Kingsway Financial Services Inc. ($KFS)

All right. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Kingsway's 2026 Investor Day. Thank you for joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange on a beautiful summerish day. And also thank you to everyone joining us via webcast. My name is JT Fitzgerald. I'm the CEO and President of Kingsway. And as approved at our AGM this morning, tomorrow morning will be known as the Kingsway Corporation and trading under the ticker KWI, which is exciting. So we'll come back to that a little later. Excited for a great day. 2 years ago, we stood here in this room, and we shared our vision for a unique model to compound capital. Last year, we showed you the operating system that we built to execute it, and today is about proof. Tangible evidence that the vision is becoming reality. I'm excited to share where we are, where we're going and also to introduce you to two of our operator CEOs, who are going to walk you through how the model works at the ground level. Before we dive in, the usual reminder, some of what we'll cover today is forward-looking and includes non-GAAP measures. These statements reflect our expectations based on what we would know today, and they involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from what we project. Please refer to our filings with the SEC, including the risk factors in our 2025 annual report on Form 10-K for a full discussion. And I'll let you read the detailed safe harbor language on this slide at your leisure. So here's how today is going to go. 9 sections. I'll start with the last 12 months at Kingsway. Then I'll walk through the 2026 outlook, including a strong start of the year with Q1. Then I'll recap the equity story for anyone newer to Kingsway and also as a refresher to those who've been with us for some time. Then Ken will provide a capital markets update, including the rebrand, a new website, and improvements to how we report. I'll then come back to discuss what we call from theory to action, how the Kingsway Business System actually gets deployed in our businesses, then we'll have two operator spotlights. First, Miles Mamon, CEO at Roundhouse Electric; and then Davide Zanchi, the CEO at IS Technology. Then we'll open it up to an audience Q&A. And finally, to close, we're excited to have a fireside chat with Tyler Gordy to discuss his full cycle journey with Kingsway from operator to exit and now advisory Board member. We've got a really great day plan. A couple of housekeeping items. For those on the webcast, if you have questions throughout the day for the Q&A session, please e-mail them to Kent Hansen, His e-mail addresses [email protected] A little later today, they're going to clear this and bring in some lunch. So we'll have box lunches for everyone here in person for you guys to have during the Q&A session. And with that, let's jump into it. So this is a quick framing of who we are. To our knowledge, we're the only publicly traded U.S. company employing the search fund model to acquire and build great companies. We own and operate a portfolio of high-quality, growing asset-light B2B and B2C services businesses with recurring revenue and strong profitability. And importantly, our goal is to compound long-term shareholder value on a per share basis through a decentralized management model, a talented team of operators in a tax-advantaged corporate structure. That describes the company. The rest of today is about what it looks like in practice. Just one quick slide here before we move into the substance. Each one of our Investor Days, we've tried to build on the last. In 2024, we shared the vision, a repeatable model to compound intrinsic value per share. Last year, we introduced the system, an operating system to turn good acquisitions into great businesses. And today is the proof, tangible evidence that the vision is becoming reality. Section 1 is the last 12 months, what we said we'd do and what we did. So let's start with the report card. On the left side is what we said we'd do at this time last year. On the right is what we delivered. We said we'd target 3 to 5 acquisitions per year. and we completed 6 in 2025. Buds Plumbing, Viewpoint, Roundhouse, AAA, the HR team and Southside Plumbing. Last year, we said our run rate adjusted EBITDA was about $18 million to $19 million and we achieved portfolio EBITDA of $22 million to $23 million as of March 31, 2026. 6 acquisitions instead of 3, greater than 20% portfolio EBITDA growth. By the measures we set for ourselves last May, we did more than we said we would. Here's a quick visual on those 6 acquisitions. Starting with the acquisition of Buds Plumbing. We completed 3 Skilled Trades acquisitions on the platform we launched last year with follow-on acquisitions of both AAA and Southside. We acquired Roundhouse Electric in July, a business in the heart of the Permian Basin. We acquired the HR Team, a B2B services tuck-in inside of Ravix. And we acquired Viewpoint, a vertical market SaaS business that was a tuck-in inside of SPI. I think the most important thing on the slide isn't what logos are on it. It's that every one of these businesses is a high-quality company, acquired at mid-single-digit EBITDA multiples. So we held our discipline. And this is the inflection point we've been pointing toward for several years. KSX, our search fund platform is now a majority of both consolidated revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the first time. Why does this matter? It validates the strategic pivot from a legacy insurance holding company to an operator-led public search platform. It removes investor confusion that has historically dogged our story, and KSX's higher growth profile now delivers the consolidated equity story. And it underpins the rationale for retiring the financial services name, which we'll come to in Section 4. We're no longer a legacy insurance company with a search fund side business. We're an operator-led compounding platform with a profitable extended warranty franchise running alongside it. So Section 2, the 2026 outlook. We've had an excellent first quarter and a busy start to the year operationally and from a capital markets perspective. Four headlines here. Q1 was strong on the bottom line, profits at both KSX and Extended Warranty came in ahead of our internal expectations. KSX delivered record quarterly revenue and record quarterly adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter. And that was in what is seasonally a light quarter for several of our businesses. We continue to execute disciplined M&A. On January 7, we announced the acquisition of Ledgers by our Ravix Group. And just last week, we announced the sale of Trinity Warranty Solutions. We also reiterated our expectation of double-digit organic revenue and profit growth at KSX and extended warranty for the year, and we also reiterated our target of 3 to 5 acquisitions in 2026. Bringing this back to the framework you've heard from us before, we believe we've got dual engines of value creation. On the one hand, organic growth, targeting double-digit revenue and EBITDA growth across both segments, and on the other hand, inorganic growth. 3 to 5 high-quality acquisitions per year, underwritten with discipline. Compounding together those two engines drive per share value accretion. That's the Kingsway flywheel. It's the same flywheel we've been showing you for several years. The difference now is that it is becoming visible. On the organic growth pillar, we've got 2 segments and 2 different drivers, but both pointing in the same direction. Extended Warranty has strong cash sales and moderating claims growth. Cash sales momentum from the second half of 2025 is carrying into 2026 and warranty claims growth is moderating in both frequency and severity. Our KSX investments are also paying off. The acquisitions we made in 2024 and 2025 are now poised to accelerate growth into 2026 and beyond. On the inorganic pillar, 3 to 5 acquisitions underwritten with discipline. Our underwriting filter hasn't changed. We target a 30% IRR hurdle and acquire businesses at mid-single-digit EBITDA multiples. We target capital-light businesses with strong demand tailwinds and clear operational improvement priorities. And what's somewhat new, and the reason we're increasingly confident in the 3 to 5 number is that KSX is now running 2 M&A engines side by side. New platforms sourced through our active OIR pipeline along with operator-led tuck-ins, sourced inside the businesses, our operators already run, 2 engines running in parallel. A quick governance update. Adam Patinkin, who is here, and most of you know, is the Founder and Managing Partner of David Capital Partners, a long-term oriented alternative investment firm. And Adam has been appointed as our Chairman of the Board. Adam has been a Kingsway Director since 2025 and is playing an active role supporting our management team and delivering on the company's objectives. Terry Cavanaugh, who's also here has served as our Chairman for a long time, going back to 2012, so 14 years. And Terry has graciously transitioned to Vice Chairman. Terry really guided the company through a long and oftentimes complicated strategic shift from our legacy insurance business to now the search fund platform. And we're deeply grateful that he is staying on the Board and continues to provide his experience and expertise as we enter this next phase. Thank you, Terry. So Section 3, the equity story. A lot of you in the room have probably heard a lot of this before, including at last year's Investor Day. So I'm going to move through these slides at pace. Think of the next few minutes as a refresher and for the newer investors, a set up for the proof points still to come. So why search funds? Well, in short, they work. The Stanford GSP has tracked the asset class since 1984, and the median annualized return is 35.1%. Entrepreneurship through acquisition or ETA, has a multi-decade track record of producing outsized returns by backing talented entrepreneurs to buy and grow small businesses, and that's the asset class that we're playing in. And the model fills a real gap in the market, retiring small business owners with no succession plan, no sons or daughters in the company, want a financial exit that also protects their employees and their legacy. Their businesses are generally too small for traditional private equity as a platform and selling to a strategic buyer can be a poor cultural fit. On the other side, motivated post-MBA operators can solve the succession challenge while preserving the founder's legacy. Search funds bridge that, a win-win for both the seller and the buyer. Why does the model outperform? Smart, energetic, properly incentivized operators take over a business that often hasn't been optimized for growth. Founder-led sales become a professional sales team. Pen and paper processes become modern systems and technology. Local becomes regional, regional becomes national, cash that was being distributed gets reinvested for growth. The business shifts from lifestyle to growth. At Kingsway, that's exactly the engine. We target $1 million to $3 million in EBITDA businesses, pay roughly 4 to 6x, finance the acquisitions with a conservative amount of debt and install a great operator, install KBS and position it for growth. Here's the runway in 3 numbers, nearly $4.8 trillion of net worth changing hands over the next 20 years, the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in U.S. history. More than 2 million small businesses expected to transition leadership in the next 10 years and only 100 or so active searches at any given time. Lower middle market private equity is hesitant to buy businesses where the primary operator wants to step away. Supply outstrips demand, and that creates favorable buyer dynamics for many years to come. We're well positioned to ride the silver tsunami wave. And here's the access problem. Direct search investing often means small checks of $100,000 to $300,000 or $400,000 into individual deals sourced through tight networks, illiquid, difficult to access and hard to scale. Fund of search funds provide access, but add a second layer of fees on top of the carry the searchers themselves earn. Kingsway is the alternative. A publicly traded vehicle that gives investors instant liquid access to a diversified portfolio of search fund acquisitions, self-funded at scale with multiple operating platforms already in place and with public company reporting and transparency built in. And here's why we think we're well positioned to succeed. I'll do a quick run-through of the 9 boxes on the slide. We have a proven track record. We have infrastructure and support, disciplined investment criteria, top quality searcher talent, a world-class advisory board, a public company reputation, permanent capital, access to debt capital on competitive terms and the tax advantage structure that we're the beneficiaries of. Each one of those matters. And together, they are very powerful. I'll touch more deeply on a few of these advantages. The first is talent. And for us, it's not a slogan. It's really core to our strategy. In 2025, we had over 200 applicants to OIR positions, which means we can be highly selective. The roster on this slide is the current operating bench. Davide Zanchi, who you'll hear from later today; Timi Okah at Ravix, Peter Dausman at Digital Diagnostics; Charles Mokolu at SNS, Drew Richard at SPI; Miles, who you'll also hear from later today and Coulter Hansen at Skilled Trades, plus Paul Vidal as an active OIR and more OIRs to be announced soon. A deepening operator bench is the most important investment we make. Our criteria hasn't changed. B2B or B2C services. We target industries that are large and growing with growth supported by long-term secular tailwinds. We target fragmented industries with lots of opportunities for shots on goal and interesting niches. And at the company level, we seek recurring revenue businesses with low customer concentration, high margins and a history of consistent profitability that are also capital light, meaning they don't require incremental capital to grow. That's the margin of safety, and we stick to it. And we've got a great advisory board. Here's a quick refresh. Tom Joyce is the former CEO of Danaher. He was here last year for the fireside chat. Tom was instrumental in developing and implementing the Danaher Business System, the gold standard of our KBS playbook. Will Thorndike, who many of you know, who was the author of the outsiders, but also one of the most prolific and first institutional investors in the search fund asset class. Decades of pattern recognition our operators can tap into. And finally, Tyler Gordy. Tyler was formerly the CEO of PWSC. PWSC was the Kingsway subsidiary that delivered our 10x return when we sold it in 2022. And Tyler was a great operator in our structure and had tremendous success. And I'll be sitting down with Tyler a little later today for the fireside chat, which I'm excited about. And finally, our NOLs, approximately $628 million of net operating loss carryforwards from our legacy insurance business. They're tax assets that shelter future earnings, meaning more of what we produce drops to the bottom line, and the rate of compounding goes up. Incoming at Leucadia once said, profits are great, profits without taxes or even better. We agree. So here's the flywheel in one breath. Acquire a profitable business, invest to grow often through a J curve as we position the business for the next stage. Reap the increased cash flow and reinvest in the next acquisition, rinse and repeat. More acquisitions create more cash flow, which funds more acquisitions, talent and capital compounding. And finally, does the model work in practice? We've got three data points here. First, PWSC, which I mentioned was really our proof of concept. It was a home warranty business. We acquired it for $10 million, $5 million in equity. And Tyler, who's a West Point and Harvard Business School. Grad led it, and we sold PWSC for 10x net return roughly 4.5 years later. I've been investing in search funds for a very long time. The search fund investment firm, I found it is now wholly owned by Kingsway, it's called Argo. And I've invested in dozens and dozens of search fund acquisitions and the returns that I've witnessed and been a part of are as good or better than the search fund returns, the model works. And through that time, I've developed some pattern recognition. And my experience, I think brings a great set of background and understanding to what we're trying to build. And finally, the Kingsway Search Accelerator itself. Many of the businesses in our portfolio today are demonstrating significant business momentum with the potential to produce PSC type outcomes. We're definitely still in the early innings, but the evidence so far validates the approach. And so finally, just closing the equity story on 1 slide, 10 boxes, but they sit on 4 pillars: people, exceptional searcher talent, a robust infrastructure and support and coaching by a world-class advisory board. Our playbook, KBS is our operating system, plus disciplined investment criteria to improve the probability of success. And all inside a public permanent capital vehicle with access to attractive debt financing with a strong track record and a tax advantage structure. No other public company in the U.S. has this combination. All right. I'm going to turn it over to Kent now for a quick capital markets update.

