Morning, or good afternoon, everyone. I'm John Mazzoni, one of the equity analysts here at Wells Fargo. I'm here to introduce Rollins' CFO, Kenneth Krause, and he has a few opening remarks before we dig a little deeper into the company. Hey, great, John. Thanks for having me. Great to be here with you again. Just start here with the safe harbor. We're all aware of the safe harbor, if you could just pay attention to that. Of course, as we go through the discussion, we'll talk about non-GAAP measures. There's a reconciliation to all the GAAP-presented figures, in the appendix and on our website. Great to be here again, as I said. A couple things just to start with, you know, consistency and continuous improvement is what Rollins is all about. You know, how do we continue to consistently grow? How do we continue to make changes and improvements in our overall margin profile to inflect profitability higher? We continue to compete in a very attractive market, a growing market. Global market size is $20-plus billion. In the U.S. alone, a lot of folks call out a $12 billion market that's growing at 3%-5%. Very attractive growth profile. We have a very nice diversified business across three major service offerings. We have, first and foremost, a residential market. That's our biggest market for us. That's our biggest service lines, includes a number of different services. We also have commercial markets that we serve, and we also have the termite business and ancillary markets that's continuing to see robust levels of growth. Really attractive financial profile with just under $3 billion of annual revenue, EBITDA margins north of 22%. Free cash flow conversion has consistently been above 100%, and we've continued to compound cash flow at north of 15% for a very long time. When we look at the market, and we think about the size of our market, there's a number of secular growth trends that continue to drive our markets higher and stronger, whether it be the continued warming of our climates or the continued migration of our population to the south, or the rising middle class and the awareness and importance of health and safety. All very important trends for our markets and continuing to make our attractive, our markets even that more attractive. When we think about our business, not only do we compete in a very attractive market, but execution has been incredibly strong across the business for a while here now, and most notably, here in the first quarter, where we posted a very strong, robust revenue growth, attractive incremental margins. We closed on our second-largest acquisition, and we continued to fund our increasing dividend. When we think about the most recent acquisition that I just mentioned, the Fox acquisition, second-largest acquisition in the history of our company, and a very appealing and compelling transaction for us. We are really looking forward to bringing in the associates of Fox into the fold at Rollins and really helping them continuing to grow their careers and grow their brand while helping us grow our organic business. You know, there's a really nice synergy and cross-sell opportunity here with this acquisition, where we bring in some of their marketing efforts at Fox. We couple it with our organic business, especially at HomeTeam, and we're pretty excited about the growth opportunities that we see for the business. It's off to a really strong start. We bought it, we closed in April, and May, good performance, good growth, good demand for services. We're seeing robust levels of growth. As we think about the second quarter here, we continue to execute well. Demand continues to be pretty robust after a slow start to April. May started to pick up, and we continue to see some improvements in demand. As I said back in the first quarter, we expected to invest in marketing costs and advertising, as the season starts to heat up and the business demand starts to improve, and we have continued to do that here as we go through the second quarter. We're disproportionately investing in advertising and marketing because we have a really strong market that we're competing in currently. That's driving really consistent revenue growth over a very long period of time. You can see here, over the last 20 years, we've consistently grown through industrial recession, great recession, and through COVID, and we continue to inflect higher, more recently, post-COVID, with a very attractive growth profile that's emerged for us. We also, in addition to having a strong growth profile, we continue to have opportunities on the margin profile. We have an attractive margin, a gross margin north of 50 and EBITDA margins north of 20, there's about 30% of sales that's spent in SG&A. G&A is certainly a focus for us as we think about improving the efficiency of the business. S is an important part of it as well, the selling costs, and in order to... Measuring the effectiveness of our selling spend. We continue to really intensify the focus there. You know, I fully believe and expect margins to continue to improve as we move forward. The incremental margin profile is 30%-40%. Organic growth is gonna continue to hopefully bring through a very attractive margin profile. In addition to that, we're looking at how we can continue to improve the business and take some additional costs out of our business as we go forward. Cash flow here, as I said earlier, compounding at 15+% over the long term, as well as more the near term. Conversion of net income to free cash flow has consistently been above 100%, our focus is on how can we continue to drive cash flow higher? How can we continue to convert net income to cash at 100-plus percent? That will help enable this mid-teen sort of growth in cash flow going forward. We're also focused on modernization. I joined the company last September. Since September to today, we've focused on a number of things. First and foremost, last fall, we announced an increase to our regular dividend. We priced in our special dividend, we raised our regular dividend by 30%, and we're committed to funding that dividend. As you saw on the prior slide, we've generated about $2 billion of cash flow over the last five years. 