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Serve Robotics Inc. (SERV)

Q2 2019 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 6, 2019

$9.43

-4.70%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to ServiceMaster's Second Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded and broadcast on the Internet. Beginning today's call is Jesse Jenkins, ServiceMaster's Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer.I will now turn it over to Mr. Jenkins, who will introduce the other speakers on the call.

Jesse Jenkins

Management

Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, and welcome to our second quarter 2019 earnings conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that throughout today's call, management may make forward-looking statements to assist you in understanding the company's strategies and operating performance.As stated on Slide 2, all forward-looking statements are subject to the forward-looking statements legend contained in our public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and are subject to the risk factors contained in our public filings that may cause actual results to vary materially from those contemplated in the forward-looking statements. Information discussed on today's call speaks only as of today, August 6, 2019. The company undertakes no obligation to update any information discussed on today's call.This morning, ServiceMaster issued a press release filed with the SEC on Form 8-K, highlighting our second quarter 2019 financial results. The press release and the related presentation can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at servicemaster.com.We will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures throughout today's call, and we have included definitions of these terms in our press release. We've also included reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures in our press release and the appendix of this presentation in order to better assist you in understanding our financial performance. All references on the call to EBITDA are to adjusted EBITDA, as defined in our press release.Joining me on today's call are ServiceMaster's Chief Executive Officer, Nik Varty; and Chief Financial Officer, Tony DiLucente. Slide 3 of the presentation posted on the Investor Relations section of our website shows the agenda we will cover today.I'll now turn the call over to ServiceMaster's CEO, Nik Varty. Nik?

Nikhil Varty

Management

Thanks, Jesse. And thank you all for your time today. I will start with the Q2 financial highlights on Slide 4. ServiceMaster delivered strong revenue growth in the second quarter as we continue progress on all of our strategic initiatives. We reported 8% revenue growth in the quarter, including 10% growth at Terminix and 2% growth at ServiceMaster Brands. Organic growth at Terminix was 4%, including 6% in Residential Pest, 4% in Termite & Home Services and 2% in Commercial Pest. Meaningful retention gains and pricing realizations across all service lines helped to offset lower new unit sales due to the unseasonal weather patterns in the quarter. I am very proud of the growth Matt Stevenson and our team delivered in face of a challenging environment this quarter, driving several measures anticipating and countering the impacts of weather.Our strategic acquisition program contributed the remaining growth in Terminix as we continue to identify attractive opportunities. Growth at ServiceMaster Brands came from higher revenue performance of 16% in commercial cleaning national accounts and 6% in health care cleaning and disinfection. We are also able to leverage our relationships with major insurance carriers in the quarter to drive a 24% year-over-year increase in the amount of revenue generated from program leads.Dion Persson and his team have led an incredible effort to deliver strong returns from our strategic acquisition program, starting from developing a creative value creation strategy with robust pipelines, building strong bottoms-up M&A and integration processes and bringing onboard much needed capabilities, talent and synergistic opportunities. We closed on seven tuck-in acquisitions in the quarter that will deliver high returns by buying at attractive prices and fully leveraging our existing infrastructure.We also closed on two other acquisitions that add strategic capabilities to drive future growth and productivity. As a result of these…

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Thanks, Nik, and good morning, everyone. I'll be covering our Q2 consolidated financial summary and segment level results, cash flow and 2019 guidance. Turning to slide 9, let's start with the Q2 consolidated financial summary. Revenue grew $41 million or 8% compared to the prior year. Terminix grew organically $18 million or 4%, excluding $3 million of the year-over-year revenue decline from our divested fumigation service line. Revenue from acquired businesses at Terminix added $24 million or 5% growth in the quarter, partially from the Assured Environment acquisition, which grew 13% year-over-year. ServiceMaster Brands added 2% growth in the quarter, in line with our expectations for the business. Excluding the impact of $11 million in the prior period for historically allocated American Home Shield costs, EBITDA in Q2 would have been down $4 million year-over-year. EBITDA was lower in the period partially due to increased investments in the Terminix business as well as spin-related dis-synergies.Turning to Slide 10, I'll discuss Terminix starting with revenue growth by channel. Before I break down the revenue channels, I'd like to note that this presentation excludes the performance of our divested termite fumigation operation. This allows us to focus our efforts on faster growing and more profitable revenue channels, including termite preventative services. However, we do still diagnose customers that are in need of termite fumigation completion jobs. When this occurs, we're able to outsource the completion to a third-party provider in order to solve our customers' problems. With the -- while the revenue will continue to decline in this area as we shift our focus, the outsourcing is going well and we expect a full year revenue decline of approximately $4 million.We are presenting fumigation separately to more clearly reflect our ongoing performance. Our 2% to 3% organic growth guidance continues to exclude…