Thanks, JT, and good morning, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'd like to give a quick shout out to the NYSE team as well as James and Hayden IR for doing all the heavy lifting to make the stay possible for us. I also want to quickly mention that today's presentation has been posted to our website. There was a press release that went out this morning with the link to the presentation as well as my e-mail address for those attending via webcast to submit questions as JT mentioned before. . From my portion of the presentation, I'd like to walk you through the capital markets update, which at its core is about ensuring that how investors see and understanding Kingsway accurately reflects the company we are today. A lot has changed in our company and our capital markets presence needs to catch up. Let me walk you through what we're doing. We've organized this work into three work streams: branding, reporting and discoverability. Each one has a clear set of deliverables and together, they're designed to accomplish four things: a rebrand that reflects where we're actually headed, a new website built for our key stakeholders, reporting that makes shareholder value creation more visible and easier to understand, and accurate external descriptions and classifications so that the right investors can actually find us. These are cosmetic changes, they're foundational to how we show up in the market. This is probably the most tangible piece of news today. Shareholders voted this morning to approve the name and ticker change. Starting Tuesday, May 19, we expect to begin trading as Kingsway Corporation under the ticker KWI. The financial services name has outstayed its welcome, kind of like when visiting relatives don't know when to leave. It came from our legacy as an insurance holding company. That's not what we are anymore. The majority of our revenue and EBITDA now comes from the KSX segment, which is high growth and has nothing to do with insurance. Not that there's anything wrong with insurance. The name simply didn't match the business, and that's been a source of confusion for investors. One thing I want to be clear about is that the CUSIP number is not changing. This is purely a name and ticker change, your shares or your shares and no action is needed on your part. Regarding the brand and website, the goal is simple. When someone lands on our site or sees our name, they should immediately understand who we are and what we do, whether they're a current shareholder, an entrepreneurial looking at the KSX program, a business owner thinking about succession or an intermediary who might bring us a deal. This just isn't a fresh coat of paint. The new site will have dedicated sections for each of those audiences, which is a meaningful shift from where we are today. For shareholders and investors, there will be a dedicated investor portal, clear explanation of the KWI model and materials on the KSX program. For entrepreneurs and business owners, we're building out case studies, succession planning contents and a streamlined application process. And for intermediaries, we're giving them the criteria and deal submission capability to work with us effectively. The Unified brands, new logo, refreshed color scheme and brand guidelines ties it all together. We're targeting the launch of this later this summer. As CFO, this work stream is particularly exciting to me, simplifying the financial statements. We're moving to simplify them and better reflect our focus on the KSX segment. I'll spend a minute on the income statement changes because I think these matter quite a bit for how investors read our financials. If you look at the old structure on the left, it was built around the insurance business. Lots of line items that reflected legacy accounting conventions. It made sense then, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense now. The new structure is cleaner, fewer line items, we've introduced a gross profit line, which is something most investors and growth businesses actually look for. Depreciation is clearly labeled. And importantly, nothing is being hidden. The detailed notes already exist for every line item for anyone who wants to go deeper. This is about legibility, not simplicity for its own sake. The same thing thinking applies to the balance sheet, which we've also recently restructured. This one is a little bit more under the hood, but it matters a lot for discoverability. Right now, our company profile across the major data aggregators, think about Cap IQ, Bloomberg, Yahoo, FactSet is inconsistent or just wrong. That creates noise and confusion and affects which investors even see us when they're doing their research. The name change is actually a natural opportunity to fix this. We're going to submit updated information, new name, ticker, logo company profile and also get to work in our GICS classification and SIC classifications, right? That's GICS and SIC. Those classifications drive how investors see us on their screens. So if we're miscategorized, it can be a really big problem. The goal is a single source of truth that makes Kingsway findable by the investors who should be looking for our story. This last piece is enhanced investor reporting, and this one is about where we're headed as we scale the KSX portfolio. In the near term, we intend to begin reporting organic and EBITDA growth on a consolidated basis, likely later this year or early next year. And as the portfolio grows and our peer group becomes more meaningful, our mid- to long-term goal is to move towards segment reporting within KSX providing those same organic metrics at a business unit level. The enabler for all this is the centralized accounting platform. By consolidating accounting at the holdco level, we have the infrastructure to produce this kind of reporting accurately and consistently as we continue to grow. For current shareholders, this is about giving you better visibility into the underlying performance of the businesses that we own. For prospective investors, it's about giving you the metrics you need to evaluate this as a compounder. With that, I'll turn it back over to JT.

