Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (BAH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. And welcome, everyone, to the Booz Allen 2021 Investor Day. My name is Rubun Dey, and I am Head of Investor Relations here at Booz Allen. I see a lot of familiar faces out here in the audience today. I have spoken with most of you over the past few months here, but it is really great to finally be able to see you here in person. So thank you for coming and for joining us for this event. Our team here is very excited to share with you our investment thesis as well as the long-term strategic vision that makes it all happen. It's been a privilege for me to work alongside a lot of the key leaders that you'll hear from later today. First, our President and CEO, Horacio Rozanski; then our 3 market leads, Karen Dahut, who leads Defense and Commercial; Judi Dotson, who leads Intel; and Kristine Martin Anderson, who leads Civil. Next, you'll hear from our Chief Innovation Officer, Susan Penfield, and our Chief People Officer, Betty Thompson, to walk through our innovation agenda as well as our talent strategy. Finally, to cap things off, our CFO, Lloyd Howell, will walk through the financials as well as the underpinnings of our investment thesis. Before we start, just a few logistics. [Operator Instructions] And for your awareness, this event is being recorded. At this point, I am obligated to run through some of our safe harbor provisions by our trusted legal team over here. So hopefully, I won't mess this one up. Some of the statements we will make today are forward-looking and subject to certain risks and uncertainties as noted in our SEC filings and today's slides. We assume no obligation to update or revise the information discussed today. We will use some non-GAAP metrics that we believe provide useful information to investors and the reconciliations of the non-GAAP metrics are also included in our SEC filings and in today's materials. For more information, please see the safe harbor disclaimer contained in today's Investor Day presentation right here. With that excitement out of the way, it is my pleasure to introduce our CEO, Horacio Rozanski.

Thank you, Rubun, for that beautiful introduction and for sharing with us with -- the poetry of the safe harbor statement. I have been trying to get IR to wrap to the safe harbor statement for years, and they just won't do it. So happy that we could get together in person. This is a long time coming. We actually had to postpone this event twice because we actually wanted to get together with as many of you face-to-face as we possibly could. If you couldn't travel and you're joining us on the live stream, welcome. We're glad to have you. Our objective today is, of course, to share with you our financial projections and framework through our fiscal year 2025. But the reason we wanted to do this in person was to be able to talk to you with some clarity and look you in the eye as we share with you our vision for Booz Allen, where we're going and our excitement about it. Success at Booz Allen is a team sport. And so I'm not here alone today, and it's not just Lloyd and Rubun and I like we typically do. Some of our key leaders are joining us today. And I hope you'll enjoy hearing from them as you get a sense for the quality of this team for what we can do together and for the success, not just that we've had, but that we're capable of having in the future. I had a chance over the years to get to know many of you. It's hard to tell you apart with the masks, but perhaps, I haven't met everybody yet. So 30 seconds on me. I lived in New York for a while, but you can tell from my accent that I was not born in Brooklyn. I hail from Buenos Aires, Argentina. I spent most of my career, really all of my career at Booz Allen. I joined Booz Allen after school as a summer intern, and I've been here ever since. I thought I'd be here 2 years. So maybe that's something about my capacity to predict. In 2015, I had the privilege of becoming the eighth CEO of this 107-year-old company. The first 2 were Ed Booz and Jim Allen. So it's been my objective to live up to their standards and to continue their legacy while I have the privilege of occupying this role. Over 30 years at Booz Allen, I've seen us change and evolve. We're not the same firm we were when I joined. In fact, if I look back and if you allow me to brag for a moment about our history, Ed Booz got us going in 1914. But it wasn't just us that he got going. He got going the entire management consulting profession. 35 years later, an old client of his who had become the Secretary of the Navy, asked him to come and bring Booz Allen to help us get ready for World War 2. And that began our long relationship with the Navy that endures till today, 81 years later. And it's so began our journey through the federal government. We've had the privilege and the opportunity to participate in some of the most important things our governments have done and some other interesting things across the private sector. We were a part of the Apollo program. Whether you like it or not, and sometimes I'm not so sure, we help in the formation of the NFL. We started doing cyber in the '90s before it was even called cyber. And if you'd followed us most closely, over the last 10 years, we ran through a process, which we call Vision 2020. And the goal of Vision 2020 was to get us closer to the center of our clients' mission and to bring innovation and technology in different ways into those missions to create a transformation. In fact, as I think about our entire history, it's really in our DNA as an institution that we can transform. We transform ourselves to stay relevant with the environment, and we transform ourselves to help our clients transform. And from an investor standpoint, that capacity for transformation is, I believe, a key ingredient for our ability to outpace markets to grow in good markets and in tough ones. So today, in addition to showing you the numbers and where we're going financially, we want to share with you our vision for how we are going to once again transform ourselves to take advantage of the next wave of opportunity that sits right in front of us. In fact, we believe that for all the turbulence that we're experiencing out there, Booz Allen sits at an extraordinary point of opportunity. The opportunity to help our clients transform, the opportunity to cement our industry leadership and take it to a next level, and the opportunity to drive outstanding shareholder returns. Our agenda for today, as Rubun said, relatively straightforward. I'm going to offer some brief remarks to try and frame this opportunity and where we're going, share with you some numbers and provide a bit of a summary. But then I really want you to hear directly from the leaders of this business, the extraordinary people who are actually driving this day-to-day, creating the strategies and actually turning this opportunity into business reality. And ultimately, Lloyd will come back on stage and connect all of this to our investment thesis, so you see how it all fits together. But let me take you back to take us forward. As I say, time flies when you're having fun. Last time we were in New York for an Investor Day was actually June of 2018. And at the time, we said that we were targeting a 50% increase in ADEPS from 2018 to 2021. For those of you who remember, I know a few of you do, we're at about $2 a share in 2018, and we thought we could get to $3 by 2021. And as you know, we far outpaced that. In fact, at the close of 2021, we reported $3.90, so almost a doubling of our original objective. And we did that, first of all, by once again outpacing the market. Our organic growth rate was 8.4%, near the top of an envelope of 6% to 9% that we had talked about. We had said at the time that we thought we could do maybe 10 basis points of margin improvement every year. Over the 3-year period, we delivered 120 basis points in margin. And we also deployed, I think, in a disciplined and intelligent way, $1.3 billion of capital, focused on dividends and share repurchases. In short, we outperformed. And I cannot tell you how excited and how proud I am of that outperformance and of the team that really made it all happen. The fact that we are performing is a point of pride, and I'll take that with me, but the fact that we outperformed in the environment that we contended with is unique. Think about it. The longest shutdown in the government's history, a global pandemic that's still with us. Social unrest in the summer of 2020. The most contentious election and government transition in our lifetime. And yet, we delivered 100% increase in ADEPS over that time frame. Perhaps as important as the number, in my view, is the reasons for that outperformance because I think they give you some sense of why we can do it again in the future. First, we outperformed by leveraging our unique operating model. You've heard us talk about time and time again about things like our single P&L and our partnership culture and how that allows us to be agile in a market that is constantly changing. We didn't just talk about Vision 2020 on earnings calls. We turned that into operating reality. Our strategy is what we did, and it led to success. We're relentlessly invested in people at all levels, and ultimately develop a cadre of leaders that is second to none in this industry in its talent, in its ability and in its diversity. And I so wish that we didn't have a pandemic going on, and I could have brought more people here, so you could meet them directly because I think you would be as impressed as I am. And ultimately, before it was even cool, we were investing in innovation in the federal government, and that really set us apart. And when Susan Penfield takes a stage, you'll hear much more about what we did and what we intend to do. Vision 2020 transformed Booz Allen. But perhaps as importantly, Vision 2020 has put us in a place of first-mover advantage as we look to capture future opportunity. We're going to talk at length about this strategy. I'll get us started. Our colleagues will talk about it even more. But this is Investor Day. So why don't we start with investment thesis and talk about numbers. As we look forward, between now and fiscal year 2025, we are targeting growth of EBITDA dollars by roughly 50% from $840 million back in FY '21 to about $1.3 billion in FY '25. You'll notice right away that we moved from ADEPS to EBITDA as our target metric, did that for a couple of reasons. The first one is, with all the talk about potential changes to interest rates and the taxes and so forth, we wanted a clean metric that reflected our performance. And second of all, because a lot of what I think makes Booz Allen an attractive investment is our ability to drive top line growth into bottom line growth. And we believe adjusted EBITDA is a great metric to do that. As you begin to see in these numbers at the core of this outperformance is once again the ambition and the commitment to outpace the market; to deliver strong, stable margins, while at the same time continuing to invest in our business and innovation and in our people; and to actually make more consistent use of acquisitions as a strategic accelerator for our business. Numerically, we're talking about 5% to 8% organic growth range over this time frame; we're talking about margins in the mid-10s; and we're talking about deploying $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion of capital with a priority on key strategic acquisitions. I believe, and I hope you agree that a 50% increase in EBITDA is an attractive goal for our investors. And for us, as a management team, it's a good stretch goal. And yet, even though this is a bit of a stretch, I am very confident that this team can deliver on these goals, and I'm confident for 2 reasons. First and foremost, as I hinted before, we are at a point of unique opportunity, and we have both the position and the ambition to capture it. So why don't I spend a few moments on that? I'm not going to tell you anything earth shattering. You follow this sector. So you know what our clients are facing. Global climate change, great power competition, incessant technology waves that they need to deal with every day, constrained budgets that make investing in those technologies difficult. You wonder if there's a burning platform, I'm here to tell you there is 1 and our clients understand it. In fact, almost every conversation with the senior client that I've had over the last year or 18 months revolves around some of these themes. When Judi and I go see intelligence clients, they are contending with massive amounts of data, much more than ever before, data that is hidden in places and that is not integrated in a way that they can translate insights into decisions faster. And our clients understand that a good decision made late is a bad decision. Our defense clients, who have their hands full with a very complicated world, no longer can fight in air, land and sea. They have to contend with cyber space and outer space as war-fighting domains. And the ability to fight across 5 dimensions and integrate what they need to know to put the decisions in front of the war fighter in the correct way to give them the data that will keep them safe is an absolute priority for the department. And Kristine and I talk to civilian clients all the time, and they talk about twin challenges. One, some of these new missions that are huge and they're complex, pandemic preparedness, global climate change. But at the same time, they're dealing with consumers who've gotten used to dealing with our government, who are gotten used to dealing in a digital economy with a Netflix and an Amazon, and they want to deal with the government the same way. When we put it all together, we at Booz Allen believe that when you look back on the 2020s, this will have been a decade of fundamental change in the way our government operates. In fact, to be successful by 2030, significant portions of our government will have to be a digital government pursuing digital missions. Huge challenges, yes. But from a Booz Allen perspective, also a huge opportunity. Because Booz Allen has spent the last decade getting ready for this. We are positioned to help our clients thrive in the digital age. And I don't just say this as a vision statement. I say this as the reality that we face on the ground. You're going to hear today that we are already positioned with key contract vehicles against the foundational programs for all of these changes. And you will hear that our innovation agenda has put us out in front of the next-generation technologies that are necessary for this to be real. AI, 5G, cyber, quantum, Booz Allen has already unique positions recognized by our clients as leading positions. And this is the opportunity in front of us. And the team that's going to talk to you today and the team that couldn't be here today, but is probably watching on the live stream, we intend to seize it. Booz Allen's ambition can be summed up relatively simple. Booz Allen will be the clear leader, where technology innovation meets national mission. Said another way, we aim to power the digital revolution in government. We will do so by leveraging what we already have to build positions of scale to transform set missions. We will do so by bringing talent and technology to bear in a different way. And as I said before, our broad portfolio gives us both insight into those opportunities and starting positions. But we recognize that, that is not enough. To build positions of scale repeatedly and reliably, that requires us to change. It requires us to tap into this DNA of transformation that I described to you at the beginning of my talk. Our new strategy to drive this change is really a change program. And it has 3 key components: velocity, leadership and technology. And so together, they're are VoLT. And VoLT is about moving at digital speed to bring talent and resources to bear against these problems faster than we ever have before. Let's double-click on each of the components just a little bit. Velocity means doubling down on our innovation agenda; making sure that our already leading positions in cyber, AI, 5G, quantum and other technologies remains leading and in fact, we will try to even pull away from our existing competitors. It means leveraging strategic acquisitions differently than we have in the past to build positions faster. And it means fine-tuning our unique operating model to look for ways to make decisions closer to the customer, so we can actually move faster. Leadership is about mission leadership. And it is about identifying areas ripe for hyper growth. And you'll hear today about a couple of those. You'll hear about digital battle space. You'll hear about national cyber and a number of other topics. And it's about not just being a player in those areas, but having the strategy and the investment capacity to be the #1 player in those areas. And look, if you know anything about Booz Allen, you know that people are at the center of everything we do. So VoLT, of course, is founded on our people. The V for velocity speaks to our need to hire people faster, yes, but to develop their skill sets faster, to keep up and ahead out of all of this change. L, leadership, means about us continuing to invest in the next generation of leaders that will take this firm forward, not just now, but well into the future. And the T for technology is about technology talent, where the war is raging and only the best companies can attract the best people. And when Betty Thompson takes the stage, she'll talk to you more about how we intend to do that. So as I begin to wrap up, let me leave you with the following thought. This is the time when some in our industry will begin to retrench because it's a complicated environment out there. And just like before, this is the time when Booz Allen leads forward. So VoLT is a growth strategy. VoLT is a growth strategy. And as I said earlier, there are 2 reasons that I'm confident that we can accomplish these goals and we can actually execute this strategy. The first one is the opportunity in front of us and our will to capture it. But the second one, the one that is near and dear to my heart, the one that has kept me here for 30 years, and I think we'll endeavor for many more than 30 more is the people of Booz Allen. It's the team that I have the privilege to come to work with every day. The leaders who are here, the next generation waiting in the wings, and the 29,000 people we've assembled at Booz Allen that I consider to be a national asset. So let me let you hear directly from them as they describe to you the opportunities by each of our markets, our innovation and our talent agendas and then our financial outlook. And then we'll all come back together on stage, and it's going to be a lot of chairs, as you'll see, to take your questions. Thank you for listening. Let me turn the podium over to my colleague and friend, the leader of our Global Defense business, the one and only Karen Dahut.

