Distribution Solutions Group, Inc. (DSGR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I'm going to kick us off. I appreciate everybody, I appreciate those of you all who traveled from far and wide to be here in Fort Worth today. I'm Brian King, and I'm the Chairman, I guess, CEO of DSG and we are excited to host our first ever Investor Day, and I'm fired up about telling you why we put this business together. Why we are excited about the prospects of the business over the next 5, 10 years and further. And really why this is the culmination of a vision and journey that I've been on for the last 30 years in distribution and specifically for this objective for the last 15 years. So we are excited to walk you through that. Initially -- or first, we've got to go through the legal statements. I'm not soliciting anybody to invest in this business. And we've already put everything we've got in it and -- or everything yet. And then we've -- also I am going to talk about the future of DSG and our objectives and vision. And I'm going to talk about a lot of details around how we think the business is unfolding and some of that we'll feel more forward-looking, but it's not forward-looking guidance but it's certainly setting some flags on the field of play. Other disclaimers are that I don't really know how to sail and I'm working a sailing tie. And I used to know how, but I've forgotten in the last 20 years of work. The -- I'm going to talk first and we're going to kind of hit -- go through specialty distribution and why we love the space, the history we've got in it and specifically how that informed us on what we were trying to accomplish with DSG and then we're going to -- I'm going to hand the mic over to Ron, who's been the long-standing CFO of Lawson and a friend for the last over 10 years as we've been investors there. And then he'll hand it over to Matt Boyce, Matt has been working with us since there -- when we put IDG together in 2008, he helped us unlock a lot of value there. We went back to his former employer, once we sold it, and then rejoined us for this journey at our request. And then we'll go to -- have a little break, then we'll go to a panel. Brad Wallace, my long-time colleague and business partner, who's helped us along with a lot of our team on specialty distribution over the last 20 years. He's going to walk through a panel with the 3 business vertical CEOs. We're excited about sharing a lot of the initiatives that they've got on their plate. That's no short or small task that they're tackling and that our project management team, Headwater ops team is working with them on. And then I'll come back and say just a few closing remarks. The key takeaways for today are that I want to make sure that you all and many of you know this, why are specialty distributors, we think exciting businesses to invest in, particularly for those of us that like to compound wealth over time and why DSG specifically is at an exciting inflection point on that journey. We're going to talk through the value proposition that we have very deliberately tried to build for the customers and how we will continue to execute on that approach to trying to elevate the value to the customers as well as drive through that, the stickiness and the accelerating return and profitability profiles that you would expect from that value proposition. And then lastly, we want to make sure that everyone appreciates all the many levers that we've got currently in the business that where we're working to unlock value. You can imagine, as we brought 3 disparate business units verticals together and as we've made a number of acquisitions that there's no shortage of opportunity, but there's also a dawning amount of work that's being done by a lot of folks. And we want to make sure that you appreciate how that accelerates returns and accelerate profitability from what we've seen historically in these businesses, but also -- and recognize that a lot of the levers that we're currently pulling are ones that are levers that are in our camp to unlock value. So there's a lot of value that will be unlocked in the marketplace, we believe, with our value proposition, but there's a tremendous amount of acceleration in profitability that's kind of in our camp on projects that we're working through right now. The -- initially, let's talk about Specialty Distribution. Specialty Distribution. 30 years ago, I went on a distribution businesses Board, and I was a young buy-side analyst here at Luther King Capital Management. And my dad has had a long -- who's in the back row has had a long-standing philosophy about investing in businesses that have high returns on invested capital, have strong opportunities to continue to manage our cash flow as shareholders back into incrementally high or higher rates of return can drive the moats around their business by delivering more value to the customers in order to build a more durable business model and ultimately have the confidence in the leadership team, which I hope you will have with us after today that they're going to do the right things to steward the business to be long-time compounders. And so we have historically not been traders of stocks. We're more of investors and businesses. And the great search to try and find the right types of businesses to invest in, the vertical or the industry of specialty distribution or just broad line distribution fell in my camp. And so in 1993, I started spending a lot of time looking at distribution companies. I also went on to a Board with a very thoughtful mentor for me of a distribution business. That distribution business, we thought was a specialty distributor. What we learned over our -- over a 10-year journey on owning that business was that it was increasingly more like a broad line distributor or really a commodity distributor. We had lots of margin pressure. The marketplace became more competitive. Our ability to deliver more specialty capabilities or more value-added services was not really there and scale was working against us. So we had to become way more efficient in the way that we thought about our route structures, our sales force, our logistics and equipment, and we had to become more efficient in our warehouse. And even with those efforts, we did -- we were not able to fight margin contraction because we didn't really have the specialty capabilities or the value-added services that we needed to have for our customers. Hisco and others, Brad's father actually was building a business that was crushing us at that time as a CEO of a distributor. And there were moves that he made and the removes that our other competitors were making that in hindsight as a student of distribution, I think that we've try to embrace as lessons learned and why we migrated to this DSG platform and the approach that we've taken to this business. IDG was a business that we bought in 2008. It was a public company, and IDG had characteristics of it that had specialty elements. It also had broad line elements to it. And we were trying to compete with Grainger, and we didn't have the scale, and we were trying to do store management, which we did very well, but we found that over time, our customers were continuing to ask us to take on more and pay us less. And so there was margin compression that we were fighting there that as we step back and try to look at it while we had a really defensible and good business model, we were struggling to try and figure out what additional elements we could bring to the business to drive a higher level of value added and touch to our customer and scale was a challenge for some of the things that we were looking at. And so -- but the repeatability that these business models offer, the free cash flow characteristics that they have, oftentimes, the connectivity with the customer that allows a high degree of repeatability and engagement, the diversification and the fragmentation in the marketplace, the diversification of the end markets that we serve, the fragmentation in terms of the number of competitors that are still out there. Those are all characteristics that we have migrated that have caused us to migrate to wanting to spend more and more time in the space. Over the last 20 years, I started sharing a spec more of a specialty distributor 20 years ago, and the team that operated that business and the Board that we were able to assemble kind of coach me up as a young Chairman are all still with us today, which is a lot of fun. So they are partners in this. And one of the things that you'll find is that as we have spent the last 20 years focused on specialty distribution and building scale there and knowledge, we've been able to attract a really resilient ecosystem of operators and coaches who are investors in DSG. We have over 100 former CEOs and C-suite executives. Most of those have been specialty distribution executives, and they're all limited partners in helping us try and unlock value very thoughtfully and to ultimately build the business that we are talking to you about today. It's also why we spend the better part of 35%, 40% of our capital in this space. So it's -- over the last 20 years. The -- see here, so on value-added capabilities, again, going back to the difference, and we'll look at metrics on many of you all that cover this space know better than I do, but having spent 30-year study in them. It's remarkable what history tells you about how the value-added capabilities of things like fabrication, kitting, labeling, packaging, vendor managed inventory capabilities, a lot of the supply chain solutions that we bring to our customers, how that investment in the equipment or in the people that deliver those additional offerings allow you to have a higher structural margin or incremental margin with your customers. And it also allows you to have a higher return on invested capital. And so I think a lot about it when I look at our businesses or I look at the lessons learned over the last 20 years, 30 years of studying Fastenal, if you look at the incremental capital that they're investing in those key capabilities, that incremental capital allows them to make such a significantly higher return on invested capital and also structural incremental margin. The return on that capital -- if it's a capital asset, so if it's a packaging or labeling machine, once you get to scale, the incremental return or the return annually on that capability is very consistent with, if not higher than the incremental returns that you're getting on the incremental working capital dollar you're having to put to work. So if you think about 100% incremental returns on incremental working capital, you kind of have the same benefit out of the fixed assets that you have that are bringing the specialty capabilities to the business. So when I look at Gexpro Services, I think -- or I know the Industrial Technology Group has $50 million of investment in rental assets or hard assets. And as I look at the optimization of the network effect of Hisco and test equity that we're going to execute on over the next couple of years, the unlocking of value there ought to be consistent with the amount of dollars that we've got tied up in those fixed assets. If I think about Lawson and their sales force and the way that they serve the customer, that sales force is a real expense. But the investment that we have in that sales force every year gives us and should give us the incremental amount of profitability relative to a broad liner or commodity distributor that is that lift over margin that you have being in that -- kind of delivering that extra service. And so that's an important part of when we look at the metrics that define the differences between a broad liner and the value-added capabilities or when we step back and we think about, okay, Hisco had a labeling machine. And that labeling equipment that they had was being significantly underutilized because they didn't have the scale yet in that line of business. But Gexpro Services had a lot of need for labeling. And so we were outsourcing it to somebody else. So bringing it back in-house and driving a lot more value through it has a significant lift in gross margins. right? And so that 20-plus percent lift in gross margins that we pick up is a lot of what will drive profitability. As we think about the 3 verticals and the walk that we're on to drive profitability in each of them, you'll -- and when we talk, Matt talks about acquisitions, and we'll talk about metrics between -- across our acquisitions over the last year and where we're headed on those and kind of how we think about underwriting a tuck-in. Those tuck-in acquisitions, if we're taking an acquisition from 8x EBITDA to 6 and then ultimately to 4 or lower over the first couple of years. What that's not capturing is the value that, that acquisition may be bringing to the other verticals because there's been significant and deliberate underwriting that we've done to look at how the capability around something like either for Hisco their labeling equipment might be brought to bring a lot of value into the P&L of another vertical. So here, we're looking at the track record of specialty versus broad line distributors, again, trying to underscore the differences between the 2. If you look at -- I would have been sailing a lot more. If I had just held on to Fastenal 30 years ago, right? I mean if you look at -- when they came public in the late '80s, split adjusted, I think the stock price was about $0.08. Today, it's like $0.55. If you look at -- and they're paying out, I think that their payout ratio allows them to have a dividend that's consistent in what you would have paid in 1995 or '97 for the stock. We've got a number of shares of businesses that know Luther RMC owns and that our firm owns for our clients where we are enjoying dividends that are greater than our purchase price on those securities. And we're looking for those types of businesses to own for long cycles that have that sort of compounding -- underlying compounding characteristic, that free cash flow characteristic. And that's where all things kept bringing us back to specialty distribution as a place to spend a lot of time investing in learning and building an ecosystem around. And so we went back and studied prior to pulling the businesses together, what sort of characteristics we would expect out of a specialty distributor with that scale and then how that would flow through financial performance and returns on invested capital over kind of a cycle, how long would it take to realistically or how long had historically it taken for peer sets that we were trying to mimic, if you will, or that we were trying to take lessons from in order to try and execute for our plan. And the time it took to try and triple EBITDA, the sort of incremental margin that dropped during that period of time, one of the things that you could see because I wanted to see what it looked like against the broad liners because I had been an investor and studied those as well. And I had that experience in the '90s through the early 2000s of the challenges around trying to build scale in a more broad line marketplace. And you can see the significant difference in the way that those businesses performed as public securities. How they performed, which both of them performed tremendously relative to S&P 500. If we looked at the way that the incremental margin profile of specialty distributors drove the aggregate EBITDA margin, which you can get to a tripling of EBITDA was shorter. When I look at that these metrics, mind you, Lawson's annum. And if anything is one of the things that I step back and I reflect on is Lawson was a public company, and they were larger than Fastenal in the late '80s and all the way through the early '90s. And there were differences in the past that they took, even though the vendor managed inventory value proposition that Lawson's had has been significantly -- I'm super resilient business, in our opinion. I mean, the 90,000 customers that they serve, the 1,000 salespeople going to see them. At the end of the day, the customers have awarded at the incremental profitability level, Lawson, and they've stayed there consistently rewarding them as a loyal channel partner. We became their largest customer in 2012, I think it was, when Barnes was bought by MSC, IDG needed for their integrated supply business, they needed a -- we needed, I was Chairman, we needed to migrate away from a competitor to try and find a really good fastener, vendor-managed inventory solution for all of our store management relationships at IDG. And so we became Lawson's largest customer. And this idea of building a high free cash flow compounding engine that we could have partners with us on for a long journey was already there in my mind. And we've taken IDG private, we were cleaning it up. We had taken it from $8 million to ultimately like $53 million of EBITDA. And yet we -- when I looked at it and I step back, the business model that Lawson had at the customer value proposition level was so much more sticky and resilient. And the incremental profitability that they enjoyed was very different than what we were experiencing in an everyday knife-fight at IDG. And so we pivoted. We sold IDG, took a bunch of dollars off the table and instead took a big part of those dollars and went and started building an investment position in Lawson. And so that was very deliberate in 2012/'13 before we sold IDG in 2014 to try and start building up our investment in Lawson, recognizing that there were lots of levers. And some of the levers that we had to tackle there, which we'll get into later, were levers that are not particularly easy to do in a public company. It's also the reason why IDG took itself private. They knew that they had unprofitable customers that they needed to fire or that they needed to rework. They knew that their service delivery model at some level for some of their customers was over serving their customers relative to the costs associated for serving the customer relative to the gross profit dollars available with that customer. So you had to kind of start thinking about the business models differently. It was easier for us as a private company to do that. It was very challenging as an investor Board member and the Chairman at Lawson for us to think through some of the levers that Cesar has been able to pull and is continuing to pull with Ron. They were things that we'd identified, but there were levers that were challenging to get folks behind. The -- so I'm going to -- we're going to play this video because I think that as we get further into DSG, I want to make sure that we give you a little bit of the background, some visuals and then we'll kind of hit the bullet point. So who is -- thank you. [Presentation]