All right. Great. Thanks, Kent. Section 5, from theory to action. We've talked about what we did and what's ahead, the equity story and the rebrand. And so now let's talk about how the Kingsway business system actually gets installed at the ground level. Two of our operator CEOs will walk you through their journey in a moment. But first, let me set the table with a handful of orientation slides. Why does KBS matter? Because buying a good business is only step 1. What really determines whether a search fund acquisition becomes a great outcome is what happens after the deal closes. On the left side of the slide, you'll see the pre-deal risks, the things our underwriting filters for, customer concentration, low gross margins, investor and seller conflicts, poor industry growth, complex operations, excess leverage and many more. Our investment criteria are designed to avoid those. On the right side are the post-deal risks, just a couple. But in our experience, two of these risks dominate outcomes. The first is a failure to retain or hire great people, and the second is a failure to execute on the operating plan. Just as we have a playbook for underwriting compelling deals, we have a framework to derisk execution after closing, KBS that framework. We provide our CEOs the coaching and the playbook to bend the curve towards better outcomes. Just a quick recap of what KBS is. It's a comprehensive, integrated approach to continuous improvement, inspired by the best operating system in the world and most directly by the Danaher Business System, anchored around four pillars. The first is talent, hiring and promoting the best people available at every salary level. There's really nothing more important than that. The next is planning, creating practical business plans that actually drive results with continuous feedback through KPIs. The next pillar is what we call enterprise excellence, repeatable, teachable processes that power customer satisfaction and scalable growth. And finally is the growth pillar. Great companies understand the components of value creation and actively pursue strategies to improve performance in those key areas, four pillars, same playbook, every business. It's one thing to have a playbook, it's another thing to put it to work. We provide three layers of practical support to every operator: leadership training, establishing and managing priorities, building culture, communicating effectively, stage appropriate coaching aligned to where each operator is in the journey. The second is our centralized knowledge hub, a proprietary platform of tools and case studies structured around the realities of being a CEO in a small business. And finally, the KSX community, peer feedback among our operators, structured coaching and advisory Board support from Tom, Will and Tyler. The result is that an operator CEO at Kingsway, Way, had more support while preserving the entrepreneurial autonomy of a stand-alone search fund. The combination is hard to replicate. We'll hear more from Miles and Davide on this, but we really view the operator journey as a multiyear process structured on a crawl, walk, run framework. And so we've sequenced our playbook. We don't ask a new President to do everything on day 1. KBS sequences, which -- what each operator installs in what order and on an appropriate timeline. There's a reason for that sequence. Most first-time CEOs want to jump straight to strategy and transformation. But without operational stability and performance visibility underneath, strategic initiatives often collapse into firefighting and chaos. This framework is explicitly designed to prevent that. Tom Joyce, who helped build the Danaher Business System describes the whole approach in a single phrase, common sense vigorously applied. I think that captures it. We've got four stages on this slide. The first is crawl, the first 100 days, entry and diagnosis. The new President enters with curiosity and humility, listens, learns stabilizes any immediate risks and earns the right to lead. This isn't -- don't do anything for 100 days. It's a disciplined diagnosis. They're building the fact base that they will use to install the operating system and establish priorities, not the priorities they assumed before they arrived. Stage 2, the crawl to walk phase happens typically the remainder of year 1 and into year 2, and it has 5 interconnected systems that go in. The first is a leadership cadence. Daily management with data, a talent system and a standardized core set of processes. By the end of Stage 2, the business runs on a system, not on a person, creating the foundation for growth. Stage 3, the walk phase is where our operators go deeper on each of the four systems and add a fifth and sixth, planning and growth. Voice of customer gathering becomes systematic and a 3-year vision gets articulated. Breakthrough objectives are defined and a one-page plan aligns the leadership team. And Stage 4 is the walk to run phase, typically years 2 through 3. This is mastery of the 6 systems and adding 7 system, what we call policy deployment or also known as Hoshin Kanri. Strategy gets translated into cascading action plans with the same PDCA discipline we already apply to our operations, continuous daily management and Kaizen runs alongside it. And two principles travel with this framework, and they're nonnegotiable. The first is we customized the timeline for each operator. We never customized -- we never customized the sequence, however. The timeline can change, but the sequence is rigid. Stage 2 stability has to proceed Stage 3 strategy, which has to proceed Stage 4 deployment. If you try to skip ahead, the layer above will collapse the layer below. The second principle is that daily management is permanent. It never graduates into something else. Every new layer of KBS sits on top of it forever. When Hoshin planning arrives in stage 4, the team runs both at once. Operators stay stable, while breakthrough execution happens on top. And to bring this all to life, I'd like to now turn it over to Miles Mamon, the CEO of Roundhouse Electric. Miles is going to walk you through exactly how this looks at the ground level. Miles, the floor is yours.

Good morning, everyone. Excited to be here and tell you about my experience at Kingsway so far. Quick background on me. From Chicago. I went to college nearby Northwestern. After I graduated, I joined the Army as a Missile Defense Officer. I serve for about 4 years with one deployment where we protected a Turkish-Syrian border city from ballistic missiles during the Syrians of war. After the Army, I went back to Northwestern for grad school, where I did the JD MBA program. And -- from there, I moved to San Francisco to join Morgan Stanley, where I did acquisitions with their real estate private equity business. So I'd like to talk a little bit about how I found Kingsway and what drew me to the platform. So I learned about search and business school. It was extremely compelling in a lot of ways, it sounded too good to be true. And to be totally candid, I didn't have enough confidence in kind of my business acumen and experience to pursue it immediately after graduating. So I like I said, went to Morgan Stanley and kind of worked on my finance chops. I had a great experience there. But it came to a point where I was promoted VP and more and more of my comp was becoming deferred. It kind of felt like now or never moment to take this entrepreneurial leap. So I did my due diligence, I talked to about 30 searchers and through that process connected with Pete Dausman, who's currently the CEO of DDI. He told me a little bit about the platform and introduced me to some other folks at Kingsway. And once I learned about the program, it was the obvious choice. So some of the key benefits that I saw were the ready-to-go platform. So I was in a fairly high intensity job. I didn't have a lot of time to set up a search fund on the side, and Kingsway provided ready-to-go, tech stack, marketing materials, relationships with brokers, so I could really kind of hit the ground running. That was really compelling. I also like the economics, which I kind of see as traditional search plus, a couple of features of that are in traditional search, your pursuit costs are stepped up 50% usually. So if you spend $500,000 pursuing a deal, your basis will increase by $750,000 at acquisition and Kingsway doesn't step up those costs, which is nice. But probably the most important economic benefit is participating in Kingsway tax advantages. So what we would have spent paying federal tax of the business is included as a distribution in our waterfall and our carrier, however, you describe it as calculated. And then also the peer network was really compelling. I really like the idea of having other people going to the same thing that I could talk to and reach out to on a formal basis. So those are kind of obvious to me. At the start, I got a sense for the deep search experience within Kingsway, especially from JT, alignment on how we thought about investing and operating decisions and then mentorship from JT and the Advisory Board. But those -- the value of those really was fleshed out for me in the search acquisition and operating process. So I'll talk about those benefits more in these upcoming slides. So fast forward, I joined Kingsway in September of '23, and we acquired Roundhouse in July of '25. Roundhouse is a business -- 50 year-old business in Odessa, Texas. They serve midstream oil and gas companies by selling, repairing and maintaining especially electric motors, also switchgear and transformers and the motors that they service are used primarily for compression of natural gas. So natural gas processing facilities and along pipelines. We talked about the business before some of the highlights, what we really love about it. What I really love about it, it's relatively capital light. The services it provides are critical and recurring or reoccurring in nature. We have over 200 active customers, really great retention metrics and long-term relationships with our customers. And then there are some nice tailwinds driving growth. So production of natural gas is increasing in the Permian, and that's fueled by a variety of demand drivers and then kind of compounding the growth potential is the fact that our customers are switching from legacy combustible engines to electric power motors, which is what we do. So in the rest of the presentation, I'm going to kind of talk about the impact that Kingsway had and how Kingsway and KBS has kind of added value from the search phase all the way through the first of operating. So I think Kingsway was instrumental in January of '25. And we had an LOI accepted in February and then we closed in under 120 days. I think with any transaction, especially in this segment of the market, there's some and friction and some issues that need to be solved. And this is no different. A couple of examples of kind of issues that we had to work through. The sellers owned the real estate, it is not uncommon, and we had to solve for kind of two things. On the one hand, owning real estate is in a great fit for Kingsway cost of capital. But on the other real estate is a strategic consideration for It's a physical business, we store motors, the layout and design of space is a key part of our kind of operations in physical space can be a bottleneck for growth. So we needed to be able to grow the real estate as the business grew. We were able to work through that and come to a solution where we're now leasing. The sellers kept the real estate, releasing it from them at a rate that compensates them for owning it. And we were able to negotiate a lease where we have control over the real estate to make changes as necessary for the business and also expand as the business grows. Another kind of piece of complexity was the ownership structure. So there were two owners of the business, co-owners. One was looking to retire. The other was open to staying on. And there was also the retiring owners son is in the business. He was and is overseeing the field service division. So the issues that we had to solve were there were we wanted the people staying on with the business to retain some economic stake to be properly incentivized. And we also had to solve for it to make sure that we were maximizing kind of tax advantages for both sides of the transaction. So there is just a little complexity there and some give and take and how we negotiated that. So those are just kind of examples of a multitude of issues that we needed to solve. I think that we were able to come to really great resolutions on those issues for two reasons. One is the support from the team at Kingsway. So we had the full support of Ken, Yvon, Charlie working on the deal with us, along with the full HR and finance teams. And so we had -- I had strong confidence that kind of the things that I told the sellers we could do. We could -- I could bring them back to the team and we could actually execute on them. The other piece is the decision-making process is ultra streamlined. I was working in constant contact with JT, and I think we had developed kind of our understanding and trust over the 15 months when I was searching through the whole process. So I kind of knew his thoughts on investment philosophy and priorities in boundaries, what we could and couldn't do. And that enabled me to fly out to Odessa and sit down in the conference room with the sellers and come to an agreement on what will work for both sides to make the deal happen. I think that streamline process is super powerful, especially relative to traditional search where you might have 8 to 12 investors, maybe 4 to 5 lead investors and you're kind of trying to herd to get a deal done, especially when a broker is breathing down your neck to meet a timeline or whatever it is. So I think that was really powerful. And then into operating. A key priority for me has been earning the right to lead the business. And this was especially important as an outsider from California without a technical background coming into a 50-year-old family business, highly technical where most of the employees were born and raise in Odessa and many of them came up repairing electric motors from early on. So Kingsway has kind of codified our plan to address that challenge in a 100-day plan, which incidentally is very similar to kind of the management philosophies I learned as a lieutenant in the Army. The three pillars are learn the business, build trust and ensure continuity. And I did that with some structure provided by Kingsway and tactics to use. But it's basically talking to the employees, interviewing everybody one-on-one, taking the management team out to lunch, meeting with customers, reassuring them that there won't be an interruption in their service, and then getting your hands sturdy and demonstrating commitment to the business. So that can mean hopping in a truck with the tech and driving a couple of hours at to New Mexico and learning how to change the oil on a piece of equipment, or showing up in the morning for a safety meeting or -- I'm serving on the Board of our regional chapter of our Industry Association, the Electrical Apparatus Service Association. So all kind of things like that where you're learning, you're building the trust of the employees and kind of making sure that the train stays on the tracks. I don't think that, that kind of mindset and execution of that plan has led to some really nice outcomes at Roundhouse. The most obvious is the lack of the J curve in the Roundhouse investment. I think JT has done some more rigorous data analysis. I know anecdotally in search fund acquired businesses it's common for there to be a J curve. And oftentimes, they can be caused by a first-time CEO just breaking some things and employees can leave and customers can leave and maybe the business is better for it. But in many ways, it's not optimal. At Roundhouse, we not only haven't had a J curve, but we have achieved on a year-over-year basis post acquisition close to 20% revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth. So continuing kind of the growth trajectory that the business has been on historically in a nice way. And some qualitative features of that lack of the J curve are listed here. So Lee Hudson is one of the sellers who stayed on. He's a President. I'm the CEO of the business. I see us as equal partners running it. We have a similar economic stake and really our incentives are well aligned. We have a strong relationship with the retired seller. He did a 6-month transition full time with the business. He still serves in kind of an advisory consulting capacity. And then I think this is really important. We've had no turnover in the management team or intact at the senior level. So retaining all that really valuable talent at the business has been super important. And then not only have we not dramatically -- anything up, but we've done some nice things improve -- made some improvements to the business. So how do we think about this one. Sometimes I get pushed back on things I want to do because the business has been doing well. We acquired it for a reason. It's been growing. And it's got a great culture. So it's like if it's not broken, why fix it. But for me, the systems and processes that brought the business from $2 million to $20 million in revenue over the 5 years before acquisition are not going to be the same systems and processes that bring it from $20 million to $100 million. So we're moving in that direction. To do that, we've identified and filled talent gap. So we've meaningfully upgraded the accounting function, sales and operations functions from a quality control standpoint. We've implemented ERP system upgrades for better sharing of files and data and tracking, especially customer relations. We have implemented some basic kind of KPIs for the different departments to get better data flowing. We've secured an accreditation from our industry organization through auditing our SHOP processes, which is a meaningful improvement from a quality control standpoint, and we have through working with the accounting and HR team at Kingsway to bring our processes up to Kingsway Standard. We've meaningfully derisked the business. So that's kind of -- we're still early days, but we've made some really nice progress and improvements across the organization. And then kind of zooming in a little further. One challenge that we identified before the acquisition is talent and being able to hire and retain qualified techs. This has historically been a challenge for Roundhouse. I talked earlier about these nice growth tailwinds. And the Permian Basin, Midland Odessa is really supply constrained market, which is nice from a competitive dynamic standpoint, but it's a challenge because there is enough labor to meet demand oftentimes. So after getting into the business and kind of validating that, we have made improvements to just upgrade our hiring and retention programs. So we've implemented an in-house training program. We kind of defined roles in progression for all the technicians and the steps you have to take to move from one level and salary band to the next. So those are on-the-job items and also third-party training requirements. And tax, I think that's a really powerful retention tool. When you start Roundhouse,, you can have visibility into what your career might look like, and it's a career, not just a job. So I think that's been really powerful and also just kind of like streamlines the decision-making process when you're thinking about hiring or promoting somebody or when somebody comes asking for arrays, you have kind of guidelines on making that decision, so it creates leverage for our managers. We've engaged a third-party staffing firm to help accelerate recruiting. We do pretty well on the entry-level side of the business. Like if you just need a hard worker who's willing to learn, we can go out to job fairs or -- but to indeed to find those people where we needed the most -- where we had the most acute need was hiring techs who already had experience. And the staffing firm has been really great for helping us find people to hire who have a short ramp to lead a crew. Yes, prioritize retention of technicians via multiple approach that's kind of like all these things combined to that. And the quantitative outcome of all of this is that we've increased headcount at the business, about 20% in the 10 months since acquisition with outsized gains in the field service department where that's been our priority. So yes, in conclusion, Kingsway has been instrumental in finding and getting this deal done, and we've laid some great groundwork that is ongoing, continue to learn and build trust and do more there. And we've kind of put enough down work in place where we can move on to the next stage of KBS and continue to professionalize and streamline and ultimately grow the business into the future. So with that, I'll turn it over to Davide. Thank you, everyone.