Thank you, Horacio. Oh my goodness, it is so great to be here this morning. Thank you for coming. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening to us. As Horacio said, I am Karen Dahut. I lead our Global Defense business, and I'm excited to tell you what we've been up to as well as to share with you a little bit about our future. I'm a former naval officer, believe it or not, spent some time in the Navy, finance and engineering background. And I think it gives me a particularly good perspective on the operational needs of the Navy, but more importantly, how technology can really help the Department of Defense change the way they go about executing their mission. What I love most about Booz Allen more than anything is that all of the executives you're going to hear from this morning, I've had a great opportunity to work with deeply over my career at the firm; with Judi building our business in Europe; with Kristine making the Affordable Care Act real for millions of Americans; and with Susan, in building repeatable innovation strategies that change the game for our clients and for our firm. This shared history is the foundation of collaboration and mutual support, which, I believe, is the secret sauce of Booz Allen. My conversation with you this morning about the defense business will cover 3 important topics. The first, I'd like to share with you some trends that I am seeing that I think will force a particular paradigm shift in the department. The second, I'll share with you details about our business, our contracts and our team. And the third, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the future of the defense market and the future of our business. So let's get started with those 3 trends. First and most importantly, the will to modernize, the recognition and urgency to modernize the department is real. For the past 20 years, we've been fighting an asymmetric war in Afghanistan and the Middle East and our near peer competitors like China and Russia have been catching up with us technologically. In some cases, like hypersonics, they've advanced our technology. The good news is that policymakers, legislators and appropriators understand this urgency. They've increased RDT&E budgets. They've increased budgets in core, combatant commands and in core technologies. And the policymakers recognize the need to shift directive. Increasingly, more is talked about within the department and driven through their regulations around the need for data and AI and cloud enablement. So modernization is real, and it is taking root in the department. The second trend. You heard Horacio mention the need to fight the fight in 5 domains, air, land, sea, of course, cyber and space. The need for joint all-domain control -- all-domain command and control is real and relevant and our fighting forces feel the need. This past summer, there was a war game between our country and China over Taiwan. We failed miserably per General Hyten, the Vice Chief Staff of the services. And he said, specifically, we cannot fight unless we go to war together. We need joint all-domain and control to make that real. The third trend, one that is not a surprise to this audience is the speed with which technology has transformed the manner in which we are able to fight. Now the department has not kept pace with these technology changes. Moore's law has changed that technology repeatedly over the past 20 years, but industry, technology firms like Booz Allen have kept pace with those technological adoptions and changes. And we're prepared to help the department to speed their integration of these new technologies. These 3 trends, modernization, JADC2, emerging technology forces a paradigm shift within the departments. It forces them to change and move away from large, monolithic, vertically integrated platforms and systems to technologies that enable software applications, a data layer and AI to create decision advantage and to create decision supremacy for our fighting forces. We believe Booz Allen is the firm perfectly positioned to help them make this shift. Now it's not only for our fighting forces, it's also to train our sailors, soldiers and airmen, and we've been hard at work at this. I'd like to share a video with you to show you a little bit about this. Take a look. [Presentation]

I love that video. Of course, we showed it. So you know I must love it. But I love it for 2 reasons. One, it shows you our differentiated approach and our belief in technology to change the game. And it sure as heck shows you our approach to diversity and how we think differently about it. Let me shift gears and let's pivot and talk a little bit about our business and why I feel the confidence I do in our ability to help the department make the paradigm shift. First of all, for context, we have over 1,000 contracts, serving every element of the Department of Defense, Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Joint and Combatant Commands, Defense Agencies. Thousands of contracts across the globe, over 13,000 people serving the mission and incredible client intimacy. And when I talk about client intimacy because people use that term rather loosely. We are serving side-by-side with our clients. We know the mission, but we are executing the mission with them. Our ability to bring technology to bear on that mission is very real and very relevant. So 2 of our contracts are to provide AI, artificial intelligence, for the joint war-fighting mission. They are the only 2 contracts of its kind in the department, and we are singly awarded both of those. One is for the JAIC, the Joint AI Center, and the other is for the joint work fighting command. We have the ability today to bring AI to bear on war and the war fight, which is really important in battle. Sometimes we don't like to necessarily talk about these things, but the idea that you can bring data and AI to define decision advantage for the war fighter is the critical element of winning. Secondly, we have contracts across the Air Force and the Army to deliver on the promise of joint all-domain command and control, JADC2. We developed the Rainmaker solution for the Army, which is their foundation of their JADC2 efforts, and we're supporting the Air Force in advanced battle management system contracts that supply the foundation for their JADC2 efforts, making air and land a very real promise for JADC2. And importantly, we have large teams in Europe and in the Pacific to include Japan and Korea that are sitting side by side with Department of Defense leaders and mission specialists, delivering on the mission. It allows us to test our solutions in real time. Improve them where needed, but scale them across the departments. We have extraordinary confidence in our ability to build solutions that are relevant and to scale them where needed. We're excited about the value proposition that Booz Allen can bring. A little bit about the future of Defense, and then I'll pass it off to my colleague, Judi. First of all, in my opinion, there are 3 types of companies that will thrive in the next decade in Defense. First, of course, kinetic and nonkinetic companies, traditional OEMs, providing the power to fight. Secondly, network and infrastructure types of companies that provide the backbone. And thirdly, and in my opinion, most importantly, decision supremacy types of companies, companies that can bring the power of data and software and AI to the fight. We're in the pole position to deliver on the promise of decision supremacy. We are the company that can provide these capabilities to the department. You'll hear more from Susan about our deep AI capabilities, but I'll leave you with this. Bloomberg government named Booz Allen, the #1 company in AI and DoD because of the size of our contracts and our bookings. We've also been investing in the digital battle space for the past 2 years. The digital battle space is the place where data is mined, amalgamated, processed to create that decision advantage. We've been building that for the department, and we have been building on the solutions that will deliver that decision advantage. And lastly, our talent. We have an extraordinary set of technologists, mission specialists and leaders that are dedicated to this mission and focused on how to improve it. And we're consistently developing and upskilling them, so that they can deliver against that mission. And Betty will talk more about that later. So with that, I'll leave you with this simple statement. We're ready. You have a firm that is built for growth -- built for accelerated growth. We have the capabilities and the technologies to deliver on that promise, and we're excited to get started. I'd love to turn the podium over to my friend and colleague, Judi Dotson. As you might imagine, the Intelligence business shares a great deal of responsibility in the defense mission. As such, Judi and I collaborate, as do our teams, on a regular basis. Thanks so much.