All right. Thanks to those that did that video for us, the brown wasn't inspiring our CEO or a bunch of our salespeople. And so we did this video. And in the video, we saw it and the first thing all of us were said was like, "Oh, my gosh, we're using the old bins. So there's a tremendous amount of freshening up that our teams have done with these businesses and will continue to do. It's been exciting to see that. This slide I stole from the guys. They're going to use it later in the presentation. But I wanted to make sure that coming off of the video that we talked to -- or got some perspective on all the different parts of these production facilities where we participate and engage with the customer. What this doesn't show is all the value-added solutions that would be attached to these different product categories in these different parts of the plant. And what it also doesn't show is that a number of these product categories that we've highlighted here are actually product categories that are equally as important to other areas. So if it's electrical, you see them over at electronics assembly or the solders just as important for Hisco and on the main assembly side, because of their OEM relationships on the solder. You can talk about fasteners and fasteners are key category for us. It's our largest category alongside of test and measurement equipment. But in terms of gross profit dollars, you can imagine, fasteners are our driver of a lot of the business, and they're important to more than just the maintenance shop because they're a major part of Gexpro's offering over in the main assembly side. So 500,000 SKUs, pretty dawning number, but a number that lines up into a bunch of these categories, 170,000 customers. The Power of Three is -- Bob's been of Gexpro Services, as Bob Connor's been championing this Power of Three. He's been one of the biggest advocates and deliverers of cross-selling across the Gexpro relationships that are deeply embedded in the plants and all the capabilities that the rest of the verticals are bringing to those embedded relationships. Hisco has a lot of the same types of embedded relationships. We got into a lot of banner early on in talking about Hisco because we've been chasing Hisco or I've been chasing Hisco for 17 years, 16 years, just like I'd spent 14 years, I'm trying to get Bob's get Rexel to sell us Bob's business. But -- and obviously, over 10 years chasing Lawson, to try and pull these businesses together. But Hisco had so many characteristics that were very binding to the test equity and Industrial Technologies business. And not the least of which was in markets, but also some of the product categories that they sell and that they lean into. But they also have capabilities and OEM engagements that are very similar to what we see over Gexpro Services. So there was -- and then they've got some elements of what they're doing are on the MRO side with some of their product categories being used more on maintenance side. So there's a lot of different elements of -- and those of you all who've heard me speak for the last 2 years would know the analogy that I use of the 3 legs of the stool. And one of the things that we found in terms of building the kind of operating the 3 legs was that there were often the braces between the legs. And so Hisco has a lot of bracing elements to the other 2 legs of the stool, even though they're going to significantly help us drive test equities, structural margin higher than we would have been able to do without them. And they were able to leverage a lot of Hisco's capabilities with the bigger platform. The -- this is just a walk through. It does allude a little bit more to our solutions-based approach. You can -- it's a visual, but a lot of words there. I like numbers, so we'll go back to this. There's -- this is trying to highlight 4 of the most important keys to the specialty distribution platform that we've tried to build here. We think a lot about the stickiness of our customers, the revenue retention. That 92% number is a good number. It's higher over where you've got an OEM engagement. It's lower where you have sales force turnover. We're -- and going back to the slide about specialty distributors and talking about the human capital. Our customer-facing employees are the most important asset that we have. And where we aren't doing a great job retaining them or where we need to continue to drive more dollars of value to them, like one of our long perspectives that I've had at least on Lawson has been that we've got to get our sales force where they have more gross profit dollars flowing through so that each of those sellers can make more money because it's hard to get the younger sellers or the newer sellers on board and have a high level of success on a recruit and retention. And when you lose someone, then it's -- there's a real cost to that, and one of the costs is revenue retention because they've just finished securing a relationship. They've got a small book, and then they're gone. And there's choppiness in that relationship. And so the relationship migrates someplace else. We're doing a lot better job on our side of knowing where those revenue dollars are and making sure that we're backing up those sales folks and that we've got retention initiatives that we've put in place over the last several years. But the #1 way to cut down on over that -- over $20 million of profitability that we lose a year on the churn on our sales force is figuring out ways to make sure that those guys and gals are more efficient and can make more money. That drives revenue retention, that we're deeply embedded with our customers, and we continue to look at ways to get more embedded. That's a lot of -- making sure couple things. One is obviously, increasing our engagement around value-added services and value-added capabilities. I would say that we lean into complexity, right? I mean as you get bigger and bigger and you have more and more scale, one of the easiest things to do is to start saying, you know what, I don't serve my customers that way, right? But our customers are asking us to lean into complexity. And that's a big part of being a specialty distributor. It's part of the reason why the market has survived as long as it has with a lot of fragmentation. There are real scale benefits to being able to lead into complexity. And then there are real challenges when you get too large or bigger where you start having so much complexity at certain scales that you start saying, "You know what? Ultimately, I'm losing money on trying to support that complex customizable solution, so you migrate away from it. And so we're at a stage in this business where complexity is our friend. And it's something that we're leaning heavily into. A bunch of the value-added capabilities that we have pulled together are capabilities that our scale that we currently are allows us to do more profitably than if we were smaller and didn't have the sort of value that we can push through that labeling infrastructure that we picked up at Hisco for instance. There's 10 key industries. We'll look at them later on a pie chart, but several of them are ones that are currently out of cycle, but are ones with really strong secular growth. The ones that jumped out to me right there, would be renewables and semiconductor, both of which have had tough headwinds, the production tax credit is back in place. We think there's a massive long-term secular opportunity, both doing service and reman on wind towers and renewables, but also in all the new projects that are out there. That's not been an area that's had a great last 24 months or so, semiconductors with the CHIPS Act, obviously, that's an area that we continue to feel a lot of enthusiasm out of our customers and migration back to North America. But it's also been an area that's been a tough headwind. But that's part of what we love about the diversification or a well-diversified specialty distributor. We've got other markets like aerospace and defense, where things are quite robust. We've got other areas where the Inflation Reduction Act is leaning into a lot of enthusiasm or secular growth for our customers. We have -- we manage 7,000 suppliers. We currently have 36% what we -- the way we kind of look at return on net working capital. That 36% is a tale of multiple tapes, right? When I look at where we want to go on a return on net working capital, we say 50% here. We've got business units that are operating over 50%. We just added a major acquisition that -- to team up with test equity where it increased their working capital intensity, but we're working that back to our long-term targets and we've got an opportunity to have a significant lift in profitability of that near $1 billion of revenue, by optimizing the 2 businesses in the way that they engage with their customers. And so you can see there where their return on net working capital is about where the average is. And yet there's a lot of room to move it. And then you've got, last year, the last 2 years, as we added a lot of content, very specific content that we were deliberately chasing to add to our Gexpro Services division. In doing so, trying to get SKU alignment or SKU congruence, which is something that also took place on our TEquipment acquisition. When you're trying to pull your SKU congruence and you invest in more SKU categories, but you don't necessarily get the returns yet. And so -- and then also, a lot of our customers from a planning perspective, when you're an OEM vendor, you've got customers that are giving you their plans and they're telling you what levels of investment that they would expect for you to have. Everybody has been, for the last several years, been anxious about supply chains. So there's been kind of, we'll call it, double rounding. People have been double rounding their numbers or they've been double buffering their numbers in order to try and make sure that their suppliers are holding more inventory. We were making sure we held more buffer on top of what they were -- because of concerns around supply chain. A lot of those supply chain dynamics have mitigated. They're moderated. And by moderating, it's allowed us to start unlocking a lot of money out of our working capital. And so you'll see that -- and we've talked to this that there is a significant amount of working capital dollars that we put into these 3 business verticals over the last 18 months and some of that is coming back out. Some of that's going to stay in to support the next level of growth, but it doesn't -- it also means that you don't have to invest that next 23% or 24% of revenue for incremental revenue to be supported by incremental working capital. And so you kind of get the benefit of more free cash flow for a period than you would have had over the last 18 months. We talk a little bit -- we show here on the dual pronged growth 10% year-over-year organic sales growth. We obviously just eclipsed a really robust period on that. We both had the inflation tailwind, which is something that we enjoyed, but also we had unit increases, and we're certainly hitting the harder part of our comps, which we've indicated to everybody the organic side of our business is still really healthy. It's interesting what pockets are softer. Capital spending has been one of them for sure. We've talked about for now for the last 9 months, the test and measurement. Equipment is much more -- has much more of a capital spending cycle to it. So you see customers either delaying the purchase of that capital asset or they migrate to buying something that you used or renting something out of your rental portfolio. The acquisitions, 7.7 gone down to 6.3 over the first year. Those are just last year's acquisitions. There's -- we'll look at a couple of case studies there. There are some of those that we've got in there. They are in the end markets that have been more challenged like parts of the renewable. And so we may not have yet had the big step down in those purchase price multiples, that we expect to have over the next 12 months. And we expect to continue to see those 2022 acquisition season to a much lower multiple. And what that doesn't also capture is what I said earlier, which is the impact that those have had on the profitability or the long-term structural profitability that we will see out of their core verticals or even across the whole network. This just kind of had some flash numbers here. We do operate in over 40 countries, that 170,000 customers, some of them ask us to go places. Some of our vendors, our key vendors have asked us to make sure that we're supporting them with key customers in parts of the world. Our Hisco acquisition was quite, it was super deliberate because we had -- and we are seeing more and more of our customers that are the larger customers ask us to have a bigger presence in Mexico. And so that's -- the near shoring is a big secular tailwind for us as is reshoring. And so Hisco not only brought a lot of capabilities that we were after, but it significantly expanded our geographic ability for Lawson and Gexpro Services to leverage in that part of the world. This is -- I talked about free cash flow. We are fierce about how we evaluate our opportunities to use it. I don't take lightly the fact that we all share that free cash flow as shareholders. It's part of the original thesis and training that I still embrace as a 30-year public company analyst. If we're going to keep dollars inside of a business, you should hold us accountable about how we're reinvesting them, because we own them collectively. And we have absolutely a lot of spirited conversation about who gets those dollars and how they're going to most impact the long-term defensibility or durability of our engagements with our customers and the long-term returns on invested capital of the business and margins. We want to make sure that the customer experience stays absolutely not disrupted or undisrupted in pulling these businesses together. So we're fiercely defending the way that we go to market with each of our verticals and how we're trying to take the best of is we're doing tuck-ins in leveraging some of the tuck-in capabilities, but making sure that each of the verticals continue to serve the customers where they've historically served them or elevating it by vertical, which goes back to the brand identity. Our brand identity is absolutely being maintained or elevated as it is the case in Cesar's, Lawson. And the best practices here, we are -- we have a hops team and operations team that's an outside consulting firm that we've brought to where they just work on businesses that we're affiliated with. And they have that -- they own that business and they work on operating companies. They are our PMO on this, and they are heavily embedded in all of our efforts. I see Niraj over there. Thank you, Niraj. Niraj is managing all sorts of work streams to optimize each of these verticals as well as working hard, and there's Tim as well. I don't know if Prashant is here, but those 3 guys are -- Prashant's probably in Salt Lake City, but -- those guys are working very -- every day actively alongside of the IT and the operations teams and the leadership teams are assembling resources, making sure that we're tracking every bit of cross-selling every bit of IT efficiency. Where we need to put dollars to work. Where we can get shared services. Where we can find opportunities and like TEquip came with a pretty significant footprint in the Philippines. So we leaned into some of that. We're not trying to rationalize or consolidate but where we've got attrition or where we've got capabilities that we need to go get. We're leaning into some of the capabilities that our team has gone and evaluated, engaged with or that we acquired that then we kind of did a deep level of secondary engagement once it became a part of the fold. Then speaking to that like on Hisco test equity and our team and the hops team leaned heavily into working with Hisco on that acquisition. But we didn't really -- because there was a lot of sensitized data because of the way that you've got 2 businesses that were somewhat competing in the marketplace significantly competing at some levels. We were very sensitive and they were very sensitive about making sure that we weren't sharing information that would, in any way, compromise each of our identities. And so that also meant that the Gexpro Services and Lawson teams were even more removed from how to leverage those capabilities. And so once we were able to get Hisco closed, then it was the big aha moment of all the ways that Cesar and Bob's teams could start going to work, working actively with a high level of collaboration with the Hisco leadership team on ways that we can expand the frontier or the revenue growth. So broader customer, that's part of that and sourcing advantages. I would say sourcing advantages have been important, but those other 2 leveraging best practices and broader customer access to value-added products, those are where we're seeing even more lift and opportunity. But absolutely, we've defined a very discrete amount of sourcing benefits. There's real dollars that we are capturing there. And there's -- longer term, we think, increased advantages to our customer value proposition. The team, we talked about all of them earlier. What's been fun is that most -- everybody -- all these folk on that are helping us -- one of the things that we've had the benefit of is by creating an ecosystem around specialty distribution that's got 20 years. And also because of the way that we like working collegially with leaders of businesses or retired leaders of businesses like [ Tom Felterech ] there, who's been working with us for 15 years after he sold his business to not [ Eric ], to Pond, right? We've been able to assemble a tremendous amount of collegiality and that collegiality both has maintained continuity through decades of people that have helped us. It's also brought people back to the ecosystem like a map voice. It's recruited talent that was -- some of the talent that we've got today, but some of the talent that's continuing to come into the fold. It's guys like Russ, where he was at FCX, and we several times tried to either merge a business with FCX or sell a business to FCX. And so there was a long history and continuity and understanding that environment that he was working in and having a lot of respect for his ability to integrate 50 as an operator. I mean he's -- we've got a couple of commercial guys here, and then we got somebody who actually knows how to really pull all the levers of operation in Russ. And so it's key to make sure that you have that history, so you don't look like you're putting together a boy band. And I think about so many of the bands of the '80s where you kind of take a bunch of good-looking males or females and you put them on stage. And the reality of it is, it looks good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they know how to work together. And it doesn't mean that you have the continuity and confidence when things get tough or decisions are not easy of knowing exactly what sort of history you have to lean on in terms of your confidence in them to be able to get through tougher times. And so one of the great things about the conversations that we're able to have in pulling these verticals together is that the conversations can be quite frank. They can be very collegial at the same time. And there's a lot of different people opining on ways for our team to try and figure out a way to unlock accelerated value because of all the resources that are in the backdrop behind the curtain, if you will, which are not only the diverse set of Board members that we've got, but also a bunch of additional advisers that are -- some of which are limited partners, some of which have just been attracted to this specific platform. It's exciting to see a specialty distributor at this size and scale, knowing how when you get to a certain inflection point at over $100 million of EBITDA with certain specialty characteristics how you can kind of accelerate value. So we've got a lot of people that have come to the table. We've got a lot of acquisitions that have shown up. They want to be a part of the program, and that's been a lot of fun. Our whole team spends time on specialty distribution. This is a kind of a slide to kind of highlight all the different things that we're trying to help lean into. At the end of the day, the daily accountable people are the people that you'll hear from later today, but we have a level of accountability across our team where different people are owning different conversations and work streams in a collegial way with people that are on the ground inside of the companies. And we're also trying to conduct the orchestra a little bit. The hops team is probably most relied upon for that and Brad Wallace. But there's a conducting of the orchestra where you've got different musicians from different parts or different musical instruments. You've got the Lawson team working with the Gexpro Services team or the Hisco and Test Equity teams. And so there's an element of coordination that needs to take place. It's the enthusiasm that we have every day because of the amount of value that we can see right in front of us on margin lift, is super exciting. And then it's been a lot of fun and really invigorating for all of us as we think about how this unfolds over the next 5 years. That's getting into the investment highlights. So this slide is just to show the broad diversity that we have or diversification that we have on across our industries and our sectors. We wanted to highlight 1 of them, but we could have highlighted any 1 of them on the aerospace and defense. You can see how we're engaging with different parts of the aerospace and defense complex and specifically with like A, you pick a customer, and we probably work with them. And we may be -- we likely are engaging with them in more than 1 part of their business, like the slide that we showed earlier and will show later. So we've got the R&D, the production side and the maintenance and repair side and each of the business units are working across, in this case, that sector, but you could pick one of several key manufacturers and see that same breakdown. The renewables and the energy and power sets are together another important category for us. It's interesting to see how we expect secular tailwinds, like we said earlier, in renewable, even though it's been tough for the last 24 months. There's elements of how we pulled together these capabilities, and it's been very deliberate to Bob's team, they had a vision on how they wanted to serve renewables. And in order to serve renewables, the way that they wanted to serve them, we had to go out and acquire some specific additional capabilities and customer engagements such that we could have a much more holistic solution where we are the leader in supporting the renewables sector for all the categories that we have deliberately acquired, if not already developed over decades inside of Gexpro Services. So there was just some elements of Gexpro Services new after several decades, but not having had access to capital when they were inside of Rexel that they knew these businesses. They knew how much they fit inside of their footprint, inside of their long-term vision of being the best in that space and own it. And our belief that long term, there was a major secular tailwind. And that secular tailwind is not just for new renewable projects, but it's how all this installed base is not holding up as well as people thought it would, which is , which is crazy. But if we thought that a bunch of wind towers were going to last 15 to 20 years and not get touched, that's not the case, right? I mean they're needing significant amount of investment on an MRO type basis. And we've got now all the pieces, not only in the relationships with the customers, but all the pieces and the kits and the capabilities that we needed to have to be able to support that massive wave that we saw in front of us in terms of repair and maintenance and overhauls. The value creation themes. We've walked through some of these onshoring, nearshoring, the CHIPS Act, renewables, just talking about it and some -- I guess I was on the wrong slide. And then the tech and digitalization, IoT and then some of the -- that tech and digitalization and how we're engaging with it and then how even some of these more contemporaneous growth parts of markets like auto, if it's Tesla or it's electrification of automobiles and how we're playing in those space activities. I mean we really are -- we've got a -- we need to continue to grow our health care franchise our medical devices franchise, that we've got a smaller presence in, if I go backwards one you can see there it's only 2% and yet it's an area that we've got a nice new engagement with Hisco to add to it, and we've got a very deliberate effort to try and continue to grow. So cross-selling across the customer base, expanded digital capabilities. I will say that we had some really -- we had some very capable digital capabilities in pockets of our business. We did not have them across all 3 of our verticals. In fact, we were significantly deficient in a couple of our verticals. And so that's an area that not only our hops team has been able to go, "Okay, look, we've got really strong capability over here". We need to figure out how to port those capabilities over here because we've got ultimately a way to drive more efficiency such that we can sell more and our salespeople can be more efficient. Our customers can be more efficient because they're asking for it, and we'll get even more leverage out of our working capital investment in our human capital investment. And so that's the best practice sharing, which is what I'm in those capabilities extension, the cross-selling. This slide kind of just reinforces gets to a little piggy bank over on the end, but we're trying to leverage our indirect spend. We didn't put these businesses together in order to save a bunch of money. One of the things that we were very clear about is we thought that the upside opportunity in leveraging capabilities and leveraging their channels to market and the defensibility that we would have with customers, all that would drive returns on working capital, drive EBITDA margins higher, unlock a lot of accelerated amount of free cash flow. But what we also recognize is that there are absolutely spend dollars that need to be rationalized. And so we're very early in how to look across the platforms to figure out how to best optimize dollars that we're spending. We alluded to some ways that we're doing that earlier but we don't want to be disruptive to the cultures. Like we are so going back to the channels to market and the brands, what you don't want to do is be penny wise and pound foolish. And so we don't think that the big dollars are there. There are real dollars. I mean we're talking about dollars that are still in the -- that are still very meaningful but they aren't the dollars that we expect to get out of. And I would say the same thing about strategic sourcing. There's probably more dollars in indirect spend than it's strategic sourcing. But then the bigger things are capabilities, extensions and cross-selling. All that though unlocks tens of millions of dollars not millions of dollars. The compounding value, when you unlock tens of millions of dollars when you drive more efficiency out of your engagements with your customers, your sales force engagements, your value-added capabilities that are being half utilized or where you're running them with half the shift that you should be running. Then all of a sudden, you've got all elements that drive significantly higher free cash flow and earnings per share. So this is embedded -- we're deeply embedded with our customers. We're driving the sticky relationship, we're very deliberate about how we're thinking about adding to capabilities in order to make those relationships more sticky and more embedded. We're very deliberate about how that then falls into a financial profile that we're all going to get excited about, which we'll get to in just a minute and how that drives returns on incremental capital. And there's a playbook that we've been doing this for 20 years effectively. We've had tremendous returns and our jump shot is specialty distribution. That's the reason why it's 35%, 40% or more of all of the capital we put to work. We've built 16 or 17 platforms. We just consolidated 3 of them. We've sold 6 or 7 of them. That's they've unlocked 10x our money or 9.92. And it's obviously, we had an opportunity to sell these 3 platforms or to run them separately, but for the fact that we saw so much opportunity over a long cycle to create a tremendously more valuable franchise for all of us as shareholders. This is the compounding effect. What you know is that today, we're probably not paying out dividends yet. We've still got so much in front of us that we think that we can do before we get to that chapter. And some of you all have challenged me on whether or not we can keep our leverage close to our targets, which are 3 turns, if you will, and try to stay at that 3 or so turns of EBITDA. It's hard when you're continuing to have an accelerating amount of EBITDA margin and cash flow to find the right deliberate acquisition that's going to help the whole ecosystem be more capital efficient and higher margin. But we think that those opportunities are out there. We've identified many of them. We're having dialogues with quite a few. And so for some period of time, we think that we're going to be able to fold in absolutely the right deliberate acquisition that's going to elevate the platform. There will be a point in time where we expect, over the next 5 years, where the amount of cash flow that's coming off of these businesses, just like what we saw years ago with these larger -- today, larger distributors and larger specialty distributors, is that the cash wave became hard to keep putting to work at that really high 60% or so or higher pretax return on working capital. So money started getting distributed but we're still years away from that. Debt reduction. Right now, we are generating a lot of free cash flow. It's going to pay down debt or it's going to cash. But the reality of it is we plan on putting that back to work but our leverage ratios, as Ron will get to here in a minute, continue to move significantly in our favor. And we would expect that, that dynamic will continue to get reset as we make an acquisition and then we move -- progress through optimizing that. This is -- where is DSG currently? Again, I look at this and I can't help like place each 1 of our verticals and each 1 of our acquisitions in some spot of these continuum. So I'll be like, okay, this is where we are sitting right now with each business unit, both in terms of net return on working capital and EBITDA margins. Some of our business units are operating much more where our aspiration is for the platform. But we think that there's still a lot of room for them. Others are still at a spot, especially as we're making acquisitions and trying to digest them and unlock value where we're below where our current averages are. We all know that 1 of the ones that we're super focused on collectively is industrial technology. And so having brought Hisco and Test Equity together, there's a network effect there that we're working through. But it's a significant network effect that over the next several years ought to drive that vertical to towards where our long-term goals are, which we'll talk about here next. Our 5-year goals. All right. I'm putting a flag in the sand. I know I've been helped by some of you on this and my team -- and I appreciate that, right? I mean there's a heavy level of banter on our team about whether or not to give guidance in the short term or whether or not to give long-term at least goals. And so these have been sensitized because everybody's got a participation level and giving me coaching on what I can or can't say here. But these are ones that we collectively have all agreed to as being objectives or targets goals, whatever we want to use here. Look, we think that there's a path here with $1.8 billion to have organic growth and acquisition growth that equally in this model share and driving us to well over $3 billion of revenue. We think that there's opportunity to -- at that level -- one of the tensions here, as we talk about EBITDA margins, is what acquisitions are folded in at what point on the continuum and how those come in initially with what margin construct. So one of the things that we had a lot of banner about was whether or not to place a flag on the field that is a flag on the field that is the current $1.8 billion and what we think we can get to with that or whether or not it's the current $1.8 billion with the acquisitions that we're going to do and not knowing when those acquisitions fall in and knowing that we want those acquisitions to ultimately perform at higher EBITDA margins than what we're saying our objective is, but not knowing what they're going to do. If we do a Hisco on the day before you measure us on these numbers, and we're going to have integration challenges to get that to the 13.5% or higher percent EBITDA margin. But lots of explanation for me on this because there's lots of compromising on the numbers that we are trying to think through and how they work. So we think that there's a lot of organic growth opportunities. Some of this is cross-selling. A lot of it is the value proposition that we think we've expanded the narrative with our customers and that we're going to continue to expand as we think very deliberately about how to put capital to work. There's also just some end market secular and North American tailwinds that we're feeling and seeing and we think that we're going to be given what we put together, we think we're going to be strong participants in that. There's -- certainly in our current conversations and customer engagements, and our kind of loose pipeline of conversations, we believe that we've put together and we've got deep enough relationships that we're going to continue to see organic benefits. We've got gross margin expansion of 25 to 50 basis points here. There's elements of how that falls between the different business units. If we pull one unit through as we lean on different sales channels. is going to create noisiness on this 25 to 50 basis points. So while we think that there's an embedded level of EBIT -- of gross margin expansion that we see across pulling these additional capabilities more broadly across the customer engagements we have today, which should drive a lot more than 25 to 50 basis points. We also recognize that there's channels that we are investing in that we expect are going to -- might grow faster, but moderate some of the blended gross margins on the platform. But we definitely think that there's so -- that all that unlocks more value to the EBITDA number and more value at their returns on invested capital or net working capital numbers. And so this one was one that was harder for me because I could -- I was -- there was a lot of noise in the way that I was working through the 25 to 50 basis points because look, we've got a lot of work to do on a couple of our verticals right now on gross margins, and we think there's a lot of value opportunity there to capture. And over a 5-year period, that ought to translate into a lot more than this, but there's other areas where I think that we're investing appropriately for growth that ought to help drive the revenue side and the earnings per share side, but may moderate the amount of expansion that we get on gross margins. The 50 bps of annual SG&A leverage -- so getting -- again, taking out expenses or just making sure that SG&A is not growing at the pace that the top line is. We think that both of those are levers that we will be pulling. I look at operating margin is, for me, kind of a king of the hill. And so we believe that between gross margins and the SG&A leverage and then just the benefits that we get through the ways that we -- the incremental profitability at the platform that we've pulled together has that the operating leverage is in that 20% to 30% range like we've enjoyed historically in these businesses. That all translates into a high EBITDA CAGR and a 5-plus over the next 5 years so I'm happy to take questions on this later. I know there will be a lot of them, there may be, if not, I know I've got to be sensitive about giving more than what I've already done because I want to make sure those that are not in this room, get communicated by those that are in this room broadly. But we think that this is a good place for us to anchor our objectives. This is kind of the bridge to get there. We think that there's -- that each of these has very actionable efforts that are going on right now where we've got -- we've sized the prize and we're daily resizing the prize. And as we daily resize the price, we're finding that there's more in the price to be unlocked. And so that's a good place to be. It also is dawning because it's not something that's going to happen over the next 12 months. It's obviously something that's going to take a period of time to work through the model. But certainly, by using a 5-year horizon, we've given ourselves plenty of room. So digital acceleration, we talked about go-to-market transformation. We're doing a lot there. You'll hear more about it from our team. The Hisco integration is exciting. Look, Hisco was a great business, and we couldn't have picked up more good people in that acquisition. And they have been very focused on organic revenue growth over the last -- as you would expect, it was ESOP owned business, and their objective was to drive revenue growth. And they've enjoyed a lot of revenue growth over the last decades. We were certainly not fighting with them on a regular basis with test equity and other businesses that we were watching them go out and take market share and grow. There's now an opportunity by being together optimize the profitability and the value proposition to the customers. And both of those ought to do 2 things. They ought to sustain or help the continued engagement with customers and getting more revenue growth opportunities for the whole DSG, but it also ought to allow us to thoughtfully unlock a lot more profitability. So I think that's it for me. Ron? Thank you. Enjoyed it.