All right. All right. Thank you, Miles. Thank you, JT. On the morning, September 27, 2024, my wife woke me up. Close the window, I'm hearing cars on the highway. As I'm walking to the window, I realize the that we've been hearing were not cars. There were tree falling down. This was Hurricane Helene, the most devastating natural disaster in the last 100 years in Western North Carolina. My mind went immediately to IS technology. We closed on the deal the day before. And now I was wondering whether there was anything left to run. My name is Davide. And I'm from Italy originally, but studied in the heart of the pharma world in Europe, in Switzerland in my PhD in neuroscience there, work in operating roles in pharmaceutical companies, at Roche and Eli Lilly. In 2020, I moved to California, where I did my MBA at Stanford. After that, I spent a couple of years investing in venture capital. And in 2023, I joined Kingsway and I'm now the CEO at IS Technology. Let me tell you a little bit why I decided to pursue a search fund, really my passions. We're investing and operating. And the search fund as an asset class is the only or one of the few asset class would allow me to buy a business and then run it. So I was looking for the right investor. I talked to several of them. I spoke to my professors at Stanford and other big funds out there. But they all kind of looked the same to me. Until I connected with Timi, the CEO at Ravix, part of the Kingsway portfolio. And he spoke about the public company structure the Kingsway provides. The reputation that comes with it. The support system from JT, Kent, Charlie, the management team, the other OIRs, and finally, the NOLs and the financial incentives. For me, it was a no-brainer. That's why I decided to join Kingsway and start my journey in 2023, May 15. In September 2024, we closed on highest technology, MSP in Western North Carolina, located 20 minutes outside The business was running at $3.1 million in adjusted EBITDA. We bought it for $19.5 million ,6.3 multiple. What was attractive for us was that the business really had all the characteristics that we like at Kingsway, starting with revenue quality, between recurring and reoccurring, the business at about 90% of recurring revenue was a business that had been growing between 10% and 15% year-over-year in the past 3 years and was capital-light. So it was able to convert into cash EBITDA so high Ravix. The stickiness was really translated into more than 100% net revenue retention and low single digit. The business was running on pen and paper. I'm going to talk a little bit about this later. So we liked it because we could improve the business and make it more efficient. And the industry per se is very fragmented. About 80% of the MSP market is not consolidated and very few MSPs reached the $10 million in revenue. So I was ready to step in, in the job and implement the KBS playbook. But I immediately, that day, September 27, I immediately realized that we need to do a step back and first deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. So supporting the community and bringing the business back to normal operation was our #1 goal. And we wanted to accomplish this within our first 90 days. After that, we could move to apply the KBS playbook and focus on three major improvements, rebuild the sales team and our engine -- growth engine, implement processes and technologies that would allow us to improve the efficiency of the business and cut costs, and finally, implement systems that will give us a data-driven approach. And that's what we did. You see here on the right, a picture of me doing supply runs from Ashfield to Charlotte. This was one of the first initiatives that we implemented. In fact, that morning when I realized that the Hurricane Helene was taking place in North Carolina. I drove to the office. And luckily, the office was on hill and was protected by the flooding. So with the help of our engineers, we installed StarLink within 48 hours, the business had Internet connection. We were the first business in Western North Carolina to have Internet just 48 hours after the hurricane. This gave us the possibility to get connecting with our employees. And why we learned that luckily their lives were not affecting, they didn't lose their lives, but they lost their homes. And so we initiated what we call office as a safe place where thanks to those daily runs that we have been doing our employees and the loved ones could come to the office and find food, potable water and the possibility to have a shower. We took a similar approach with our customers when we proactively send our technicians to visit our customers in person to take care of their technology needs. The local Chamber of Commerce played the pivotal role in that. And then we wanted to have a clear picture of the financial impacts on the company from day 1. And so the first thing that we did was to reach out to our vendors and negotiate -- payment terms with them. All of these give us the possibility to normalize the business by November 2024 when water was restored in Ashville. Our business was back to normal. And we could then move to improve the KBS playbook. The first area of improvement for us was our growth engine. When I joined IS Technology, we had only one sales rep, one account manager that was taking care of 450 accounts. So as the business was growing because those accounts were expanding, we didn't really have a predictable sales engine that could allow us to cross-sell and go after new logos. So to recruit a sales team, the first thing we did, we partnered with an external organization, the Pros 800 and Steve Rolla, they are more than 40 years in the field. We use their tool called Pivot to map Western North Carolina ZIP code by ZIP code based on the TAM. And we identified 3 main regions: Asheville, Greenville and the West side of Ashfield. Each region had the potential for 2 sales reps, account manager that would manage the current accounts and cross-sell and account executive that would go hunt for net new businesses. So we divided the region in 3 big areas, and then we started to recruit to find really strong talent that could come in and make a difference. So we applied the KBS talent identification approach where we drafted job scorecards specific role specific people analyzers and an accountability chart for all those new sales hires. Thanks to T and other OIRs that have been in my shoes before me with their businesses, we also used a third party to assess those candidates with tools that would predict the performance 1 year into the job. So I'm proud to report that a year in the job, we went from 1 sales rep to 8 sales representatives that are really scouring the 3 territories that we identified in Western North Carolina. The second area for improvement for us was processes and technology. We made many improvements that had real financial impact on the business. The best one, I think, is how we dealt with the cost of supplies. Our customers, part of the service that we provide for our customer is taking care of their copiers. So big machines for hospitals and lawyers or CPAs. Our customers pay a monthly fee, and we go there and we provide service and support. We also provide free donor replacement when the inks level go down. Historically, the business relied on the customer to pick up the phone, call the office and ask for a replacement. This created some friction because customers had to interrupt their working day to assess the donor level and make the call. And also it created a lot of waste because customers have not experts. And so when something was not working, they thought it was a -- and they were calling us. So we implemented a remote fleet management tool that we still have right now so that we monitor their fleet, our fleet in their environment, 24/7. So we know where our machines are. If they have any issues, if there is any part that needs a replacement and we monitor the ink level in the toners at any time. Applying the store and having those processes and we were able to, a, increase customer satisfaction because we're now shipping those toners proactively. So the customer doesn't need to call the office. And b, we were able to cut costs significantly because we are now able to replace those toners when there is only 1% to 3% ink remaining. Just little numbers. I know you guys like numbers. Just by introducing this, we saved about $0.5 million last year on supply costs. And the third improvement is on systems. The business was running pen and papers, was literally the income statement and the end of the month was corrected by hand by the prior accountants and all procurements and so on was done, again, using pen and papers. Well, now the business is running on a P system that is fully implemented. The whole company runs on cloud, all of my employees have access to cloud. We have APIs between cloud and our ERP and cloud and our CRM so that any time we can analyze data coming from in the sales activities, or procurement, project management and so on. We're implementing monday.com for project management, procurement, delivery and installation, our credit cards run using Ramp, HR, ADP. In just a little anecdote, we implemented a tool called Smile Back, so that at the end of each call, once the technician completed a job, a customer can fill out a survey on what they liked and what we could improve. So thanks to this store, we work to improve our customer service. I'm proud to report that we've been running 36 consecutive weeks at 100% CSAT for customer satisfaction. I give you a later snapshot in my first 18 months as the CEO IS Technology. We started with Hurricane Helene. We implemented the KBS with an only diagnosis and installing operating systems. We're now focusing on going deeper and focusing on strategic developments. Before I end my presentation, I just want to give you a snapshot of the financial performance on the business. If we look at Q1 2025, right after Hurricane Helene, and we'll look at Q1 2026, the business has grown 25% in revenue and 53% in adjusted EBITDA. And this has been a constant growth quarter by quarter. So thank you for listening to me. I hope I gave you a later snapshot about my journey and the financial performance of the business. I know you guys are eager to with questions, and I give it back JT.