Good morning. I'm Judi Dotson. And as Karen said, I lead our -- the Booz Allen Intelligence business. I've been in this role for 18 months, and I'm really excited to tell you about where we're going with the business. As a matter of introduction, I've been with Booz Allen for over 30 years. I've worked across all of our federal markets with every leader that you're going to meet today. But what I bring to the Intel business specifically is a proven track record of leadership; my passion for technology, it's what I studied in school and much of my time at Booz Allen has been focused on technology business areas; and finally, my mission understanding. My time at Defense taught me quite a bit about how the Intelligence business connects with the Defense business, and that makes a huge difference for serving our clients. So it's clear to me, and the 4,000 cleared technical and mission experts that are stationed around the world in the Intelligence business. But something transformational is happening across our markets. The new threats and the technologies to support those threats are forcing the Intelligence community to change. And Booz Allen is exactly positioned to support that change. In fact, in the Intel business, we're in the midst of a powerful turnaround. Let me give you some context. When I stepped into this role 18 months ago, I looked around and found an amazingly talented group of professionals, working on some of the most complex and important mission-critical jobs that I've seen in my entire career. Yet, year-over-year, we weren't growing. We needed to make some adjustments. Since then, we've strengthened our pipeline, adding opportunities that align to the core mission. That's where we often find the most interesting work for our talent, but even more importantly, funding is a priority against the core missions. Second, we've taken full advantage of the firm's capabilities, bringing in the Strategic Innovation Group, our Defense colleagues and bringing all of that to our Intel clients, both in delivery and around our proposal efforts. And third, we've changed both our philosophy and our approach to recruiting. Our philosophies change from just in time to hiring in advance of demand. Our approach has changed in a lot of ways. We worked closely with Betty's team. I'll talk about our functional approach or I'll mention our functional approach in terms of hiring in bulk, and Betty is going to talk about some of the other programs that we put in place across the entire firm. What I'll tell you is we're already seeing success. I'm going to give you a caveat though. Much of our business is classified, so I can't talk specifically about the work today. But what I want you to take away from this discussion is that we are positioned for growth. So over my decades at Booz Allen, I've seen time and time again that our success is linked to our proactive approach. So what do I mean? We don't wait for requirements. Instead, we lean forward, thinking about what's next in the context of both the mission and the newest technologies. And right now, we're taking that approach to a whole new level. Over the past 12 months, in addition to recompetes, we won a series of large contract vehicles that position us for new multiyear growth in some key areas, including digital modernization, artificial intelligence and high-end analytics. And on top of that growth, the area where we see the largest opportunity for us is in cyber, specifically supporting the national cyber mission and protecting our country against adversaries. Here's why? Often when we think of cybersecurity, we think about defending an enterprise, and that is absolutely necessary. In fact, we have -- we do play a large role in doing that in Kristine's market in the Civil business, protecting 80% of the .gov networks. However, today, the enterprise approach alone isn't enough. In the cyber battle space, threats are morphing and the attack surface is growing. We saw with solar wins that the adversaries are focused, and they're sophisticated. And given our connected world, everything is at risk, including our national critical infrastructure, our telecommunication infrastructure and our weapon systems. We can't just wait to get attacked and only play defense. Instead, we need to understand how our adversaries are operating across their targets. And when I say targets, I mean our government, our society and our economy. This is a broad and complicated problem that requires very special expertise. The good news is that Booz Allen has this rare expertise because we're doing this work today. We don't just defend the enterprise. For over 20 years, we've been on the leading edge of the cyber battle space, identifying and mitigating threats for the Intel community. Our cyber talent, the people who do this work, are not just assets to Booz Allen. They are national assets to our country and now is our time to take what we know how to do to a broader set of clients. So what I'm talking about is big, and it requires strategic investment in 3 key areas. First, it starts with our people. People at the top with key relationships and credibility, people with the right level of technical expertise. And we know it's not easy to find these people. It hasn't been easy to find these people for the 20 years we've been doing this work. We understand that we need to invest, take people with the right attitude, invest, give them the right resources, training and mentorship. And number three, because we're scaling, we need to invest in building mass, and we're doing that through our recruiting and our retention programs. So that's our people. The second area of investment is around our trade craft development. Trade craft is the capabilities and the tools that we use to execute the mission. We have an investment that we call Dark Labs, where our talent can rotate in and out. And while they're there, we give them the opportunity to research, develop, test ideas often in the commercial market, where we can get things done -- tested quickly. And then once they're proven, package up that IP and IC to be reused across our future delivery. Ultimately, this is how we can create differentiation in this space. The final area of investment is around M&A. We've talked about this. As we look forward, looking for the right acquisitions to accelerate our growth and drive our business strategy is something we will continually do. I am so proud of the work that we're doing and the momentum that we have built, but what makes me the proudest are the people who do the work. Technology is shaping all elements of our national power, and I know it's time for us to lean in and do what we can do. It's the right thing for our business. But as importantly, it's the right thing for our country. The next story that you'll hear is one that I know well, because I worked in the Civil business with Kristine. It's a great one. I'd like to introduce Kristine up to the stage to tell it.

Good morning. And thank you to Judi. As Judi mentioned, a lot of the -- and Karen mentioned as well, a lot of the leaders in this room have worked in Civil. So they are also part of the success story that I'm going to tell you. I'm Kristine Martin Anderson. I am the Executive Vice President who runs our Civil group. And 3 years ago, when I was on the stage, I was talking a bit about our health story. I was actually hired into Booz Allen to grow the Health business. At that point, I've been here about 12 years. And we have grown from a business that was $80 million a year when I started to $800 million a year when I stood on the stage 3 years ago, a similar stage. And I'm really happy to give you an update on that. Because our Health business is poised to finish this year, doubled from where it was 3 years ago. Organically, we're poised to finish at $1.2 billion in revenue. And then with the Liberty IT acquisition, well north of $1.5 billion. And I think I told you then, we weren't done yet. I'm telling you now, we're not done yet. There's still growth to be had in our health business. The way we grow in Civil is through a very focused strategy. We have essential missions that we focus on using advanced technology to change, empowering people to change the world. The business is 75% technical and 25% strategy and operations. The way we pick essential missions as we look for those missions that the government must operate regardless of the political environment or who's in the White House. So these are things the government must get done. We will always collect taxes. We have to have health care for our vulnerable population. We have to protect the homeland, et cetera. And then we relentlessly pursue progress in those missions. Well, changes on the horizon. In the past few years, health has been where it's at. I think you know that in terms of where the growth has been happening in Civil. But unfortunately, we've had a set of threats and tragedies that are pushing the domestic agenda in a new direction. While we've been living in the mitigation of biological threats like COVID, the effect of climate, aging infrastructure, the combination of climate and infrastructure, the tragedies that we've had. Even on the Boston Globe, you'd read about the Boston University professor who went for a run and then fell through some rusted-out stairs at the T, right? This aging infrastructure is everywhere in the U.S. and it's pushing our budget. Now this crosses the whole of the government, these issues, but the biggest impact will be in Civil. Now the President's budget proposal and proposed legislation make clear there's a desire to expand domestic spending on technology to continue to modernize citizen services. And then there's also a great interest in transforming energy, environment, transportation, secure the nation from cyber threats, create health security and fight future pandemics. So that's the mission side. On the how does technology transform mission, I'm going to give you a gross oversimplification of the way my mind works. I think of the use of technology in 2 generalized buckets. Technology modernization that increases mission efficiency and technology advancements deployed to transform mission effectiveness, and we'll go into those a little bit. This first wave of IT modernization that you've seen across Civil, and it's definitely emphasized in the budgets again is about efficiency. Commercial expectations of experience that Horacio mentioned of government have changed the way government approaches the citizen. Cloud and mobile, best example of the past few years where we've seen a lot of investment. Most of us can hardly remember filling out a paper tax reform -- tax form. We can also not imagine a day when you couldn't check on the status of something from government on your phone. So Where's My Refund app as an example. When I was on the stage before, I talked to you about the Veterans Benefit determination contract that we have that was associated with our SPARC acquisition some time ago in Charleston. And at the time, I think I showed you a video and we were talking about the need for the government to reduce the backlog of those active duty that are transferring to veteran status. They were waiting for a really long time, sometimes years to find out exactly what benefits they were -- were available to them. And that changed. And we've been -- we showed you a great video of how we've reduced that backlog. Well, more recently, we just want to recompete on that. I think you may have noticed. And we were focused over the last 9 months on pension and burial. And in that area, using technology, we've been able to reduce the time it takes for claims to minutes over months, reduce the cycle time by 1/3, reduce the backlog by 75%. There's still more work to do to create efficiency in the government. So that's efficiency. Now IT for mission effectiveness is different. It's where the government does things. It's never done before in missions. As you heard from Karen and Judi, AI for Defense and Intel is already well on its way. Not as much in Civil. It's still a bold idea to be able to predict and avert national disasters rather than mitigate them after the fact. You saw a little bit of this in COVID, right? We saw a very fast vaccine development. There's been incredible work in HHS to use AI to determine what existing approved -- FDA-approved compounds could be used to treat COVID. That's been an amazing spur for all the clinical trial funding, et cetera, and some of the types of things that you're seeing today, some of the hopeful treatments are related to that effort. We are working in a lot of those areas in Health. And most recently, we're awarded a contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on their comprehensive and rapid response IDIQ, and that's the plan for future pandemics and epidemics. So bioinformatics, biostatistics, analytics much deeper in the Civil business. So what's our future going to look like? Well, it's going to look a little bit like the past. I know you have a -- I know you all have this book on your table, It's My Fault. You have that. Because our way of thinking about the future is, first imagining a better future, right? And for those of you on the web, you can find it on Amazon. So you imagine the better future. You imagine how it could be good, right? This book looks at how technology is advancing and then ask the question, what would it be capable of kind of if we got out of its way. So it doesn't predict the future and more ask what is possible in the future. And we choose those missions and the technology we think can enable them and then relentlessly pursue that progress. And that's what we'll continue to do in Civil, and we do see a pivot expanded broader than Health coming up. Now we will grow organically, but we will also use M&A in Civil to complement our organic growth. You've seen our success in Civil with M&A. We have a very high bar for culture and most importantly, client impact. So Liberty IT, our most recent acquisition. I got to tell you, I think we hit this one out of the park. These folks are winners and have been winning. You might have seen another recent contract award. They share our passion for people, for innovation, for technical excellence and the mission of the VA. That's where we work most closely with them. 600-plus solution architects, engineers and other professional staff, they complement us, where we already have fabulous technologies across the firm and in the strategic innovation group. And together, we're poised for additional growth. So we'll keep on doing things like that, thinking about the broader mission areas. And also, I think there still is quite a bit of growth left in Health. So let me just turn it over to Karen, who's going to update you on Commercial. Thank you.