Thanks, Brian, and good afternoon, everybody. Great to get together in our first Investor Day. I know I've had a chance to meet a lot of you one-on-one through many conversations. So it's great to see everybody here today. And I think appropriate timing as well with us being together under one platform now for nearly 18 months. I think it's a good time to discuss where we're going and also discuss a lot of our accomplishments as well within the first 5 to 6 quarters. So as Brian mentioned, I'm Ron Knutson, CFO of DSG, and I retain my role as the CFO of one of our operating businesses, Lawson products as well. So working really close with Cesar on making some of those incremental changes that Brian had mentioned. I'm going to spend just 2 real areas I want to cover today. First is -- and this will be quick. Just a quick jumping off point in terms of where we ended the second quarter, I think that will set kind of a benchmark for us on a go forward basis. And the probably more importantly what we've accomplished in the first 5 quarters together and just reflecting back a little bit on some of those strengths. So third quarter. I'll make some comments about that here shortly. But our second quarter, really strong quarter for DSG across the board. Revenues grew in total of about 18%, about 5% of that was organic growth, both in a combination of both price and volume. And we did surpass $40 million in adjusted EBITDA for our first time as a combined company. And that's a real -- we deem that as a real milestone. Ended the quarter at 10.6% of sales -- you saw on Brian's slides the trailing 12, we were at 9.5%. But if you look at the most recent quarter, we are at 10 6, that does include Hisco for 3 weeks of activities, and we anticipated this, right, and we communicated this on our earnings call as well. I mean, that brought our consolidated margins down by about 40 bps. So excluding that close to 11%, really close to where we were in the first quarter as well. On an EPS basis, adjusted going from $0.36 to $0.52, that's about a 40% improvement in overall earnings per share. And then the other piece that we really saw happen in the second quarter is that what we call flow through, effectively for every dollar of incremental sales we can create, how much of that can we get to drop to the bottom line. Publicly, we've talked about that being in the $0.25 range on a combined platform we realized about $0.40 per dollar on the flow-through versus a year ago quarter. Much of that attributable to some of the performance increase we saw in Lawson products on a quarter-over-quarter basis. And then lastly, what -- before I kind of reflect a little bit on the First 5 Quarters, and Brian mentioned this a little bit as well. So -- and you'll hear this from the CEOs later there's a lot of initiatives going on within the organization, right? And as we think about even the third quarter, a year ago, Q3, our organic sales were up 15%. So we are up against some tougher comps throughout this quarter. And probably the best way to say this is, there's going to be some lumpiness in the quarters. It's not going to be linear, right? We can't just draw a straight line from 10.6 to 13.5. There's going to be quarters where we're making some investments, and you'll see some of that in our -- as the quarters certainly develop. So let me change gears here a little bit and just reflect back a little bit on the first, call it, 5 quarters that we've published information. First of all, it's -- we're really proud of what we've accomplished and really excited, and you could see this in Brian's message around where we think we can take the platform on a go-forward basis. Firstly, on the M&A front, we made 4 acquisitions within our first, call it, 15 months together. Hisco, Instrumex, tea equipment as well as national test -- I'm sorry, Instrumex, added about $39 million into our overall profitability. So that's certainly a piece of our overall growth strategy. We said that early on, right? If you go back when we first put the 3 businesses together, we purposely said that acquisitions were going to be a big piece of our growth strategy. And so far, 1.5 years into it, we certainly have seen that. Strong commercial collaboration really across the 3 businesses. I think about sales opportunities, I think about customer context. I think about leveraging knowledge across the businesses from a digital perspective. We have weekly meetings on initiatives that are taking place to make sure that we're all aligned that it benefits the entire platform in some of these meetings, when you look at the individual businesses, there may be a winner or a loser on the individual businesses, but we look through that because we know what's best for DSG is what's best for our shareholders on a longer-term basis. And candidly, amongst the 3 businesses, where are we going to get the highest level of return, where do we think that we can invest get the fastest return back and the best use of our overall cash position. So it's great to see that. It's great to see the culture of the 3 organizations that are very, very, very similar. Brian touched on the indirect spend as well as some of the direct. Let me put numbers to this. On the indirect spend, so far, we've identified and started to realize about $5 million of annualized. Clearly, there's opportunities around consolidation of vendor spend. It's an area that we're early in the process. We've identified some wins, but clearly, more and more opportunities we feel are available in that area. But as Brian said, it wasn't why we put the 3 organizations together but clearly, we want to take advantage of that to the extent that we can. So on the overall financial perspective, let me just make a couple of... [Audio Gap] So as Bryan mentioned, trailing 12, $1.8 billion and adjusted EBITDA of about $171 million on a trailing 12 basis. I mean total revenues grew about 70%, right? And if you break that down further, the organic piece, the $1.055 billion grew to a little bit north of $1.2 billion with the remainder being the 4 acquisitions that we had acquired. So during that time period, organic sales, excluding the acquisitions we made, we're up about 17%. So off to some really nice revenue growth from not only our existing base business, but also those companies that had existed a year ago. And then also on the $171 million, I commented about $39 million of that was picked up through the acquisitions, with the rest of that being on the organic growth. On the far right-hand side, you'll see the overall profitability, and you can do the math on this relative to EBITDA as a percent of the individual business units. If you look at the MRO piece of our business, $61 million -- I'm sorry, $62 million is about 12%. But our most recent 2 quarters are right around 14% under Cesar's leadership, and I know he'll talk about that a little bit later as well. Gexpro Services, if you look at their first 2 quarters of the year, they exceeded 12% EBITDA as a percent of sales in the most recent quarter, 11.6% the prior quarter. So Bob and team just they keep pounding it out, right? I mean they keep delivering in double-digit EBITDA numbers. You'll hear from Bob how they're able to reallocate their resources to their growing end markets, which is critically important. They operate in 6 diverse end markets and working through those cycles, they've got the ability to offset if there's any slowing with growth in other end markets. And then Industrial Technologies or TestEquity, margin in the second quarter was about 7%, that does include Hisco that we brought in. Russ will talk a little bit about the integration of Hisco in terms of how that's going so far, given that we're, what, probably 3 to 4 months in from the acquisition date. And then also how we'll grow that piece of the business up to -- or back to double-digit EBITDA margins. So we feel really good about the overall financial performance in these first 5 quarters together and are really excited about what we can produce on a go-forward basis. A couple of other financial highlights, and I'm going to start in the middle of the page here. So overall leverage, when we brought the 3 companies together, we were at 3.6x. We ended the most recent quarter at 3.1. Giving effect to the Hisco if you take Hisco out of this calculation at 3.1 we were actually closer to 2.7. So again, given the timing of when some of these acquisitions take place, we were at 3.1. As we sit today, we're well south of 3 even a couple of months into the quarter. So we continue to be able to delever the overall platform on a nice basis. And I would say this is a combination of both free cash flow as well as overall earnings power as well, as you saw it on the previous slide. Working capital, there's clearly some opportunity here. On a consolidated basis, we run at about 26%. And what you'll see here is that Lawson Products operates at about 22% to 23%. TestEquity is about 20% to 21% and Gexpro Services, given their service to their customers, runs at about 35% of sales. So during 2022, we purposely invested into working capital to Bryan's point earlier about some of the supply chain, making sure that we could fulfill all of our customer needs. But we do believe that there is opportunity here to bring this down. In fact, when you look across the platform, one of the things that we did early on was we synced up the annual incentive plan across the 3 companies. So all 3 companies have their own operating plan. Their teams are accountable towards sales dollars, EBITDA dollars and working capital as a percent of sales. So it's clearly getting focused across the entire platform, and each individual company has individual metrics and targets that they're going after from a working capital perspective as a percent of sales. And then on the far right-hand side, I think most of you may be aware of this as well. We did increase our credit facility from $500 million to $805 million with the help of JPMorgan Chase. I know there's a couple of individuals here. I appreciate them being here today. And what I would call probably one of the most difficult bank markets to go out and raise some capital, right? It was in the April and May and June time frame. We were very fortunate. We worked with our existing bank group. Six of the 8 banks that were already in our facility stepped up, which was a really positive sign for us. And then we added 4 additional banks into the bank group as well. So we currently have 12 banks in at the $805 million. And for us, in that difficult environment, it was just further evidence that the banks understood and believed in our growth plans, both investments that we want to make on the organic side of the business and then also certainly the M&A strategy. $200 million, as we sit here today, $200 million of the $805 million is a revolving credit facility. We have zero drawn on that. We are in a cash accumulation process right now. We're accumulating cash and really to be able to move forward on some of the M&A in the pipeline and make some of these other investments. The facility for those of you who don't know, 5% amortization feature, we do have a $200 million uncommitted accordion feature as well, which gives us plenty of firepower not only on the committed plus the cash we're sitting on today. But if need be, we can go out and tap that additional $200 million as well. And then on the overall pricing, again, so far plus [ 100 to 275 ]. We think that's pretty good pricing in today's environment, and it's all based upon overall leverage. So let me wrap up with this page and just hit on what I would say, a few key items. And I think this will sync up with a lot of the comments that Bryan made as well. Value-added distributor. I can't emphasize enough how embedded all 3 businesses are with our customers, right? We are -- we provide mission-critical solutions. We have a high-touch value prop to our customer base. We have a broad range of products, over 170,000 products available to our customers -- I'm sorry, over 500,000 of products available that we can sell to our customers. In all 3 organizations are really in, what I would call industry-leading positions. Diversified end markets, 170,000 customers now across the platform supported by over 3,800 employees across the platform as well. We've estimated that our addressable market is north of $60 billion. So plenty of room to grow there. And certainly, the M&A piece that you'll hear Matt talk about is another clear opportunity for us. And then attractive growth opportunity around both the M&A and the organic. So before I turn it over to Matt, let me just wrap up with a couple of things. One is when we brought DSG together, we were very clear around some of our objectives that we wanted to hit within the short-term time frame. One was, we wanted to exit 2022 with EBITDA north of 10%, and we did that, it was 10.3%. We indicated that we wanted to move forward with acquisitions, and we did that. We completed 4 acquisitions in the first 6 quarters together, and we've purchased about $39 million of EBITDA. We wanted to delever the company. We clearly did that going from 3.6 down to 3.1. And we also said we wanted to be able to cross-sell across the organizations, and we clearly have done that, and we've seen some really nice wins there. And the piece that's hard to put a number to is how well the teams are working together and I'm in various operating meetings and Board meetings and have a chance to interact with all three of the teams. And the culture, the competitiveness, the sharing of ideas is phenomenal. So it's great to be part of the organization to be able to see all this come together and get that benefit that we knew was there. But again, it's hard to put a number there. So really excited about our first year together. We've got a lot of great things going on. You'll hear about that from the CEOs. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Matt Boyce and walk us through a little bit more on the M&A side. Thank you.

