ServiceMaster

ServiceMaster Brands is an American privately held company that provides residential and commercial services. Its headquarters are located in Memphis, Tennessee, after moving there in early 2007 from Downers Grove, Illinois. Brands operated by ServiceMaster include ServiceMaster Clean, ServiceMaster Restore, Merry Maids, AmeriSpec and Furniture Medic. The core services of the company are disaster response and restoration, janitorial services, professional home cleaning, furniture repair and home inspections.
ServiceMaster has more than 7,000 company-owned and franchise locations around the world. It has 13,000 corporate employees and a franchise network that independently employs over 33,000 additional people. In 2007, the company had approximately 5,500 locations.
History.
ServiceMaster was founded in 1929 by Marion E. Wade, a minor league baseball player, as a moth-proofing company in Chicago, Illinois. It was incorporated in 1947 and expanded to franchised carpet cleaning in 1952. Its movement into business services makes it a large outsourcing company.
In the 1980s, the company built a network of branch and franchise-based service companies including Terminix, TruGreen, Merry Maids, and American Home Shield. In 2001, ServiceMaster divested its management services businesses to focus more on its residential and commercial business.
A group of equity sponsors led by Clayton, Dubilier, and Rice (CD&R) acquired ServiceMaster in July 2007 and took the company private. In the same year, the company moved its headquarters from Downers Grove, Ill., to Memphis, Tenn., to better enable the corporate staff to work with all of its business units.
In 2011, Hank Mullany, former executive vice president of Walmart U.S. and president of northern U.S. Walmart, was appointed as CEO for all ServiceMaster brands. Robert J. Gillette was appointed chief executive officer in June 2013.
As of January 1, 2014, TruGreen is no longer a brand of ServiceMaster, opting instead to remain a privately held company. TruGreen acquired Scotts Lawn Service in 2016.
ServiceMaster Global Holdings, Inc., the parent of The ServiceMaster Company, LLC, announced on June 25, 2014, that it had priced an initial public offering of 35,900,000 shares of common stock at $17.00 per share. The shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on June 25, 2014, under the ticker symbol SERV. The company continues to be majority-owned by private equity firms Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, StepStone Group and Ridgemont Equity Partners, and JPMorgan Chase Funding.
ServiceMaster announced a relocation of its global headquarters from East Memphis to Peabody Place in Downtown Memphis in June 2016. The move was completed in 2018.
Nikhil Varty was appointed chief executive officer in July 2017. On July 26, 2017, ServiceMaster Global Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SERV, $42.18, Market Capitalization: $5.7 billion) announced a plan to spin-off its American Home Shield business from its Terminix and Franchise Services Group into a separate publicly-traded company.
In October 2020, Roark Capital Group purchased ServiceMaster Brands.
Brands.
AmeriSpec.
Amerispec is a franchisor which sells and supports residential and commercial inspection services franchisees throughout the United States and Canada. It is a subsidiary of ServiceMaster. The company's main services are general home inspection, relocation inspections and commercial property inspections. AmeriSpec has around 300 independently owned and operated franchises in the United States and Canada. It is a subsidiary of The ServiceMaster Company, and was formerly a wholly owned subsidiary of American Home Shield, another ServiceMaster company.
Controversy.
On July 24, 2007, a lawsuit was filed against American Home Shield alleging that "American Home Shield engaged in a pattern and practice of failing to fulfill its contractual obligation to its customers". In February 2008 American Home Shield announced a proposed settlement.