All right. Thank you, both, Miles and Davide. Two operators, two very different businesses, same playbook, real measurable results. That's the theory in action. We're going to open it up to Q&A now. We've got someone with a mic that's going to -- Charlie is going to run around and give you the microphone. I'll ask both Miles and Davide to come back up here, and we'll be happy to field any questions you guys have. And whether it's our strategy, the performance or the opportunities we see ahead.

So I've got a microphone here. We'll be happy to take some questions. So who's got the first question?

Thanks for the presentation. I was wondering, I've been following the stock price, and it's been as high as around 16 and as low as around 10. Is there a reason for the fluctuation so much, given that everything in your presentation is so excellent that it would seem kind of hard not to want to be long the stock, but yet it's come off a bit.

Yes, that's a good question. I guess I don't really know how to answer that. I can't speak to the day-to-day or week-to-week, the of the stock price. I think that we're very much focused on building the engine and hopefully have that fully reflected in the stock price over time.

Thank you. Miles, I believe your business if I heard you correctly, went from $2 million of revenue to $20 million of revenue over the trailing 5-year period when you bought it. How did you get comfortable with that, that historical growth was going to -- you were going to go backwards after that period? And what do you see for the business as you look out 5 or 10 years?

Sure. I think we were able to get comfortable because the growth was comprised of services that were critical and recurring, we're going to continue into the future. So it wasn't one-off project revenue that had kind of built the business to that level. It was things that were going to continue year after year, and we were going to add on top of that. We looked at revenue retention numbers from our customers, and they were strong. So not only retention, but we looked at churn and we were losing customers and that was low. I don't remember the number off hand right now, but I think we talked about them in the prior presentation. So out there. But yes, those are really compelling. And we also looked at kind of the underlying demand. There is a lot of data analysis around oil and gas production in the Permian. And most of our customers are public Fortune 500 companies that publish investor materials and kind of talk about what they're doing. And the customer set that we've been serving projected to continue to grow. So really, I think the growth at Roundhouse pre-acquisition is a function of kind of -- part of it is -- this might be going too far down the rabbit trail, but Lee Hudson is the current President of the company. He came into the business about 5 years ago. And kind of did a version of what we're trying to do to bring the business from $20 million to $100 million of revenue. And so he implemented some processes and that unlocked leverage for the employees, streamlined the hiring and management to bring the business out of the other sellers had an off pen and paper into an ERP and with repeatable processes that employees could take over and -- so it kind of unlocked capacity and then they were able to seize on underlying demand. And there's enough meat on the bone and additional underlying demand that by kind of provisualizing it again and taking it to the next level, we think we can continue on that trajectory that's kind of been said and also installed in the culture around us.

I think this is for both Davide and Miles. You both are sort of towards tail end of your walk period of the journey. So you went from an M&A mindset to an operational mindset. How do you balance the time and energy to think about inorganic growth versus driving additional organic growth at your businesses?

Yes. Well, I would divide the process into two steps. The first one is acquiring a platform that's M&A intensive and they are required 100% of my focus. The second part of it is organic opportunities, organic M&A opportunities that are coming in once I've owned -- we owned, I became CEO of IS Technology. This is something that surprised me. But in the 18 months that I've been with the business, I get two quality businesses per quarter my desk that ready to sell. And so in the second stage, that's at least my experience, the tuck-in acquisitions and the M&A portion requires less involvement than the acquisition of the initial platform. So I can combine both the operating part and keeping an eye on potential inorganic opportunities.

I might just tack on to that. As part of our philosophy, we believe that pacing is really important in an inorganic strategy, right, for some of the reasons that we talked about new operator, new business, new industry. You've got to get through that couple of year journey, learn the business, build credibility, establish trust, get a strong foundation before -- when we've seen search fail, it's like do an acquisition very quickly thereafter, and you're buying something on a very shaky foundation. And so you really have to build the foundation on which to then run an inorganic strategy. And typically, that's that 2- to 3-year. And coincidentally, during that period, these businesses have the ability to use the cash flows of the business to delever their balance sheet so that follow-on acquisitions can be done with little or no additional equity capital required from Kingsway. And you've seen evidence of that at SPI, for instance, or Ravix as well. So they happen to go hand-in-hand, that journey, but I think that it's very powerful and allows us to follow that capital-efficient framework and an inorganic strategy.

So it's kind of kind of related to the question the other person had, which is, there is a Stanford study and there is something which you did prior to doing this at KBS and both are probably around 30% range in terms of IRR. Like now how do we know where is this portfolio of companies tracking in relation to the targets like -- is it anywhere close to 30%? That's one. And second is if you can -- you have all these companies. I know some of these didn't do well like secured nursing. I know because I was a staffing and nursing company because of COVID, probably not doing well. So yes, on the portfolio level individual level, how are we tracking towards what we expected and from the past experience? And do we need more time? Do we need more companies like only after 25 investments, does it track that? Like...

Yes. It's a wonderful question. How are we tracking relative to the base rate that we read about, right? I would start by saying that even almost universally, even the very best outcomes go through a period, what we refer to as the J curve, right? And just sort of a function of being in the lower end of the lower middle market. In the first couple of years, every operator is kind of face a crisis. It's part of the curriculum really. And so every business, even the very best outcomes go through a pattern where they may step backwards. And it's just part of the journey. I would say that with the exception of perhaps SNS, we're very pleased with the development of all of our companies and feel like they're on a really good path and trajectory. Some might take a little bit longer time to get through the journey. Others didn't step back at all. But yes, I think that generally, we feel like the trajectory with the exception of probably SNS are on a very good trajectory. And we're more focused on MOIC than IRR probably. But I think that over time, these businesses are going to develop and we're going to deliver similar types of returns.

To get to -- does it like in your experience running Argus, was it like it takes like a certain number of years or a certain number of companies before you reach this statistical median number, which is projected in all these studies.

Yes. I would think -- what I've seen is that the ones that are going to go bad, right, the mistakes I've made those become apparent very quickly. And the great outcomes take a long time to develop, probably not unlike venture capital investing, right? So you're going to -- the failures are going to emerge very quickly. And the great businesses are going to develop over a much longer time period.

This is for both of you. But maybe, Davide, I know that you initially had a very different type of business that you had gotten far along the path with and I think the life sciences or health care before going to the MSP business. I'm curious for both of you, if you could maybe talk about the number of targets that you evaluated and kind of how different they were, how focused you were on a particular industry or business model. Could you just speak to that?

Yes, absolutely. So my background using pharma. So health care specific focus in pharma and that was the thesis that I brought to Kingsway and was my initial focus. And so I focus on all of those services, ideation to the drug development industry. We look at a CRO, but 6 months in -- or actually already identified the target when I came to Kingsway. So from the get go, we had our eyes on that acquisition. Unfortunately, as we were -- as we kind of order in the due diligence going back to the Kingsway criteria, we saw that the revenue was not really recurring as we thought. Initially, it was more reoccurring with some lumpiness. And the growth trajectory was not really given by a strong industry tailwind, but by a specific moment in time when COVID hit. So we decided to take a pause there and step back. In terms of how many deals we looked at, it's really a funnel to me. So I would say probably look at hundreds a quarter, just initial gains. And then you move through the funnel, does that meet the Kingsway criteria for a good profile. Finding the right acquisition is difficult. It's -- you're looking at businesses that have all of those criteria, and we want to minimize the risk. And so in the Stanford a 2-year time period for on average for a searcher to find a business for those that are able to find those business. So that's what I would take to a couple of years. Yes.