45% of that cash flow is went to funding the dividend, 50% of it went to M&A, and 5% of it is went to CapEx. Very light CapEx, and really a focus on investing for growth and returning cash to the shareholder through the dividend. The second thing that we did was we refinanced a revolver back in January. Went from two banks to eight banks, $175 million to $1 billion. Gives us a lot of flexibility. We changed our auditor in March, went from Grant Thornton to Deloitte. After 19 years with Grant, we decided to move to Deloitte, with a relationship, and we're looking forward to partnering with Deloitte as we go forward. We closed on our second largest acquisition in April, as I said earlier, we've consistently focused on hiring key talent. Casey Forrest is with me in the back of the room. He heads up at FP&A and Strategy. He's new to Rollins. Traci Hornfeck, the new Chief Accounting Officer, a couple years back. Andrew Light, I just hired as a Head of Tax, and we're continuing to look at additional positions and people to bring in to really help modernize us. The other thing that we did recently, last Monday, we announced the shelf filing. We filed a shelf with the SEC that has two components, a primary component, where we would be able to raise $1.5 billion of additional capital through a number of different securities. We also registered the entire family position. Family owns just over 50% of the company. It was not registered. We registered it as part of the shelf filing, that's north of $10 billion of ownership being registered. We also entered into a registration rights agreement with the family that will allow us to work more closely with the family as we move forward. The one thing that I was a little surprised about after joining last fall was, you know, when we went through, we saw some block trades, we saw some 144 sales, and I was surprised to see we didn't have something like this in place before. I set a target that as we go through and we get done with the revolver, we get done with the auditor change, we get done with the acquisition, the shelf filing was the next thing that I wanted to take care of, and we put that behind us. We filed that for approval with the SEC just over a week ago now. So we're hopeful that we'll get that in place, and it'll provide even more optionality going forward. Just to close it out, you know, Rollins remains a very attractive investment, consistent revenue growth. We're investing in M&A, continuing to consolidate this highly fragmented market. We have robust margin opportunities as we move forward, focused on driving cash flow and maintaining an investment-grade profile across our on our balance sheet. With that, I'll open it up, John, to any questions you might have. Thanks, Ken. That's great color. Maybe just to recap, seems like Rollins has this storied history over 100 years of operations, obviously a very kind of strong presence in the market they serve. As we think about kind of 80% recurring revenues and the defensiveness of the business, could you just remind us on how the business is more defensive than during prior downturns? More focused on 2008 rather than 2020, which was a bit of an anomaly, but any impacts in kind of the COVID era for potential residential uplifts would also be helpful as we kind of think about, one, the defensiveness, and two, just the business profile itself. When I think about defensiveness, the thing that comes to mind for me are two things. One is essential. We, just like a lot of businesses, quite frankly, classify ourself as essential. We certainly are essential because we're helping protect the brand of a business. The last thing you'd wanna do is, if you get a box from a person you're doing business with, the last thing you wanna do is open it up and have a bug jump out of that box. Helping protect brands by providing pest control at logistics centers, providing it at healthcare institutions, helping the travel and tourism industry help protect their brands, it's essential. Whether it be in, as well as in the residential side, you think about termite, and the property damage that comes through termites is enormous. The last thing you wanna do is move away from that service. The risk-reward equation in that is upside down. Why would you move away from termites, which is costing you? The other side of this is the cost of this is such a low portion of a budget, so why would you move away from that? For what return? For damage to your property? It just doesn't add up. It's an essential service, and it's a very low portion of spend for our customer. That's a really important combination of factors because that is, it provides us a lot of opportunities from a pricing perspective. It's, I think those are the two things that come to mind when I think about the defensiveness of our business and why it's so resilient to all cycles. That's great color. Thank you. Then maybe also moving to kind of the topic, as you were, just competition with one of your major competitors merging with two of them. Have you seen anything shifted in the competitive landscape? Also, if you want to add any more color around Fox and kind of the underserved market opportunity, because that was also kind of a compelling deal from what we've seen? Yeah, the market continues to be a very attractive market. It's highly fragmented. Despite seeing the recent combination of Rentokil and Terminix. We continue to operate in a very fragmented market, and we also feel like it's a very rational market. We all understand that there's a value associated with the services that we're providing our customers. Very rarely are you competing on price. You're competing on what kind of service and what value are you providing to the customer? I think that's important to us. You know, you know, it's hard to comment on the Rentokil Terminix merger. I know it's a big deal, and it's, I don't envy where they are in the integration. There's a lot of hard work and a lot of effort to go through a transaction like that. We're also focused on continuing to