Nikhil Varty

Management

Thanks, Tony. Two years into my journey at ServiceMaster, I am even more excited about the possibilities and incredibly proud of the progress our people are enabling to create a best-in-class company. We continue to make consistent improvements in our service levels as demonstrated by our improving customer retention numbers. We fully recognize that our employee satisfaction must be a key priority to help drive increased customer satisfaction and are seeing significant improvements in our safety performance, talent build up and employee engagement scores, while improving benefits for our employees and investing in a servant leadership culture.We are heavily very focused on executing our 3 strategic pillars and have achieved several milestones to become an industry leader. We are well positioned to build a strong customer and service-focused company that sustainably delivers above market growth rates, strong profitability and cash flow. Our investments in building a talent bench strength, improved go-to-market models, innovation and customer experience platform will provide the differentiation we need to deliver outstanding shareholder value. We have transitioned new leaders into 2 of our businesses in Greg Rutherford and Aster Angagaw, and we continue to develop deep talent at all levels of the organization.The mission of our company is to create cleaner, healthier and safer environments for our customers at home, work and play. Achieving our goals requires a cultural alignment throughout the organization as we focus on serving our customers with a servant leadership mindset. We have recently launched a companywide initiative in which leaders in our company interact one-on-one with associates to listen to what they think about our organization today, so that we can shape the culture of our future. We want to move towards an empowered, motivated, accountable organization of highly capable people who will create value for our customers, employees and shareholders well into the future. I know with the momentum we have in the business, we will drive a change through the organization and create teams with a capability and motivation to drive continued progress on our value creation strategies that will make us the best service company in the industry.I will now turn the call back over to Jesse to lead us through a Q&A session.

Jesse Jenkins

Management

Thanks, Nik. As a reminder, during the question-and-answer session, we encourage you to ask any questions that you may have, but please note that guidance is limited to the outlook we provided in our press release and webcast presentation. [Operator Instructions].Kevin, let's open up the line for questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And our first question comes from the line of Ian Zaffino of Oppenheimer.

Ian Zaffino

Analyst

Question would be just be focusing on M&A. What sort of multiples are you paying? What sort of multiples are you seeing for potential acquisitions? And also kind of -- we will take -- you definitely turned up the acquisition sort of cannon, call it. What's been driving that, and what are you seeing there and what gives you confidence to continue to do that?

Nikhil Varty

Management

Ian, as you know, right since about two years, we have made it clear that acquisitions are an integral part of our innovation and growth strategy. And the way we look at acquisitions is twofold; one is there's some strategic acquisitions that we make, which bring in some very much needed capabilities for us as we've done with Assured Environments for urban strategy as we brought it up with -- as we brought Copesan, which really helped us significantly in our journey towards commercial. We've looked at Cooper Pest Control, which helped us with bedbugs. So we continue down that path of strategic acquisitions, but we're being very selective in that as to what targets we bring in based on our needs and how we can generate synergies in the future, both growth and productivity synergies.And it's a slow process where we continue to build the capabilities, we're continuing to -- but we're doing it with extremely strong discipline in what kind of targets you bring in and how we pay for them. As you know, the multiples in this area are -- have been driven quite high. But there is a way to do this in a very disciplined way of how it always -- we have a targeted return, which we will pay carefully just making sure that any of these acquisitions deliver that. The second prong, as I mentioned, we look at very selective and focused tuck-ins, which help us with density improvement in certain areas of the country rather than -- so you have to compare that. We typically compare that with what it will cost us to continue to prime the pump on marketing dollars versus bringing in some smart acquisitions that help us with just improve the density of certain branches and certain geographies where we believe we have very strong capabilities to serve.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of George Tong of Goldman Sachs.

George Tong

Analyst

You mentioned that you're strengthening your commercial pest marketing initiatives primarily in the back half of the year. Can you elaborate on this initiative and the expected impact it will have on Terminix margins, particularly around the timing of when this spend will happen over the next 2 quarters?