Thanks, Kristine. Thank you, Kristine. We're going to wrap our discussion of our markets with a brief overview of our Commercial business, and then we'll take a short break. Our Commercial business is a small, but strategic asset to the institution. And as a reminder, it's comprised of 2 components. First, our global commercial cyber center line business; and secondly, our international portfolio. And as I think many of you know, we've been reshaping our international portfolio over the past 2 to 3 years, moving more towards a business focused in commercial in Western Europe. For context, our Commercial business is about 400 to 500 cyber professionals, and last year serving over 100 different clients. It's an important asset to the institution because of its synergistic value. We have a Commercial business and we have a large and vibrant growing Federal business. Our Commercial business is powered by the deep insights and tradecraft from our Intelligence Community business that you heard Judi talk about and our deep technology capabilities that you'll hear about from Susan. In turn, our Commercial business provides really deep insights and expertise around the threat vector in the commercial sector to our federal clients. And there is real appreciation from our federal clients to understand what is happening and how the commercial enterprises are defeating these threats. So that synergy is very real, and we share our client base in that way. I'd like to just mention the 3 offerings that comprise our Commercial business so you have a bit of an understanding of that. The first is around our Incident Response business, a growing and vibrant business, as you can imagine listening to the news with ransomware attacks as well as just solar winds, our commercial enterprises are facing those threats on a daily basis. Our incident response team helps not only to define and deter those threats, but following an incident, they help an enterprise recover from those threats. The second area is our Enterprise Consulting business, which is our business where we support Boards, executive teams, CEOs and CSOs with building and developing cyber strategies and road maps. And importantly, we also design, build and operate cyber operation centers for our clients. And lastly, we have a Managed Security Service business, which is our platform of sophisticated sensors that help to protect and defend an enterprise in our client environments. So those are the 3 aspects of the kinds of businesses that we operate in our Commercial business. Our client set includes 8 of the 10 top life sciences companies, 2 of the 3 largest commercial energy companies, 2 of the 3 largest global financial services companies, many of the world's largest technology and software companies as well as the financial exchanges across the globe. It's an impressive customer list and we're doing impressive work on their behalf. COVID clearly affected the economy and clearly affected the Commercial business. But we have great reason to be excited about the growth potential and the opportunities that continue to exist in our Commercial business. In fact, you may have heard about the equity stake we took in Tracepoint, a small digital forensics incident response company, last December. And just last month, we completed that acquisition because of the excitement we had around their capability, their culture, their channel to market, and their expansive and growing client list. Together, we have found great complementarity with Tracepoint and are excited to bring them into the Booz Allen fold. In fact, I would tell you that acquisitions have been a strategic accelerator for our Commercial business. I mentioned Tracepoint. We also acquired Morphick, which really was the foundation for our managed security service that I mentioned earlier. And importantly, we've been augmenting our executive team with really impressive hires that have operational cyber responsibilities in large companies, and they have joined our team to bring their expertise to our client set. So in short, a lot of opportunity in Commercial, and we're excited about the growth potential for our business. Before we hear from Susan and our exciting innovation agenda, which, by the way, has fueled a lot of the growth in our markets, we're going to take a short break. Thank you very much. [Break]

Okay. Good morning, and welcome back from the break. I'm so delighted to talk about our innovation agenda. I'm Susan Penfield, and I joined Booz Allen as an associate 27 years ago, and I am an original STEM girl and a technologist at hard. I led our Digital business, our Health business. And for the last 5 years, I'm leading our Strategic Innovation Group. In the early days, I worked with Judi when we were transforming mainframe systems. And then I recruited and hired Kristine into the firm, and together, we built the Health business. And lastly, I worked forward with Karen as we crafted our initial innovation agenda. So as Karen said, we really truly do have a deep history of learning for each other. You heard from the markets today about their plans for accelerating growth. And now I'd like to tell you a little bit about innovation and technology, and how that innovation and technology will support the growth of the future, and why Booz Allen is truly positioned as a leader in digital government. So a little history on the SIG. It was stood up in 2013 as a key tenant of Vision 2020. We had a desire to become more innovative and shift our portfolio and our workforce to more complex technical work. We invested in our culture, in hiring deep technical talent and developing capability areas in digital, cyber and analytics. We also built deep influence in the technology ecosystem. Today, the rewards are here. More than 65% of our firm's work is technical at its core. A few examples of that success. First, from a digital perspective. Over 400 cloud migrations for large-scale organizations were conducted. We are recognized as #1 IT services provider by Gartner, and we've scaled also our digital capacity through key acquisitions. We are also the nation's largest cybersecurity services provider with over 5,000 cyber professionals, with 10,000 advanced cyber certifications. As Karen already said about AI, we are the industry leader, clear and simple in the public sector. We have the 2 largest AI contracts in DoD history. And we also have a set of differentiated partnerships with Amazon, with NVIDIA and with many others in the startup community. In addition to scaling capability, the SIG also invested in building new businesses and introducing new solutions with alternative business models and differentiated economics. So first, I'd like to show you a video of one of our most successful option value investments. Take a look. [Presentation]

So I guess you're ready to go to a national park now, just the beauty of everything that we have in America. So congratulations to Will and that team. They've doubled that business in the last 5 years, and they've positioned us for success with onboarding new parks and new services. So let's talk about our 3 remaining option value investments that are in flight. District Defend is a software-based security mobility solution. And we're making -- we're working to make that a funded directive as part of DoD. We also have a robust set of clients across the intel community as well as international governments. Modzy was our enterprise AI platform and marketplace. And that offers scalable AI models, and it's designed to govern AI at the enterprise level. We've currently finished our technical development, and we're now piloting that product across a number of cross-sector customers. Our directed energy solution, which is tied to urgent operational needs across the DoD is unique intellectual capital that will advance DE technologies for a variety of platforms and missions. We've proven and tested that technology, and now we're advancing discussions with our key clients. We continue to see substantial financial upside for these solutions in the option value portfolio. And in the context of our VoLT strategy, we have a target of $0.25 billion of revenues and accretive margins by FY '25. Also on this journey -- we've had the financial success for sure, but also on this journey, we learned a lot about how to build solutions; how and when to invest; what to build and buy; where to really partner; and lastly, when to scale it and when to sunset it. This hard-earned experience and engagement with experts from the VC community, along with the innovation ecosystem is going to inform how we attack our new solutions businesses in the future. So now let's turn for what's next for the innovation agenda under our new VoLT strategy. The market continues to transform. You heard it from all my colleagues, the technology waves continue to accelerate. You see it for yourselves. We feel, given the work we've done in the past and the work we'll do in the future, that we are well positioned to accelerate growth and engineer digital solutions for our government. Under our new VoLT strategy, we will enable our markets in 3 particular areas: one, emerging tech experimentation, solutions engineering and partnership development. First, the experimentation agenda. It's going to continue to include a focus on AI, quantum, but we'll also add 5G and edge cloud as well as IoT and XR. We're looking to build road maps for each of these capabilities as we have in the past, and we're aligning this to mission priorities. We'll make, build, buy and partner decisions with speed and agility. On the experimentation side, we're always looking for new focus areas and exploring how future tech can disrupt our clients' missions. We'll look at bioscience and biosecurity. We think they have broad applications for both Defense and Health. We'll look at advanced manufacturing technologies that we think will disrupt logistics and supply chain processes. And lastly, developments within robotics and neurotechnology will truly shape the digital battle space of the future. Our next focus area is solutions engineering, and we're able to leverage what we've already done in the SIG. We've already built solutions baselines for a number of emerging tech, and that will help us increase our speed to market, as we allow these to be leveraged across the firm. Our engineering approach includes reusable assets, reference architectures and design patterns. Lastly, our partnership approach will be critical to gaining access to emerging tech. We will deepen the tech strategy for each of our markets by building relationships with the right partners and broker access to advanced technologies and tech training investments for our talent. We have a value exchange agreement with our partners. We want access to partners' customer base and deal flow. We want insight into the road maps. We want opportunities to invest and co-develop, and we absolutely want the technical training and certifications for our talent. We continue to work with many large institutional partners, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA. Today, we're already co-developing new mission technology. And we'll also focus on unique start-ups, like AI, which we recently took a stake in to access their model compression technology. So in closing, the SIG has been an incredible catalyst for technology innovation. We scaled capabilities, we've driven market growth, and we've developed a deep technical talent. Our future truly depends on our ability to continue to rapidly experiment, to engineer and accelerate solutions, to build partnerships at speed to both support our firm growth and also the transformation of the clients we serve. Now let me turn it over to Betty, who will talk our most -- about our most important asset, our talent.