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Matt Boyce, and I'm the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at DSG. Really appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with you this afternoon. I'm excited to share with you a little bit of where we're at on this inorganic growth journey as you've started to hear from Bryan and Ron. I joined DSG, it was about 18 months ago. So just a couple of days after the merger closed. Prior to DSG, I spent a fair amount of my career working in manufacturing for a diversified industrial manufacturing company, publicly traded called Carlisle Companies. As Bryan alluded to earlier, there was a period of time where I left manufacturing and gave distribution a shot, and that's when I met Bryan and Brad working at Industrial Distribution Group. We had a lot of fun transforming that business, built a fantastic business and created a ton of value for all stakeholders. And after a successful exit, and that was in fall of 2014 ended up rejoining Carlisle in another M&A capacity to help lead M&A at Carlisle. So stayed in touch with the LKCM team over the years, and it was, I think, early 2022, having conversations with Bryan and Brad and they were starting to share with me the vision for DSG. So what are the embarking on kind of the vision for DSG. And after several conversations, I knew this was the right opportunity to -- as Bryan was mentioning, get the band back together. Give it another shot, similar to what we did at IDG, but on a much, much larger scale. And so I was really excited to rejoin partner back with Bryan, Brad and the business unit leadership teams. But they did tell me it was under one condition. The only way we could really pull this off is if we built a really strong and capable corporate development team. And so with their support, we are fortunate enough to add a couple of really strong players, A players to the team. And so I'll introduce both of them right now, they're both here. So if you want to say, hello, I was going to ask him to stand up and say a few words, but I didn't want to put that pressure on them today. But -- so Melanie Nix joined the company a little over 3 years ago. So she's a director on the team and brings a great set of diverse experience to the group. So she has investment banking experience, private equity experience. So a great addition to the team. And then we also have Brent Pearlstein, who is also a Director on the team, who we pulled -- he joined us recently from KPMG from their transaction advisory group. So what I love about our team is our diverse set of experience and skill sets. So I grew up in operations. We have the investment making private equity background, transaction services background. And so we've really formed a great team because as you have heard and you will see, we're busy. There's a lot going on, and we're really excited. Our primary role as the corporate development team at DSG is to lead and drive M&A kind of processes for DSG and DSG alone. So we support all three of the business units with all things, M&A. Our primary role and responsibility, as most of you know, we're not doing anything different from others out there. We focus on the sourcing, building a robust pipeline, partnering with all the business unit leadership on building an active and robust M&A pipeline. We also are an extension of the business unit teams and all things M&A. So when you think about due diligence, we're going to take the lead on that, but we partner with all business unit leadership teams, managing diligence from start to finish, deploying a lot of really nice standardized tools that we've developed as a group over the past 18 months. Another area that's really important for us is to kind of help and partner with the business units on the integration. So whether it's the integration plan that we all work on together in the early innings of a diligence process and then also staying attached to it post close. And all up, I have a -- some more -- another slide that goes a little deeper into integration to kind of let you know what -- how we support each other there. Turning to Slide 36. I want to give a little background on what have the businesses within the DSG platform accomplished over the past several years. And before I kind of get into some of that, one thing I didn't know that I was getting myself into when I rejoined DSG was the fact that the business unit leadership teams all have immense experience in M&A. I can't emphasize that enough how valuable that is to our team to be able to partner with folks who know what we're trying to accomplish. So that's extremely valuable to have that kind of expertise to partner with. I have a firm believer in M&A. The only way to get good at M&A is to do M&A. So the fact that most of our business leaders have this experience is really invaluable. As Bryan mentioned, you put up the slide, the Power of 3, and I'm going to kind of refer you back to that as we think about our M&A strategy. It's a focused strategy where we -- the leadership teams, they map out the ideal future state customer value proposition, what do we want to deliver to our customers? So we map all that out. That's future state. And we also -- and we focus on using M&A as one of the tools to help us build out our capabilities in order to enhance that customer value proposition. As you could see on the slide, since 2017, we've acquired 14 companies, annual revenue is about $900 million, annual purchase price of roughly $600 million. And part of our strategy, which we'll get into a little bit more, too, with our acquisition criteria. So what are we looking for in all of these targets? Really centered around these five attributes that you'll see on the screen here. We focus on expanding in certain elements of our business as well as enhancing certain components of our business. On the expansion side, as you think about product offering. We know we have gaps in our product offering. And so we're targeting opportunities that help us expand that product offering. An example of that would be Lawson's acquisition in 2020 of Partsmaster who brought to us a nice private label cutting tool and abrasive line. On the geographic expansion and coverage, our customers are pulling us into certain geographies. So we use M&A as a tool to potentially accelerate how quick we can get to some of those regions and locations to support our customers. An example of that would be Hisco, with our broad and strong Mexico infrastructure presence. And on the end market side, Bryan referenced all the verticals, kind of our core competencies, where do we really want to play in certain end markets? And so we use M&A as a tool to enhance or strengthen our leadership position in some of these markets. An example of that would be Resolux in the renewable energy space. We also focus on enhancing some of the value-added services and capabilities we already have today and also add to it through acquisition. An example of enhancing the value-added services and capabilities attribute would be Hisco with some of their label printing and precision converting capabilities. And then on the technology and sales side, we're always looking for ways to enhance either the technology we offer to customers, the technology we use to attract new customers as well as sales channels. And an example of that would be with TEquipment and sort of the sales channel and the group of customers we were able to acquire with them, targeting small and medium customers. One thing I'll leave you with is we look at our M&A culture, it's very integration, value creation focus, right? We target and acquire companies that they got to fit, right? There just has to be a really good fit for us. And this is kind of our mind set and our approach to M&A. And I think because of that, the integration, value creation mindset and focus on fit, that's one of the drivers for our ability to kind of pay down these multiples over time. And as Bryan mentioned earlier, and we have the data point on the screen as well. So the 5 acquisitions from 2022, we've been able to pay down that multiple by about 1.5 turns during our first year of ownership. And we're not going to stop there. We're going to continue to find opportunities to improve the margin profile of all these businesses. Turning to Slide 37. So here -- this is my favorite slide in the deck. I really want to share with you more about our acquisition criteria. What really are we looking for? Where are we spending our time today. I want you to know that when we are sourcing these targets and opportunities, we're very disciplined and selective and the types of opportunities we choose to pursue. You can see the data sort of at the bottom and that kind of speaks volumes. So this isn't a representation of our actual funnel, this is just the activity from I guess, over the last 18 months, reviewing over 100 opportunities, doing a lot of work on about 15 of those, and we ultimately closed 5 of those. So very selective and what we choose to work on. And I'd also say we're very selective and disciplined when we think about valuation and pursuing opportunities that generate the greatest return on invested capital. As Ron mentioned and Bryan too, our business is we're all sort of competing for dollars, right, whether it's organic growth initiatives, supporting the business, but me selfishly on the M&A side, we're competing for those dollars as well. So it's -- if Russ, Bob and Cesar, brought acquisition opportunities to us, and we had to choose this one of them, we're going to kind of fall back on the greatest return on invested capital for DSG. And our approach to sourcing, very, very simple. And I love it because it makes my job really easy. I'd lean on the business units, lean on LKCM, who has a deep history, deep relationship with a lot of the companies and targets out there. So our sales teams in the field. They're the ones who have the finger on the pulse. They know who's out there. They're visiting customers every day. These are the types of targets that I want to hear about. It's kind of all the sourcing comes from the bottom up. So that makes our job like I said, very easy. The decades of experience that LKCM team has, Bryan mentioned that they were the ones that developed the relationship with Hisco over many, many years. They are the ones that introduced Hisco to DSG. So that's just something we continue and will continue to lean on as we build out this robust pipeline. As we think about other criteria for acquisitions, really what are we looking for, I talked about those 5 attributes on the previous page. So as you think about that power of 3 slides, that's the ultimate value proposition for customers, but we know there are gaps. Whether it's our product offering, service offering, geographic coverage, we know there are gaps. So what our teams focus on myself with the business unit leadership teams, finding opportunities across the platform that allows us to expand, enhance our capabilities, to strengthen this customer value proposition. That's what it's all about because we have an idea what future state looks like. We know where we're at today with current state. We're just trying to close that gap and use M&A as one of those tools. We're going to spend time just focusing on the current verticals, markets we serve. We target opportunities in companies with strong teams. Really good -- it's got to be a cultural fit. And in most cases, we actually know who these companies are, who we're pursuing. It's not -- we're not casting a very broad net. It's a very selective selection process. They have to be financially accretive to us. So whether it's from the margin profile day one or we have to have a clear path to this financial accretion in the short term. So that's also, yes, extremely important to us. And we also target companies that have a compelling value proposition. It gets back to this value added, as Ron mentioned, I mean, solutions provider, that's who we are. So that's the kind of the DNA of these targets. That's who we want to acquire as well. Opportunities where we believe that under our ownership, we can accelerate some of these value creation, initiatives and opportunities. And together, we believe the businesses are better together than if we were to stay operating independently. And lastly, we strive to be and become the acquirer of choice. When I first started, all I was doing was making outbound calls for the last, we'll call it, 12 months, just a ton of outbound calls. But now that we've made some acquisitions. The DSG name is getting out there in the marketplace. It's pretty nice. We're starting to get inbound calls where business owners are out there saying, "Hey, we see what you're doing, we like what you're doing. We want to be a part of it." And so that's been a fun little shift in our world I've seen. Companies out there that we know reputable that are calling on us to be a part of what we're building. And they want to invest in what we're doing. In case a good example of that is the Hisco because they were an ESOP, have that culture of ownership. And after we close the transaction, been able to give them an opportunity to own shares of DSG. And so they've been able to maintain that culture of ownership because they also believe and what we're doing and how important all of this is. And I do -- I truly believe that the investments we've made in M&A resources, some of our standardized processes have allowed us to pursue opportunities like Hisco. And I don't know if 2 to 3 years ago, if we'd be able to say that. Turning to Slide 38, talk about our approach to integration. In my M&A career, I've only been -- I've only worked for in-house corporate development teams. So I've seen a couple of different approaches to managing M&A processes. And one instance I've seen where the corporate development team was responsible for sourcing, for the diligence and closing the transaction. And once you close, you kind of throw the business over the wall to the operating team and say, all right, it's your now. There was a hand off. I've also been a part of M&A processes where the corporate development team, the source, diligence, you close the transaction, you work on integration planning, and you stay attached to that deal post close and help on integration and execution. It's that kind of the latter approach where I've seen the most success. The longer that the teams who are leading diligence and participating in the integration plan, the longer they stay attached to a transaction post close, the higher the probability of success. That's the model we deploy here at DSG. Our team is an extension of these business units. So we can be additional arms and legs as we think about integrating these companies into the platform. And we don't have a one-size-fits-all approach to integration. I talk to business owners all the time. They always ask. That's one of their first questions, are you going to roll us into you? Are we going to be on the same ERP system? And I keep telling them we don't have a one-size-fits-all. It's very needs-based. Like where do you need help? You have a great vision. We're here to help you accelerate that vision, whether it's throwing resources at you. Do you need people, do you need capital. That's really our approach to design this plan, needs base, best of both. We know there are things that these businesses do better than us and vice versa. And that's really what our focus is on. And we also target the highest priority opportunities to drive value creation. The way we structure integration's post close, pretty simple, pretty straightforward. In the bottom left of the screen, you'll see we established a steering committee, integration management office and then we have functional leaders. And depending on the size of the acquisition, we may have what we call "Two in a Box". So we'll take leaders from both businesses, collaborate and we're going to kind of manage and lead this integration altogether. And I will say that's one of the important things about our integration process, too, as we start planning very, very early, preliminary diligence phase even before we have an offer on the table. We're already starting to think about how will these two businesses look when we combine them together. And we also are very collaborative with the target. This isn't us telling them how it's going to be. It's more of a we approach. How are we going to make these two businesses better. And lastly, we're all very competitive, right? We love to score. We love to keep score. So we need to keep score. Like how are we doing when it comes to these acquisitions that we've closed. And so measuring success, kind of lay it out, and this goes back to by manufacturing days, this might look familiar to some of you, but it's really a continuous improvement focus. So it's that the PDCA cycle, plan, do check, act. So what we do is the planning phase, that's all about diligence, right, the integration plan. That's what you're establishing. On the due portion of the cycle, now we're executing. So we're in it. We own the business, we're in it. Check, that's the part where we spent a ton of time. We're measuring our financial performance, comparing that to our deal model, comparing all of our numerous integration initiatives, how are we doing, kind of rating ourselves. And then at the end, act to close out that loop, are we off track in any way, shape or form? And if we are, let's establish and implement some countermeasures to get us back on track so we can achieve our goals because at the end of the day, we all like to win. I wanted to talk about a couple of case studies here. I know Bryan mentioned them a little bit, but I'll just kind of elaborate a little bit further. The first one on the left, so TEquipment was a business that TestEquity acquired in, let's say, year April of 2022. At the time of close, they were doing about $110 million of sales. One of the highlights of the strategic rationale is that they did provide access to small and medium customers to TestEquity. Historically, TestEquity has been extremely good at serving large customers, large accounts. And so this is a very complementary set of customers to bring to the team. They also brought some enhanced digital capabilities to TestEquity as well as an offshore shared service support... [Audio Gap] Initiatives that are on the page, whether it's through pricing discipline, cost reductions, such as warehouse consolidation, adding breadth to the stocked inventory, that's available to sell and then also cross-selling products and services within TestEquity. And we're not done here, right? This is just the early innings of this journey. The team still remains focused on execution of other initiatives to drive the margin improvement going forward. Next case study is Resolux, I touched on this a little bit as well. And it gets back to what Bryan mentioned, there was a very deliberate strategy here to strengthen Gexpro Services leadership position, especially in certain markets. So acquiring Resolux allowed us to enhance our ability to serve global OEMs in attractive markets such as Europe, Asia and South America. And by acquiring Resolux, it enhanced our ability to serve these customers in those geographies with kind of an expanded and complementary product offering. And so your typical cross-selling -- is the middle of the fairway of cross-selling opportunities, take our products into their customers and vice versa. And this is an example of what I mentioned about our sourcing strategy, about leveraging relationships we've built through many, many years. This is a great example of that. Gexpro Services had known Resolux for many, many years. They were a strong competitor out there. So that relationship was there. And when Bob and team met with the Resolux team and found out, hey, we have visions to grow from $30 million to $50 million to $75 million. The lightbulb went off with Resolux when they realized they wouldn't be able to do that without us. And so this is an opportunity of or an example of Resolux seeking us out to partner with and said, "Hey, we have ideas, we have thoughts. Let's partner together so we can accelerate the growth here". And that's been the focus here. It's cross-selling initiatives to, as you see improved margin profile in the short term, but then continue to kind of beat that drum of all these numerous cross-selling initiatives to expand that margin going forward. One last thing I'll add about kind of Resolux, Gexpro Services on the renewable energy side is to expand upon this deliberate strategy, there's a bit of a vertical integration play. By acquiring Frontier who has some strong manufacturing fabrication capabilities. We're now vertically aligned to serve the renewable sector through a number of different components that Frontier can actually manufacture for us. So that is significantly enhancing and improving that customer value proposition, which is really important to us. And then lastly, I know Bryan has talked quite a bit about the Hisco acquisition. Ron as well, and I know Russ will too, but I'm going to also talk about Hisco because it is really important to us, and we're really excited about it. So I'll give just a brief update on the integration process to date. As Ron mentioned, yes, we've owned for about 4 months now. And our initial thesis just to kind of highlight again, we knew and believe that Hisco would accelerate the growth trajectory across the DSG platform. And there are many opportunities to unlock value within Hisco, TestEquity as well as just DSG overall. Bryan mentioned, there were some diligence limitations throughout the process, a direct competitor with TestEquity. So folks at the Lawson and Gexpro Services level, their commercial teams really weren't able to get engaged until after we close. So he's already had meetings with them, Bob did as well, but we just couldn't get to that next level of folks who were going to lean on to execute on some of these commercial growth opportunities. Now that we've owned it for 4 months. We've had a ton of access to management, a lot more data share amongst the group. And we're starting to discover and uncover significant benefits that are over and above our initial thesis, which yes, we're blown away by. We're really, really excited about. The focus initially coming out of the gate is on cross-selling opportunities, Lawson, Gexpro Services and TestEquity, and they continue to grow. The teams are fully engaged, which is great, as Ron mentioned, regular update calls weekly. We're touring each other's facilities, we're training each other's sales forces. So really what you would expect out of a high-level cross-selling process. Collaboration is great. Other things we're doing together, a lot of customer introductions. We're taking Hisco team members and our customers and vice versa. We're doing line walks together. So you're in a production facility, you're kind of walking together, understanding some of the touch points like what's -- where the customer issues are and what can we do to solve those issues. We're beginning to have conversations on how do we leverage Hisco's robust infrastructure in Mexico. And then also, several opportunities, Bryan alluded to, where Gexpro Services is starting to pull through some of the value-added capabilities that Hisco provides, whether it be, for example, label printing. The integration activity, a lot going on, and we're just starting to get that flywheel that positive momentum going. And a lot of these initiatives are coming to fruition much earlier than originally anticipated. I can share with you the commercial opportunities are exceeding expectations, and we are on track to realize the cost savings as we laid out and publicly as well as in our deal model. We realized still a lot of work to do. We're not done. The journey is just beginning, but we're really excited and believe we are off to a fantastic start. So just in closing, I'll leave you with this. Really excited to be back with DSG, blown away by the talent that's at the business unit leadership level. And I'm not saying that just because most of them are in the room. I actually -- I do believe it. I would say it even if they weren't here. So whether it's the business unit leadership teams, the LKCM team, just like Ron mentioned, the collegiality, we're all focused in working, marching towards the beat of the same drum, right? Sales growth, just creating value, margin accretion, all those good things. So our acquisition pipeline, very, very healthy. We're really excited about it, working on some great opportunities, and we look forward to sharing some of those success stories in the near future with all of you. So thank you again. Really appreciate the opportunity to present to you, share some of the things we're excited about. And let's see here. I'm supposed to kick it over to a break. So it's about 1:45. So we're thinking 10 minutes? Yes. So if everybody could reconvene about 1:55, maybe 2:00. Maybe 1:55, 1:55. So thank you. [Break]

All right. We'll get this kicked off. So good afternoon, everyone. I'm Brad Wallace. I'm a partner with LKCM Headwater Investments and also serve on the Board of DSG. I look forward to managing this conversation with our business unit CEOs, Cesar Lanuza, who definitely has the best hair of the group. And Bob Connors, who will have everybody in the room cross-selling by the end of this. And Russ Frazee, who's got the best [ bay boat ] of all of them, but we never let him use it. So Bryan and I and a large portion of our investment team have the benefit of really working with these guys and their teams on a daily basis. And I truly call it a benefit because it is. We have a tremendous amount of respect for their leadership abilities, their capabilities and that reciprocates the other way because we're not new to distribution. You've heard that all day to day. Bryan and I, Andy Zacharias and Jac Smith have been working together for close to 2 decades largely on distribution. Most of our capital and our time has been spent on that. Bryan alluded to this as well that I grew up around distribution, my father ran a distribution company. And collectively, we've invested in 14 different platforms over the years and then 61 follow-on acquisitions within those platforms. So our collective returns, if you look at both businesses that we've sold as well as those that we still own are around 4x gross returns. And our exits, those businesses that have reached maturity that we exited were on average at 10x multiple for our partners. And so a lot of those returns were generated through some of the same initiatives and same things that we're working on at DSG. And that's organically building better companies and inorganically with a very disciplined M&A strategy. So IDG, we alluded to earlier, a great example of a business that was under 5% operating margins that we took to close to 10%. We did 6 accretive acquisitions. Bryan may have been critical about that business, but we ultimately made 10x our money for our partners on that or a land and mobile radio distribution company, where we own for 4.5 years tripled -- over tripled EBITDA through 13 acquisitions and organic strategies and made over 8x of money for our partners. So this is our business. Our business is working with teams like this to build world-class companies. And so you're going to hear more about that today. I'd ask each one of them to take a deeper dive into their business model, to also talk to us about their go-to-market strategy as well as the way that they serve customers. So part of today, we didn't get the benefit of a plant tour or see customers, but what we try to do is a showcase of products of video and then today, a little bit deeper level conversation around how we serve customers and how we create that sticky relationship. So I'm going to let Cesar kick it off to give us a little brief background yourself and then dive into Lawson Products.

Perfect. Thanks, Brad. I appreciate everybody being here today. And look, before I start, as I was looking into Lawson opportunity in talking to our Board about it, and I was like, okay, so let's talk about how serious are you about driving profitable growth, helping us drive profitable at Lawson. And also thinking about having a fresh look of in our business, and I was like, does that mean I get to change the color of our bins? And say, yes. So right after that, I said, I'm in, right? Which is -- I'm going to use it bag as an example. So it will tell you a little bit about how we are evolving a 7-year-old company with amazing foundations and bringing it up to 2023, but also leveraging all these that we have. So going back a little bit about me, joined about 1.5 years ago, 4 days after Matt. Had a chance to meet Matt in the process. So I was like, "Oh, okay, LKCM, they're serious about this", right? So we're putting these 3 businesses together and Head of M&A. But I got to tell you, there's no other way -- no other place I can think better than this one to be at. After spending 10 years in manufacturing space, my first 10 years of my career, between United Technologies, and GE Healthcare. And then the last 18 within the distribution space, a little bit over decade with Grainger. And then my last role as CEO was actually, especially the [indiscernible], putting our hands around it and realizing the great work that they've done with the industrial customer base, but also the footprint that they have in Mexico and it's just a great business. right? And as you know, we -- at Lawson we don't have any physical presence there. And who knows, maybe I get to practice my Spanish again now, right? So I was like, wow, what a great opportunity here to take a 7-year-old business with very strong foundations, great people, great culture, great infrastructure. Take it a fresh look at on a business that has a very service intense business model. And when I say service instances, it's really -- that's what we do. It's a vendor-managed inventory business, best-in-class in the MRO space. So we have that out there every day, touching a very diverse of customers that we have about 80,000 of them where the biggest customer represents less than 3% for us. And they're touching these customers every day, every time. Now we cannot do that without having a great infrastructure within our supply chain and our distribution network. So our team has been building not only a great distribution network, but also a very solid product offering. And one of the things that we're proud of is our private label offering, which today represents about 40% of our revenue. And that's something that we've been embedding within our business year after year after year. So we got solid distribution network with great people behind it that are able to buy the product, repack it, pay package ship and make sure it moves through our network very smoothly. And being able to serve 94% of our market and our customers within 2 days. Now we're very short-cycle business, lots of transactions happen every day. But we're very sticky with our business. And you probably heard from Ron earlier that over the past year, our EBITDA margin as a percentage of sales, we've gone from like high single-digit more into 12% EBITDA margin trailing 12 months and in the first and second quarter around 14%. Now that's a combination of 3 components: a, better margin management. B, leveraging our operating cost infrastructure, which is highly people intense. And third, we've been doubling down the efforts on increasing our team around strategic account for us to help us to get new customers, but also our Kent business. Both of these segments of our business have been outperforming the average of our business. But also this is part of what I love working with these guys is because I know and I knew they were going to help me to gather new customers. So we started building that capacity in that sales organization within that specific segment of our base is to make sure I was able to catch that ahead of time. So what is it exactly that we do for our customers? Our service delivery model is about having the right product on site when the customer need it. That's it. Now that means that we take over a facility in that facility could be an equipment rental facility and manufacturing side. And typically, when I say facility, I'm referring specifically to a maintenance room. In that area... [Audio Gap] have, and we help them to make a choice on what products they should be using, set of the inventory levels and put all those cabinets and bins that you probably saw in the other space in our room and basically, we take over that, right? So once we set it up for VMI, how we do it, we basically have our 900-plus people, they go into our customers every day. They talk to our customers, they're very well embedded. They have great relationships and they ship the inventory levels of these bins. Now anything that is empty, they scan it, that sends a signal to a distribution center [Audio Gap] from the labor-first perspective, which a lot of you know that there's a lot of labor challenges out there, and that's been beneficial for our business because we've proven that our model really works. So our customers can ease their mind, they can sleep better at night knowing that we got their back. And that's basically what we do as a base in-class MRO business within the consumable space.

Thanks, Cesar. Yes, early in our investment in Lawson, we're trying to get our arms around the margin profile, how do customers and why do customers pay the prices that they do when there's online options. There's other competitors at cheaper prices. So a couple of our team did ride along with the sales reps, and it's not until you do that, that you realize how service-intensive this is. There's a large part of that margin that's built into the -- a large part of the price that's built into the service that we're offering to customers. It's truly a hands-on experience for the sales reps. So I'll flip this to Bob. Bob, let's talk about OEM.