Nikhil Varty

Management

Yes. George, as you know, when we started this journey, our #1 focus was getting our residential business back on track. And we were $200-some million player, $260 million kind of player in the commercial space but we're losing traction quite a lot over the previous years. By bringing in -- creating a separate business unit, bringing in a strong leadership, and we have -- and by acquiring Copesan and really leveraging on their capabilities, we've made some incredible strides and increase our market share and market leadership in that area.So we saw for the first time, this was -- the growth we registered this quarter was the best in three years that we've seen, so we're seeing positive trends. However, we're still at the beginning phases in building -- rebuilding the fundamentals of this business. One of the key areas where we're looking at is adding selectively and understanding which cities we believe we have the strongest opportunities for growth and building strong sales capabilities. So we will -- we continue to act, put soldiers, really people are focused in understanding the market, knowing what we need to deliver, but bringing in more business. This is not your residential business B2C kind of marketing.So it's really -- you got to get these boots on the ground there. So that's the investment we're continuing to make. But again, we're doing it in a selective way, which we know will generate returns in the future. And then, we're looking at pricing optimizations because as our retention -- as our NPS scores have improved and our service levels have improved, we are gaining certain credibility in the marketplace to garner a fair share on pricing. And this, again, has to be done very carefully and selectively, and I believe pricing is a factor of what your customers allow or enable, but our customers are more interested in consistent service, high-quality service and we are starting to serve more profitable verticals, like food service, health care and others, so being deliberate about where we invest our money and what -- where we focus on. So these are the kind of investments we're looking. And once we have our Salesforce system in place, that will also give us the scalability opportunities and also consistency in the delivery of service.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Tim Mulrooney of William Blair.

Timothy Mulrooney

Analyst

The resi revenue is up 6% organically. Obviously, a very solid result. Can you talk a little bit about this result? How much of this was an improvement in retention versus higher new unit sales versus pricing, like you were just discussing?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. Thanks, Tim. So I mean the biggest drivers in our residential pest growth are pricing -- are pricing realization, and then the -- after that I would say retention is the other biggest driver. We've never had a focus on reducing cancels though we drive throughout the field and that's been a successful program. We highlighted some of that initiative during the Investor Day and we've had good traction pulling that through this year. So those are the two biggest factors. The -- so on residential pest, the lead flow was okay. The lead flow was a little bit lower on the termite side, but in residential pest, we really gained from price and retention improvement mostly.

Timothy Mulrooney

Analyst

And the lead flow on the termite side being lower, is that primarily due to the poor weather in the quarter you think Tony?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Definitely a part of it, yes, yes.

Nikhil Varty

Management

Yes.

Anthony DiLucente

Management

It's obviously, we make an -- we gave you an estimate of what we think the weather impact is, but I think that definitely had an impact.

Nikhil Varty

Management

And Tim, the wave for new leads, it does affect for the quarter, so we try to do a fair job of calculating what we lost. What I really applaud the team is they saw this coming and there were a lot of flexibility initiatives that were launched, like rescheduling work, optimizing some weekends, looking at cross-selling, energizing our technicians to cross-sell, training them better. I mean our technician-led sales were up 9% year-over-year, which is -- it's a small base, but this is the kind of -- I like the kind of mindset that the team is building to anticipate some of these problems that had them up first. The other thing that leads to the issue is because these leads not only affecting this quarter, but they do have some impact in the outer quarters because you don't get the recurring impact of those leads that you lost because of weather. But weather is -- again, I think weather is a standard that will happen. We just have to figure out how we counter that, how we drive business responsibly and continue to please our customers. I mean the most important part is getting our fundamentals right. And I am really pleased that this is -- month after month after month, we continue to see improving, not only improving NPS scores, but finally resulting in good retention improvements.

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. And I'll add. When we see the weather impact, we try to drive more creative leads through our technicians, and we've had some success on that in Q2 to help offset to some degree.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan of Morgan Stanley.

Jeffrey Goldstein

Analyst

This is actually Jeff Goldstein, on for Toni. Your largest competitor has seen slowing organic growth over the last two quarters and this is the first quarter in about 5 years you actually outperformed them. So maybe you can update us on what you're seeing out in the competitive environment? And do you think these recent initiatives you've been undertaking could actually allow you to consistently take share moving forward?