Thanks, Susan. And good morning. I'm Betty Thompson, I'm the Chief People Officer at Booz Allen. You've just heard about our exciting VoLT strategy and our plans for growth and innovation. And I'm here to talk about the people that will power that strategy. You've heard about the attrition tsunami or some are calling it the great resignation. And I can tell you that's not what we're seeing at Booz Allen. Our attrition levels dropped at the beginning of the pandemic, as did many others. But as others are seeing big increases in their attrition, we are not. In fact, our attrition levels remain below the pre-pandemic levels. Yes, below the pre-pandemic levels and actually below those in our industry as well. You also hear a lot about higher attrition for women. And I can tell you that's also not what we see at Booz Allen. In fact, our attrition amongst women is lower than it is for men. I've been the CPO for a little over a decade. And I can tell you, I'm not surprised, and let me tell you why. Our purpose at Booz Allen is to empower people to change the world. And I'm going to focus on that word people because that's what we focus on. There's no question that there's a war for talent. You heard my colleagues talking about that. And it's been around for a long time, and it's particularly acute with technical talent. But it's not new, and we believe that we have an advantage with 2 differentiators to allow us to attract talent at scale and to have them stay. First, we have a people-centered culture. You've heard everybody use the word culture today. It's a people-centered culture that is lauded as a reason why people are attracted and why they stay. Secondly, we have strong talent systems that support individual pursuits as well as our business needs. So let me share a little bit about both of those differentiators to illustrate why we are confident in our ability to win. We are deeply proud of our people-centered culture. We had Gallup come in and do an assessment of our culture. And after all of the work that they did, interviews and surveys and such, they came to a conclusion that they described with 1 phrase, Booz Allen has heart. The way we care for each other, the way we demonstrate respect for each other is undeniably at the core of our ability to attract and retain talent. At the start of the pandemic, we committed to continue to keep our people at the center. We took $100 million and we set it aside and committed to retain all of our employees. That was really important at that time because of job security. They told us that was what was most important, but we didn't stop there. We also gave access to more leave to everyone, financial support where they needed it as well as additional child and dependent care resources. In March of 2020, while others were scrambling and trying to figure out how they were going to support their employees and in some cases, if they were going to be able to support their employees, we were able to quickly mobilize and assemble so much support because of what we already had in place. We already had a powerful program around employee wellness, which included mental health, which was new to many others, and we all know now how important that element is. We had our DEI BRGs, our business resource groups, and we had systems in place to help our employees navigate the many resources that were available to them. And we had leaders who were committed and ready and able to support their teams based on what they needed. One aspect of our culture that resonates the most for me is inclusion, that feeling of belonging. We have a long-standing commitment to DE&I. It's embedded in our values. It's part of our DNA. After the murder of George Floyd last summer, we quickly mobilized while others were scrambling. We had our resources in place. We had our BRGs. We had leaders who held listening sessions that outreach to individual employees, and we had numerous fireside chats hosted by our CEO, Horacio Rozanski. You will see DE&I front and center in our ESG efforts. But one of the things that we did is we took a step back and we said, what else should we be doing? What were we not doing? And we took a critical look at ourselves by hiring an outside firm and asked them to do an independent assessment to tell us what we were doing, policies, practices, programs. And we committed to share those results and to act on them. This has resulted in a very comprehensive DE&I strategy and action plan that's been vetted with all of our stakeholders, from our Board to our employees. And it is front and center, and that is why it is front and center in our ESG efforts. Now we know we have work to do, but we are proud of the progress that we've made and the recognition that we've received along the way. Most recently, Forbes named us the #1 employer for women and the best employer for diversity. We walk the talk. All you have to do is look around and see the leaders that are talking to you here today. 8 out of 9 of our leadership team members are women or ethnically diverse. All of our markets for the first time in the history of the firm are led by women. And our Board is 67% diverse. DE&I is a critical part of our business strategy. It brings diverse perspectives, experiences to the work we do. It brings richer, more equitable, more innovative solutions to our clients. But importantly, it is so powerful for our talent and the candidates that we want to attract because they can see themselves represented at every level of the firm. They know they can belong at Booz Allen and they can thrive. So let me shift now and talk about our talent systems, which are also very important to the success in the talent war. Our hiring capabilities are aimed at scalable hiring ahead of the kind of demand that you heard Judi, Kristine and Karen talk about. Judi alluded to it in her remarks. And a large part of that demand is still by our employee referrals. Over 30% of our hires come from employee referrals, which I think is a great indication of how much they want their friends and family to be part of our family. We have -- we know that it's very important for employees to see opportunities outside of the work they're currently doing. And so we have a talent marketplace that provides increased career mobility, skill development and specialized experiences. It gives employees and leaders visibility to the available opportunities as well as our skilled talent across the firm. And it's actually reduced our time to fill by focusing on internal first. We're equally committed to providing opportunities to our employees to enhance their skills. It's important to us as well, so that we have talent that's ready with new skills. So we have a development approach that's called Learning Without Limits. An example of that is our FlexEd benefit. It provides flexibility and opportunity to pursue education with the amount of that benefit increasing with tenure. It includes traditional education as well as certifications. Over the last 18 months, our certifications have increased 51%. 57% of our employees hold at least 1 certification. We also have an award-winning program called Tech Excellence, and Judi touched on this a bit when she talked about the investments that we were making in our talent. We offer cyber training, data science, modern software development and cloud engineering. We've had over 2,200 participants in this program. And we've had very strong attrition for those that have participated. Importantly, we're also leveraging it to increase diversity in STEM. Our last cyber cohort was 51% people of color and 34% women. So those are a couple of examples, small set to highlight the many things that we do in our people-centered culture and our talent systems, which we believe set us apart and set us up for success. We will continue to be thoughtful and innovative about our workforce, the talent we have today, and the talent we need for our future. I've got a short video I want to share with you so that you can see for yourself some of our people and our culture. [Presentation]

Let me just add my thanks for joining us here this morning, and it's my pleasure to introduce our CFO, Lloyd Howell.