Yes. So I have a quick question. As I walked in, everybody knew about Lawson, but they weren't -- they didn't know as much about Gexpro Services. So my first question is how many people in this room actually understand who is Gexpro Services and what we do? Okay. I'm going to ask you a lot of questions. But do you know what Gexpro stands for? GE experienced professionals. And why? Because our business, our foundation started with General Electric. If you look at the verticals that we support today, aerospace and defense, consumer industrial, transportation, technology, renewables and industrial power, those were all GE manufacturing businesses. So, fortunately for me, I was -- 30 years ago, I was one of the first people to build out Gexpro Services platform. We built our very first VMI, vendor-managed inventory program, at the GE gas turbine manufacturing plant in Greenville, South Carolina. And we worked with the process flow engineers to literally map out each assembly area, accessory-based, turbine-based and final assembly. And what we had to do at that point in time, we were a startup. We were doing about less than $2 million of electrical. They wanted to expand that production line to keep to add mechanicals, to add fabrications, to add assemblies, to add pipe valve and fitting, gasket ceiling [ covering ] to make us a single line distributor into a multiline distributor. But more importantly, we had to build out the technology so that we can manage the SKU progression and regression on every single area where they use that product line. So we're building in our software systems, and we're building in our wireless management systems at our distribution operation so that we could track every single part. Well, this was a big transformation for GE Supply. They didn't have a services business. We were measured on electrical. We were measured on GE sales. But quickly, this little business transformed from less than $2 million to $60 million and became one of the highest profit drivers in the company. So that was kind of a big aha for GE supply. When I'm saying the company, I mean GE supply. And then fortunately, I have the opportunity to go on and learn other business profiles. So I went to go work with consumer industrial, and I learned the solution sales business, which was automation drives, motors, meters and then I went on to transmission and distribution, ran a $650 million operation. But I kept coming back to the best job that I ever had, and that's this job because I kept saying to myself, I've never had more fun building a business with strong value-add services and capabilities, a true specialty distribution operation than when I was running, was GE Supply Services. And lo and behold, I got a phone call. It was from one of the HR directors and they said, I was going to leave the energy business, and I was potentially going to go work with the PLC, Panic Automation Group and they said, "Hey, we love the production services platform that you built for us. Would you ever consider coming back?" And I said, "I come back for one opportunity" and it was to run this fastener acquisition that they bought out of receivership that was struggling and it was in Irving, Texas. And they said, if you built the highest margin platform, why in the world would you want the lowest, and I said because you have a gem that you don't even know about. I said that have -- you don't have a fastener line for our production services portfolio today. I'm confident with the right leadership team, we can take that little $100 million business, losing about $12 million of EBITDA, leaving about $30 million of cash, and I'm confident we can turn it around. Now everybody in the world told me you're absolutely nuts, don't take that job. But we turned that business around in exactly 16 months. And the people that turned it around are the people running Gexpro Services today. Ray Herzog, Craig Schilling, Megan Rios, Mark Harrison, these are the people that had the tenacity to say, we can build this business and accelerate it. So then we consolidate it with the production services platform. GE actually sold that business. So at that point in time, remember, we can only support GE businesses because we're part of a General Electric company. The business is sold to Rexel. And now all of a sudden, the handcuffs come off. We can sell these global supply chain production management programs to every single OEM, businesses that compete with GE. So we went from 100% GE content to now GE is about 20%, still strategic and very important, but 80% of the growth of the business is going to be non-GE going forward. But what's really exciting about this is, Brian said, he's been watching this business for over 14 years. He and I have a common friend who's a good colleague. And when we were taking this business private, the two -- there was like one or two private equity groups that we were looking at. And we knew that we could scale this business. We knew it would be exactly where it is today, TTM of 413 and an EBITDA percent of 11.6% on the TTM. But when we started without Cesar, we were a $250 million business, 7% EBITDA. And we look Brian straight in the eye and we said we'll take this to double digits within a year, 16 months tops. And we've shown exactly how we are going to do it. This is how we're going to drive CM rate. This is how we can drive our commercial sales operations. It's how we're going to drive OpEx productivity. This is how we're going to drive EBITDA drop. What we need is capital investment because we need to put in the automation, the technology that we need to accelerate the labor productivity to drive the business. And true to his word, Brian invested in us, and true to our word, we delivered, and we've been one of the top-performing businesses in LKCM for 3.5 years. My friend Cesar is setting record results in terms of business improvement, right, 14% EBITDA. And I think last quarter, we were 12%. But I keep telling, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. Okay.

Had a lot of [indiscernible].

Now you've got to go 14% to 18%. I went 7% to 11%. And Brian saying, Bob, you got to be in the teens. And we're coming, we're going there. But what's great is, honestly, you couldn't work with a better group of people. I mean, LKCM stands pious anytime I need investment, I need in support even now the DSG Board, we get it. And any time I need to pull through. So customers have been asking, Ray Herzog, Ray is our Chief Commercial Officer. You guys do production supply chain management so well, why can't you build out an MRO platform? And I said, you realize what you're asking. You're talking about a completely different product line. You're talking about a tremendous amount of trade working capital investment, and there's brick mortar resources that we'd have to add. And lo and behold, Gexpro Service is doing great. And all three of these businesses are doing great on their own. Now we become part of DSG, the Distribution Solutions group with Lawson and TestEquity. And like Brian said, we carry the flag on cross-selling and collaboration because customers have been asking us to do this forever. And one of the things that you'll be impressed with just the last year -- and no, you can't pro forma these numbers. I'm just showing you what the potential opportunity is on the upstream side, and we consider upstream partnering with DSG and you look at what Brian showed you, there's literally 170,000 customers, 500,000 SKUs. And we've got an opportunity, common verticals where we support customers, multiple end users where we can scale the business. The commercial sales team has identified 250 opportunities in less than a year and Hisco just came on board. 250 opportunities, representing about $50 million of potential. And the difference is it's real. It's real. Customers are saying, Lawson, I knew your MRO capabilities, Gexpro Services has strong long-term embedded partnerships. We're pulling them through and then we're pulling rush through on the R&D side and test side, and it's easy, it's working. There are so many untapped synergies in this business that you're going to learn about. And when I go downstream and I go to our acquisitions, the 5 acquisitions at Gexpro Services is bought in the '21, '22, you're going to see even more impressive capabilities. So 4 of the 5 acquisitions that we've brought on board, bring manufacturing, contract manufacturing and light assembly. How many people saw that beautiful test chambers out in the TE? Did you see the chamber? That's -- we built that.

It's my brand.

Data Industrial Solutions built that. That's just another example of low-hanging fruit synergies that we have in our businesses. And so to me, the whole thing is we've been doing this so long with our customers. They have 90,000 customers. You have 80,000 customers, I have 2,000 customers. We're a $400 million business and I have 2,000 customers. The difference is what we do is build comprehensive end-to-end supply chain management programs. What does that mean? That means that every part that I'm providing is going directly into the production line. So you're talking about fasteners, fabrications, electricals, pipe valve and fitting labels and adhesives. That product line is going to change every year. Every year, we're going to add more diverse products. We started as a 100% electrical. And then if you look at the value-added services that we're providing, the VMI, the packaging, the kitting, the value engineering, the manufacturing that I just told you about, and light assemblies and the technical sales support and global sourcing capability, that's the stickiness. It take -- if you want to go work for the largest Fortune 1, Fortune 5 OEMs in the verticals that we support, you better have really good quality management processes. You better have exceptional supplier development. You better have high OTD, high service, high technology, to better be repeatable and sustainable or you have no chance, zero. But because we grew up in a GE manufacturing environment, and it's part of our DNA, we do this and we do it exceptionally well. And our customer retention is 98%. Brad, go back to the previous slide. I want to show one more thing. So when we're supporting our customers, we're not just covering the OEM production line, we're covering field installation and we're covering aftermarket. We want to be completely embedded in their process so they never have to go anywhere else but through Gexpro Services. And now that we have DSG, they don't have to go anywhere else but through Gexpro Services to get the Lawson and to get to TestEquity, and it's mutually the same. And the best benefit which I have to tell you that what the biggest learning lesson for me with Hisco coming on board, part of the TestEquity group is I had no idea how close and entrenched they are with their largest OEMs. And they're in the same common verticals that I am. But they brought me to customers. I've personally gone out to customers to make sure that the request and demand that they're asking for is real. And they brought me to telecommunication customers and they brought me to set to our automotive customers and they have such a strong partnership that the customer trust them when they bring Gexpro Services. And my competition, who are some of the largest competitors in this space, both on the fastener side as well as the electrical side, they're creating a tremendous opportunity for us to partner with Hisco and displace them because customers are tired of line outages. They're tired of a lack of reliability. They're tied of not having accurate demand forecasting. When I start walking you through the tools, it's our program analytics. And it's our technology, both on the production line that feeds into our ERP system that feeds into our warehouse distribution that gives those customers high uptime and it gives them a solid value problem that we can support them to be successful. So this is my -- I call this our money slide. This is my favorite slide. And my team will tell you, Bob gets giddy when he's presenting this in front of the customer. So we have an aircraft manufacturer, and we were presenting a business review to the Senior VP of Supply Chain. And my team -- we went into the meeting and my team said, Bob, I know you love this slide, and I know you think we can deliver 25% to 30% -- and by the way, the 25% to 30%, that's not just an average guess swag, that's cost-calculated. The customer tells us the savings that they receive after we implement a program. But they said, but for this customer, it's probably more 16% to 18% because that customer can buy material direct versus channeling it through supply chain distribution and us. And I said that they were telling me my value prop isn't as strong as I believe it to be because I'm building all the critical inventory, the infrastructure, the resources that they need on site. And you're telling me they could just go buy elsewhere and save like 7% to 8%? So we walk them through the IoT, the high quality, the high service. They were beyond impressed and they said, "We love doing business with you. You've implemented 3 programs. We want you to get 14 programs globally for us going forward." And I just said, "Hey, I just have one question. On that TCO, where I know the program management, the lean principles and the integrated technology is yielding significant uptime for you, which has to be important because I'm running your aftermarket program when you bring in an aircraft, that aircraft, AOG, that aircraft on ground has to be up and out asap, otherwise, it's costing you money." So my team says, our TCO is like 16% to 18%. I swear, it's 25% to 30%, and they said 25% to 30%, Bob, is much higher. And I just smiled and I said, say that again. It's much higher. And I said, please explain that to me. And he said, if you don't have the material, I have to put that aircraft up in the air to get it because I've got to get that jet back to its owner, ASAP. So he said, to hell, a lot more than 25% to 30%. It's -- if I put a jet up, that's tens of thousands of dollars. So now we're talking 50%, 60%, et cetera. So my point is, Brian keeps talking about specially distribution, keeps talking about stickiness. This is stickiness. When you go from 1 plant to 14 plants, this -- we do this time and time again, that 1 program that we built for GTMO is now hundreds of programs globally. And the customer pulls us through, they're the ones that pull us through to follow them globally. That's how much confidence they have in our business proposition. Next page, one more page. And what's -- this is really one of the key game plans here. So if you listen to Brian, he said, you've got to have repeatability. You got to have sustainability to be truly best-in-class value-added distributors. When we sign our programs, we signed 3- to 5-year partnerships with our OEMs. And what we're doing is we're embarking on a journey. We want to be there at the introduction -- the new product introduction stage where they're building that 20 years ago, the 1-megawatt unit to 1x, we want to be in there, getting all the electrical mechanical, the fabrications, all the machine parts that we can on that first unit turbine. And then we want to run it up to the growth stage of serial production, and that's where we're using our VMI, our kitting, our fulfillment and we're making sure that we have high OTD, high supplier performance benchmarking. And then to maturity peak performance, where now we know they're going to press for, hey, you've had the spend. You've got to take it from sole source to multisource and you've got to bring deflation and cost-saving ideas for us and then how we can further optimize the inventory and drive the transactional cost productivity. So what we're doing is, in that case, they're taking a fragmented supply chain hundreds and hundreds of suppliers. We're consolidating it into Gexpro Services and now DSG. And then we're eliminating all of those transactions because now they're signing the blanket agreement where annually, we're running a program that may have started out as $1 million, but now it's like a $5 million program. And we're making sure that, that program is lean. It's optimized. It has high OTD, high service, high quality, and that's why the customers stick with us. And then we want to capture the aftermarket and end-of-life buys. So we started 20 years ago with the 1x. Now we're building the 6x -- 6-megawatt machine, and we just see tremendous opportunity to repeat, repeat, repeat with all our key customers. And then Brian talked about one more key point that was really interesting and exciting to me. He talked about renewables and he said, renewables, new serial production spend is lagging a little bit. We have the Inflation Reduction Act, and that's the former production tax credit. And yes, the renewables segment will come back strong in the second half of '24 and '25 and it will carry forward. But what we're doing with the acquisitions that we did, I'm going back to downstream with Resolux and Gexpro Services core and then Frontier, we can now on the repower opportunities, there's 70,000 turbines -- wind turbines operating in the U.S. And the reliability of those wind turbines is not even close to what we thought it was. So it's more like 5 years, you have to do contract services and maintenance on these units. And there's 400,000 wind turbines installed globally. So when we bought Resolux and we bought Frontier Technologies, we did it purposely. There was intent here. We wanted to be able to grab -- expand our customer base. So if you look at renewables, it's a $2 billion market -- addressable market for value-add services. But the top 10 customers control more than 75% of the global market share. So Gexpro Services, we had 3 of the large OEMs. And then Resolux had 7. So we put them in, we were best-in-class on hardware, fasteners hardware and mechanical. They were best-in-class on electricals, light assembly fixtures, cables and electrical kits. And then Frontier gave us the best-in-class design engineering, manufacturing to build all the platforms, to build all the steer assemblies, all the brackets that they use inside the tower internals and at the machine head and at the nacelle. So when we started coding these repower packages, which are $1 million packages, we would normally, independently Gexpro Services would win roughly about 25% to 30%. And our margins were decent, but they weren't great, but now we're winning 80% and our margins are much more attractive because now I have the mix of the manufacturing businesses. So to Matt's point, for every one acquisition we complete, it takes us 15 targets to get to one because we're bringing in companies that are accretive day 1 that bring -- that strengthen our value proposition, have a high services concentration, and they can be a plug and play and they have accretive margins. So we're pretty excited about where Gexpro Services is going, and we're very excited about partnering with Lawson and the TestEquity Group because we see a significant opportunity that the 250 opportunities I told you, $50 million pipeline on the downstream synergies with Gexpro Services, 5 acquisitions, pipeline of just 70 opportunities equals $65 million. Now can you pro forma that and put it into my numbers next year? No, you can't. This is a long-cycle business. It takes 2 to 3 years, but I'm telling you, customers get the value. They get the value and they want to work with DSG.

Thanks, Bob. Appreciate that. So we at Headwater are incredibly fortunate that we get to build our private investment firm inside of what is now a 44-year-old firm where Luther assigns a ton of value to culture and continuity. I talked about the 2 decades that we've been working with together at our team. We assigned that same sort of value inside of businesses like Bob. So you guys have been working together now, how long, your team?

Almost 20 years.

Yes, 20 years. So thanks, Bob. I appreciate that overview. Russ, he's going to let you talk now. So let's talk about TestEquity.

I don't know, I must have drawn the short straw here to go third behind these 2 guys. They are a tough act to follow, but it's amazing I get to share the stage with these guys and work with them every day at DSG. So I do appreciate that. It is amazing. My name is Russ Frazee. I am the CEO of TestEquity. And I'm going to struggle here because my team teases me that if they tied me to a podium, I couldn't talk. So sitting down and talking to me is -- it's a challenge. I move a lot, but we'll get through it. I have been with TestEquity probably about just a little over 5 years now. Prior to that, I spent 18 years with the company called FCX Performance, where during my leadership time there, we started at about $60 million, and the last time we were sold, we were around $800 million. Those who sustained organic growth from adding new product lines and other areas of the country as well as I've done over, at FCX alone, 45 acquisitions and integrations. So the important part of that is the integration part as we move forward with what we're doing here. Everybody tells me, Russ, we know that there's no playbook for doing integrations. Well, there actually is. I spent the past 20 years of my career building the playbook on how to do integrations, how to get the synergies and how to build value in companies when we're doing what we're doing, building the platform and growing it. So I've done this for a lot in my career. We've been very successful at it. One of the questions I got earlier, when I was at the booth was how many of those acquisitions have been successful. A very high percentage of them. We bought some very large companies. We bought some medium-sized companies. We even bought some companies out of bankruptcy and did some turnarounds on them and brought those into the mix. So I've had a lot of experience in doing what I'm doing here. I'm exceptionally excited to be part of TestEquity. The TestEquity Group and our different brands, bringing this all together and working with these two and being part of DSG and bringing all of what we can do together to all of our customer base. It's a lot of fun. So what is the Industrial Technologies Group? That's a very wide-ranging category of customers. So I'm going to narrow it down a little bit to exactly what TestEquity is and what we do. We basically participate in the electronic production cycle. So anything from conception to R&D through the manufacturing to the service and maintenance at the end of the product. So if you look around this room, every one of you has something on you or drove something here today that there's a product that TestsEquity represent in. So it's that full life cycle of everything we do. We have very highly technical salespeople that get involved at the beginning of the process. They work with the engineers in the beginning to use some of the equipment that you all saw on our booth over there in the development of the new technology that they're going to roll to the marketplace. While those engineers are working with the engineering groups and our customers, that's when we get our products specced into the next phase into the manufacturing phase of the process. Now one of the reasons that we were so keen to buy Hisco is because that's where they really, really play the best is in that manufacturing phase. We had a small group, our Technical division, sold into that area as well, but not nearly at the volumes that Hisco did and not nearly the stickiness that Hisco has with their customers. So that acquisition is very, very important to our growth and our margin growth as we go forward as a company. And I'll talk a little bit more of that here in a bit. We offer a very wide range of services that a lot of the broad range distributors don't. We offer services. We do VMI, we do calibration. We do chemical management, which is very different, and that also came with the Hisco acquisition. All of our customers, including a lot of Bob's customers and Cesar's customers are big consumers of chemicals. And chemicals, there's a wide spectrum of what they are. But it's also very detailed how those are managed and how those are tracked and shipped and stored. We actually can do that service for the customer. So I know the term is used all the time, but it truly does build the moat around the customer. The value that we bring to the customer base and what really makes us special, as I mentioned before, is our technical abilities. A lot of the folks that work at TestEquity, Hisco are engineers. So on the TestEquity side, there's a lot of electronical engineers that work with the engineers in development of their products. They understand what they're developing. They work with them in that process to get our items specced in. On the other side, on our Techni-Tool which -- what we call our electronic production supplies, those functions are very technical too. Because what you really don't realize is how technical solder is. Solder and solder paste and flux and all those different products like that are exceptionally chemical or I mean chemical -- they're exceptionally technical and you really have to be careful what you're speccing into the products. So we bring that technical ability to the table that most of our competition doesn't. We do a lot of private label brands. Bob talked about the chamber that's sitting over there. We don't call them private label, we call them own brand. You probably -- a lot of you heard me refer to those products over there as own brand. I do that mainly in case our marketing teams here and they yell at me. With the difference between own brand and private labels, we didn't just put a TestEquity label on someone else's chamber. That chamber was designed by TestEquity. And now Bob's group at SIS are manufacturing those for us. We used to outsource those to a third party. I was talking to Ray and Bob one day at one of the events that we have when we get together. And they said, "Hey, we just bought a company that can actually do that for you". So now we're moving a lot of our production over to Bob, and they did an amazing job actually on that product over there. But that keeps the full cycle within the DSG group, which is amazing. Obviously, our competition -- our direct competition, no one actually has their own-brand chambers. But we're expanding our own-brand products as well with those customers. Now we have to do that a little bit differently than Cesar, and Bob can do that because we actually have relationships with a lot of Tier 1 manufacturers that we have to maintain. But we expand our private label in a way that we don't compete directly with the Tier 1s that we're competing at a different level. So we're going to continue to grow that private label business within TestEquity that will really help us grow our margins in that area. End markets, they're very similar that we all share, the aerospace and defense, automotive, you saw the one picture that Brian put up there, the factory and where we all play into that. You don't really think about companies like TestEquity when you see what's sitting in our bench over there, that we're going to be in the same place as that Cesar and Bob are. But just if we even take the EVs out of the picture and just talk about the regular automotive factories, these guys play heavily into there. But as you know, every single car that you drive is all run by computers now and chips and different circuit boards, all that stuff, so we play heavily in that. That's how we bring the whole picture of DSG together in those type of factories. Even though we are a bit different than the other groups and what we bring, we all play in the same areas and in the same factories. Our geography is United States, Canada, Mexico, North America, moving into Central America and we're in Europe. Same reasons where Bob is, some of our Tier 1s have asked us to go into Europe and represent them in Germany and the U.K. So that's why we've moved into those areas. Next slide. I'll talk about -- I talked a little bit about how we get into the full life cycle. And I know I'm not going to go exceptionally deep on this because I know what you guys are more interested in than truly all the technical details of TestEquity. Russ, how are you going to move from 7% EBITDA up to the double digits? That's what you're all interested in because that's where all the questions were going over there. So we'll get to there in just a minute. But I want to say a little bit about the background about how we're going to do that and why we can do that and this is the important -- but why can we do that? Why are we special? Why won't they go to just the broad line distributors to get some of the things that we sell, and this is why. We're very technical. We have different brands that we go to market with, you see on this slide here. Our engineers are working and we call that the tip of the spear. They're working with the engineers at our customers, getting our products specced into the design process. Once you're specced in, as Bob knows, a lot of his products are as well, that's when you get that reoccurring revenue at the higher margins. We worked there at the beginning to get specced in. We work with our test and measurement equipment through the development part. We get our solder, we get some of the other utensils and things that we have over there specced into the process. That's when we move into that next section. And as I mentioned before, that's why the Hisco acquisition was so important to our future and where we're going with this company and how we are going to drive our margins up. That next section where we play, it's the highest volume. It's the highest margins, and it's got massive pull-through of everything that we do. Not only everything that we do, but Bob and Cesar as well. So that's where -- that is the DSG sweet spot, and that's where we're going to move more into. We're still going to use our highly technical abilities to get us in the door. Those topline products that we carry, the Keysight, the Tektronix, the [indiscernible], those are calling cards that get you into the door to talk to engineers. If you carry those product lines, engineering takes you serious. They know you know what you're doing, they'll talk to you. Those get you into the door to open up the door for the rest of the stuff that we do. Once we get through that next process, we even have the process on the end and the products that we sell in the end for the -- it's MRO, not exactly like Cesar does it, but it is maintenance and repair of those electronics that we sell in the beginning of that whole process. As you can see, we have some very, very top notch customers that we sell our products to. And I'm sure most of you own something from one of these customers, they're probably sitting on the table in front of you there but it's very exciting. We are just at the -- speaking of tip of the spear, we are just at the beginning of the electrification of the entire world. We're just starting in the United States. There's Tesla, there's Rivian, there's all kinds of car companies. Even the Big 3 are starting to electrify their cars. We're just getting started there. The future for TestEquity is just -- it gets me very, very excited about where we can go with this, considering we're just getting started down that path. It's very exciting. The next slide, please. So this is a lower case study. Again, I won't go through too deeply. But one of our customers came to us because of our engineers who was working with them in the beginning of the process. They were developing some rocket boosters, obviously, those working outer space. There's a whole different environment up there. Some of the test chambers that we built, our own brand, they're not labeled from somebody else. These are our own brands, so we can change them with our engineering department. There was nothing on the market out there that they could test those particular circuit boards in because of the environment in outer space, how cold it was. So they worked with our engineers on how are we going to be able to test this. So we designed a chamber, that's at the end of this thing that was cooled with liquid nitrogen rather than a typical refrigerants to be able to get the temperatures to where they needed to test that. But because of our technical abilities on that front end, that's where we worked with them to get our products. You can see in that electronic assembly section specced into the manufacturing process of the circuit board because what we were testing in the beginning would flow through and work in the environment that it was supposed to in outer space. This is also where we pull Lawson and Gexpro Services into the same area. In that OEM section, it's where we're going to focus on our growth. That's where we're going to be able to pull more volume and pull higher margins through to increase the overall margin profile of the TestEquity group, which is Hisco and our other brands that we go to market with.

