Rentokil

2 Business View Caribbean Rentokil Initial Jamaica Limited Protecting people - enhancing lives Rentokil Initial Jamaica Limited is a company that is ac- tually made up of two different businesses. The Rento- kil division is part of the global Rentokil Group, a pest control company founded in London in 1925. Today, that company employs over 70,000 people worldwide and has operations in 40 countries. Rentokil came to Jamaica in 1968 and opened a branch in downtown Kingston and, according to its current Managing Direc- tor, Maurice Goldson, by the 1980s, Rentokil Jamaica had grown into the country’s premier pest control com- pany. For a time, pest control was the firm’s only business. Meanwhile, Goldson says that Rentokil began to face serious competition from what he calls “single-person spray men,” individuals who purported to be experi- enced pest control technicians in Jamaica’s unregu- lated environment, but were really just interlopers who could operate a spray gun. That and various “internal challenges” within the company led it to scale down the pest control aspect of its business, while ramping up a hygiene services division, specializing in sanitact units used for the disposal of feminine hygiene prod- ucts in commercial building restrooms. In 1996, Rentokil acquired the Initial Company, a towel