Rollins Has Grown Revenue for 100 Straight Quarters. Here Are 3 More Boring Businesses to Watch
Rollins just logged a milestone that spans two crashes and a pandemic, and three other unglamorous businesses share the same stubborn habit of growing no matter what the economy does.
Some of the market’s steadiest compounders haul trash, treat termites, wash work shirts, and keep factory-floor vending machines stocked with drill bits. With its latest results, Rollins (NYSE:ROL | ROL Price Prediction) chief executive Jerry Gahlhoff pointed to 100 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. That works out to 25 years, a stretch that covers both the 2008 meltdown and the 2020 shutdowns. Such a record is the whole argument for boring businesses. The four companies below sell services their customers must keep buying, and most have shown they can raise prices along the way.
Waste Management: Trash Pickup Never Gets Canceled
Waste Management (NYSE:WM) collects garbage, runs transfer stations and landfills, sorts recycling, turns landfill gas into renewable natural gas, and since buying Stericycle, it also hauls regulated medical waste. The company says it operates North America’s largest disposal network and collection fleet. Demand doesn’t depend on the economy. Households and hospitals keep producing waste, municipal contracts run for years, and new landfills are very hard to permit, so the ones WM already owns are scarce assets.
Its ability to raise prices shows up in the numbers. In the third quarter, core price rose 5.8%, and Collection and Disposal yield rose 3.4%, and the gap between price and cost added 40 basis points of underlying margin. Customers stayed despite higher prices: commercial churn improved to 9.3%. Chief operating officer Tara Hemmer put it plainly on the call: “We also know how to pass those costs along to our customers through price increases and leverage that.”
The record through past downturns is just as steady. WM’s regular quarterly dividend was $0.27 in 2008, rose to $0.29 in 2009 and to $0.315 in 2010. In the pandemic year, it went to $0.545 from $0.5125 in 2019. The stock is up 336.21% over ten years.
Risk: Volume is soft. Collection and Disposal volume slipped 0.4% in the third quarter, and higher fuel costs created a 70-basis-point headwind. Leadership is also changing: Jim Fish said on the call that he will retire in early January, and President John Morris will succeed him.
Rollins: Pests Ignore the Business Cycle
Rollins is North America’s largest pest and termite control company. It operates under Orkin and a group of regional brands including HomeTeam, Clark, Western and Fox, and serves more than 2.8 million customers. Most of the revenue comes from recurring service agreements. Restaurants, warehouses and food processors need pest control to pass health inspections, and homeowners rarely cancel termite protection to save a few dollars.
Management describes Rollins as “a CPI-plus business,” meaning its price increases have run ahead of inflation. On the third-quarter call, management said customers responded well to the latest increase and that it had not seen a meaningful rise in cancellations or requests to roll prices back. Gahlhoff said, “Our recurring residential customer base is healthy, with customer count continuing to grow in the third quarter and retention remaining strong.” The board also raised the quarterly dividend to $0.20 from $0.1825.
Risk: Rollins is having its rockiest year in a long time. AI-driven search is changing how homeowners find exterminators, residential organic growth slowed to 2.3%, and operating margin contracted 140 bps to 21.2%. The stock is down 41.59% year to date, though it remains up 189.17% over ten years. Anyone who owns Rollins today is trusting that the underlying demand will survive a marketing problem.
Cintas: Work Uniforms and Restroom Supplies, Delivered on a Schedule
Cintas (NASDAQ:CTAS) rents and launders work uniforms and also supplies floor mats, restroom products, first aid cabinets, and fire protection services. Its regular delivery routes serve more than one million businesses. Once a Cintas truck is stopping by every week, switching to another vendor takes real effort. Speaking about the economy, chief executive Todd Schneider said: “We prefer an absolutely thriving economy, just like any American would, but we don’t need it.”
The company’s margins back him up. Gross margin rose 120 bps to a record 51.5% in fiscal Q1 2027, after fiscal 2026 had already set an all-time high of 50.7%. Operating margin reached 23.6% vs. 22.7% a year earlier. Management says most of that improvement comes from adding customers and making routes more efficient, with pricing playing a smaller part. During the financial crisis, Cintas’s annual dividend went from $0.46 in February 2008 to $0.47 in February 2009 and $0.49 in late 2010. The adjusted share price is up 839.03% over ten years.
Risk: The pending acquisition of UniFirst (NYSE:UNF) still needs FTC clearance. A long review or a blocked deal would trouble management, and if the deal closes, Cintas will have to take over a large competitor. The effective tax rate also rose to 20.0% vs 17.6%.
Fastenal: Supply Machines Built Into Customers’ Factories
Fastenal (NASDAQ:FAST) sells fasteners, safety gear, cutting tools and maintenance supplies to manufacturers and contractors. What sets it apart is location: much of its inventory sits inside customer plants in bins and vending machines that reorder automatically. At the end of the third quarter, it had 143,878 weighted FASTBin and FASTVend installations in the field. Contract customers now account for 76.5% of revenue, and a plant that runs its supply room on Fastenal’s equipment has little reason to remove it.
Pricing added about 240 bps to third-quarter sales growth, and return on invested capital reached 32.5%, compared with a 10-year average of about 28%. Fastenal kept paying through the 2020 shutdowns: its quarterly dividend was $0.25 through 2020, up from $0.22 in late 2019, and it added a $0.40 payment that December. The stock is up 599.45% over ten years.
Risk: Fastenal depends more on the economy than the other three. Heavy manufacturing makes up about 45% of sales. Faster growth with large customers, who pay lower prices, is costing about 50 basis points of gross margin. And management expects price increases to add less to growth as Fastenal laps last year’s pricing actions.
Strength That Has Lasted Through Decades of Downturns
These companies rarely draw market buzz, and that is part of the appeal. Each sells a service its customers have to keep paying for, and each has a long record that runs through recessions (if that kind of multi-decade dividend strength is what you’re after, the longest streaks ranked by valuation are in a free Dividend Kings report). Rollins shows that even a durable business can have a rockiest year. For long-term holders, the things to keep an eye on are whether WM can keep its pricing ahead of costs, whether Rollins can fix how customers find it, whether Cintas’s UniFirst deal passes review, and how Fastenal’s margins hold up as its customers get larger.
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Chris Lange is a financial and geopolitical writer with more than a decade of experience covering a myriad of topics. He has published thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St., with past coverage focused heavily on stocks, IPOs, healthcare, defense, global affairs, and technology.
His work has been quoted, or referenced by a number of outlets including Business Insider, USA Today, Yahoo Finance, MSN, The Motley Fool, and many other publications. A graduate of Southwestern University, he studied business with a focus on investments and has previous experience in banking and startups.
When not reading or writing the news, he is following his passion for Lacrosse, playing chess, or building solar projects with his dad.