Nikhil Varty

Management

Yes. I think the way I would see it is, we still see the market fundamentals fairly strong. Weather has been kind of a weird thing starting January with a very cold winter, a pretty moderate spring and then excessive rain. So those things happen and like I said, we've got to find ways to live with this, but also make sure we find creative ways around that. For us the story has all been about just fixing the fundamentals. You can see just from the number of missed appointment reductions by over 50%, that is a major customer pleaser. As you know, last year, in the back half of the year, we showed some good growth, but those came with more like the onetime events, like improving start rates, improving our completion rates, those are necessary, but some of these just can't be repeated, but the fundamentals are being fixed.We are communicating a lot better with the customers before we visit them to help them understand the kind of service we're going to provide them, what else do they need us to be prepared for, and then communicating with them afterwards about how the service was driven, how the tech behaved. So it really helps us learn a lot. But the most important part is it helps increase the -- enhance the customer experience a lot. So for us, it's an ongoing journey. And as you know, the second aspect was really putting a stake in the ground and from -- stating that we do believe in the commercial business and we do believe we have a big right to play and be a leader, so that's how we're driving consistently. It's a matter for us is just -- we're not there yet. I mean we've just -- still got a long way to go from where we were. But I am very proud that we're seeing sustainability and consistency. The key is, again, through the second half and through next year even with growing numbers, how do we continue to build a pipeline. And in the end, retention is going to be the key saver because we've got to get from a retention perspective, that's probably the least expensive way of continuing to grow.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Hoffman of Stifel.

Michael Hoffman

Analyst

So this is actually just one question, but it does have some layers in it, if I can. I am trying to get a good feel for how to think about the trend by segment, 3Q, 4Q, year-over-year of the margins. If I frame that against midpoint of revs to midpoint of EBITDA, full year, it looks like you'd be up about 40 basis points in total. How do I think about the mix of that contribution between Terminix and SMB by quarter comparatively year-over-year?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

So let me make sure I understand your question. You're basically saying, you're looking at the third quarter and fourth quarter and you're asking where we're heading from a margin...

Michael Hoffman

Analyst

What do you see -- Yes. What do you think the trend is year-over-year, 3 and 4Q by the two segments comparatively, given the midpoint of guidance, both rev and EBITDA has you up 40 basis points for the year?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. We definitely have more margin improvement in the second half of the year in Terminix. I don't think there's a meaningful change in ServiceMaster Brands. And so that's -- so Terminix is definitely the driver. And we have really consistently said that all along that we were going to see lower incremental margins in the first 2 quarters and we're going to slow -- trend up particularly in the third and fourth quarter. So that's the main driver for that trend in the second half.

Michael Hoffman

Analyst

And you would expect Terminix to be better margin year-over-year in 4Q as well because you have a seasonal pattern here I got to follow as well?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. Better year-over-year, right, given that factors into seasonality. Yes, that's right. Remember we lap the dis-synergies and the Salesforce investment in the fourth quarter as well too.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Dolev of Nomura.

Dan Dolev

Analyst

Great results. Great organic growth. Can you help us clarify some of the margin guide, the lowering of the incremental margin? It sounds like it was because of acquisitions, like kind of more where were you 3, 4 months ago versus where you are now in terms of your expected contribution of these, and what has changed?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. Thanks, Dan. It's definitely driven by just investing more in growth, particularly in three areas. We talked a lot about transformation, the clean sheet redesign and let me separate that a little bit from the Salesforce investment. This is our front-end led transformation that Pratip Dastidar is leading and we're looking at ways of doing things smarter, better. We're investing more in that, which will have good long-term value for us. Standing up commercial and trying to get -- accelerate growth, getting our sales organization filled to where it needs to be is a part of it. And then on the residential side, higher sales and marketing, that we've made a conscious decision to invest more in sales and marketing for the remainder of the year. I mean, so that's the main drivers.

Nikhil Varty

Management

Yes. I think, Dan, where fundamentally if you want to get to a level that's ultimately not just reaching market or above market growth rates and good profitability, it's also how you sustain that quarter-over-quarter. So a lot of it is building the right talent, building the capabilities, even within, we've had -- we've added quite a lot of incredible talent from several different companies that bring us a lot of richness and it's in the areas of HR and legal and not just in the business. I mean, so we are making great strides, and we're starting to see some great dividends from that. But this is really a build up towards being the best-in-class company, which will then be propped up and steadily supported by capable systems like Salesforce that take us into the future with better machine learning capabilities and helping our technicians focus much more on the customer rather than the administrative work that we were overly layering on them.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jamie Clement of Buckingham Research.

