A Real F.O.B.

Bill Pollard is our "Power over Pests" Hero! C. William Pollard is Chairman of the Board of The ServiceMaster Company. A native of Chicago, Bill and his wife, Judy, have been married for over 40 years.  They have four adult children and twelve grandchildren. 

ServiceMaster was founded by Marion E. Wade, a minor league baseball player, as a moth-proofing company in Chicago, Illinois. Today, ServiceMaster provides services for the healthcare and education markets, and home services for the residential market under such well-known brands as Terminix, TruGreen, American Residential Services, Merry Maids and American Home Shield.  The Company serves more than 12 million customers in the United States and 44 foreign countries, with customer level revenue of $7 billion. During the past twenty-five years, the Company has achieved market leadership in each of the markets it serves and has provided an average annual total return to its shareholders of 20%.

In addition to his work at ServiceMaster, Bill serves as a director of two other public companies: Herman Miller, Inc. and Ah-humProvident Corporation.  Bill devotes much of his time to nonprofits and  serves as a director for Wheaton College, The Drucker Foundation and is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. (Where he is the only person who has enough chutzpah to keep Franklin in line.)

Bill wanted ServiceMaster to be perceived as a Christian-oriented company. Representatives explain that the name ServiceMaster comes from a Christian concept called "service thy master." The name Terminix, also is faith-based from the latin terminatio and crucifix.

Their corporate slogan "Honor God in All We Do" will be printed on all the ServiceMaster coins minted by the U.S. Treasury in 2012, when ServiceMaster loans the U.S. Government 38 Trillion. Bill has also recently opened a Catholic branch of ServiceMaster in Latin American countries called "Mary Maids." In 2007 Bill sold ServiceMaster to Jack Welch & CD&R Private Equity Group, who has since changed the corporate slogan to "God will always have a job, but you won't unless you get back to work."

Before ServiceMaster, Bill served on the Wheaton faculty and as a Vice President of Wheaton College, until he was tired of taking out his own trash can, and said out loud "Don't we have anyone to do this for us?"

We soon discovered that many people are Pollard F.O.B.'s -  infact, we didn't realize it but he knows Moses and Oscar the Grouch.