Good morning, everyone. It's been a long 18 months, but I want to share some stories with you. It was good and bad. On the challenging side, I realize that I can sit in front of my MacBook Pro for 9-plus hours with minimal break. Also learned how to hush my family members and move them out of the background, so that they didn't distract. Became very sensitive to what Internet connectivity meant and screens that were freezing and use the phrase, you're on mute, more than I thought I'd ever do in my life. Now it wasn't all bad. I lost a little bit of weight. Family budget got a lot better. And as a CFO, I was greatly appreciative of that. But I really missed getting back out, seeing everyone. And so my thanks and appreciation to you all for making the trip, making the journey, wearing masks, COVID cards, you name it, vaccination cards. Great to be with you. Before I get into the specifics of our updated investment thesis, there are some concepts that I think you really need to appreciate and many of which you've heard from my colleagues this morning and in Horacio's opening commentary. We are committed to strong financial value proposition. Long-term above-market EBITDA growth of 50% by 2025. We're going to achieve this on our strategy around velocity, leadership and technology differentiation. And we're going to have internal investment, which you've heard from Susan and others to achieve this leadership in high priority areas. We're doubling down innovation to be at the center of our clients' mission, and we're emphasizing strategic M&A to accelerate our pace of growth. Now why should you believe we will achieve any of this. Well, we have a very strong track record and Horacio, being the ever diplomat that he is, said that we outperformed our targets from FY '18 to '21. And -- now me being from Philadelphia, I get really enthusiastic. We crushed it. 96% ADEPS growth, organic growth of 8.4%, a 120 basis point improvement in our margin and $1.3 billion in capital deployed. Now Horacio and I and my fellow leaders, we get looked at and take credit, but it's really the credit of our people. And you heard Betty talk about our culture, our inclusivity and how we really spend the time and energy investing in our people. And they really came through an environment where great uncertainty around budgets, a global pandemic, racial and social inequality, a changed work environment that probably will be changed forever. But that really gives us the confidence that we've got the team that will allow us to achieve these financial objectives that I'm running through this morning with you. Next slide. So before I jump into '23 to '25, I want to go back and sort of reiterate our guidance for this fiscal year. Just to remind everyone, we're shooting for 7% to 10% growth at the top line, low single-digit growth in the first half with an acceleration in the second half. Billable expenses is still down. I gave guidance that typically says we look to be between 29% and 31%. And this year, as we're sort of emerging from the virtual world that I think we're all in, it's still going to be toward the lower end of that range. Margins, we still expect to be in the mid-10% range and ADEPS between $4.10 and $4.30. Our operating cash is still at the lower end of our $800 million to $850 million guidance range. Now the ongoing on the demand side, we get all of the positive signals from our clients. They're engaging with us. We're having proactive shaping opportunities, but there's still a slowness to how the business is sort of coming about. Some of that is due to just the virtual nature that we're in. So it was just sort of the tiredness, if you will, of where everyone is at this point. But we still believe we are not demand constrained. You'll see it in -- in a minute, you'll see in our backlog performance, our book-to-bill performance, it's very strong and we expect that to continue. What we've always said is that we're more supply constrained. So Lloyd, why can't you sort of grow at the same rate as your backlog? Well, we need the people and the talent in order to convert that backlog. And Q3 of last year was a sort of a wake-up call that we really needed to pick up the pace on recruitment, and we have done that. So we've had steady improvement. It continues to improve. In a couple of weeks' time, I'll give you a sort of an update, but we're seeing still high staff utilization. Billable expenses are still a little bit off because we can't travel like we once did. Vaccine rollouts, PTO utilization, workforce fatigue are very much in the mix. And just this week and last week, we're engaging our workforce to talk it out and to see where people are so that we can return to work in a safe manner. We're encouraging our people to take time off. It's been a very unpredictable 1.5 years, and they are beginning to do that. We're not seeing to Betty's point the PTO revenge or tsunami. It's sort of in a more deliberate pace, but we're being very mindful of it. And we think that these will have financial consequences that will stabilize more so in the second half than what we're seeing in the first half. So let's flip to the investment thesis. We are leveraging our velocity, leadership and technology differentiation to achieve this EBITDA growth. And they're between -- around $1.3 billion. And there are probably lots of ways to get there, but what we're modeling out is organic growth between 5% and 8%, mid-10% margins and $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion in capital deployed. We're also forecasting free cash flow to convert at about 100% of adjusted net income through FY '25. Why these metrics? You heard Horacio say that, well, we track EBITDA internally. It's what we can control. We have a commitment to long-term growth, and it speaks to our operational performance. What's not in our control is taxes, interest rate changes. And so we feel that EBITDA growth is not only what we focus on internally, but also what we should be focusing on externally and you all sort of evaluating us based on that performance. Now what I'd like to do is walk through why we're so confident that we can achieve these objectives. So let's start with the 5% to 8% organic growth. You heard from my colleagues that our positioning, our investment strategies, our deep relationship with clients gives us the confidence that we're going to be well aligned with what their priorities are and what they need to be. We also have a history of above-market delivery. We're in alignment with our clients, as I mentioned. We're intimate with our clients, as I mentioned. We have a very strong backlog and pipeline performance, and we invest in multiyear growth. When we consistently outpaced the market, we have a long-term track record, as you can see behind me, of growing faster than the market. We've grown at approximately 10% CAGR, above the addressable market for quite some time. And it really points to significant market gains that we will consolidate in the future. We're pacing off into a large and growing addressable market. As you can see to the left, our addressable market includes approximately $150 billion worth of opportunities. And if you look at the growth rate that's expected at the government fiscal year '26, about $1.6 trillion. And in our size today, we feel that there's plenty of upside potential to take advantage of this addressable market. We're a major player in health and in defense, as you've heard from Kristine and Karen. And to the left, you can see with one of our aerospace clients, going all the way back to FY '13, we grew that particular client to $175 million thereabouts over that period of time. You've heard from Kristine in the past about our health -- public health clients. And you can see here, going back to like $23 million and today, $155 million and above that when you consider some of the inorganic things that we're doing is just phenomenal. So we can land and grow the clients that we've had, and we've done that all the way back to World War II with our first client, the Navy. When we look at our backlog, you see that we have ample strength and have consistently grown our backlog going all the way back to FY '12. And again, the questions that I typically get from you guys is sort of, hey, how come you can't grow the top line at that? Again, we're not demand constrained. It's really supply and we're making improvements on that as we speak. Three components to our backlog: priced options, funded and unfunded. And we tend to look at priced options as a leading indicator of our clients' confidence and satisfaction with Booz Allen. In terms of the qualified pipeline, to the right, that's also been very strong. So we pride ourselves in shaping opportunities that are reflected in sort of the quality of the work and the opportunities, and that also has been growing very strong. Now we've always been growth-oriented and specifically around investments. So we have been and will continue to focus on internal investments to achieve leadership in these key high priority areas. We're also committed to invest to take advantage of the increasing velocity of our clients to drive multiyear growth. And what you can see on this to the right is sort of our margin performance over that period of time, and our growth rate in terms of EBITDA dollars. And it has improved from 9.5% to mid-10s and that's fantastic, but one of the questions that I typically get from you guys is, hey, why can't it be higher? Like what's the upper limit? And quite frankly, margins hasn't been sort of the focus of our business. It's been EBITDA dollar growth. And we see margins as a means to get there. And we like the fact we invest ahead of the opportunity. Now we don't get it always right, but we got a pretty good track record. And I think the FY '18 to '21 performance is a reflection of that. So what might that look like going forward? If we look at the next slide, this is a bit illustrative on purpose. But today, we're sort of high 10s. So Lloyd, how do you get to mid-10s? Well, we see a mix shift contributing to an improvement, let's call it, 30 to 50 basis points. Cost containment, another maybe 10 to 30 basis points, but it's really this blue chart that I get excited about because that represents investment capacity that we can then get ahead of things such as the digital battle space. Cyber, which Judi talked about. And today, it's sort of 60 to 100 basis point estimate as we see it today. Now that is certainly going to change over the next couple of years. But today, it gives us a good sort of confidence building that we have the capacity to invest in our growth and that will sort of land us in the mid-10s. In terms of cash, we have historically been a very strong cash generator, and we expect to do so going forward. So we expect our operating cash flow to largely track with adjusted EBITDA. We expect our CapEx to remain between $80 million and $100 million. A lot of that aimed at sort of this emerging challenging work environment that we all find ourselves in, but also with the eye toward growth. We are currently renovating our innovation center, which has been a huge boom to our federal clients as well as our workforce. And we're looking for ways to upgrade that as an example. Altogether, we expect our free cash flow to convert at about 100% of adjusted net income through FY '25, and this will largely translate roughly to attractive double-digit free cash flow per share CAGR through FY '25. Capital deployment. I know you've heard a lot today about M&A and I'm going to get to that, but I want to set some context of why we're -- we feel we have the right capital deployment strategy and how M&A will fit into that. What you can see in this chart is that we have historically maintained a very balanced approach to capital deployment, leveraging dividends, share repurchases, capability tuck-ins as they've made sense and way back when special dividends as we were emerging from Carlyle. But since that period of time, it's really been those 3 levers. And most recently, as you heard from Kristine, the acquisition that we're very excited about with Liberty and what you heard from Karen in our acquisition of Tracepoint. So let's go through each of these levers that make up our capital deployment strategy. We've been -- we feel good stewards in managing what the market is and pulling the right levers that makes sense for the benefit of our shareholders in the near, mid and long term. We have a very strong balance sheet. It has allowed us to leverage it in terms of how to deploy that capital. With $1.6 billion in cash plus access to a revolver, it gives us a tremendous amount of capacity to engage if deals make sense. At the same time, we have no near-term maturities or significant financing commitments. And we feel comfortable being between a 3 and 3.5 net leverage position. We anticipate deploying $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion over the investment period. And again, it will be a combination of dividends, share repos and strategic M&A. On the dividend side, we intend to maintain a dividend payout ratio of between 25% and 35%. And this really is a reflection of remaining committed to our dividend holders, and we expect to grow our dividends over time. On the repurchase dimension, we established a view on the intrinsic value of our shares through a set of robust analysis that and procedures and we look for opportunities in the market where it makes sense to repurchase. So we don't go -- I don't go into every fiscal year, like I'm going to do just this amount because we feel that we will have the flexibility to make the call as it makes sense, given what market conditions are. Now we've talked a lot about strategic M&A. So let me address that. Let me take you back in time. One of the reasons M&A really hasn't been at the forefront of our thinking is because we have really been focused on the organic dimension, basically since Carlyle unwind. And we've been doing that very well. So when you look at, well, where do I spend my time? Our business leaders have really been focused on the organic dimension and they've been doing it very well. Now as we think about the future, we want to augment that and complement that organic growth with some strategic M&A as long as it's accelerating our growth. We're not looking to just scale up for the sake of scale up. There may be times where situations and we will debate it, but we hold very sacred cultural alignment, our ability to integrate. Certainly, the financials have to make sense. And that criteria has served us well. Historically, we've looked at over 100 opportunities every year, but we haven't felt the need or haven't seen the right opportunities to pull the trigger. Either the pricing was more expensive than what we thought it should be, the culture was wrong or strategically, it just didn't make sense. But now we feel that with a strengthened corporate development team led by Matt Calderone, who's here with us today, who'll come up when we do Q&A. We've got the right sort of a playbook that's building the right set of experiences with some of the deals that we've done. We've got, as I mentioned, $1.6 billion of liquidity plus access to a revolver. So plenty of powder to pursue M&A opportunities as they make sense. And we have some recent examples in the form of Liberty, which was a complementary organization, as you heard from Kristine. It was in a functional area that we see as being in high demand going forward. And we still expect $200 million of revenue synergies by FY '25. The other one is Tracepoint. And you heard from Karen that this was an investment we made in December of last year. We pulled the trigger on full acquisition. Why? Because it made sense financially. They're exceeding their projections. We had strong cultural alignment. We're winning in the market. It was the right thing to do, and that's sort of the mentality that we have when we think about M&A opportunities. In closing, we're going to enter into this next multiyear period enthusiastically. And hopefully, you all got a sense today of that from all of our leadership. We have an updated strategy that's both near and long term with benefits. We've got a track record of managing through challenging times, and we have the right strategy and leadership to execute. I want to thank you for your time today. With that, we're going to take a short break to set up the chairs for Q&A. I'm also going to ask our Chief Legal Officer, Nancy Laben, to come up as well as our Chief Strategist, Matt Calderone, to come up to field any questions that you may have. [Break]

Great. So let's get started with Q&A. [Operator Instructions] With that, if you're ready, I am passing the mic over to Horacio.

Thank you, Rubun. No legal statements this time around?

No, nothing I can think of.

All right. Well, I promised you a lot of chairs and here we are. Nancy, Matt, welcome. I'm going to try and moderate the conversation so that we get your questions answered. I don't know if mics have been passed around, but we're ready to start.

Matt Akers from Wells Fargo. I was wondering if you could talk about -- so your 5% to 8% growth guidance, what kind of budget growth do you need to get there? How much does the government need to cooperate? And then I guess, could you maybe talk about what are kind of some of the puts and takes that get you to the top end of that range versus the bottom end?

Sure. I'll start. As you saw on one of the charts, the budget growth rate is sort of in that 2% to 3% range, and we have always sort of been above that by about 2% or 3%. The swinger on what end of that is really due to our ability to bring on the talent. The demand and the backlog is there. If we bring on sort of mid-single digits, we feel very confident that we're going to be in that range, if not to the top end of that range. To bridge it for you, it's the FTEs plus wage inflation that gets us into that sort of range. So to compare and contrast, our highest year was probably FY '19, we finished at 5.6%. FY '20 sort of 4.2% in terms of headcount growth and hit '21, the pandemic, dropped back to a run rate of about 3%, if not, I think 2.6% to 3%. So we're now getting back up into that sort of mid-single-digit range, and that will convert what we believe we have in terms of already strong pipeline.

