Jerry E. Gahlhoff
Chief Executive Officer and President at Rollins
Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to report that Rollins delivered another good quarter of growth and profitability, reflecting consistent execution of our operating strategies and continuous improvement in our business. Our financial performance for the second quarter was highlighted by an increase in revenue of approximately 15% to $821 million. I'm very pleased to report that we continue to see organic growth of approximately 8%. Further, this reflects a solid performance across all major service lines. Commercial pest control rose approximately 11%, residential increased over 18%, and termite was up approximately 14% this quarter.
Revenue performance in the quarter was healthy, although a little uneven due to pest seasonality. On a month-to-month basis, organic growth was very robust at 10% in May before slowing a bit in June. We're back on a good trajectory now in July, in line with what we saw in May. Importantly, our frontline team member staffing levels are better than we've seen in several years, and that is providing us with an opportunity to capitalize on demand for our services. I'm also quite pleased with the progress we're making this far with the Fox Pest Control acquisition, the second largest acquisition in the history of our company.
Taking a closer look, the integration of Fox has gone smoothly over the past few months. The Fox teams are executing and doing very well. The transaction was accretive to our second quarter earnings. This continues to be an exciting, highly complementary addition and we believe the revenue growth achieved this quarter is reflective of the team's focus on execution. The team at Fox was not distracted by the shift in ownership to Rollins and was focused on their customers and growing their business. Making for a smooth transition is a key tenet of our acquisition integration strategy, and our collective teams were diligent about not disrupting these efforts of our frontline team members post close.
I'd like to express my thanks to the Fox team and all our teammates that have worked hard to make this happen, and we're very excited about the growth opportunities ahead for the Fox brand. Next, we continue to have an enhanced capital structure and a robust acquisition pipeline as we're actively evaluating acquisition opportunities, both domestically and internationally. As I've highlighted in the past, Acquisitions are an important component in helping us expand our market position while also complementing efforts to accelerate recurring organic growth. We remain disciplined in evaluating M&A opportunities and feel very good about our continued ability to invest in strategic acquisitions while delivering strong organic growth across the business.
Another important part of our culture is our dedication to continuous improvement. As you've heard us discuss previously, we're constantly looking to improve our service levels and operating efficiencies. As a result, we continue to see opportunities for margin expansion as we move forward and execute our strategy. We are currently evaluating several streamlining efforts. Kim will provide more detail and address the margins in the quarter shortly. In addition to the unrelenting focus on productivity and improving our margin profile, we're also more strongly focused on safety. Our experience was disappointing in this area in Q2 as we continue to see higher settlements associated primarily with auto accidents.
This was a $0.01 per share drag on earnings this quarter versus a year ago. We have ramped up efforts to significantly reduce automobile accidents moving forward. Our drivers now utilize an app that begins monitoring driving behaviors once our vehicle is in motion. This app detects unsafe driving maneuvers, such as acceleration, braking, distractions and speed and then converts these data into an industry-accepted FICO driving score from 100 to 850, with 850 being the best. The data indicate that drivers with scores below 710 are 30% more likely to have a collision than those with higher scores. We're working hard in the field to increase driver safety awareness and get these scores up by coaching and training those with lower scores while recognizing and rewarding those that score the highest.
We believe these efforts will help us keep people safe and mitigate negative potential financial impact to our business. On the investment side, we proactively increased customer acquisition-related efforts during the second quarter and strategically invested more heavily on advertising spend when compared with the same quarter a year ago and sequentially versus the first quarter of 2023. While these costs were a $0.01 drag on second quarter earnings, we saw meaningful opportunities to go after and acquire new customers during the start of the busier spring and summer seasons. Given that approximately 80% of our business is recurring, I want to emphasize that the opportunity for us to attract potential new customers is very important and it's a strategic investment over the long term.
To date, we're extremely pleased with our targeted marketing and advertising efforts, which we believe is reflected in our strong organic growth performance for the quarter, and we expect this momentum to continue into the third quarter of 2023. Next, we continue to focus on modernizing our business, our capital structure and our organization. As you may recall, in February, we enhanced our capital structure by refinancing our revolver, increasing it from $175 million in two banks up to $1 billion in eight banks, providing us with investment-grade flexibility. More recently, our approximately $1.5 billion universal shelf facility was declared effective by the SEC.
This facility provides additional financial capital and flexibility to the company, and Ken will share some additional details on this in a moment. Operationally, we're committed to developing great talent and investing in our teams. Hiring has been healthy, and we've put a lot of energy into onboarding the right people in both the support functions and the customer-facing side of our business. As we look ahead to the improvement opportunity in front of us, we're focused on upgrading and realigning key areas in our home office support functions. You've heard us talk about opportunities in this area, and we are evaluating several initiatives as we start the second half of 2023.
We believe that driving this type of change will provide opportunities to accelerate our growth goals and enable our home office to become a better, more efficient provider of shared services to our frontline operations. Our modernization efforts are progressing well, but we're not done yet, and we look forward to sharing additional developments on this front later. In closing, before I turn the call over to Ken, we're pleased about where our business stands today. We're well positioned for the remainder of the year and remain focused on robust organic growth, delivering healthy incremental margins and continuing to attract, hire and retain top talent across the business.
I'll now turn the call over to Ken.