invest in our business, continuing to target our advertising dollars in the areas where there may be just some disruption with the customer base, because that's an opportunity for any of our brands, any one of our brands, to be successful. We're certainly focused on that as we think about that more recent acquisition that's occurred in our space. That's great. Maybe just to follow up on that, Rollins is a bit of a household name, but as we think about advertising, can you talk about the digital channels and other types of maybe more surgical advertising methods, perhaps through maybe TikTok or something else? Yeah that was a nontraditional? Sure. You know, I was asked earlier today, and we are certainly active on a number of different social media platforms. We're obviously active on television, but as many of you know, and probably if I did a survey of you all in the room, probably a few of you probably would never even access cable television, and you're on streaming. Our advertising would not necessarily hit you, and you wouldn't get your response if you were on streaming. As a result, we also advertise across TikTok and Instagram and other social media platforms, and it's been a really successful outlet for us. You know, we've seen good demand coming through a number of those different platforms. We continue to ramp up the intensity at which we advertise. We also, the flip side of this is we have this Fox acquisition that we just closed. Fox acquisition is a door-knocking business. They're out there working neighborhoods and knocking on doors and selling pest control services. It's been an incredible business model. They've done extremely well, we're coupling that now with our HomeTeam acquisition. Our HomeTeam business has what we call Tubes in the Wall. Taexx tubes, they're in the walls. When you buy a new home in certain parts of the country, a builder will contract with HomeTeam to put Tubes in the Wall that are proprietary to HomeTeam, that we can deliver pest control services through. As we all know, homeowners don't stay in their home forever, and you may only see a homeowner stay in a home for three, five or seven years, and then they move. Those tubes stay in the walls, oftentimes, those tubes go unused after the first homeowner. We know where those tubes are. There's a tremendous amount of those tubes. Now we're focused on how we might provide Fox with the opportunity to go in and knock on those doors as a HomeTeam employee to bring those tubes back online. There's a really good opportunity to really bring that really significant customer base back in. HomeTeam continues to perform. It's a great business, but it could be even better through the combination with Fox. That's great, color. Thank you. Then maybe just on that same vein, could you talk about the cross-sell opportunity as well as selling? Yeah termite, wildlife, insulation, and other types of kind of opportunities into the core customer set? Sure. Growth is paramount with us. You know, I mean, we have very much a growth mindset in our business. When I think about growth mindset, there are two or three things that come to mind, and Jonathan points one out that's really important, and that's cross-sell. You know, most of our customers don't have more than one or two services, but we have three, four, or five different service lines that we can provide them. We can not only do termite, we can do general pests, we can do mosquito services, we can help actually with exclusion services, because part of the reason why they got pest issues is because there's access points in the crawl space, so we can seal that. We can do work around insulation in the attic, and we can also do work around what we call Critter Control. Assume a squirrel gets into your attic or a raccoon gets into your fireplace, the last thing I'd want to do is go take care of that raccoon or squirrel. I'm the last guy that's gonna do that for you. We've got people that are really good at doing that kind of work. We found that customers are willing to pay for that incredible value. We certainly have seen great demand. There's an opportunity to expand the share of wallet with the customer. There's also an opportunity to reduce churn. You know, churn in a recurring business is a big focus. You want to reduce the amount of churn you have that comes through your business on any given year. What we found is, in order to reduce churn, we've got to focus on our techs. We've got to make sure turnover of techs is low. We've got to train our techs so that when they're working with the customer, they're providing a superior customer service, they're living up to their commitments. If they do all that, the Net Promoter Score goes up, the churn goes down, and the retention is very healthy on the customer base. Churn and cross-sell are two really big, important areas for us as we think about growing our business. Great. It seems like it does tie into the fact around the training centers as well as the technicians. Maybe could you just quickly touch on labor and what you're seeing? Previously, there were some kind of staffing constraints in prior peak selling cycles, but what are you seeing as we going into kind of this summer? ... Labor and is obviously a really important part of our business and is the key ingredient to growth. We've got to have people that are trained and that are qualified available to us when we enter in a peak season. This year, for example, in the first quarter, we reported pretty robust growth. When questioned on the call, we were responsive, and that's in saying that a big reason why the growth came through was because we had the people to provide the service. We're a people business, and without those people, without them engaged in our business, we can't provide the service that our customers require. We have a very healthy level of staffing to enter the second quarter. And that's helping us enable even further growth as we go throughout the quarter. We feel like we've staffed very well. It really goes back to the third quarter of last year. I want to say the third quarter, that's my first quarter, with