Group President of Rollins Brands, Rollins Inc
M&A strategy at Rollins 🎙️Talking Pest Management with Steve Leavitt, Group President at Rollins Inc
M&A strategy at Rollins
This week’s interview is short and to the point and has a more commercial feel to it, as Talking Pest Management welcomes Steve Leavitt, Group President at Rollins Inc. based in Atlanta, USA.
As the parent company, Rollins is better known within pest control in the US under its Orkin banner but also has a strong presence in Australia, Singapore, Canada and the UK with franchises elsewhere across the world.
Rollins recently made the headlines when it announced the acquisition of Melbourne-based Adams Pest Control in Australia who Steve describes as “a great member to...
About Steven Leavitt
In a July 2020 interview, Steve Leavitt discussed Rollins' acquisition of Adams Pest Control in Australia, describing the company as "a great member to our team." He stated that the company's M&A strategy focuses on "who we want to be" rather than "where we want to be," emphasizing the importance of local industry knowledge and finding operators with "like-mindedness" in terms of culture. Leavitt also addressed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Rollins. He noted that the company created a reporting process to track infections and exposures among employees and adjusted policies to ensure workers were not financially harmed. He observed that commercial business services, which make up most of the company's operations in Europe and Canada, were the segment most affected by the pandemic.
Transcript (13 segments)
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Steven Leavitt0:10
which is the parent company for many, many brands, most widely known as Orkin in North America, but brands throughout the world. We've got presence in Australia, Singapore, the UK, and then Orkin franchises throughout the rest of the world.
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Interviewer0:25
Speaking about the rest of the world and franchises, Steve, I know you have an M&A strategy and you just recently purchased Adams Pest Control, one of the most important brands down there in Australia. Congrats on that by the way. Maybe you want to tell the folks about your M&A strategy in general?
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Steven Leavitt0:42
Yeah, so that's a great question and we're so tickled to have a relationship with Adams and be able to partner with them. You know, they're based out of, well, they've got two locations, but primarily out of Victoria, Melbourne, but then they also have a fairly decent sized operation in... In these industries, as we move into these new markets, we start to gain relationships with all sorts of different members of our industry through associations and conferences. And as we start to see kindred spirits, people who have a very similar culture to us, that's when we get interested. We're not really buying a market, we're buying a culture. And it's really, really important to us that we find somebody who's got kind of like-mindedness.
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Interviewer1:38
And you told me earlier that quality is your main metric, right?
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Steven Leavitt1:43
Yes, absolutely. And I'll give you an example of how it works. Take Adams for example. We had partnered with a company in the Bay Area of California, West Coast of the United States... outside of business that can also help act as a promoter to this merge of Adams and Rollins. It just makes it all the better. But you've also got a reference where you can go to Hell Sign and Verisign and say, tell us a little bit about these folks and who they really are. In this case, their relationship was so close that the companies are mirror images of each other. Crane is just Adams only in San Francisco.
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Interviewer2:37
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, that's like the perfect fit. And I think the complex it sounds from the outside world basically, I think when you're actually in that position, I think M&A on that scale that you're doing and performing it successfully internationally is actually only being done when it's easy, right? It needs to feel easy.
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Steven Leavitt2:58
Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I think that's why we've been successful. You know, I spent 20 years in this industry before I came to Rollins. And I knew who in my industry was good and I knew who was not good. Because I knew the companies that I couldn't pry a customer away from them, and then I knew the ones that would just run from them to me. And so that local knowledge, that boots on the street kind of knowledge, you cannot pay for that. It's just invaluable. And so as we grow more and more in Australia or more and more in Canada, you're getting more and more knowledge of other good operators out there that you want to reach out to, if it's nothing other than just helping each other get better if you're benchmarking. But start having a good relationship because ultimately we all represent the...
I
Interviewer4:11
But the next one, my next question will be, I think a lot of people will be interested in learning is, how did you manage to complete the COVID scenario? And how did COVID hit you and how did it change your daily business and affect your brands?
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Steven Leavitt4:27
Well, so we're finding that the commercial side of the business, which is largely what we are outside of the US, US has a very strong residential market. Australia has a certain residential market, but most of Europe, most of Canada, it's largely what we call commercial or business related services. That's the one that got hit the most. How we felt it the most was travel pretty much stopped, whether it was domestic travel or... had all of that. Make sure that their people are safe. So we had to create a reporting process to make sure that as people were becoming infected or getting tested or exposed, that we were made aware of it and we could, you know, we had to change some policies to make sure that people weren't financially hurt, or at least we could minimize the financial impact on them. Or other things that we had to do. And then ultimately, you had to change some things about yourself personally. I found myself having to lean much more on effective questions and the ability to ask the right questions at the right time, versus just relying so much on me being with you and reading body language and observing. I had to really, really listen better.
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Interviewer5:55
Interesting that you said it because I think there's a lot of young people out there that are now looking for jobs at stable businesses that are still thriving during COVID, where a lot of bars and shops are closing, and looking at pest control. And I think listening to how you perform leadership is quite impressive and inspiring to a lot of young folks out there. You get a lot of new people applying to pest control, to the Rollins brand. Is there a curve to be seen?
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Steven Leavitt6:40
You know, we typically see the curve is when the economy is hurting, yeah, we get a lot more traffic coming to us because our industry, forget the company itself, the industry is pretty resilient. It's not dynamic, right? Right. So that's typically when, in fact, I've probably had more Zoom interviews in the last four weeks than I have in the last four months.
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Interviewer7:28
Yeah, agreed. Yeah, yeah, it's incredible. Yeah, yeah. Super Steve, thank you so much for the brief interview and thank you for agreeing to revisit our show and being a regular day. We look forward.
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Steven Leavitt7:41
Absolutely, Daniel. It was great seeing you again and I look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you.