James Clement

Analyst

I don't know who wants to take this, maybe Tony, but one thing that came up 3 months ago, and I just -- kind of just curious to go over this, again. Obviously, second half of last year, you all saw tremendous improvement in organic growth. But if retention is improving, why does your organic growth have to decelerate in the second half of this year as implied by your guidance?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. That's a good question. And I do think we have some very tough compares in Q3 and Q4 year over -- and we had, if you recall, 7.8% growth in residential pest in the third quarter of 2018 and 7.1% growth in residential pest in the fourth quarter of 2018. We also added an accounting adjustment that we had to make for our -- accounting change that we had to make for the new revenue recognition that affected termite positively in the fourth quarter of 2018. So we've always known that we're going to have a tough comparison in the back half. And then, you really have to go back and look at how we achieve that extraordinarily high growth in primarily residential pest in 2018. We greatly improved -- well first, we greatly -- we made a conscious decision to spend more on marketing. We drove more leads and then we, on top of that, implemented programs to really increase our start rates, our completion rates, which helped us process that revenue and achieve that growth. And we've said all along that we can't repeat that kind of improvement that we made in start rates and completion rates. And so that's why we're sticking to our guide on organic growth of 2% to 3%. We'll have some -- we've always said all along that the back half has tough compares year-over-year.

Nikhil Varty

Management

And the positive thing, Jamie is, you know this industry very well and like any other recurring business, your real consistency improvement is only going to come from steady improvements and retention. And we had seen the NPS scores come up, so we knew that the correlation is there, but we couldn't predict the exact timing. And we've seen the last couple of quarters, especially this one, where we started seeing the retention needle move up. So this takes time. It's not going to be a straight line, but it's hard to do the start rate, completion rate improvement. At best, we're maintaining that, continuing to steadily make sure that we don't brittle that way, but at the same time I think retention is going to be the key game. And we're being very prudent about how we go about building this and not doing it with onetime events kind of stuff, so the whole focus is building a consistent machine for the future.

James Clement

Analyst

Okay. And then just one follow-up, if I may. I'm hearing out there over the last couple of quarters that it's become progressively difficult to fill open sales positions. Are you seeing the same thing? And if you are, what are you doing to make sure you're hiring the right people?

Nikhil Varty

Management

One of the things we also did is we changed very clearly from a new HR look to make sure we're not just bringing in people, but we're bringing in highly credible capable people who are setup for success. We've done some tremendous improvements in onboarding of these people. So we reduced the attrition rates in the beginning of this process, but it is difficult because in the economy that we're in, be the -- it's challenging to get the kind of people you want. But we're doing some very targeted moves. We're focusing on hiring a lot more veterans, we're going towards more customer service related people that we can bring in, who understand what customer service is. We have upped our -- even our leadership development program in terms -- and then extending it beyond to more college-based recruiting. So there's a lot of initiatives that HR is taking to help us not only improve the pace at which we can bring in people, but also make sure that we're bringing in people that are not setup for failure to begin with.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Judah Sokel of JPMorgan.

Judah Sokel

Analyst

M&A has come up -- M&A has come up a number of times in the Q&A, so I just wanted to follow up to get little more specific in terms of the topic of technology, given the acquisition that you guys made in the quarter. I was wondering, if perhaps, Nik, you could share some thoughts on the role of technology for the pest control industry moving forward? And more specifically on the purchase you made, can you talk about perhaps the type of technology this company employs? Is it related to digital control and monitoring or something else? Does it have residential applications or is it specifically for national accounts and commercial? Any color is appreciated.

Nikhil Varty

Management

Yes. This is a very small acquisition, and they have capabilities from a wide range of focus, but primarily towards more electronically controlled solutions that can not only allow us to do remote tracking and monitoring, but also daily reporting to customers, creating some value add, triggering actions faster to cover. So, but bear in mind, these technologies are still in relatively early phases. So we're going through some very exciting pilot programs, which we're learning a lot from. What I'm happy about is this is the first time we've really made, as a company, a major step in this direction. We brought in more scientific capabilities and knowledge base with some incredible talent in that group. So I am really excited about this because I believe this is the way of the future. And we do want to be the industry leader. This is how we have to learn how to operate and invest in.And the other point of commercial versus residential, this -- in the outset, I see a lot more applications towards commercial, more national accounts, because of scalability, opportunities. But again, I'll be excited to report on this as time goes by. We just want to be transparent about the activities we're doing, so we try to bring this up as -- like we did with our Tick Defend System last time and we'll continue to report on progress of all these initiatives.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Seth Weber of RBC Capital Markets.