being with Rollins. I was on the call, and I heard the statistics thrown out about new applicants. We had a robust level of new applicants, and that was a leading indicator for our staffing levels going into Q1 of this year, and then also our revenue growth that we had. We entered with very healthy level of applicants. We hired a really strong pool of talent, and we entered a very strong season with a very healthy labor position. Helped us grow nicely. Of course. Then there's, no conversation is complete without talking about margins. How sustainable is the 30% incremental? Maybe if you could just hit on kind of the big buckets, materials and supplies. Mm-hmm. insurance, kind of fleet and labor. You know, the incremental margin of 30%-40% is the right range. I mean, if you're generating 22% EBITDA margins, you're generating low 50% range of gross margins, you should certainly leverage every additional $ of growth through the model at 30%+. You know, you've got fixed costs that are in the equation that you're going to leverage and drive the 30%-40% incremental margin. We certainly feel like it's sustainable and it's a focus for us. Not only is it a focus to deliver those margins going forward, but it's also a focus to continue to improve our business model, take costs out, really focus on making it as efficient as possible. Great. As we kind of look in terms of technology, and what, any, would you characterize the company in terms of automated kind of routing software, other types of technology, such as a customer app, the website, things like that? You know, I think we're coming along. We're not where we need to be. There's opportunities to improve upon the use of technology. We've got some really nice route-based software, whether it be our BOSS system or we use other vendor software that's that we procure from vendors. We feel like we're positioned pretty well in the route-based software. There's things that we're looking at around how can we make our tech lives easier, you know, the technicians' lives easier? It's a hard job. Whatever we can do to make their lives easier, will drive a higher level of engagement and a better customer experience. How can we interface with the customer more effectively? We're looking at the use of technology there. There's a number of things that are certainly on the horizon in years to come that we feel like we can continue to leverage. That will help us too, drive the margin profile higher, drive down the cost in our business. That's a big focus for us. You know, when I look at the business, when I look at the major areas of spend, you've got materials, you've got people, you've got fleet costs. Those are the big three when it comes to our cost of sales. Insurance and claims, we talk a lot about that because we have a lot of drivers on the road, and unfortunately, we have accidents. We're focused on doing some things different with the use of technology that'll drive a more behavioral-based safety environment and help improve our experience in that area. We're gaining leverage in materials. We're gaining leverage in fleet and people. The area where we haven't gained as much leverage of late has been in the insurance and claims area. Got it. Maybe a quick follow-up on that. Has there been any kind of updates in terms of the electrification of the fleet or any other longer-term ESG targets, which could potentially be kind of something we should look out for in the future? Yeah, there's a number of things that we're doing with respect to ESG. You know, we're evaluating the use of the electric vehicle, the EV, and we're looking at a whole lot of other things. The other thing that we, you know, we continue to do a really nice job with is being recognized as an employer of choice. For example, in the city of Atlanta and across the state of Georgia, we've been consistently recognized as an employer of choice across the country. More recently, we were named an employer of choice, a top workplace, through an independent research agency. That's really good to see. We're committed in investing in diversity. We've got a number of different platform and groups, that we certainly are funding, and we also are partnering with our communities. So, you know, there's a number of things, whether it be on the E, whether it be on the S, or whether it be on the G, that we're trying to ramp up and increase our focus upon. Great color. Thank you. Maybe just shifting gears, you talked about the shelf, you talked about the capital structure optimization. Is there any shift in capital kind of allocation philosophy? Are there any other larger deals out there? When you say the employer of choice, it also seems like Rollins is the acquirer of choice when it comes to M&A. How should we think about kind of capital allocation as a whole? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I inherited an incredibly valuable balance sheet, very little debt, but incredible opportunities. Just because we put a billion-dollar revolver in place and we put this shelf in place, doesn't mean that Jerry and I are gonna go on a spending spree and lever up two or three times. What we're trying to do is create optionality. I think it's important to have optionality so that in the right environment, we can execute. So stay tuned on that front, but know that my focus is investment grade. We wanna continue to maintain investment grade, but we also wanna take advantage of the opportunities and the options that should be available to an investment-grade company. That's why the last nine or so months, we focused on good corporate housekeeping, modernization, because I think those are the things that are gonna enable even more improvements to come through this business model in years to come. That's great. Then if we think about the major buckets of investment, is it largely going to be within the BOSS system, will you have more in the people side, or as we just think longer term, how, kind of, do you prioritize investments within the business itself? You know, first and foremost, you always think about how we're here for the customer. How do you service the