Principal Executive Officer, President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Rollins Inc
Rollins CEO, Jerry Gahlhoff, Live from PestWorld 2023
Join us all week for our Live coverage of Pest World 2023, Honolulu, HI. Filmed, Oct 17th 2023
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About Jerry Gahlhoff
In an October 2023 interview at PestWorld, Rollins CEO Jerry Gahlhoff described his first ten months in the role as "a heck of a lot of fun" and said he had "a great team" and that the company was "doing a lot of good stuff." Gahlhoff noted that he was in a "blackout period" around earnings and could not discuss certain topics. He discussed his background, stating that he grew up around pest control because his father worked for Orkin, and that the Orkin branch employees became his social network as his family relocated frequently. Gahlhoff outlined several priorities for Rollins, including a three- to five-year project to "modernize as a parent company to be a better coach to our brands" and to encourage best-practice sharing. He said he intends to "continue to honor" the company's tradition and culture while seeking to "accelerate our organic growth rates." On acquisitions, he emphasized the importance of brand equity, culture, and the quality of people. He also stated that the company would not expand outside the UK until it has built a unified platform with a single CRM and accounting system. Regarding technology, Gahlhoff said he is interested in tools that make technicians' jobs easier but is "less interested in technology that means we don't get FaceTime with the customer," and he expressed concern about technology commoditizing the client relationship.
Transcript (15 segments)
I
Interviewer0:13
Jerry, welcome to FOMIC TV. Hello. So, 10 months into your new gig as CEO, how's it been thus far?
J
Jerry Gahlhoff0:24
It's been a heck of a lot of fun. We have a lot of really positive energy. I've got a great team and we're doing a lot of good stuff, so there's not much to be disappointed about. It's all good.
I
Interviewer0:37
I know we're in the blackout period for Rollins, which is the period around earnings where we can't talk about any interesting questions that I have. So I think today what I want to do is focus more on you. Everyone knows who you are, but they don't know a lot of details. So how did you get into this?
J
Jerry Gahlhoff1:13
I moved around a lot as a child. What really attracted me to this industry overall was the people side of it. As I relocated as a kid, usually in the 1970s and early 1980s quite a bit, the Orkin people in the branches that I moved from place to place became my family and that was my social network as a 10-year-old, 11-year-old. We'd have Wednesday night softball games and Saturday or Friday night rodeos in Louisiana and those kinds of things. So as I got into college, I started out as kind of a business major and then eventually through college, when I left school in the late '90s, I got my first job with what was a family-owned company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina called Wilson Pest Control that had been around since the 1940s. That eventually got owned by a venture capital firm that attempted to do a rollup of the pest control industry, and that didn't go terribly well. I recall that lasted about two and a half years, ended badly, and we ended up getting sold to what at the time was CNX Corporation. Then I continued to move around and got a lot of opportunities along the way. I had great bosses and great mentors along the way. We had a pretty strong run when I was at the HomeTeam brand for about seven years until we were acquired by Rollins.
I
Interviewer3:21
Were you based in Dallas at the time?
J
Jerry Gahlhoff3:22
At that time, I had gone from North Carolina to Dallas, then Dallas to Tampa, then back to Dallas again in 2011. So I've continued that pattern of moving around. It's been quite a journey really. Rollins acquired us in 2008. I acquired the brand I was with in 2008, and then I moved to Atlanta in 2016 running our Specialty Brands group, and then a few years later became the...
I
Interviewer4:11
You had finished your master's program at the University of Florida, research on termites, and had a project lined out and began working on your PhD program. I thought that's what I was going to do, and then I got recruited for that job at Wilson Pest Control. Some folks made me an offer, and I took that offer home to my wife and said, 'Look at these crazy people, they're going to do this for me because they want me to work for them.' And she said, 'Oh, you're going to do that. Time for you to quit school and get a job.' It wasn't part of my plans because I really enjoyed school.
J
Jerry Gahlhoff4:49
Was she supporting you at the time?
I
Interviewer4:50
She was a school teacher. She was the breadwinner and I was the one living it up on the weekends and having...
J
Jerry Gahlhoff5:11
I am really into the science. The more I got into it, even when I was a kid, I remember going into my dad's Orkin branches and he would have an aquarium in there on Saturdays when I went to work with him. We'd put a mouse or a rat in there along with a snake, and every Saturday I'm checking to see which one lived or whatever critters that we had in the office. So I was always messing around with that. I liked growing things. I liked having a garden as a kid. I would have roly-polies under bricks as a kid. So not a lot of people say they were born into pest control and bred to do that kind of stuff, but I certainly had that interest probably when I was six or seven years old.
I
Interviewer6:12
So when you were under Rollins, there were some organizational changes that occurred and I moved back to Dallas and became the president of HomeTeam. So the organization at Rollins now that you're CEO, what is it? We've got Gary Rollins there, we've got John Wilson there. I see him running around somewhere on vacation. What's the C-suite at Rollins look like today?
J
Jerry Gahlhoff6:36
Gary Rollins remains as our Executive Chairman and he still is very active. He's been in this business for about 58 years and he loves it. He's very passionate about it. He asks questions and I meet with him often. Both John and I talk to him frequently. He's one of my first phone calls in life, so he's still an integral part of it. I have a CFO that's been around for about a year. I recently onboarded a new CFO. And then I have my Chief of Staff. In field operations, I've got a President of Orkin, Pat Schanowski, who runs all five divisions of Orkin. Each division has a division president. And then Steve Levit runs all of our other brands that aren't Orkin in the US and all of our international operations, which is a very rapidly growing part of our business. We've added to our portfolio of brands over the years and we take a lot of pride in that as well. But at the same time, we've got the history of the Orkin brand. My Chief of Staff also runs our IT department. So I've got a fantastic team that has set us up really well for the future.
I
Interviewer8:25
It's not going to be easy to follow in John Wilson's footsteps. What's your vision now? Where are you going to take Rollins into the future? How are you going to make your mark on the company?
J
Jerry Gahlhoff8:36
When you think about the history of Rollins, Rollins acquired Orkin in 1964 and has really been at it for a long time. There's a lot of deep roots, a lot of institutional knowledge about how to be in pest control. At the same time, I think we have some opportunity to continue to grow our business faster than maybe we have historically grown. Can we accelerate our organic growth rates? At the same time, I think we have a great story to tell when it comes to our brands and our brand strategy. We love the culture, the people, and what all of our individual brands bring to the table is something new and unique. When we leverage that and we learn and share from one another, share best practices in our business, there's a lot to be gained from that. When we create the environment in which those discussions can be had and we eliminate...
I
Interviewer10:12
We don't really disclose a lot of the details. We talk about our residential business, our commercial business, as well as our termite and ancillary service business. But we really don't disclose how big our brands are. A lot of people underestimate how big everything that's kind of non-Orkin in the US is. It's a pretty big business, and of course that's what you ran prior to becoming CEO. Will Rollins continue to run a variety of different brands in the long term? You don't see it at some point all being Orkin?