So now you have access to cheaper capital and wrongs versus historically now you're more comfortable with debt. So does this open up a larger pipeline opportunity for M and A that maybe in the past may have decided not to pursue just because now the return on the capital fit within your requirements.

What I would say is, as we have so many opportunities in the middle of the fairway. And when I talk about the fairway, it's it's what we've been doing for years. You're not going to see a major inflection point where we're going and changing the strategy Our focus is investment grade. Our focus is to continue to manage this business at investment grade but take advantage of the opportunities that a company like us should have. And that's why we went after and got the credit rating was we want to avail ourselves to an the opportunity that we should be should have available to us. And so with respect to your question, we're going to continue to execute this business the same way we've done for under our leadership. But also past leadership. The approach is working. And we feel like there's a lot of runway left to execute on that approach. Yes. So let me I'll add to that. We will still have a very disciplined approach to how we how we both pace how we value, how we assess acquisitions and the other maybe going to this having this credit rating helps lower our hurdle rate for return on investment, those kinds of things.

But we are still going to be maintaining the same strategy that we've for a very long time and being very conservative how we approach things.

Great. Thank you for taking my questions. The next question comes from Josh Chan with UBS. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning. This is Karan Sighani on If I could ask a question maybe on what are you seeing on the cost inflation side? What are you seeing maybe just across the board, but labor, material and equipment? And what are your expectations for 2025 versus what you saw in 2024?

We feel like the inflation is very much under control. We continue to see and what gives us confidence in the ability to say that is when you look at the gross margin level. And you look at when you isolate things that we're doing, in terms of adding folks to go after growth, From the underlying business, and materials and supplies and those other things We feel good about our ability to manage manage inflation. I mentioned earlier the one area that we see outsized inflation maybe is in the fleet area. That when you look at just look at the lease liability that we have on the book, stepped up of late You look at the cost of acquiring new leases relative to two, three, four years ago.

It's a higher cost. And so that's something that that's probably more of a headwind But when you should look at the other areas of the P and L, that's not a a large area that P and L by any stretch. But when you look at the other areas, people are largest area. We feel very well managed and ability to continue to manage that.

Got it. That's helpful. And maybe from a follow-up, if I can ask a question on the different sales channels. Are your priorities for 2025 with respect to those areas? And How do you expect that to drive like volume performance for the year?

Could you repeat that question again? I missed the first half. Of your question.

Sorry, yes, sure. So basically, I wanted to ask you about the different sales channels that you have. And how are you thinking about that for 2025? And like how do you expect those to drive some volume performance over there? [indiscernible] is Jerry. I think each of our channels is as I stated, they're all performing well and doing well. And we aim to continue to have all of them keep that momentum that we currently have. We see the residential business as as continued opportunity to grow. We have a multifaceted way to acquire new customers that's dependent on our brands. We have the commercial business, those investments we made last year continue to pay off for us as we try to drive execution efficiency sales productivity, those types of things. Continue to drive that business and We think our brand Our brands are what will continue to help us drive that. And then continuing to drive on the termite and ancillary side, as you see in the growth rates of that is continued opportunity. We haven't seen any concerns with the consumer. When there's a severe say, rat infestation in the attic and we've got to do other exclusion work or maybe remediation of contaminated insulation and these types of things.

We haven't seen resistance from from our customers not willing to to pay for that service. So So all those channels for us execution of all three of those areas will continue to be a focus for us and we see all three of them as excellent opportunities as we go into 2025.

The next question comes from Stephanie Moore with Jefferies. Please proceed. Hey, good morning, guys. This is Peter Sullivan on for Stephanie Moore.

Hi, Peter. So how's it going?

Was just curious about your strategy for continuing momentum in new business Rollins. What are you guys seeing on your end when it comes to through digital versus door to door? And then also, is there a dispersion in retention for gaining customers through these avenues that We feel like it's getting we're going to continue to have a multifaceted approach to customer acquisition. That's a really important part of our strategy. We've been very successful And when you look at it, the cost might differ across the different categories.

The retention doesn't necessarily differ. The retention is very healthy across those various categories. So we feel we feel really good about our ability continue to do that. And when we look at acquisitions, when we buy businesses, we look at their geographic footprint. And how complementary it might be to us. We look at the way they access their customers We look at the way they service their customers. So we're always looking at adding diversification to our arsenal in terms of how we approach our customers. And so no, we feel good. We feel really good about those various channels.

And then for my follow-up, I was curious a little bit on to switch up to the labor side. And then looking at kind of the consolidation of the competitive landscape, are you guys seeing any noticeable change in say, technician turnover and then some context on what the technician hiring environment This is Jerry. Yes, we had a good hiring environment It's probably the I'm still not going to describe it as I wouldn't fully describe it as easy. But compared to say 2020 and 2021, it definitely feels easier And so from that standpoint, we did a great job of being staffed and meeting meet the demands of our customers, probably better than we have in the previous five years. And so we don't see anything changing there. We monitor pay. We try to make sure that we pay our people very competitively. We try to be in the top quartile of pay to make sure we retain people, offer great benefits and a great place to work. So, a a great career opportunity.

So [indiscernible] certainly the people expenses are the majority of our real expenses of our business. It's also where we spend a lot of our time and make a lot of our investment So we're pretty comfortable and confident in the position that we're in to debt. Guess maybe Jerry, the one thing maybe is the retention that we continue to focus on investing in retention and the real impact with customer engagement and profitability across the business, it's certainly an area as an opportunity. We continue to make strides there, but we're certainly not finished with respect to our efforts on retention.

Thank you.

At this time, I would like to turn the floor back over to management for closing comments.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.

Appreciate your interest in our company and we look forward to speaking with you on our first quarter earnings call in a few months.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a great day.