Thank you, Russ. Appreciate that. We're going to kind of move into the next phase of this, which we're going to talk about initiatives. Obviously, we have initiatives that are ongoing at the DSG level. We have cross-selling. We have cost savings initiatives but each of the teams are working on projects that are driving better operating margins within their business. So we're going to talk briefly about kind of the top single initiative. I think each of them will work going on to drive higher margins. Cesar is going to go first. He's going to talk about our sales transformation project, which we call Project Evolve, 70-year-old business, been going to market the same way for 70 years. So Cesar, when we brought him on, and he said, "Hey, can I change some things? Can I figure out ways to serve our customers a little bit differently?" And we said, have at it, and here's a playbook because we started building the playbook several years ago along with Ron and the rest of the leadership team. So I'll hand it over to you, Cesar.

I guess sometimes you got to be careful what you ask for, right? And this is one of those. So as you can tell, we're very passionate about our business. But this is one of those that was like, wow, we got to work on this on our own first before I'm able to leverage -- to better leverage these 2 businesses. So when you think about Lawson and you think about the 80,000 customers that we serve today, they're like -- the end markets are all over the place, right? We got fleet management, collision centers, equipment rental, heavy manufacturing and these customers are very diverse, not only from the end-market perspective but also from the complexity. So we got those customers that might have small job sites. But we have all the customers are way more complex than the small folks, right? Now what these customers have in common is actually that they need somebody like us to help them to figure out what products they should be using, why and somebody to help them to keep their facilities up and running and being able to be there for them so they can focus on their core business. On the other side, we've been serving all these customers, like Brad said, the same way for over 7 years. And everybody in this room, you guys know that probably over the past 2 decades, there has been a change or an evolution in the buying behaviors of B2B out there, right? So the question is, what are we doing about it? So if we go to the next chart, we're taking our high complex customers and on one side -- but what we've done is that long tail of small and medium customers, we've taken that group and we basically created an insight sales channel so we can actually serve those customers and touch them in some instances, more times than what we've been doing with the same field sales channels, right? Now as we move these long tail of customers to the phone in our digital footprint, we've also -- what we've done for our field sales team, we've opened capacity to this group to spend more time with large customers. Large customers that Bob and Russ are helping me to get to it, right? And these large customers, our customers are asking for more support. They're asking for our people to be there more often. So we're allowing our field sales team to be in front of our larger customers, spend more time with them, get more new customers and make more money, right? So our end goal is to have multiple sales channels that we can serve a diverse customer base with the right cost structure per sales channel. So think about this for a minute, right? So why is this good for our field sales team? This is great because, like I said earlier, they spend more time with our customers, they'll be able to increase the share of wallet, but they also are going to be able to get more new customers from our other 2 sister companies and other methods, right? Our inside sales team are actually touching those customers more frequently, but over the phone, right? And then our customers actually benefit from this because now they have resources from us that are spending more time with them. And for us, as a company, we've taken those unprofitable sales and allocate that into the right cost-to-serve model. But we are not doing this only from the people and sales channel perspective. We also need technology, right? So we embrace this, a couple of upgrades and investments that we've been doing in our business. And this is a joke that I -- long joke with Brad, but we have 900-plus field sales team, and we have no CRM, right? So that's a tough job, right, as a sales leader. So beginning of the first quarter next year, we're going to be launching our new CRM. We're also investing in technology on helping -- so we can help our field sales team to do a better job on the order entry process as we scan all these bins. And we're in the very early stages of our digital road map. And one of the first steps we took was actually to do a brand refresh, which is -- a lot of you guys saw it in the other room, but also in our website as well. Now as we got into this process, everything that we expected that was going to happen, we're pretty much validating all that. And then -- but then on the other side, it's very early for us, but we're very actually very pleased with our progress. So like I said earlier, this is very exciting because I couldn't think about the best time to do this, which is allowing our field team to open up that capacity, so I can actually leverage these 2 businesses in the near future. So thank you, Brad.

Thank you, Cesar. We get asked often like the EBITDA margin acceleration that we're seeing, how much is it a result of this go-to-market change that we're doing. The good news is that Cesar and his team are early innings on this. So there's a lot of upside remaining for us to build efficiencies within the sales channel. As shareholders -- several shareholders always ask the question, give us your rep count -- tied rep count into revenues. It's less about that now, it's all about building efficiencies with the reps that you do have. So great progress there, Cesar. And Bob, I'll hand it over to you to talk about your cross-selling initiatives you have with an OEM. And I'll stress brevity here because Bob does get passionate about what he's talking about. So let's quickly go through this next one.

Before we leave that thought, go back to Cesar slide. Right there. So this is more than concept. I mean, this is the reality. Cesar has built a national account team now that's -- when I told you we have the 170,000 customers that we're working on the large OEM opportunities. So Ray Herzog, Mike Jenene, Matt Malin, Dan James, they're working on some of our largest customer opportunities to pull through the MRO. And to me, it's beyond intuitive now, like it's just a common culture practice. When I told you about that 250 opportunities, 40% of those opportunities are Gexpro Services pulling Lawson through to our OEMs. So if you walk away with one thing, there's a huge installed base that we can mine collectively together. And that is, to me, the biggest compelling value prop for our customers and compound value for our investors.

Are you putting more pressure on me now?

You got to 9 to 14 like nothing. We worked hard to get to 7 and 11. So don't worry, he's going to get the 10. But -- so this is kind of -- this is our playbook. This is the size of the pie. And I told you, we talked about renewables and the size of these addressable markets for what we call our product line value-add services, and you see over $30 billion of opportunities. And then we want -- we know the top 10 customers in every vertical. And so our focus is how are we going to get these customers organically, how we -- believe it or not, some of the best leads we get are from our key suppliers. And then how are we going to be able to build these customers on a new business development standpoint and be inorganically via acquisition. So the focus is more customers, more suppliers, more products, more services, more technology and expanded footprint. Now when you look at the acquisition partners we brought in, so we've got Omni Fasteners, which is a faster machine manufacturing business. This little business -- I mean, margins as impressive as Cesar's, started out primarily in industrial power and aerospace and defense and transportation. Now we're pulling them through into consumer industrial and into technology. So this business is -- little business is starting to scale. And the next one. National Engineered Fasteners gave us a new end market. It's a sub-tier segment of transportation, but they are -- they work with the largest Tier 1 automotive manufacturers, and they are above and beyond very strong specification design engineering, value engineering, and they're bringing a lot of depth and breadth and capabilities to our business. They're in Canada. They're in Mexico. They're in the U.S. So now we're teaming with Hisco who has a very large footprint in Mexico to team with our NEF business and our Gexpro Services business to really capture market share, customer opportunities selectively in those verticals. SIS, the state industrial solutions, contract manufacturing. They do electric -- electromechanical assembly. So you saw the chambers push buttons. They build pressure switches, gauge cabinets, everything a customer that was -- cable and harness assemblies that a customer was doing in-house that they don't have the time to [indiscernible] productivity to manage, it comes over to SIS. SIS was primarily a consumer industrial segment. We've now broadened them into technology, aerospace, defense and renewables because as we talked about, the repower, they play the critical role in the cable and harness assemblies. And then Resolux, again, best-in-class on electricals, electrical kits, lighting fixtures. For us, they're very well respected in Europe, in Asia, in Brazil and Turkey, in the U.S., so common footprints that we can expand upon, common customers that we can cross-sell on and then Frontier Technologies, 100% renewables. We've diversified them into transportation and into industrial power. And now we just recently brought them into technology. So we're pretty high on the growth opportunities from downstream standpoint and then also on an upstream standpoint because now when we go approach an OEM, we'd always look at the lens through Gexpro Services. Now we look at the lens through Lawson and Hisco and TestEquity. And to me, that's -- it's just -- it's an easy plug and play to support the businesses.

Thank you, Bob. All right, Russ. Let's talk about driving double-digit EBITDA margins.

All right. Great. I know this is what you're all interested in. So my very first point there, VMI pricing improvement that we're going to work very hard, basically with the Hisco group. The Hisco group does a lot of VMI. And as we stated a little bit earlier, they've done a very good job growing their topline, growing their volume. They have not had the focus on VMI that they should have and getting paid for the value. A little back story on that. When I started here with TestEquity, we do VMI also, and it was broken bad. And this is before DSG even came together. But I reached out to Bob and Ray, and I said, "Listen, my VMI is broken and I know these guys are the best at it in the country." So we got some pointers from them. We revamped our VMI at TestEquity. Now it's actually my fastest-growing division of my business. I give Bob and Ray a lot of credit for helping us through that. That was before we even exist as DSG. So now can you imagine that we are DSG, we do work together, how much easier it is for us to get this type of stuff done. So that's amazing. The cross-selling is a very big deal. That's not just cross-selling within our different brands within TestEquity. But one of the big, big chunks is TestEquity is a little bit different in how we manage than Hisco manage their inventory. Hisco's inventory was mainly for the customers that they did VMI with. TestEquity's inventory is for sale to everyone. So we're taking the products that we stock in our TestEquity website or warehouse and making them available on all the Hisco websites in their e-commerce platform. We're also actually been in talks with Bob and Cesar listing some of our chambers on their websites to sell them. So the cross-selling within TestEquity's divisions and branches or verticals as well as within DSG on a lot of things. That's going to help us move those chambers and a lot of that products are much, much higher-margin than some of the other stuff that we sell. I mentioned digital and own brand. We go to market digitally. We're going to move a lot of those products there. We're going to continue to move products to own brand, where we have a much higher-margin profile like Cesar gets to enjoy in those. So we're moving quickly as we can towards that. Strategic cost out. We mentioned that we do have an offshoring facility in the Philippines and some in India. Currently, we have about 130 people there, and that's been through attrition. We don't -- we haven't done our riff. We haven't done anything to move those jobs there. But through attrition, and we get those on about a 70% lower rate than we can employ the same folks in the states for us. So we're going to continue moving the non-customer-facing positions over there that we can. We've done a lot of -- four of those acquisitions that you saw up there were within the TestEquity Group. We're going through the integration right now of those companies. We're pretty much done with the equipment. We've got most of the cost out of there as we're moving forward. But we've got a long way to go with a lot that we're doing. What's going to make that easier is, listen, Matt talked about -- they help with that, Matt, Brent and Melanie are absolutely amazing helping us get those synergies out of those companies and move that forward as well as that, I've brought some of the folks that worked with me previously that did those 45 acquisitions and integrations over to TestEquity, and they're also working on bringing these companies together. We're streamlining the sales coverage. As you know, when we bought Hisco and TestEquity, we have some duplicate salespeople. In some places, we had 3 salespeople calling on 1 customer. So we're smoothing that out. As Cesar is doing, we're creating opportunities for the salespeople to call on more customers by streamlining that whole process. And this is the one that scares a lot of people, but to integrate ERP systems across the business units. We're moving very methodically through that to get to one platform. Tim, I don't know if Tim is still here, but he's actually doing some studies for us from the HOPS Group to make sure that we're headed in the right direction with that. I have an entire team that has done this over 50 times. That work for me in implementing ERP systems and know all the pitfalls and where you can get burn on that. But we will gradually move towards that where we'll get a lot of cost out and streamline a lot of what we're doing. And when we do that, we'll be able to streamline our digital platform. Right now, we're pulling from multiple different warehouses. So we have to have multiple different integrations on the back end of our digital to pull from all those different warehouses. And different ERP systems as we get to 1 ERP system, 1 database, won't be able to develop 1 integration to pull that. So that's actually a big deal for what we're doing. And that streamlined the distribution network, too. We've got too many spaces. When we bought Hisco, we both had one in El Paso. We both had one in Juarez. We're in the process of moving those two together and eliminating two buildings right there. So this is our path back to the double-digit EBITDA that we talked about earlier. We knew when we bought Hisco, it was going to dilute us because we were fully prepared from what they were bringing. But the upside of what they bring with their customer base, their stickiness and their product lines that we bring all together, we will be able to move quickly back to our double-digit EBITDA.

Thank you, Russ. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate that. We have a couple more slides in here about cross-selling and some of the initiatives about how we're using our DSG platform to have a more holistic sale. I'm sure some of that will come out in some of the Q&A. We've run out a little bit of time in the program, but we are going to move to Q&A. The team is going to still be around as well afterwards for any questions, but we really want to encourage active dialogue here on some things that we may miss. We do have 3-part advisers that's in the stands with microphones. So if you have a question, we'd love for you to raise your hand, and they'll bring a mic to you so the webcast can hear. And we've got Brian up, Ron available and the team here up on stage for questions, and Matt.

First of all, thank you. Okay. Thank you for the presentation. Terrific. You guys are giving Cesar a hard time. That Cesar's buying stock. So I'd like to congratulate Cesar on doing that in a meaningful number, so he's walking the talk. So a question about the cross-selling, just generally, there's a lot of overlap in these businesses. I understand the use case for keeping system separate perhaps, but I think about Salesforce and could you take it across the entire enterprise because they are so related? Would that accelerate the sales process for all 3 companies? And then maybe a follow-up is, is there a place in the future for really trying to consolidate the entire technology stack for the business because this is a problem that we're seeing now in public companies all over the place where it's great for a while to keep them separate, but they never optimize and you reach a certain critical mass, it's usually a couple of billion, and then you have problems.

So I'll hit that real quick. So just a reminder for the group, I mean, our intention on putting these businesses together was not to fully consolidate. These are 3 separate, distinct, value-creating, go-to-market strategies we have with each of these 3 verticals. So the last thing we want to do is homogenize the way that we go to market. And by combining systems that suggests that you're going to combine Salesforce, and your combined inventory systems. We've seen that fail in our market. We've been doing this for a long time, and we've seen things that work and things that don't. It is our opinion that we want to keep these 3 businesses distinctly separate on the outbound customer-facing side of what we do. The back office, absolutely, we're looking at several different initiatives there. We've undergone a study on that. We've actually hired a third party to come in and do some work on it to determine that. And the conclusion is a consolidated ERP system is a lot of work, has a lot of risk and not a lot of upside for us.

Perhaps if you go back -- can you back to the slide that we borrowed to Bryan earlier? .

That we borrowed from Bryan.

Yes, he stole it from us. So we borrowed it from him. But this is -- we're very early into this, right? But when you think about a facility, what we're seeing in addition to what you heard from Brad is that [Audio gap] also sold these at GE Healthcare. When you think about a hospital, similar analogy, right? It's a very different environment, settling a CTE big scanner to accessories within the end back of the room, right? So [Audio gap] deals business that in the rail industry from Rob, aerospace from a business that -- he does business on the aerospace side. And then actually, we closed the Hisco transaction on the electrical component piece as well, right? And this will happen because of that, right? They have great relationships with a direct procurement person. They made the introduction to the indirect procurement person, and that's where we come on board and we do the same thing. But we've been teaching our sales team about each other so that everyone can talk about what we do.