customer? What are the things that we can do to make BOSS better or other software we're using on the routes better? That certainly gets priority. Focusing in on how we can deploy the right advertising dollars. In my mind, in our business, advertising is like R&D in a manufacturing business. There's a direct correlation between the effectiveness of our advertising spend and the growth, the organic growth in our business. We're certainly focused on trying to identify those areas, those opportunities, where we can place the right investments in advertising and customer acquisition activities. Providing our employees the right training, investing in training, so that when we bring those folks on, they're ramping up at the right pace and the right cadence to support the customer. All three of those major areas are areas of focus investment in our, in our business. Not to mention, you know, you look at, you know, some of the things we're doing in back office. You know, we're looking at Back office, I would say, is an area that we have not invested in that greatly at Rollins. When I joined, I identified an opportunity to make some investments in our finance, accounting, HR, IT, legal areas, that will allow us to be better service providers to our brands, better shared service functions. If we can do things there better, we can be a better acquirer of businesses. We can bring businesses in and create more value through the use of a shared service center. Mm-hmm. To date, we really haven't done that. That, I think, is one of the biggest opportunities going forward to improve margin profile. Yeah, that's definitely very compelling. Also, just kind of zooming out a little bit, you talked about some of the mega trends, such as a warmer climate, such as population. Could you maybe just talk about maybe at a high level, where the company is focusing more, be it in the Sun Belt states or areas that are seeing more growth or areas that might be more kind of, I would say, bug-friendly? Yeah. That's a great question. You know, when I look at the strategy, again, it starts with growth, it starts with focusing in on those areas, like the U.S., where we're strongest. A lot of people ask me about international growth and other growth avenues, new markets. I'm here to tell you, we don't need to shift away from our core market. The core market's big enough, it's growing fast enough, there's enough opportunity for us to grow in this core pest control market that we're in today. What's also really good to see is the opportunity to grow in the U.S. We continue to intensify the investments that we're making in Florida, Georgia, Texas, the Carolinas, California, across all those areas, because we see a really big opportunity to continue to drive robust levels of growth in those regions as population expands in many of those regions. That's one thing that's certainly a focus for us. The second thing is new areas. You know, the Midwest, we're in Chicago today. The Midwest is a great market, but I would say we're under-penetrated in the Midwest. There's an opportunity in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, to make some more investments to go after additional growth. In the U.S. alone, there's opportunities in areas where we're already strong, but some new opportunities where we're not as strong as we are in other areas. Mm-hmm. In addition, the international side. You know, I started the point with saying that international is an opportunity. It may not be as high on the list as the U.S., but it is an opportunity. It'll continue to be an opportunity. We've invested in the U.K., Australia, Singapore, Canada. We'll continue to invest in those regions, but we'll also continue to evaluate new opportunities for growth for us as well. Great. Maybe just my last question before we wrap it up. You joined about nine months ago. Really, what are the things that get you the most excited about the company, and what have been your biggest surprises, either positive or negative? Yeah, you know, the thing that is really exciting for me is the opportunity to make a bigger impact. When I think about Rollins, I'm inheriting a very valuable business with an incredible market position in a very attractive market. It's one thing to have a good market position. It's another one to have it in a market that's growing at mid-singles, and it's very sizable, and it's very fragmented. I'm inheriting incredible, valuable business. You know, working with Jerry, we're trying to identify the areas where we can modernize, make additional investments, and make this business incrementally better. We don't have to transform it. It's already a great business, but how do we make it better each and every day? That's something... You know, I interacted with Gary Rollins not too long ago, and the thing that he said was, "You know, it's really about how do you just get a little bit better each and every day?" You know, we've done incredibly well with this business, and as I said, I've inherited a lot of value, but it's how do you continue to make the changes to bring it up to speed and to really leverage all of the strengths you already have? So that's kind of what I'm focused on. No big surprises from a downside perspective. I mean, what you see is what you get with this company, quite frankly. It's a pretty straightforward business model, and that's what makes it even more special. It's such a straightforward business model. The cash generation is so strong. You're not evaluating, you know, like, global supply chains like you are in other businesses. You don't have to make huge CapEx investments. They're very small, very manageable investments you're making with an incredible amount of reward on the back end. Yeah, it's great business, great to be here and look forward to more opportunities going forward. Great. Yeah, definitely, good to have a predictable growth company with little to no generative AI risk, but, if there's any other closing comments, please be my guest. No, thanks for having me. Great to be here again, and look forward to reporting back in future quarters. Thanks for coming. Thank you.