For me, I guess let's tell my story and then we'll kind of illustrate. So I came from real estate. So I started looking initially in like facility services businesses because it was a similar customer set to companies that I had some experience working with and that kind of led me to explore a variety of different industries. A lot of them were guys and trucks type businesses like fire protection, kitchen exhaust cleaning, et cetera. And I like those types of businesses, preventive maintenance because all the economic features that go along with them, but also I thought it aligned with my experience in the Army. Everybody in the Army, at least half of your job is doing preventive maintenance. So I kind of felt like I could get a handle on that. And so I wasn't looking at a specific industry, but we had a couple of really important guiding principles as recurring revenue, critical services, low cyclicality, manageable customer concentrations, all the things that everybody talked about. And I think that having a strong sense of those features that we were targeting kind of positioned us well to identify the opportunity in Roundhouse. Yes, Roundhouse, was a broker deal on its face, had some kind of yellow flags, being in oil and gas and a little bit more capital intensity than like than some of the other businesses in Kingsway's portfolio like an MSP or a software or an accounting business. But we were able to see through those items, see that it's in a segment of the market that's insulated from cyclicality and capital intensity is actually low on a relative basis to the market. So yes, I think those guiding principles kind of allowed us to see. And then from like a quantitative standpoint, yes, the name of the game is trying to look at as many opportunities as possible. So I think we were targeting setting out like 150 proprietary e-mails. I was targeting setting out something like 150 proprietary e-mails per week and then just trying to monitor every source for broker deals possible and maintaining relationships with brokers. I think before identifying Roundhouse, which happened about 15 months into my search. I put out 5 LOIs, 1 of which was accepted and broken to due diligence, but yes, those are kind of my stats.

Sorry, one more question. The same thing, which is -- so that as investors can sort of follow the story a little better, which is like when you did that JD, your personal such -- were the returns dominated by a few outliers. And is that the normal sort of story that we need some 20x or 30x or for the model to prove itself or is that -- so is it more evenly distributed the returns on the portfolio?

Yes, look, there's like distribution returns been published. My experience was actually not that. Pretty consistently, that 3.5 to 5x MOIC over 5 to 8 years. A few that were better than that, but pretty consistently, the good ones, and that's probably a little bit different. I think that some people would say that you do need some of those right tail outcomes to move the needle. But that wasn't -- that's actually not been my experience. I missed out on the 100 baggers, but pretty consistently, maybe it's my sort of risk aversion or something, but pretty consistently in that 4.5x MOIC over 7 years would be kind of what I have seen personally. And the attribution of those returns is a combination. Obviously, there's financial leverage involved, which enhances the equity returns. And then it's organic EBITDA growth or inorganic or a combination of the two and then some multiple expansion as you build a bigger and better run business, you get some multiple expansion on exit, I think that -- for us, we want to own these businesses for a very long time and let the organic and inorganic growth engines compound.

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I think that over time, we've learned what good looks -- more like what bad looks like, and began avoiding things that didn't have the attributes, like didn't have the revenue quality, more project-based stuff, less recurring, maybe lower gross margin, maybe higher capital intensity. And so if you just some pattern recognition of when things don't work out, they had a set of attributes that were different than when things did work out, which is what caused us to focus on a handful of the attributes that we're very focused on now. And the B2B and B2C services isn't like we didn't set out to do that. It's what fell out of the focus on large and growing industries with small niches, fragmentation, high margin, low capital intensity, recurring revenue, and that's just kind of where you default to.

Miles, I know you just touched on your deal saying that it was a broker deal. Davide, I can't really recall the extent to which yours was brokered. But very curious on just like competition, I know maybe you won't have hundreds of people bidding on these businesses. But can you just share a little bit more about how competitive that was and then the extent you knew kind of the deciding factors and how you're able to separate yourself, that would be helpful.

Okay. Yes, I think -- so my deal was brokered. I think there's a spectrum of how efficiently a brokered process is run and oftentimes in this segment of the market, there's inefficiencies even in broker deals. But that said, we were going up against the broker market. I think there were a handful of bids, maybe 5 or 6. And they were all kind of within a reasonable range. I think we were able to win for a few reasons. We -- so not to get too far in the weeds, but the business was a C corp in Texas. And so doing a stock sale was very tax advantaged for the sellers, and we were able to offer that because of Kingsway NOLs and tax advantages. So that was a real differentiator. And then beyond that, like there's a huge qualitative aspect to the sellers. The retiring owner has worked -- it was an early employee. He's worked in the business for 40 years. His family involved. His family friends are involved, He's born raising Odessa and his reputation in the community, his customers are his friends. And the business is his baby. And I think he -- I'm grateful to say that I think you have a lot of trust in me and Kingsway, that we would be good stewards of his legacy. So that was a major consideration. And also for the other seller who is staying on, I think you had a lot of confidence that we'd be able to work well together. We had a similar vision for the future of Roundhouse, and that he'd be able to execute with Kingsway and me. So yes, I mean the personal touch goes a long way. And yes, I don't know, Davide, do you have anything else to add.

So we just have a couple of questions that came from the webcast participants and then we'll go to a short break. So JT this one is probably for you. I think we've talked about it in prior presentations, but can you just remind people how the OIRs are compensated and how that aligns to create value for Kingsway shareholders.

I assume this means after they get a deal done. Yes. So we've really structured our compensation to be pretty consistent with the way that traditional search has run. When they step into the President or CEO role in the business that they acquire, they're -- they get a reset on their annual comp, a base salary commensurate with the role, typically around $250,000 a year, something like that, and the potential for short-term incentives tied to cash flow return on invested capital. But the most important thing is their ability to participate in the value creation through the equity upside. And so they have both of these guys and all of our guys have the opportunity to earn up to 25% in the common equity of the business. And that equity is after our initial investment, which goes in the form of preferred gets paid back. And then they are shareholders in the common and the upside participation and invests in three tranches. So 25%, and 1/3, 1/3. The first 1/3 vests at closing as compensation for finding a great acquisition. The second, third vests over time, 4 or 5 years. And the final third vests based on performance on an IRR or in some cases, an IRR threshold with MOIC, but generally on the equity returns on a sliding scale, minimum 20% and full earn at 35% IRR.

Great. Then the last question, we've got a few different questions with respect to the recent movements in OIRs. Can you comment on the recent changes in the plans to fill those open roles for OIRs

Yes. So we -- like I mentioned, we have a very strong pipeline of OIR candidates. We've got some backfilling to do. Charlie, I mentioned in 2025 of 200 candidates. I think in the last 12 months, it's more like 270. So we've got a lot of interest, and we've got -- from that, obviously, we filtered down and people move through. We have like a 6-stage process of recruiting. And we've got I would say probably 5 or 6 candidates. They're moving further along that stage in some in very late stages. So we're excited about the quality of the people that we're seeing. And yes, that's an important engine to keep the OIR pipeline full.

Great. Thank you, everybody, for your questions. We'll take about a 10-minute break, and we'll set up for the fireside chat.

Awesome. Thank you. [Break]

Hi, everybody. We're going to get started with the fireside chat here shortly.

Awesome. Hopefully, everyone got some lunch. And yes, I thought it would be fun to close out today. I'm really delighted to welcome someone who, more than anyone else really embodies the Kingsway model in action, Tyler Gordy. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Tyler's story is proof an action of what we're building. Obviously, we've talked a lot about his experience at PWSC and the benefits that to us as a result of that. But maybe I thought I would just give a little bit of a background and a bio on you. Tyler has a really sort of impressive background and history. After 9/11, he was called to serve in the Army and was part of the first wave invasion of Iraq. Elevated through the ranks very quickly where he became a Sergeant and got the attention of the theater commander there who saw something special in Tyler, and recommended that he go to West Point, which is a fairly nontraditional path for an enlisted NCO. And so Tyler ripped the stripes off of his sleeve and went back as a freshman at West Point as a -- had an incredible career at West Point and graduated as first Captain of West Point, which is the highest ranking cadet in his class. Commensurate with that honor. I think the expectation is that you take a role that he fits title and was deployed at the tip of the spear to Afghanistan where he fought the Taliban for 4 or 5 years. After which he went to Harvard Business School, was a full bright Scholar finalist and also learned about search funds while he was there. We had just started building at Kingsway around the time that Tyler graduated from HBS and had embarked on a self-funded search. And we met -- you had a deal late stages under LOI that was sort of falling apart is our first conversation. And Tyler had kind of run out of personal capital and enthusiasm to get that deal done, and we were sort of concurrently about to close on a Warranty acquisition. And so Tyler graciously agreed to come and join us and take over that operation. We knew that it needed a new manager and a new management team. Thanks to Terry. He indulged me and us on our vision to take an inexperienced, but highly talented young operator and put them into a new business. It was a new thing for you guys and you took a flyer. And we had a great outcome. And Tyler really embodied all of the things that we hope to, I think that KBS has come a long way since then, but you were instrumental in helping us build it. And obviously, we had a wonderful exit and now Tyler is a very active member of our advisory board, providing counsel and guidance to our young operators, which is really amazing. So Tyler, thank you for being here.

Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Yes. So maybe we'll just dive right into some questions here for you. I've got them written down, so bear with me. So maybe in your words, I've just described your incredible journey from the 101st Airborne to West Point, to Harvard Business School. What initially drew you from military to business? And then follow-on, how did that path eventually lead you to Kingsway?

Yes. I think the big thing was in the military, you just have no control over where you're going next and I got tired of that. So I wanted to have more control over my life and my career and I wanted to do something different. My dad actually was a small business owner. He started a really small company in Northern California 25 years ago. And I thought it was so cool. He got to work whichever 80 hours he wanted to per week. You got to choose what time of day you would work and where he would do it. And I got to see that. And it was wonderful watching that as a young man, and I wanted to kind of follow in his footsteps. So that's what set me down the path of getting out of the army and going to business school and then I didn't know anything about search funds when I got to business school. I did a traditional internship at a big company -- and I got done with the end of the summer, and I thought, wow, this was very similar to what I experienced in the Army, and I don't want to do that again. And I had a section at business school that had spent 4 years in private equity on the investing side and I was talking to him about what he was going to do. And he said, "I'm going to go buy a business and run it," and I was like, "Wow, you can do that. That's amazing." I never heard of that, and I didn't even know the path existed. So he talked to me about it and he said -- and the cool thing is there's a class or called entrepreneurship through acquisitions. It's a full year. You take financial management small firms 1 semester and then you take the second part, which is kind of how to run and operate a business. So I took the course with Rick & Royce. And unlike Miles, who said he didn't have the confidence to sit out on his own, I was overly confident and naive. And so I went out and launched a self-funded search. And I was in Austin, Texas, and I had a deal under LOI that I've been working on for probably 8 months, and I have gone through all the steps of diligence. It was a meet little -- it was a laboratory actually. They did QA screening for pharmaceuticals and supplements and things like that. And it had all the characteristics that you would want of a search fund acquisition deal, except for one, but it was highly recurring revenue. It was noncyclical, wasn't capital intensive, no customer concentration, nothing like that. But the problem was when we got to the end of diligence and we drafted the purchase sale agreement, we were ready to close. Chase wanted all of the leaders in the company to go through a background check. And the sellers were okay with it, but the lab director was not, and he refused to do a background check. And then the sellers came back to me and said, the lab director won't do a background check, but we have another guy who will act as a Lab Director and he'll do a background check. And I said, yes, that's not going to work, unfortunately. So I was broke at the time, I remember I was looking at my bike and my skis and thinking which one I could pawn and get more money for to continue my search -- and right at that time, I had heard about Kingsway had just acquired a business through a guy who was a searcher and that they were looking for an operator. And so he actually put me in touch with JT, and I flew out to and heard about the opportunity and JT's vision and what they were trying to do with the platform and that's when I decided to make the leap. And so I shut down my search basically right there. That was the end of it and accepted the offer and came on board.

Yes. Awesome. When you first met us, what do you think it was that attracted you to King's way? How is it different than trying to reload with a self-funded search or maybe go the traditional search model?

Well, I just got my tail kick. So I was in a position where I realize that I did not have the answers and then I needed that structure, and I really needed the mentor. I mean, frankly, that was the biggest thing was I recognize that, my own deficiencies that I needed a mentor and JT had invested in a lot of searchers and had gone through a search himself back before search was a cool thing. And so I really gravitated towards the idea of we're partnering with a mentor that had been there and done a search before. And that kind of knew what right look like. And then he JT explained the Kingsway Business System to me at the time. And I think that's when I clicked it was like, "Wow, not only do I not know how to buy a business, but I don't know how to run one either. And this is like really hard stuff." So I think that it was kind of those two things, not just how to buy, but how to operate a company and then to have access to you and to the resources at Kingsway to help me be successful because it's really hard stuff to do on your own.

Yes. Amazing, amazing. Well, you did an amazing job. So let's go back to when you took over PWSC. And for those of you not familiar, PWSC was home warranty business. They essentially sold what I would describe as OEM manufacturer and warranty on new home construction. So their customers were the largest residential homebuilders in the country. And as a way to move sort of let's call it 1, 2, 10, so 1 year everything, 2 years sort of behind the wall, 10-year structural defect warranty off of their balance sheet, they partner with a company like PWSC, which acted as what I would describe as like a managing general agent. They didn't take the risk, but they placed the risk and priced it. So it was an interesting business, had come out of the aftermath of the housing crisis and was at sort of a year we thought and probably had an opportunity to sort of build out of that but it was in tough straights when you stepped in. So maybe just kind of set the stage, what did the business look like when you walked in the door? And what were the first couple of things you focused on?

Yes. When I got into the business, I thought that the business was going to be in great shape because it was owned by a pretty big private equity firm. And -- but they had bought it pre-housing crisis, and then the EBITDA was decreased by 80% during the housing crisis. It was a huge loss for them. And when I got into the company, what I realized was that the management team that was in place, they were kind of caretakers of the business. They were just kind of keeping the business going, but there was no growth strategy that was put in place. And everyone on the leadership team, but one VP was getting ready to retire in the next 18 months. So they were all kind of getting ready to check out. There were no real processes in place. There was no business system in place to kind of operate the company, and there was also really no strategy at the time. So one of the lessons that I learned early on was that we were actually losing customers where we were getting ready to lose customers and no one really knew that. So the first big aha moment for me was I went out and I decided I was going to meet with all the big customers and just kind of listen to what they were telling us about the business and how we can improve. And I went to meet Beazer Homes at the time, which is a big builder. I think they're a top 10 at the time in the country. And I sat down with the guy and the outgoing CEO, introduced me, to the Risk Manager there. And within 10 minutes, he was like nice to meet you. And just so you know, we're leaving, and we're going to take the product or the service that you guys provide in-house. And they were our third largest customer at the time. So that was like, "Oh, my gosh, we just lost our third largest customer." I think they were probably 5% of revenue, but the business had terrific operating leverage. So 5% of revenue was probably 15% of EBITDA at the time. And it was just a kind of a big wake-up call for me that the business maybe wasn't exactly what we thought it was. There were there was still a strong need for what we were doing, but we just hadn't been doing it well over time is essentially what I learned for the customer. So we had to make some changes quicker than I had anticipated. And that was really what the kind of the first 100 days for me. We're just listening to our customers, listening to our employees and understanding what the big problems were and then starting to formulate the plan, not even strategy on how we were going to compete and wear, but just how we were going to keep the business from dying in that moment.

Yes. I think every operator goes through that. There's a -- that was probably your first mini crisis to sort of set the curriculum. And would you say that you went through a bit of a J curve?

Yes. I mean we -- it was I don't think atypical. But certainly, EBITDA declined from the first year to the second year by probably 15% to 20%. It was a nice drop. And I was very nervous. You talked about why Kingsway? And I think I mentioned having a mentor and having that support system, if I was on my own, I would have been even more nervous, but JT didn't really blank. He was just like a as part of the process. And one of the things that I learned early on was that it was okay to share bad news, which I think is so important for a young operator early in his or her career is to be able to go to the Board and say, these are the things that are going on and to have candid conversations and not be afraid that you're going to get your head bitten off for that. And I shared bad news early and often with JT and together, we kind of put together the plan on how we were going to transform the business, and we went through the J curve, and it was certainly scary at the time. But looking back on it and now being involved with other small businesses, I just see it as part of the process.

Yes. Yes, for sure, for sure. It can be terrifying, right? looking back, what were maybe 2 or 3 of the key operating decisions that you made after sort of had this sort of realization that the business maybe wasn't quite what we thought it was and a mini crisis. What did you set out to do?

I would describe the first 1 as kind of tactical patients not making any knee-jerk reactions right when I got into the company, even though there were big problems that needed to be solved, I wanted to kind of develop a full picture of what was going on. So like I said, I met with every single employee, not just at a high level, but I really got into the processes to understand how the business worked. And then once I felt like I had a fully developed kind of picture of what was going on with the business and with the industry, I think we did a really good job of hiring the right team. And I think that's probably the single most important thing a search operator can do is overwhelm the business with talent. We really go out and hire talented people. And we did that. We went out and found 3 people that were former employees of our customers that those businesses had gone away during M&A. One was a General Counsel. The other one was a Senior Vice President of Construction. The other guy was a superintendent for a builder. And we went out and hired builders that really knew the space. They really understood the product. And then through them and the relationship that they had, we were able to capture the voice of the customer and the problems that those customers had, and then from that, we were able to develop strategy to address those problems. But I would say, so tactical patience, building the right team and then using the KBS system to kind of deploy the strategy that we had put together while building this team. And I think we used it pretty strictly. I mean, we really would go off-site every year at the beginning of the year, we would develop the strategy, we would share the strategy and the budget with the Board. With JT, they would approve it, and then we would deploy the strategy, and we had a model at the time that what essentially has become the Kingsway Business System. It was a little bit rougher than, but we use that to execute the strategy that we had in place using the fundamentals of plan, do check, adjust and all of the things that we talk about.

It doesn't get talked about that often. What do you think it is about a search fund operator that allows them to attract really great talent into a small company? I often sort of punch above their weight in terms of their ability to attract really capable people to an otherwise like less exciting small company.

I think it's the energy and the vision and having the right compensation plan in place. So Kingsway allowed us to build a phantom equity package for all of the team members that came into the business. So they got to participate in the upside. So it started with me going to them and saying, like, here's the vision that I have. Here's what I want to do with the business? And why don't you join me for the ride and here's what we can accomplish together in -- I think if there's something about like a young, hungry person coming in that has that energy and that vision and saying like, I'm going to go out and build this big business that gets people excited. And then when you are able to give them a compensation package that incentivizes that buy-in and kind of aligns them with what you're trying to accomplish. It creates a really kind of powerful experience for those people that I think attracts them to the business that they otherwise wouldn't join.