I'll just add a thought, which is this idea of velocity. It's about our notion that we can deploy both resources, talent and capital against areas in the government where the budget priorities are going to be there. And you heard about some of those today. We have more that we're planning on. I mean we appreciate the sense that the budget is a monolithic set of numbers. But inside of that, there's going to be things that are going to be funded, things that are going to grow, things that are the priority and that's where we're focused. And I'm going to try and make sure that we get the rest of our colleagues answering questions, because Lloyd and I get to do this all over again with you in about 2 to 3 weeks, but go right ahead, please.

Elizabeth Grenfell from Bank of America. I'm going to tag along to that question a little bit. I'm just curious as to why your organic revenue growth number isn't higher given where you came in for the last forecast you gave? And what are some of the specific organic drivers behind that? And if it is highering, what are you doing to specifically address that?

Yes. The way to think about it is on a consolidated basis. We've got 3 very attractive large businesses, all growing at a different rate in any period of time. So when we looked at it, and I'm not going to break it down in terms of guidance. The blended was in between 5% and 8%, which we felt very good about. In a competitive market, given our positioning, given our ability to bring on talent, we felt that, that was a good range for us to shoot to and get to. As you heard from Judi, she is transforming our Intelligence business. So it's getting stronger. And this year, it's going to be in a growth posture. But again, it's a blend of Kristine, Karen, Judi, contributions from Susan and what we're trying to do that puts us in that range.

Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies. I'm going to ask a little bit about the customer vertical since we have everybody up. I think 3 of the 4 verticals grew double digits last target cycle with the exception of Intel. Judi, so you talked about 3 things you're going to do to accelerate the business. Maybe can you guys talk about how you see your targets for each of the verticals? If you don't mind mentioning if it's ranges of mid-single or high single-digit growth, if that's possible.

So Sheila, I guess I'll start and then I'll turn it over to my -- as you know, we choose not to talk about specific ranges by segment because especially when we're looking out from now through 2025, we appreciate that the demands and the priorities in the government are going to change. And if you saw something today, you saw a group of leaders that work together that are selfless in terms of their approach to the business that both move talent around and drive the business. And so we're aiming as high as we can in each one of our markets, and we can talk a little bit about growth opportunities that we see everywhere. But we're not trying to limit ourselves to a single number or even a single range by market because we actually want that agility. I don't know if you guys want to talk a little bit about growth opportunities?

Sure. I'll start. Sheila, thanks for the question. And I addressed a little bit of this in my prepared remarks, but I'll emphasize that the department is really in the midst of modernization and modernization means 3 things to the department. Number one is the introduction of technology. to really transform the manner in which they execute the mission through technology. Two is building bases of operations for joint all-domain command and control. We know that they are hyper-focused on INDOPACOM, Hawaii, Japan, Korea and having a real base of operation there. And then the last area is the ability to continue to build their monolithic platforms that I talked about, but to integrate them, to drive data advantage through those integrated platforms. Those are all 3 tremendous growth opportunities for us. And I believe, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, that we're already prepositioned in those areas.

I'll add from the Intelligence business. There are 2 opportunities that I'll talk about. One, it's national cyber, which I've already discussed. We've identified 2 specific use cases across those. One is around computer network operations and the other is around protecting the critical infrastructure. And within those areas, there are a number of opportunities that span across a broad set of clients. So we're really thinking about how we pursue those opportunities differently by deploying our resources more broadly across the market and expect to capitalize on the growth there. The second area that I'll mention is one that Horacio mentioned in his opening remarks, and that is the intelligence community does not suffer from a lack of information, a lack of data. There is a tremendous amount of data out there. Some of it's in the open source, right? The challenge is how do you differentiate what's meaningful and what's useful at a point in time from the stuff that gets in the way of what's meaningful and useful. And so the answer there is technology along with the tradecraft and those are areas where we're seeing huge demand across the market.

And I'll just add on, for Civil, I think everyone's noticed that -- at least the proposals for the Civil budget are significantly larger going forward. But out of the gate, the funding so far has been in health, right? You see it through the pandemic funding and in cyber. So those are the 2 places that they're already showing strong need, and we are already winning net new contracts. The other areas that I talked about, it's going to happen, right? We will see growth in the government's efforts in climate, in transportation, et cetera. But the exact pace of that and what the negotiations will end up with in Congress coming -- going forward, I think we're not -- we don't know exactly. But there is great potential in Civil and we'll -- and I'm working very closely with Judi on cyber.

Seth Seifman from JPMorgan. I guess maybe a question for Horacio and for Karen. You talked at the start about the digital battle space and wanting to be #1 there. And we have the platform companies there too and Lockheed, in particular, has been very specific about looking to use its platforms to kind of lock up the transition to 5G and to the digital battle space. So I guess, how do you think about competing in that area with the platform companies?

I love that question. We don't intend to compete with the platform companies. The reality is that companies like Lockheed, Northrop, GD, they have their platforms, they have their fully integrated -- vertically integrated systems that don't enable JADC2 or enable the digital battle space. We come in and we say, look, we are focused on the data layer and the platform companies need to integrate into the data layer via an API. And we've already demonstrated that through our Rainmaker solution as an example, where we've developed the API library, if you will, that enable all of the platform companies to integrate into that. The digital battle space is not a competition with those kinetic platforms. The digital battle space is the layer upon which all of the data coming from those kinetic and nonkinetic platforms can be integrated and leveraged for decision superiority.

Louie DiPalma, William Blair for Karen, Judi and Kristine. I have another question on competition. Booz Allen was in the mainstream news last week as there were several stories about how the Department of Homeland Security plans to migrate certain applications from its Palantir FALCON system to a Booz Allen designed RAVEn data analytics system. Palantir has won numerous data analytics contracts such as Army Vantage. You have also won numerous data analytics contracts with this RAVEn system. You just referenced Rainmaker and Advana. Data analytics is a high-growth area that you referenced and Karen referenced, the JADC2. But from a broader investment and strategic perspective, Palantir is now valued at several times the size of Booz Allen. So ultimately, have you noticed any secular shift taking place in terms of government software procurement, like in this highly strategic data analytics area that you need to respond to in order to adapt to changing market conditions?

Well, why don't I start, and then I'm sure my colleagues were -- want to -- we're going to leave the decision of what companies are valued to you guys. And we're going to focus ourselves on how do we add the most value to our clients and create shareholder value from that. And I think everything you're seeing around VoLTE and around this notion of velocity, leadership and technology is predicated on the shift that you're describing. The shift from hardware to software, from data silos to integrated data layers is the secular trend that we believe will fundamentally transform government over the next decade and that's where we intend to play when Susan talks to you about what we're doing in our innovation agenda and the advances we're making in artificial intelligence. That is all about taking advantage of all that data and actually creating decision advantage from it. And we recognize we're not going to be the only ones who are going to play in that game. We -- at the risk of lack of humility, we think we're the best at playing that game. And we intend to go for it. And in fact, as I said before, we have the contracts to do it. We have the talent to do it. We have the capabilities and the positions to do it, and we're now bringing it all together over the next 3 years and beyond. So as I said, we expect competition. And I think, in fact, the signs that you're seeing competition means that we're right. It means that these are areas of investment that other people see, not just us. And it's up to us to retain our first-mover advantage. I don't know if you guys want to add?

I'd just add, it sounds so simple. But bringing the mission understanding together with the technology is what really enables us to tailor our solutions and how we can often gain that pole position.

David Strauss from Barclays. You touched on the increased focus of M&A going forward. So I wanted to ask about the M&A pipeline, maybe if you could break it down by end market and where you think M&A might be more focused among your end markets? As well as Lloyd, you touched on the cultural fit and all that, but could you provide some specifics around the financial metrics that you focus on most so on kind of hurdle rates around M&A?

Sure. Matt, why don't you pick up the pipeline and markets and then I'll get in the financials.

Yes. Thanks, Lloyd. Look, I think we're going to be focused on the areas you've heard today. digital battle space, national cyber, digital transformation, M&A is an accelerant. And so we're going to focus M&A. We're focused on our organic strategy as well because the 2 really work hand-in-hand. We've got a pretty robust pipeline. I think if you look at the Liberty and the Tracepoint acquisitions, both of those were done outside of processes and that is a testament, I think, to the quality of the strategies and the relationships that our market colleagues had, makes my job a lot easier. So we anticipate doing a lot of that. Obviously, we participate in processes as well. But what you're seeing is, again, the quality and the focus of the strategies makes my job easy, because we know what to go after. And quite frankly, we see the value that can be created and accelerated through M&A. With respect to hurdle rates, Lloyd, if you're comfortable, I can answer that as well.

Yes, 10% is sort of what we use internally. But if you sort of look back into the capital deployment, we're looking at $150 million to $250 million EBITDA dollar growth contributed from M&A activity. So roughly, I mean, the $2 billion over that period of time. And we feel -- because of the things Matt and my colleagues here have been doing, we feel that we're positioned to compete well in that. And as Kristine will tell you about Liberty's integration, I think in many ways, it sort of exceeds our expectations about how well that's gone and they're probably in a much better position to talk about the details. But as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we've got a running playbook. Everyone is contributing to it on a weekly basis. We know we don't have it all figured out, but we feel we're on the right path to, a, on financially having the capacity, having that right hurdle rate, having like a set of targets and what we're trying to do with capital deployment that we're going to be there.

Kristine, maybe this is an opportunity to talk a little bit more or give an update on Liberty integration.

Sure. Well, first of all, it's hard to believe it's only been 3 months. So they -- while they're not fully integrated yet, we're integrated at the market level. We're integrated at our technical capability level. We are going to market together already. We're getting results together already. And I feel like we've really cracked the code a bit on what it takes to kind of bring an organization into Booz Allen really quickly. And so we're thrilled with it, and we're starting to see the value very, very quickly.

Gavin Parsons with Goldman Sachs. I wanted to ask a little bit more about investment maybe from a couple of angles, where you plan to spend that, whether it'd be B&P, R&D, IT infrastructure, then you obviously spoke a lot about the categories, but maybe any specific projects for investment? And then Lloyd, how you think about allocating the amount of investment that you did on the slide up there?