Just -- I'm going to add just a moment to -- David, your question is a very fair one, and it's one that's gotten a lot of airtime on our team. Niraj and Tim, I don't think Tim's stepped out, but Niraj has spent a lot of time recently just on this. Russ has an IT background as well and systems background. And that was part of the magic that he had with being able to integrate all those acquisitions for FCX. Right now, as it relates to Russ' business unit, we are kind of going through a kind of a stealth approach to back our way into a single system without taking a lot of risk. And part of that is we rolled out a system in Europe on a very small division. It happens to be a system that we know very, very well. We've got a lot of experience with it across our distribution businesses. And so that's kind of working its way into Russ' business, but not on a pace that we think will assume any enterprise risk. That's -- protecting enterprise risk is number one. On Cesar's business, we've got an analysis going because we're going -- we've got an on-prem service ERP system that we're dealing with that's going to have to go through a migration to a cloud. And that migration is enough of a migration that it gives you anxiety. But there's a simpler approach, perhaps the one that Russ is using, that solves for that migration, which would -- if we go that direction, would put 2 of the 3 business units on the same ERP system. It's not going to be something that we do over the next 12 months. It's not something that's going to happen over the next 24 months, but it is something that we are mapping today for over the next 36 months, if you will. Bob's got a system that he's been on and kind of evolved.

Yes. We -- so for [ Jasper ] Services, we actually completed a 3 ERP consolidation. So we had Oracle in Europe. We had P21 from that fastener business, and then we had [ XPD2 ] for the historical production services platform. So we put that into QAD and we did it very successfully, and it's been operating very well. We recently put Omni Orion onto QAD. We're going to put state industrial solutions on to QAD. But for the higher-end manufacturing businesses like Frontier that operate on a [ BOSS ] system, we've got to be very careful. It's do no harm because I can't disrupt these best-in-class manufacturing businesses. But where it makes sense and there's a good return, both for the businesses and for us, we're going to do it. On the CRM side, I can tell you that we are on a consolidated CRM. He's on a CRM, you're on a CRM. Ray Herzog's not having any issues mobilizing the sales teams to capture the business leads from -- the field sales teams have an incentive to feed us leads where we can cross-sell and collaborate the businesses. I would tell you it's to a point now where it's intuitive. We've really progressed faster than we thought we would.

The other thing that is an obvious part of the question is Cesar's comments about our CRM system at Lawson. And it's been a great headache of many of ours for now as long as I've been an investor in Lawson. And we handed the headache over to Cesar by not telling him about it before he took the job, which is true because we do have a CRM. It's just a homegrown, kind of...

Excel spreadsheet.

It looks and feels and acts a lot like an Excel spreadsheet. But it is updated, and they do look at lots of flash reports every morning, just not as efficiently as they should be. And so when we joke about the CRM dilemma there -- and it has been half joke, half pain for now, 7 years, we knew that we were migrating towards something that we were going to do it very carefully. And we wanted to have a commercial leader in the chair who knew exactly what he expected out of the sales force, which Cesar is, and so -- and allow him to shape that narrative versus flipping from a current homespun, homegrown one into something that then was an interim solution for somebody who then was going to come in and put their final imprint on a lot of the sales force transformation that we're doing. So we've got it coming for him. I know he expected it to be rolled out by about right now, like tomorrow. October 1.

Yesterday.

Yesterday. Okay. So when he offered some anxiety or pain -- not pain -- not anxiety, but pain over the fact that it's not going to be until the first of the year, that's the reason. So yes. Tommy?

A question on M&A, and I appreciate the whole portion of the presentation on this topic. If we could narrow the discussion a little bit to year 1, year 2 value creation and synergies, where is the biggest bang for your buck that you can repeat deal after deal after deal both on the revenue side and on the margin side?

So look, the most significant thing that you can repeat year in and year out is going to be whether or not it reaffirms your ability to grow or cross-sell organic revenue growth across the whole platform. So if we buy something -- and quite candidly, everything that we've I mean, looked at, we've tried to use this lens, which is how does it bend the curve on organic revenue growth? And how is it ultimately going to drive kind of a long tail of higher value-added connectivity with the customers that we've got today that we would be introducing that capability to or -- and so I will use the Resolux transaction as an example of one that's been the last couple of -- or last years. But Resolux and Frontier were specific acquisitions that we pursued and Bob and Ray's request to absolutely drive a much higher level of organic growth, much higher structural margins and ultimately synch up their leadership position in the renewable space. And so he had come from a GE background. And GE Renewables was already an existing relationship that they had a great -- kind of great connectivity with. There were some capabilities that they wanted to have for GE that they didn't have, and they needed to get from these other 2 competitors. And then those other 2 competitors had some customer connectivity that if you're an old GE guy, those customers didn't necessarily wake up wanting to do business with you. So you can imagine who's in the renewable space, it fiercely fights with GE. So what we needed to do was show that whole ecosystem of customers how we were now their channel partner. And with that, we ended up with some kitting capabilities, some control over our supply chain that gave a higher degree of confidence in those customers that we are going to be able to serve them across all their retrofits as well as all their new programs and a much more expanded wallet share at a significantly higher margin contribution to us. And so that -- and across a geographic footprint that was more robust than Florida. I mean, if you kind of think about North American renewables. So that's -- that would be the number one. Now can we take out some costs? Or can we get onto one system? Sure. But that's not enough to go buy something for 6x or 8x EBITDA for us.

Bryan, I think the other thing that we're looking with [ Mad Voice ] is not only when we look at Gexpro Services target acquisition, when we bring those customers, do they have MRO that we can use to pull through for Cesar, Lawson and Hisco so that we're opening up our lands to incorporate a broader perspective than just sole Gexpro Services.

When we underwrote Hisco, we underwrote Hisco to how it was really going to impact the margin structure of the Industrial Technologies business and build a much better value-added division there. But we -- and that's what we underwrote to. And we underwrote to it with some high thresholds because it was a big check. So while it looked like margins were lower, it looked like we were paying a pretty full price. There was a lot of efficiency and network efficiencies that we thought we were going to get. We also thought that there was going to be, because of that value proposition inside of Industrial Technologies, more organic revenue growth for that group. What we didn't underwrite to, but what we had a tremendous amount of confidence in, was what you've heard from them, which is how it was going to impact the other 2 verticals on a revenue growth basis. Yes.

Two questions, which are related. The first is when you have the cross selling, who are you displacing competitively and how and why you winning that additional business? What's the value proposition to the customers? The second one, Bryan, I really thought it was interesting when you talked about the differences between specialty and broadline distribution. And you mentioned there was actually a company you were involved in that you thought had specialty elements and later turned out not to as much. I think some of the specialty elements such as vendor-managed inventory, the high service levels are pretty obvious and very well understood. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the more hidden or less obvious value-added specialty elements in each of the business units, maybe a focus on Hisco since that's newer. I think you talked about labeling and some other things that maybe from the outside, it doesn't sound like a big deal, but why that's really differentiating in the marketplace.

Big deal.

So on the displacement, what do you guys want to hit that on customer displacement?

So I would say the opportunities that Hisco and TestEquity is bringing us into, it's the Fasteners, the worst, [ the Basart, ] the supply technologies. But it's also the electrical distributors that don't have the full suite of value-added services capabilities. For you, it's [ use Grainger. ]

Yes, very similar in terms of -- we're competing against a lot of the big competitors out there. And the fact that we go together now with all those great relationships, it's just opening the door for us to tap into these facilities that we were not able to do it before. So that's something for us that has been a huge leverage.

We struggled a lot with Fastener would come into our VMIs and offer things that we couldn't as test. And the funny part was they would come in and win because the customer wanted to deal with one supplier. They bought all the stuff from us that we normally put in there. But now, we can hold them at bay because we just -- we go in with Cesar and we can actually deliver the full package when they actually can't.

Vendor consolidation is real. And so that part is real, and the other part that's real, that really kind of dovetails into your next question is the labor component. People underestimate the value of that labor. Manufacturers are trying to offload that on to others that do it better than they do. And so that's a big component on the selling proposition for all these guys.

Yes. Samir, the -- one of the things that -- start with one thing, OEM. We felt like that Gexpro Services, having been in the specialty distribution space for a long time and having evaluated acquisitions in specialty -- I mean, in OEM, having even looked with Fastener -- I mean, sorry, with Lawson, we looked at trying to get into OEM some years back. We look -- we assessed an acquisition. It would have brought us $30 million or $40 million of OEM, but it would not have been best-in-class. So when we went out and chased down a chance to get Gexpro Services, again, the history that I had there was one of Bob's colleagues is one of my very best friends from graduate school and helped us lead the IDG transaction of [ Go Private ], helping me on the underwriting side and is a career CEO, Chairman of Fastener businesses. And so he was a key Board member and resource and friend across a lot of our -- limited partner across a lot of our specialty distribution underwriting over the years and sat -- has sat on some boards for us. So that friend introduced me to Gexpro Services' capabilities back in the mid-2000s. And those capabilities, as we kept scoring different OEMs that we were looking at, they were not as robust as what Gexpro Services had, but it was stuck inside of Rexel. And it was a 3% of the North American revenue. It was a forgotten about division. It just happened to be a forgotten about division that was highly evolved. And so -- and they weren't allocated capital to go make acquisitions. So we made a deliberate run to try and figure out how to get that business out of Rexel and to then be able to bring those capabilities into an ecosystem that involve Lawson. What we found was that there really are a lot more conversations that you can have on MRO once you are embedded as an OEM. And so that's a part of it that we didn't necessarily fully appreciate how robust the market growth was. And so when we went back to Hisco and we're like, gosh, Hisco has got a lot of those same capabilities on their OEM front that would not only help our Industrial Technologies unit have more value-add, but be so much more deeply embedded with the customer, such that we thought, okay, that is going to allow Cesar a lot bigger hunting ground, which is what we're finding with Bob's relationships. And it also gave us a geographic footprint. So that's one part of kind of, I would say, deliberateness around kind of pulling different value-added capabilities and relationships together. On the things that might surprise you, the obvious place for me to go would be labeling or packaging or kitting because all those are things that are very real. And if it's -- but what's going to surprise you is that I would say what is lower margin and a challenge for us today is test and measurement. And so you think about test and measurement, you're like, well, that's a challenge because you're representing -- you're the largest seller of several of the major manufacturers in North America. So you have a market-leading position already. But what it does is that tip of the spear, and it's all the ecosystem around that, which involves calibration, shop service, field capabilities. It involves being in front of the customer, credibly more -- with more frequency. We've got a whole -- between rental and used, there's a whole asset management element to it that brings you deeper into some really key customers that we want to be able to get more of their production supply revenue from. And without that, I don't think that we would be able to have as many engagements as we would have. It's a tip of a spear. It's -- in the old days, it's kind of like some diapers or bananas, I guess, at a grocery store. And yet, there's our real capabilities around it. Is it a distraction from a margin construct? Absolutely. Is it a distraction for me because it's got a capital cycle to it? Absolutely. And so those are things that I don't love about it. But when I look at what it's allowing us to do in the A list of customers that are -- that have strong secular growth behind them and the ways that we can engage with them more robustly not only on the asset management side on those types of pieces of equipment. But the opportunity that we've got in front of us and doing more service for them and more higher-margin value-added consumables sales to them. There's a sneaky part of it that's super value-added that most of us -- it's taken me quite a while to warm up to how it fits into the ecosystem, candidly. Yes.

Just -- I wanted to circle back on your 5-year goals and specifically, gross margin. Can you just discuss a little bit more, dive into the drivers of the 25 to 50 basis points of annual gross margin expansion that you're forecasting?

Sure. So to try and unpack it. If you add labeling or you add packaging or you add kitting, then you pick up 20 points. Right? More or less. If you use Frontier and you bring Frontier in to a renewables engagement and you're pulling more of the assembly capabilities through, then you're not only super competitive at the price point within customer, but you're picking up 20 points. Right? If you're -- and I'm just using 20 as a generic, but it's -- but for us, we kind of look at it, it's like 20 to 25 percentage points, right? Because you're kind of -- you're closer to the actual manufacturing or assembly portion of it or you're deeper into the sourcing. If we pull more private label through, there's categories that we're looking at where we have -- where we are launching some -- not private label, it's...

Own brand.

Own brand. We've got some own brand product areas where we've historically struggled around 20% gross margins, but those own brands are 40% gross margins. And they've got additional capabilities. They're better than. There's -- on the labeling, kitting, we talked about that. Those are all kind of double-digit points higher. Where you run into challenges is big programs. Right? So if you're doing a big OEM program or if you're pulling Lawson with its VMI capabilities across on the MRO side, a customer that doesn't need as much high touch in the plant. Or they aren't signing up for that, but they want that MRO access to your SKUs, then that's a gross margin distract -- deterrent, right? I mean, because you may be -- instead of being at 60 points, you're at 40. And so it's -- for us, when we look at it, there's a lot of gross margin lift that we've got in the model. We were also competing very directly with between Hisco and TestEquity. And we had specific SKUs with specific customers where we were 1,200 points -- or 1,200 basis points off of each other, right? And that's a mentality of revenue growth without EBITDA margin discipline, candidly. I mean, right? And so we're working through a lot of those elements. That drives a lot of gross margin. That number would be higher if we weren't trying to figure out what the mix shift is. Right? So we've got more gross margin opportunities. But as we think about organic revenue growth and where all the organic revenue growth is going to come from, then we start trying to ask ourselves, okay, is -- are we going to get 50 to 100 basis points a year? Or are we going to have a mix shift that's distracting that 100 because we picked up some organic revenue in a category that's pulling the blended margin across the 3 verticals down? And so you're fighting some portion of that. So that's the reason why we put 25 to 50 basis points in there, and we didn't put a higher number. It has to do with mix.

Well one of the things that I would highlight is -- and I want to go back to alliance at Hisco, that labeling business. Every OEM has labels, adhesives. They have nameplates, they have instruction booklets for every piece of equipment that they build. Alliance is a best-in-class printing and labeling business that's, what, $25 million?

Revenue.

Of revenue. And yet the opportunity here is 10x that. And then I'll go back to precision, conversion because I didn't realize precision, conversion. The gas [ facing overing ] business was $50 million. My DSO spend is nothing to what it could be, but now I have a best-in-class DSO provider that I can pull that product line through. So the biggest thing that we see is that when we get these lift because our people are on site at the manufacturing floor every single day, when we get the lift for the opportunities to pull Lawson or TestEquity or Hisco through, they're vetted. That means there's a customer need. They're not pleased with the incumbent, and they want a higher level service. Case in point, the aircraft manufacturer that we were talking about, the day Hisco was announced, we got a phone call said, bring Hisco in now, we want to make a change. And now Hisco is working on a very large opportunity with this customer.

So another one that's out there is the Chambers. Just come back to Chambers, it's a $20 million -- $15 million or $20 million revenue business, but it's one that we haven't sold for years. We haven't marketed it. And the reason is we used to manufacture it, TestEquity manufactured it in Southern California. It was very costly, as you can imagine, to find talent to assemble these chambers. They had a great R&D team. And so they developed great product. They were the best in class. They had capabilities that a lot of customers wanted. But we've been working off of a backlog for a long time with no marketing on it, with not having the margins where we wanted it to be. So we made a significant shift 18 months ago or so, 24 months ago.

About 24 months.

24 months ago, we decided, you know what, we're not going to assemble these things anymore. Like it was -- there's somebody else out there who can assemble these better and we can end up with a much better end margin. But the problem was our backlog was so big that we had -- we've been burning off something that we priced 12, 18 months ago. So we finally, at the end of this year, we'll be out of the backlog of things that we priced 12 to 18 months ago with subpar margins. Now 4 years ago, we made a lot of money on Chambers because we had a healthier margin and we were running -- we had a more optimal situation with our labor force in Southern California. We moved it to a contract manufacturer. We still didn't have enough volume of production to meet the demand in the market. And so that's part of the reason why the backlog was continuing to swallow us. And then we sat down with Bob and realized that one of our acquisitions that we just made to bring some capabilities for Bob's business that we're going to drive margins and improve his offering to key customers that he was working with also had capacity to take on that Chambers business.

And we're improving the margins for TestEquity. And now we're at a point where we need more releases because we have capacity.

Right. So we're back to marketing it. Yes?

One question on working capital. So I think I'm just curious if there's any kind of the quantum of the working capital you might be able to take out of the business. I think it was 26% of sales or any way to think about the scale of the opportunity there?

Yes. So there's -- yes. So yes, we can quantify it broadly. We got up to where we were in the 37% or so range on Gexpro Services. That business ought to run in the lower 30s, right? Is that fair?

Yes. That's right.

Had to make sure, right? It used to be in the high 20s, just to be clear. So it moved up 8 or 9 points on us because of supply chain problems.

And we're adding manufacturing.

And we added some manufacturing. So there were some elements there and we made those acquisitions. So there was -- that moved, but it's moving back in our favor. It started the process. Niraj and team have been really working on that with -- and we brought in a third party. That is a third-party consulting firm, just to focus on driving working capital efficiency in Gexpro. Okay? We -- because of supply chain and concerns around inflation and just being able to make efficient buys, especially with a lot of private label, we took our loss in business up 4 points. Is that right? 3? 4? Okay. We've worked half of that out as of end of August, and we've got about half of that left or so that we're still working on. That business historically had run around 22% to 25%. And it got up over...

Yes, they got up to 25%, and now we're sitting 20% to 23% with [indiscernible] 25%.

So it's sitting at 23% and change. And we think it can come back down. I think longer term, we think it can run at that -- consistently at that 22% or not much over -- I mean, kind of the low 20s. Russ' business was operating in the -- around 20%, right? Because we were getting velocity out of those more expensive assets, which are the test and measurement equipment. So if you've got a more expensive asset, you are selling for less margin, but you're getting velocity out of that capital. That part of the business, even though it may not have as attractive of a gross margin, the returns on invested capital are really good. So we were getting velocity there. it was a 19% to 20% working capital business. With the pandemic and supply chains, it turned into -- and by the way, when we had an ERP system problem in that business some time ago, we watched fly up into the 20s, and we got it right. We were able to work it back down to the high teens or -- and then we run into a pandemic and supply chain, and it starts moving back in the 20s. We're also trying to be deliberate about inflation and trying to get ahold of product. I mean candidly, the backlogs in some of those test and measurement equipment was -- it gotten blown way out on us. So we were making buys when we could get ahold of them. So -- and those buys were of size. So that got up into the mid-20s or so.

Yes, mid-20s.

And then we were kind of working it down and we bought Hisco. And Hisco was in the mid- to high 20s. So right now, that business is sitting in the mid-20s again. And we expect that we'll be able to work it back down into the mid- to low 20s.

One other thing I'll add to that, Brad, is that this is a focal area for us. So all the leadership teams that part of their annual incentive plan is tied to working capital efficiencies.

Yes. That's great. And actually, that kind of dovetails to the next question. Can you talk a little bit about the incentives for the...

It was on my punch list. I knew if I didn't get to you, somebody...

I mean, the incentives of the team is also -- but I'm saying actually the incentives are more like a frontline employee on cross-selling as well would be really interesting.