And to your comment, allowed you to overwhelm that business with talent where there had been a real void.

Yes. We -- there was a competitor in our space that was probably 10x our size and their top people were coming to us in the end trying to get a job with us because they wanted to be a part of what we were doing. And we were just able to attract incredible people.

Yes, amazing, amazing. Let's talk a little bit about the exit. Obviously, PWSC, we sold for over $50 million, a really incredible exit. But maybe just give some insight into how that process came together. And maybe how did you -- why that timing, how do you know the timing was right for you?

There were a lot of things. Part of it was personal. My dad got sick, and I had been really busy in the business and wanted to devote more time to family. Interest rates were also going up. That was affecting the housing market at the time, and builders were starting to struggle. So it felt like maybe we had not reached the top, but that things were going to be a little bit more bumpy. And multiples were really high for MGAs at the time. It was like the peak of the market for managing general agencies and retail insurance brokers. And so I talked to JT about it and told them that I thought it was a good time to sell. And he gave me the green light to explore that and go out and talk to a banker. And so I actually called a friend of mine who was doing M&A for a big platform and ask them who the top bankers were in the space, and he gave me a couple of names. And he said, what do you guys do? And I told him what he did, and he was like, "Man, we would love to buy that company." So I told them awesome. I'm going to go hire the banker and then you guys can participate in the process. So that's what we did. We hired a great banker, and they ran the process for us and we were able to -- from LOI to close was 30 days.

Yes, record. Super short Yes, it was amazing and ultimately sold to to that group. Yes. They ended up being the buyer. The banker just kept a modest.

Yes. Yes.

So this is kind of an odd question, but what do you think a successful exit looks like inside a public company like our permanent capital vehicle versus an exit in a traditional search vehicle? And why are they different in your mind?

Well, I think in a traditional search vehicle, the capital goes back to LPs and that's probably the end of it. But in the Kingsway model, the capital comes back the Kingsway and gets redeployed into hopefully, a similar situation with a similar outcome, and it just continues to compound. So more successful exits equals more opportunities to back searchers, which equals more successful exits and the flywheel just continues to spin up, and it compounds over time. So I think that's the biggest. And the lessons learned within that one search company stay within the Kingsway platform and get refined and pushed out to the other searchers and the operators, and they get to be the benefactors of those lessons learned. So everything kind of stays within the ecosystem, which is very different than a traditional search fund where the capital goes back to the investors, they reload and they'll deploy that capital amongst a handful of other opportunities.

Yes. Yes. So you have sort of the combination of compounding of capital, which is interesting, but maybe more importantly, the compounding of knowledge and talent.

Yes, which I think is just kind of reduces the amount of errors and efficiencies and you get better over time. I mean I look at the Kingsway Business System now. The fundamentals were there when I was doing it, but it's so much more refined now than it was when I started. It's really remarkable to see the change.

Well, thanks to your help and input and experience on that. So after the exit, we were lucky to have you come back and continue to contribute to what we're trying to build here. You joined the Kingsway Search Accelerator Advisory Board. And that's -- in my mind, that's a meaningful choice. You probably could have done anything you want with your time. And obviously, it doesn't take all of your time, but that's a meaningful choice. Why did you feel like you wanted to stay in the ecosystem?

I mean I just love small businesses. I love being involved of them. I would like to see operators get a chance to have an opportunity to change their lives and their families' lives and the lives of the people that are in the business and it's just a wonderful space to be in. And it's an opportunity for me to give back. And I had a blast. It was just a lot of fun. It really is. So it's a joy to be back here.

You now sit with Tom and Will on the Advisory Board. What's it like for you being in that room with those guys and how do you complement each other?

Yes. I mean we all bring such unique perspectives Tom brings the Danaher kind of Fortune 500 perspective, which is terrific because you get to see how things are done at scale. And Will, I think of all the search fund investors I've heard speak, I feel like he really is able to kind of cut through the nonsense, like he really gets to the heart of what's important with these small businesses. And that as a searcher being able to listen to someone like that talk that has that knowledge is invaluable. You just get to see what right looks like when you're analyzing an opportunity, and I did not have that when I was searching. And then I think I bring the perspective of like reality in a small business.

Yes, close to the fact...

I mean it's a knife fight every day. And you face problems in small businesses that you don't face in large companies, managing talent, capital allocation decisions are different. I mean there things just are different in a small business. And I think I bring a perspective that is unique in between the three of us, I think we kind of cover all the bases.

Yes. I think it's a wonderful sort of trinity of expertise at different levels and different backgrounds. I think having been very close to the fire very recently and your experience both deploying but also helping refine and build KBS is really powerful. So looking ahead, where do you see Kingsway going from here? You've seen the company evolve from the inside. And now you've seen what we're building at KSX. What do you think -- what excites you the most about our future?

I think it's -- what I talked about earlier is the kind of the compounding the lessons learned, taking all of the lessons and putting that back into the KBS system and refining it, and continuing to attract really talented people that are smart and hungry, buying great businesses, growing those businesses, selling those businesses and then redeploying that capital and just kind of the flywheel continuing to spend. So it was a small dream when I first got here, it's expanded into what it is today. And I think it's just going to -- I mean, just is going to continue.

Yes, I feel like we're sort of just getting started in many ways. Well, thank you. Amazing. We're kind of running close on time, but you're okay with a few questions, if you.

Yes, absolutely. Does anyone have any questions for Tyler or me?

So Tyler SP1 That the EBITDA went down first year after because of a customer loss, how did you grow it and I was wondering like the 10x return, what was the contribution of like, let's say, leverage, growth? And like what contributed to 10x, like was

It was a number a number of things. Certainly, leverage was a part of that. But all of our growth was organic growth. So we put a growth strategy in place. We almost doubled EBITDA and then JT and the team bought the business, right. And we sold it right. We, like I said, the insurance industry at the time was going through consolidation on the retail side and MGA side. So there was a ton of M&A activity. And we were the benefactors of significant multiple expansion at exit. So we almost doubled EBITDA organically, and then we had nice multiple expansion. And we were able to delever, I think, in 3 years and start paying dividends.

Yes. Yes. So I think it was a contribution of things and multiple expansion was probably at least 40% of the attribution of the outcome. And I would ascribe that to a business that is now growing and growing at a nice clip with a very strong management team that Tyler built, right? And that's just a much more valuable business than the business that we started with.

I was wondering, does the company have any plans to issue dividends to the investors over time? Or is it just to reinvest the money in additional businesses because I noticed that there was kind of cash on the books, and I wondered if that might be helpful to getting more people to invest in the stock if there was some kind of dividend? And then lastly, I noticed that there's a lot of veterans working for the company. And I wonder, do you have any strategy to try to hire veterans and perhaps use it as a publicity campaign for the company to let people know that you're veteran-friendly and we try to have some program to train them or hire them because you're working in areas where a lot of veterans have skills in the trades.

Yes, great questions. I'll take the first one on the dividend. That's really a capital allocation decision. I think that -- and so to me, in my mind, that boils down to where do we think that we can get the highest return on our shareholders' capital. And so obviously, we have a strategy that we believe works that generates high returns. And so historically, we have predominantly used excess cash to find more businesses to buy and grow. We have returned capital to shareholders but not via a dividend. I think that we're focused on tax efficiency. And so we've done that from time to time through share buybacks, but only if and when we thought that those buybacks would be done at a reasonable discount to our view of intrinsic value so that we are -- so those buybacks are done in an accretive way, so generating a return vis-a-vis the alternative, right, of redeploying. So I don't know that dividend per se would be a part of our strategy for the tax efficiency. But from time to time, you might see us be buyers of our shares if there was -- if they were sort of detached meaningfully below our view of intrinsic value per share. On the veteran side, and I think Miles spoke to it a bit, and you could probably speak to it. There's something about time in the military, whether that's first through a service academy or getting dropped in as a young leader with the title, but maybe not the experience that is a very close analog to life as a searcher CEO. And so we have felt like the training that someone like Tyler or Miles has received is really valuable when you get dropped in, you sort of taught to rip the bars off of your shoulder and go and learn from the people, the NCOs and the people that are at the point of impact to figure out what's actually going on as opposed to coming in with your preconceived ideas and build the trust and work alongside them. I'm not a military guy, so I don't want to make a mischaracterization. So maybe you can expand.

Yes, I think that's right. I I think contrary to what people might believe when you're at West Point, you're taught that you don't know anything. And the best thing to do is to go in and with a level of humility and to be hungry and to listen to the people around you that do know things, particularly noncommission officers that have been in the units for years or decades and learn from them, and to stay humble and to really utilize collective intelligence within the team to kind of build the strategy and to deploy the strategy. And so it's a natural fit. It felt very much like that for me when I went into PWSC, where it's like, I don't know anything about insurance, but I have a team here that does and these guys are experts, and I'm going to kind of put on the same hat that I were as a lieutenant tenant to learn the business and learn the industry and leverage their expertise and through them and with them, we're going to build a strategy together that we're going to go out and deploy. So it's a very natural fit to go from being an officer in the military to being a small business leader because it's such a similar experience. It really is.

And so I think that you'll see us continue to view that as a positive attribute when we're talking to prospective OIRs. The good news is ex military in top-tier MBA schools. It's a pretty tight knit community and they all talk. And so I think that we've seen a lot of referrals into our pipeline because of people like Tyler or Miles or other folks that have done it and talk to each other, and so we get nice referrals that way. We can probably do more from a marketing standpoint, but I think we're seeing lots of activity already. All right. I think that is probably it. Thank you all for being here on a Monday morning in New York. I really appreciate all the great questions and thanks for sticking with us through the presentation. I hope to connect with all of you over the coming days and weeks, and appreciate your support. So thank you.