Seth Weber

Analyst

Sorry, if I missed this, but on the strength in the commercial business, can you talk about whether you're seeing any traction there with cross-selling with SMB, and sort of what you're doing there to try and push that initiative?

Nikhil Varty

Management

Seth, good question. This is going to be a major focus for us in the future, but as you know, with anything that's new, we start with some credible pilots. We have a fairly large retail chain that we've been working this with. The pilots are going really well. But it's not just about how you bundle, we're not looking at providing 1 plus 1 kind of service. We're looking at how can we redraw the lines on what is commercial cleaning all about and how we write the procedures for them, help them get better and then reduce the pest ingress because of the cleanliness, so you clean more and you spray less kind of mindset.So you're providing a highly value-based product to the customer. Apart from that, the fundamentals have to follow that. So getting -- it will be futile to sell this to the customer through our channel that performs the pest service, or our franchise partner that performs the cleaning. This has to be transparent to the customer, so we're building the interfaces that will allow single billing for these services and make it really easy for the customer to do business with us. Having said that, we have started marketing this to several other customers more to see the traction demand. We're starting to see a lot of interest in this area with couple other larger national accounts. So I am pretty excited about the promise this shows. But again, this is not a major event for the upcoming quarters, but I see a lot of promise in the future. And I'd rather be more deliberate upfront to fully understand the kind of product and package and all we provide our customers and then scale it up fast enough that we can gain a lot more traction in the future.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Justin Hauke of Robert W. Baird.

Justin Hauke

Analyst

I just wanted to clarify on the acquisition contribution and the flow through into EBITDA. The revenue guidance inching a little bit higher on the incremental revenue, but not seeing that flow through onto the EBITDA guidance. So can you just remind us exactly how much revenue contribution you're expecting from M&A this year versus the guidance you previously gave?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. We're expecting about $105 million of M&A revenue, inorganic revenue for the year. It's up $5 million. Essentially, it's a 20% incremental margin on EBITDA.

Justin Hauke

Analyst

Okay. Got it. That makes more sense then. And then I guess the second question was, so Copesan, I think, had -- this is the last quarter that there was some of that being in the acquired base. You mentioned that Assured was up 13% on it for year-over-year comparison. What was the Copesan year-over-year comparison, I think it was 6% last quarter?

Nikhil Varty

Management

Copesan was acquired in the end of March, last day of March. So that already is part of our organic base, this is not separate. So we don't call that out anymore.

Justin Hauke

Analyst

Okay. So Copesan was in the 2% year-over-year organic growth?

Nikhil Varty

Management

Yes. Including the last year's base, obviously.

Anthony DiLucente

Management

And that was part of the improvement.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Gary Bisbee of Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Gary Bisbee

Analyst

I guess just a follow up on Terminix margins. So you lapped Copesan and yet the margin was still down pretty sharply in the business. I understand all the commentary about investing, but the guidance seems to imply that expense growth for Terminix will slow sharply in the back half. And I know in Q4 you've got the dis-synergies and Salesforce spend goes away, so certainly that's a contributor, but can you just tell us how you're balancing all of the areas of investment that you've talked about on the call and over the last couple of years with the concept of delivering to the EBITDA guidance and improving margin trends?

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Yes. Couple of things. I mean, we continue to work on productivity to offset the investments that we're making in our business. We have an active program, we meet on it every week and we're going to continue to drive productivity. We also have some acquisitions, tuck-ins that will have some impact in the second half of the year. But obviously, the focus for us is really drive as much productivity because we're going to continue to invest in growth in the business. We want to stay on track in driving that long-term sustainable organic growth, growing that recurring revenue, so that's always going to be the focus for us.

Jesse Jenkins

Management

Okay. Great, and thank you. That's our last question on the call. We appreciate your participation in the call today and webcast. And as a reminder, a replay of the call will be available on our website in about 1 hour from now, and we look forward to speaking with you next during our Q3 2019 earnings release tentatively scheduled for November 15.

Nikhil Varty

Management

Thank you, everybody.

Anthony DiLucente

Management

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation, and ask that you please disconnect your lines.