So cross-selling, I'll let them tackle it. There are incentives there. In fact, it was really fun a year ago. I went to Gexpro Services' kind of annual meeting with the team, with all their folks. And I think Ray was handing out these checks, they were like this big. These checks that are -- they're longer than I am tall, and they've got like $1,000 on them, right? And -- but he was handing them out to all the colleagues across Gexpro Services for lead gen on cross-selling or closing opportunities on cross-sells. So there was a lot of celebration around it. There continues to be that sort of fanfare. And so we've got to continue to try and find ways for our salespeople to embrace pulling each other through. Because if you own a relationship, it's risky, right? You don't want to -- you're worried and you're also trying to learn or understand what's in it for me? And salespeople get driven by how can we put more in their pocket.

You hit it. I mean it's lead generation. If we close, they get a bigger payout. And then depending upon the size of the opportunity, we'll always share the wealth. Whether it's a managerial award, we need their relationships. We need their support to close these opportunities.

And we've also -- we've taken this learning process and now we're applying it to Hisco as well. So instead of reinventing the wheel, we just do what we built for DSG, and we've replicated that to the Hisco team. We've trained them in the same process as well. And I was like really excited to hear that we closed the first deal combined, Hisco and Lawson last week. So it's working out.

And this is very similar to what we did when we were at GE, and we had the same incentives, boundary-less sales for pulling all the GE business units through, we're just doing that at a DSU level. It works.

And the team that's working on it is constantly evaluating where we're at with the incentives and do they work and do we need to tweak the -- Ray kind of heads that up for the whole group, and I know they work very hard on making sure that those are relevant as they work through.

If you close a big deal, there's got to be a fair return.

There's -- in that same vein, one of the things that I wanted to come back to is the sales force transformation work that Cesar's doing on Lawson. And you can imagine now, we've got Lawson leads that are coming from these bigger OEM relationships. And we're -- we've got to make sure that the salespeople on both sides are adequately rewarded. At the same time, we've just -- with the sales force transformation initiatives that Cesar was walking through. A big part of that is that there's been a philosophical opinion now for some time, and then we brought in a consulting firm to reaffirm it, which is that we would save a lot of money if we could figure out a way to drive more gross profit dollars or sales commissions through our sales force at Lawson. We think that they should find -- that we should be helping them make 20% more a year. And that would slow down turnover. And there's over $20 million of missed EBITDA at Lawson that we had kind of speculated about years ago, but we've been using this number now for years. I don't know that it's going to flow through on any given year, but it's a number that we've convinced ourselves that we've been missing based on the fact that we've got a level of turnover with immature salespeople, right? And I say immature, meaning that they don't have a big enough book. So in order to be able to serve 90,000 or 80,000 customers, depending on whose list you're looking at, maybe it's 80,000 active and 90,000 that I'm still staring at. But for Lawson, you've got to have a network effect to run 1,000 people with a dense enough kind of milk run to fill them up. But your problem is that if you fill them up too much, then they can't go on. And that's been one of the biggest problems that we've had at Lawson over all these years is that they were -- we had mature salespeople who are filled up, but they were filled up with customers that were requiring time because they were stopping to serve them. But the total gross dollar -- profit dollars might have only been $500 in that year or less. And so how do we figure out a way to help them still get paid on that $500, transfer that relationship into other cost -- lower cost to serve, higher connectivity opportunities, but also -- so we want to still pay them. So we're still paying them, right? But at the same time, open up 30%, 40% bandwidth for them to go hunt, which is we think we've increased our capacity at 30% to 40% off the same sellers through this sales force transformation. So either you're going to fill them up or you're going to say, you know what, we're going to have -- when someone attrits out, you're going to take their list and hand it to 2 others and fill them up that way, and your cost of sales is going to come down that way. That's the other way to do it. Total -- I thought where Brad's question was actually going, and I -- and we didn't talk about it, is we, at the LKCM level, have historic Lawson -- I'm sorry, historic Gexpro Services and historic TestEquity leadership teams in our waterfall. So there is a significant amount of equity owned across people in the back rows, and otherwise, that are owned as part of owning DSG. And so there's a lot of management ownership in this business. It's not as transparent as probably we'd all like for it to be. But the good news is it's not dilutive to the public shareholders. It's really set around objectives that we've got around what we want our teams to accomplish in order to drive value for us and our ownership. So it's coming out of our 78% of the business, it's not out of the other -- kind of shared by the other 22%.

I have a couple of questions. First, just on the last point, how does turnover at the Lawson business compare with 3 and 5 years ago? Because I know it's been an ongoing challenge over the years.

So what I would say, when you think about it, everything we described, we're in the early stages, right? So our turnover, it's above the average of what you typically see in a sales organization, right? So the way we think about this is, hey, look, by opening this capacity, allowing more time to invest for our field sales team and our current customers; and b, get more large customers from my colleagues here. That will allow our current sales team to make more money and stay with us, right? So our goal in the long run is to, through time, to start reducing that turnover in keeping our sales team within our organization.

Right now, it's about -- it's pretty consistent with where it's been over the last 3 or 4 years. What is -- what was most challenging for us was not -- it used to be that we all -- I mean, look, as a sell side or buy side analyst of Lawson, I like track their sales force by the day, right? I want to know how many more salespeople have they hired. How many of those people made it 1 year, 2 years. Because I know it takes 5 to get to full -- kind of get full maturity. Why does it only take -- why does it take as long as 5 years? It seems like way too long. So we -- that was a big part of our analysis that we were doing for years from 2013 to '17, then you get in, you're on the Board, then your Chairman, you're under the hood, you're looking at everything and you're going, okay, look, how can we solve for this? There's a couple of ways we solve for it. One is we -- do we think, if we do an external analysis, that if these folks made a little bit more money or if we help their -- help their maturation curve, would we be -- how many of them would we keep? Because we -- to get 1 to stick for 5 years, it's taken -- or 3 years is taking hiring 4 or 5. That's way too expensive. And yet the business was super profitable. And again, the contribution margins would indicate that it should be operating more like Fastener. But you've got to get your gross profit per seller to be double or triple where it historically has been. And that would allow them to make 50% or more income and it would slow down your turnover substantially. The other way to do it is as part of that is to try and drive efficiency for them. But efficiency means giving them tools, and giving them tools is not always what they think they want. I mean, telling them that there's a digital platform available to them isn't necessarily going to make them feel great unless you say we're going to pay you for it. And we're going to give you all the rewards. But that's not what most people do. And then I'll say, "Hey, look, we're going to transfer this person to inside sales and through the digital, and yet we're still going to pay you on it."

Okay. I guess, the second related question would be the CRM opportunity for Lawson and the inside sales opportunity. I mean, those are good things. But why did it take so long to get there?

Well, so I -- okay, that's all right.

You're saying because it's a public company.

What, yes, because it's a public company, and nobody wants to see -- I mean, there's been -- like, I was a shareholder, I was putting pressure on them, right? I mean, I own a big position in Lawson. And I was like, "Hey, I want to see these metrics. You've been telling me we're going to get these metrics." But taking -- getting some of those metrics meant taking on some changes. Firing customers that you're losing $20 million a year on and even though they're 5% of your revenue is not something that anybody in our chairs wants to see because it's like, well, now I'm going to project your organic growth rate very differently than the way I historically projected it. And so we did a lot of activity-based cost analysis work and as a team at LKCM Headwater, once we got under the hood, and we started studying customer profitability when you fully loaded them. And we were like, okay, there's these buckets, right? Now some of those buckets, like you said, inside sales, one way to solve for an unprofitable customer is to change the way you do your service delivery model. But we had one approach for 70 years to do service delivery model. And that's -- look, the business has been resilient. And they -- I'm not like the last thing I want to do is look like I'm being critical of those that came before me. The reality of it is that business almost died. I mean, Lee, who's been a great business partner and a Board member at IDG. He had a -- I'm sorry, at Lawson. IDG, whatever it is, at Lawson, specialty distributors and my time line intact. But he brought in Mike DeCata as a CEO to run the business at a time when the business was almost debt. The customer value proposition wasn't, the revenue wasn't, but they had busted all types of things. They -- and so they had to come in and operationally fix the guts of the business. And with that, a business that was almost broken, was right on the edge of death, but with a lot of revenue and a lot of contribution margin, a lot of salespeople are making a good living, but the business itself was at the corporate level was not working. It got to a spot where it was super stable. And Ron gets a ton of credit on this. So Mike and Ron fixed the broken business on all the guts, all the plumbing, but for tackling commercial. And the commercial piece was something that is -- takes maybe a different lens. And it also took us getting a lot more momentum around other channels to market that we could kind of say, you know what, now? Because we've got all these lead gens coming from these other areas, we can take the risk on $20 million of revenue to fix it. Because it was $20 million of revenue that was sapping up, and I don't know how many like -- 30,000 customers, 20 -- or 40,000 customers, $20 million of revenue and you're losing $20 million on it, and you're using up 1/3 of your sales force capacity. And you really don't know what's going on because you don't have a really good pivot table CRM that's got a lot of data in it because you're really -- I mean, it's not as easy to manage to try and see what's going on down there. And you don't want to disrupt the sales team. They're awesome. They've done a great job for all these years. They've done exactly what you've asked them to do.

What I would add is exactly what -- I was going to take it from where Bryan said, I mean, there's 2 pieces of our -- typically in our businesses that you're like -- I don't want to touch this, right, because it's really hard work, which is, a, changing your ERP, right? Kudos for Russ that he's doing that, right? And when it comes to the sales organization, you have to be very thoughtful about it, right? And I have an amazing team. And these guys, they want to change. They want to do the right things. And all we're doing is, we're listening to them and give them the tools. That's it, right? And just like Bryan said, "Hey, now I get the chance to leverage these 2 guys that they can help me to get more new customers and being able to use that capacity with the business that I'm going to start getting more and more from these folks."

And I'm going to offer one last thing, which is -- I don't know how many people in here realize that Lawson -- one of the challenges that Lawson ran into 15 years ago or so. Longer? Was 7 -- what's when the -- 1,099?

[indiscernible].

That was...

Okay. 2013 was when the switch took. So from 1,099, all the salespeople were independent contractors at Lawson. So they had -- there was like, I don't know, 1,500 of them at one point. And so part of what almost broke the business was -- I mean, the federal government said, "Hey, look, these aren't independent contractors. You're requiring them to do a certain number of sales calls a day. You're monitoring or tracking how -- their productivity and their profitability." These are full-time employees, and you haven't been paying payroll taxes on them for all these years. So the business -- that was -- so Lawson had to go and convince all these 1,099 independent contractors who thought they own their own book of business and were not necessarily worried about being accountable on how they're spending their time every day. And you had to pay them a hostage fee of now becoming a W2. And so that amount giving them -- like paying them all that you were paying them and increasing your costs by making them -- by paying them benefits and long term in health care and short term and everything else. So there was a big step-up in their cost to serve, right? And they shrunk down at some level, to the benefit of others that were small competitors, some of the little accounts and some of the little salespeople because it just didn't work for them, right? So there was a contraction of the sales force, it kind of got cut in half and revenue was probably down 20% or 30%. I don't -- something like that in order to try and optimize it at that point. But it still was not as easy as going, okay, now we're going to put you on our CRM. Now we're going to hold you accountable to this level of efficiency and productivity that we would hold a new hire to. Because people had been living that way for 20 years. So if you fast forward, Ron and Mike started relayering back on new salespeople. And with those new salespeople, there were different disciplines. There was a different mentality because they never lived as an independent contractor. But there still is a lot of the book of business that was in the hands of those independent contractors. And they've been great sellers for and agents of Lawson for decades. But the number of them relative to where we are today is not such a large number that it is dictating 100% of what we might be able to do for some of these smaller customers. So that was -- so you kind of had to get through -- and there was a lot of other things that Mike and Ron could fix besides this one. So there was a lot of fixing to get the business to 6% or 8% EBITDA margins before you tackle trying to take it to 15% to 20%.

Yes. I just had a couple of questions on M&A, just going back. You guys gave a great presentation on your process. But can you talk a little about sort of the risk side of it, how you view -- like what are the 2 or 3 things that you absolutely avoid? And is there a size of deal that you absolutely wouldn't do? And then maybe just a little corollary. In a tougher economy, how do you view your process? Does it change? And like at Hisco, it sounds like they grew maybe a little too fast. It sounds like maybe they have some unprofitable business or very way below what you would want it to be? Are you...

I wouldn't say it's unprofitable. I think that they were taking market share, and they were using just like we've seen other people use pricing to do it, right? They also didn't have very good perspective on, I think, what other people might earn on that sort of value-added service delivery. And so there was -- I think that, again, as you build more perspective and you're part of a bigger platform, your perspective around what's the right gross margin to have for that service at that type of a customer is different than if you're kind of just like, I don't know what it takes to win it, but I think I can do it for this. And so there was a lot more I think I can do it for this mentality than there was. And again, it was owned by -- like championed to them. I mean it was an employee-owned business. They did a great job. We've seen a lot of those not go so well. So they did grow through a cycle as an employee-owned business, and they grew profitably, but they didn't optimize the engagement.

I am going to hit the risk. To this point. I'm going to do this since I have a mic and Matt doesn't. But everything -- I think that's a part of M&A, you want to avoid risk. And so everything we look at has several lenses. It has the lens of each vertical leader. It has the lens of our team. It has the lens of our business development team. And so part of the process that Matt talked about is how you avoid risk. So we're not doing everything that we see. We're -- I mean, we're closing less than 5% -- we've closed less than 5% of everything that we looked at. So we're saying no a lot more than we're saying yes. So it has to be a fit. It's got to be accretive fit. It's got to be a strategic business fit. We went through all that today. That's how you avoid the risk. I would say that as far as size, I'd say it does have to have a certain scale. Going too small does have an element of risk to it. That size threshold is probably moving up as we're sitting at [ $1.8 billion ] in revenue today versus $1 billion. So we do have certain filters that we go through. And I don't think that we've had a hard set. We're not looking at anything below this. It's more about what we can build the business into inside the DSG platform.

But no more turnarounds. No more turnarounds.

We do have some capabilities that we're continuing to hunt for, either product categories that -- I know Cesar is very focused, acutely focused right now on some SKU categories that he's after. If that took buying $20 million of revenue in order to get a good solid spot in that set of SKUs, that's probably better than going and spending $20 million on working capital to try and enter those SKUs. But we are looking at that. I mean, we're looking at, okay, would you -- are you better off building it? Or are you better off going and taking some dollars and investing in some SKU categories? Are you better off buying somebody that's already out there and you're going to get utilization out of your working capital and you aren't paying that big of an air ball? Or you -- or at least getting good solid cash flow out of the gate? From a size standpoint, look, right now, we're digesting a lot of complexity, especially as it relates to Russ's business with Hisco. And so would we put another business the size of Hisco inside of Russ right now? No. Would we do something that was highly accretive that falls into something that is in his core swim lane? Yes. So we're not done in Russ's area just because he's digesting Hisco because we've got some other channels that he's -- of his swim lines that if it was the right acquisition that fit there, and it was not over -- it was appropriately priced, and we would do it. We also have some of this -- where we've got a little bit more bandwidth right now over with Cesar. We've got some things that we're working on that we think are very tightly -- not only financially accretive, but very tightly aligned with some of our leadership areas that we want to continue to expand our position as a leader. And so those are projects that are not -- at this point, they're not -- there's not anything that's the size of Hisco there, but there are things that we would love to fold in that are going to -- and there are some things that we're working on that are smaller than that, but they're meaningful to moving the needle. We've got like specific capabilities that -- that Bob is continuing to very kind of -- future state is the term that Matt used, where we're trying to future state exactly where we want to be in certain end markets and categories and capabilities. Because we think that it elevates structurally long-term margin and improved defensibility. And so we're working on some of those right now as well, but they're very, again, rifle shot. We also have people that want to be a part of DSG. And so one of the hard challenges that we've got, which is real, and I know that we've talked about our own currency in conversations with some of our shareholders is that we've got people that would love to sell their business to DSG and take a lot of stock. And right now, that's just not a program that we're that excited about, right? And so we'd rather buy more shares ourselves than issue more shares to somebody because they are trying to hit the top of the market. However, if it's the right acquisition, and it's absolutely appropriately additive to what we're trying to accomplish, and it's not too many shares, It may be okay. Because we want them to be aligned with us, just like we're glad that some of the leadership at Hisco wanted to be shareholders, right?

Any other questions? I think we're kind of wrapped. So a big round of applause for the CEOs. Thank you, all. Bryan, why don't you give a presentation. Bryan is going to bring us home here.

I guess I've got closing words. I think I [indiscernible], maybe. Kim wrote them for me. I don't really know what I'm supposed to say, but she told me what I'm supposed to say. Probably. If you don't know, the real boss in the room is Kim. She's been our business partner for 15 or 16 years. She's the CFO, COO of our effort, and she's in the pink back there. So lots of people get recognized. We've got a really good team in this room at LKCM Headwater, kind of get on that accelerator on EBITDA margin lift, accelerant for the returns on invested capital. If you could just get to that $100 million. And so we would say that that's not getting smaller, but there are specialty capabilities that you can have where you can be super effective and efficient with your capital at a smaller threshold than that. But pulling these businesses together gave us that scale. It gave the team the opportunity to tackle some initiatives that everybody would have been a little bit more anxious about tackling, like the sales force transformation conversation that we had, had we been smaller or on our own or operating with less free cash flow. This inflection point, we think, drives profitability, and we're positioned well to be a long-term compounder and with a steep slope. Continuity in our stewardship and alignment. I mean, we've all been together for a long time. We tackled this project. We decided not to sell these 3 businesses because we felt like there was such an overwhelming amount of value that could be unlocked by bringing them together and for us to be able to be long-term shareholders of this platform. It's hard to find businesses that can throw off the amount of cash and continue to put capital back to work like this platform can. So we, as an investment team that owns -- we put up about 1/3 of our capital as a team internally with our family. And so I know that we own a lot of this business individually. Our management teams through the waterfalls own a lot of the company, and they've got -- and they're continuing to hit their accelerators. And so we expect that there's excellent alignment and that the team and the band will be together for you all for a long time. The -- what else did she say here? I'm supposed to tell you that I'm confident in how DSG will drive business growth and accelerate profitability on a per-share basis. So this is one of the things that oftentimes, we talk about EBITDA and -- sorry, Kim. We talk about EBITDA in the private equity world because we're so focused on driving EBITDA and EBITDA growth. But as a public equity investor over the last 30 years, I also weigh that daily with also making sure that I'm communicating per share. And on a per share basis, on an after-tax basis, on a fully burdened basis, what's our free cash flow is going to look like? What's that free cash flow going to look like on an incremental basis per dollar of revenue or how we're continuing to progress? And so what I would tell you is, for the first time, we wanted to make sure that we communicated to you all that we see very clearly, a line of sight at over $5 a share of earnings per share, fully burdened profitability objective within the next 5 years. And so that was, I think, an important message that you all get from us because I think that will oftentimes, if you think of us talking about just EBITDA. And while EBITDA is important, we understand that after tax is what you can eat. And after financing, costs and on an earnings per share basis. So that ROIC and the EPS side is something that we want to see fully burdened. That's really it. We would hope that you come away from this knowing that we are serious, we're disciplined, we're credible. And we're enthusiastic about what we think the opportunity is in front of us. So thank you all.

For those of you quickly, the booths will still be open over to the side. If anyone didn't get a chance to go through, there's a few chopskies and things. And then on your way out for any of you that did the valet parking, you can get a validated ticket at the -- down at the bottom of the escalators at the main Hostess stand.