Yes. I'll start. I'm sure Susan and others will want to jump in. We take a holistic view on investments. And so everything from what are we doing with our people, their training, how we ask them to allocate their time towards cultivating opportunities as opposed to utilization targets, that gets fed into it. In terms of the categories, I ramp through cost containment is another area that we think will give us the capacity as well as mix shift. Now we're not going to swing the dial like now all of a sudden we're going to do like a whole bunch of fixed price contracts because actually, the market dictates the contract types that we are. But with modest adjustments, that will also give us some investment capacity. And then we have a very detailed adjudication process in terms of my colleagues come to the table with investment opportunities. No surprise here around digital dial space and cyber and the list goes on and on. And we, by committee, make decisions that we think are going to be in the best interest of the portfolio. And I'll be honest, sometimes there's some friction there, right, because you want to get what you want to get, but we may not have the capacity at that point in time. But we believe going forward, 60 to 100 basis points is a lot by our standard that we would be able to vote and have meaningful like return in a shorter period of time than what we actually were able to do under the last strategy. So that's sort of the CFO's response, but you should probably hear it from my colleagues as well.

I thought it'd be easier to just maybe give you an example of a technology that we're pursuing like 5G as an example. So we identified, obviously, 5G as a disruptor and enabling technology for the future through our robust tech scouting program that we have. And we set into motion building a strategy, building a team. We build a carrier-grade lab with Judi in Central Maryland. And then we went about going to market. And we've won over $300 million or so in contracts that are part of DoD's R&D program around 5G. And we've won 7 or 8 contracts now to date. And that's the way we're able to go to market and test the concepts around 5G, really understand the use cases for that technology, build hands-on experience and credibility. So we incubate those investments. Maybe we'll put a couple $100,000 in it first. and then we expanded over time. We're actually doing an incredible amount of R&D in partnership with the government. Also, we build those unique partnerships with Ericsson, with Verizon, with others in the startup community and we codevelop and collaborate with them, which makes us more compelling when we go to market after these DOD procurements.

I'd add one more example that Susan and Karen and I all work on together, and that's the Dark Labs example that I highlighted in my comments. And that is an investment where we can create differentiated IP and IC and we can test it across all of our clients to make sure that it is something that is truly valuable and we can tune it with that mission understanding. So it's an investment that is -- it makes a difference today in terms of how we deliver, but it also builds our business for the future.

Byron Callan, Capital Alpha Partners. A recruitment question. Lloyd, you talked about something we've all been doing, which is working remotely or working very differently. So when you think about this question about attracting new people to come work at Booz Allen, do you change your geographic focus? Are you allowing more distributed workforce? How does that help you address this problem of getting new people at the company?

I think I'll take that.

It's easy to take that one.

Thank you for that question. It actually really has helped our recruiting because it's given us access to a much greater talent pool. And it's given our clients the same experience that we all had during the pandemic of being able to accommodate the distributed workforce, which they've been very willing to work with us on. So that has been incredibly helpful to dive into those other talent pools so that we can have broader access. So it's been tremendously helpful. And we've also spent a lot of time making sure that as we hire those people that they really also still understand what Booz Allen is about, and they feel connected. We have peer mentors and a lot of formal onboarding of things that make sure that they're just not sort of an island that's out there.

I'll give credit to our clients on this, too. I mean this has been a time where they've innovated to make this work. I think my colleagues can speak with even more clarity about this. But I mean our clients at the VA that are willing to use delivery centers in Charleston and in Melbourne, Florida, are classified clients that are allowing us to move some of the work that can be done in an unclassified basis that way, so we can attract different talent pool. It's been pervasive and it's been actually great to watch. This is -- some of us wanted to see this happen 15 years ago, and we've been making this argument. But if there's a silver lining to the last 18 months that is here now.

Yes. If you had asked me in February of 2020, if on March 16, 90% of the global defense business would be working remotely, I would have said you're crazy. Most people probably would have said you're crazy. But we were able to pivot to 90% of our team being virtual, the 10% that are still in SCIFs and sort of mission essential programs. And to be honest with you, we're still pretty much at those levels. We're close to maybe closer to 80% today virtual. And the opportunity, I think, for Booz Allen and for us totally is that we can continue to have conversations with our clients that encourage this kind of virtual engagement. It doesn't have to be a 100% virtual, but that flexibility, it offers our employees, has been tremendous and we're really having those conversations with our clients because we know it's going to matter in retention.

Can I add one thing? We -- as it relates to velocity, one of the things we have been trying to drive was virtual interviewing, just not have the travel, not have the parking, all of those. And we had like 5% of our managers that were willing to do that before the pandemic, 100% we're going to keep it that way because it really is efficient and really speeds things up.

I'm going to take moderators prerogative here and I know ESG is on many of your minds because when Lloyd and Rubun did their listening tour, you had a lot to say. So taking advantage of Nancy Laben on stage, who leads our ESG thrust. You want to talk a little bit about it?

I'd love to. Thank you very much for the opportunity, and thank you all for coming today. A little bit of an advertisement, our second annual ESG report will be out in November, so please look for that. That will be very comprehensive and talk about our program. But let me just highlight 4 key areas that we have focused on that overlap with what we think is important to our stakeholders as well as what overlaps with the work that we do. The first is talent development. That is one of the key areas that we are looking at making sure that we both focus on capability as well as all the way through to the DE&I component. The second is governance, obviously, the G in ESG. That's important. And we will continue to focus on ethical and transparent. We have been named again one of the world's most ethical companies, and that is very important to us. Thirdly, data security. This is obviously what we do, and you've heard about it all this morning for our clients, but it's also very important for us. And then lastly is global resilience. That is both to increase the positive impact we have in our communities, with our signature program and our community partnerships as well as reduce the negative impact that we may have. Now we're a very low carbon organization, for example, but we have made a commitment to go net zero by 2050. And we are also looking at metrics, and we are early in the program. But one of the things that we are doing, you will see is sustainability is now part of -- as of FY '22, our executive compensation. We felt it was important to measure us based on what we value and what we found important. So again, please look for the full report coming your way shortly.

I think we have time for one more question. Two, if we are super efficient with our answers.

Tobey Sommer with Truist Securities. I had a question. It's a tight labor market and there's wage inflation out there. Could you talk about the -- your expectations for compensation and wage inflation over the investment period? And from a benefit standpoint, I'm curious how you see your mix changing and what is of increasing importance to your labor force?

Do you want to start Lloyd and then...

I'll start. Tobey, historically, I would have told you like 2% to 3%. But given the labor, the spectrum that we're competing for, it's more like 4% to 5%. And when you factor in the contract types we have, we are up to this point, able to pass that on, the government is paying for it. Now we have to be smart and we put together our price proposals and have the right labor categories and get the mix right, but we typically do. We're in the competitive range. And so that's encouraging. But it's creeping up just given how competitive the market is, hard to find skill sets. And so we're seeing like 4% to 5% in terms of inflation.

I would say on the benefit front, the things that have become very important are programs like the FlexEd program that I talked about where they can find ways in their own time with the firm's money to be able to get the education and skills and experiences that they are looking for that will keep their career relevant and help them be ready when the next opportunity comes along inside Booz Allen. It's a benefit that's up to $10,000 a year that they can use for certifications, for regular educations, conferences that will enhance their ability to -- because there's a lot of technology that doesn't have a certification. So we cover those as well. And that is really important because they really -- they love to learn -- our employees love to learn. They want to be ready and they're just really taking advantage of that. That's been a really important benefit for us.

Great. We do have time for one more question. You guys did great. No? I think we answered all the questions. This will be a first...

We've got 1 more.

Maybe just one follow-up. Sorry, it's kind of a crude financial question. But if you could talk maybe a little bit about the trajectory of the growth path you see? The recently passed budget, the request for '22, does that give you more visibility on the near term? Or do you expect it to be a relatively even pace throughout? And just as maybe a quick follow-up. It looked like the '22 request for the defense IT budget was fairly robust and more than we've seen in the past. Is that -- do you view it that way, view it as an opportunity, specifically for Booz Allen?

You want me to start and then?

Sure.

Going into the pandemic, we would have told you that we expect the overall budget to flatten, if not start to decline, defense as well. And I don't think we would even really -- Karen is going to correct me in a minute, but I don't even think we would change much from that. The challenge is what year would we see a more dramatic shift and Karen is in a better position than I am to speak to that.

So I'll start with just a historical perspective on the defense budget. We know dating back as far back as you can look that any time the threat is perceived as imminent, there are components of the budget that really sustain and grow. And that is true in a given year and given requests that you've seen and that you indicated. What we're particularly excited about is the growth in the budget, particularly in the RDT&E area, which is the research and development. They're putting their money where their mouth is with regard to modernization in JADC2. So that's one area. Also, they're funding robustly the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which is where INDOPACOM will have the opportunity to really bring the emerging technology into those areas to drive differentiated solutions. So we're optimistic about the budget. I would also just simply add that over the past 10 years with our Vision 2020 strategy, we have really pivoted our entire business from being program management and [ CDA ] support to being in the center of the mission related to technology. So even programs that may decline and there will be some, will likely not affect us because we've moved out of some of those areas into the more mission-specific areas.

Thank you. Let me try and bring us to a close. First of all, let me thank everyone on the live stream, who spent the last couple of hours listening to this. I hope we'll get to engage with you after the fact, answer your questions and continue the conversation. And to all of you who took the time to be here, our collective gratitude. As you can see, this is an amazing team of colleagues I get to come to work with every day and a team that is committed to driving Booz Allen not just for the next 3 years, but well beyond. We're excited about this notion of 50% EBITDA growth through 2025. We're excited about continuing our track record of organic revenue growth, of strong margins and of now adding strategic accelerators to do this better and faster than ever. We are focused in the areas where national mission will be transformed by technology innovation, and we are uniquely positioned to capture those opportunities. We look forward to continuing the discussion. We look forward to future engagement. And Lloyd and I will have the pleasure of talking to most of you in a couple of weeks at our upcoming earnings call. Thank you very much.

Thank you.