Republic Services, Inc. (RSG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everybody. This is Jon Windham. I head up Alternative Energy and Environmental Services, Equity Research here at UBS, and I hope everyone is enjoying the UBS Virtual Industrials and Transportation Conference. So this is a fireside chat in which we will be talking with Republic Services. I'm very happy to have the team here. Why don't -- Nicole, I'll hand it over to you to make introductions, and then we'll sort of dive right into the Q&A. Just quickly, before I hand it over to Nicole, I would remind all the participants that if you've logged into the website, you do have the ability, if you're listening to this, to post questions through the website. If you post those questions, I'll make sure we get to them towards the end. So Nicole, over to you and then we'll start the Q&A. Thanks.

Sure. Thanks, Jon. So first and foremost, I would just like to thank Jon and UBS for hosting us today and allowing us to join this virtual fireside chat. With me, I have Don Slager, our CEO; and I also have Brian DelGhiaccio, our Executive Vice President and CFO. And then you have myself, who is the Senior Vice President of Business Transformation and the Overseas Investor Relations. So with that, Jon, I'll kick it back over to you, and we can head into questions.

Okay. Perfect. So maybe we'll start off with sort of, obviously, the topic that a lot of people have been focused on recently, and that is the COVID-19 impacts. Especially, you provided a lot of good data points on your first quarter results call, which really is such a bore out the resiliency of the Republic Services business model. Maybe just for a couple of minutes, give us an update on sort of what you are seeing on the ground and any updated thoughts as things start to evolve here as we start to sort of open up in large parts of the country.

Sure. I'll take that. This is Don. Yes, I'll start by just saying this is great for us to see the power of the portfolio at work. We've always talked about our business being a portfolio, a strong mix of business across geographies: North to South, East to West; big cities; small towns; and a variety of businesses: small container, large container, residential, et cetera. And that portfolio has held up pretty well for us through time. And even in a time like this where different markets are affected differently, that power of the portfolio really stands tall. So certainly, as we shared on the call, we saw residential volumes build and surge. We were ready for that. We expected that. We were able to shift routes, shift manpower, add trucks in some cases to certain cities. We also saw an increase in volumes at the landfill related to third-party municipalities who use our landfill. In other words, they have their own fleets, collect their own trash, but they don't have their own landfills. They come to our landfills. So that was a benefit actually in that time frame. So there were, by example, puts and takes, right? We had better productivity. We had better safety. Some of that tied to the fact that we had less traffic. But some of that was certainly the result of heightened awareness of our teams and more day-to-day interaction with our leaders, really encouraging our frontline people who showed up every day. So the fact that we're an essential service is a really good thing throughout history. It speaks of the stability and the predictability of our business. But also in a time like this of COVID-19, unprecedented time, it adds a little bit extra responsibility on our shoulders. You got to show up every day. We did that. We did it very well. We saw the volumes decline in the commercial business and in the industrial business to some degree. And now we've turned the corner. So when you're chasing sort of you know when it becomes a little difficult at times, but now we've seen year or week-on-week sequential improvement in hauls and container weights, even in driver overtime, right, because now we're seeing more businesses return. So service decreases over -- or less than service -- they were several weeks ago, and service increases are now being greater week after week. So we expected that we would -- April would be a very sort of stabilizing month for us. Let's stabilize the business. Let's keep everybody safe. Let's be ready to work. And then May would start to climb out of it, and that's exactly what we saw. We're expecting to have a good result in June. And we'll be able to talk in more detail and trend data on our July Q2 call. But we'll kind of save all the numbers for that, but it's suffice to say that the business is building and improving week on week. And as you hear more and more states turning on, going from sort of their Phase 1 to Phase 2 to Phase 3, we'll see the waste return. And again, being an essential service, being in 42 states, 100 and whatever markets, 230 markets, we naturally get the volume, because we're #1 and #2 position, so we're actually feeling really good about the resilience of the business. And as I said on the call, the cash flow. We're very assured in our minds that we'll see that $1 billion free cash flow and even potentially the bottom end of our original cash flow guidance range. So we're happy to be out of the first half and working sort of toward the second half of the year, so to speak.

Yes. And Don, I was going to add a finer point on the cash flow comment, which is, throughout this pandemic, we have been monitoring the cash receipts daily, right? And the really encouraging thing is our customers continue to pay their bills. And we have not seen any appreciable change in DSO. Cash collections remained strong. They've remained strong since the beginning of this, and they continue to remain strong, which just gives us -- again, when you talk about why we have the confidence that we do in generating that strong free cash flow, that's certainly an indication of and one of the reasons why.

Yes. Thanks for sharing that, Brian. Because that was obviously a lot of people's concern, sort of coming right through. This wasn't -- a lot of -- even commercial customers continue to want service, but the concern was, are they going to pay when the bill comes to. So it sounds like DSOs have been relatively stable, which is good. Maybe just to talk through a little bit, how you dealt with the changing nature? I think one of the things people didn't really understand coming in or had to be sort of taught again about this waste business, one is how durable it is, but then also the cost flex points that you guys were able to sort of bring to bear. And I largely mean by declining hours, taking down overtime, not necessarily laying people off, but everyone working something down to 40 hours rather than the 52 or 53 hours per week that's more normal. Is that the right way to sort of think about it on the recovery? That not necessarily more people get employed, but you start to flex up hours again as things return to normal, assuming that they do?

Yes. That's right. So you hit it right, Jon. In our -- when you think about our drivers specifically, we have the sort of 52-, 53-hour week average, and it's really sort of our target because the capital intensity of our business, these trucks cost $300,000 apiece. So if we worked our drivers 40 hours a week in a normal time, we'd have to add X percent more trucks to cover the routes. So we used to -- back in the olden days, when I was a driver, we would work 75 hours a week because we were young and bulletproof and we didn't have rules. Today, we moved our drivers down from beneath the 60-hour rule. That's the max now based on the DOT Federal Motor Carrier Act. And we get them into a comfortable sort of 52 hours because it works well for them and their families. It's sort of a safe zone for them. I mean, too many hours, you can get a little bit tired and so forth. So it gives us the flexibility to flex up. And if there's a weather event or a problem, we can flex up to 58, 59. But in this case, we flexed down in many cases. So while some of our residential drivers had experienced additional overtime, our other -- again, like roll-off large container, we flexed down. All of our techs and our other folks, back-office people, et cetera, we were more consistent with the 40 hours. And in some cases, less. So we did the right thing by our people. We offered up a 30-hour work guarantee, because, look, we knew this thing was going to be Temporary with a capital T. So there's no point in sending people home, giving people the worry, necessary or related to what's going to happen next. We said, look, we're going to get through this together. This next 30 to 90 days, this might get a little wonky, but we're going to put you on a 30-hour guarantee. At the peak of this thing or the trough, I guess, we only had a couple of hundred people taking advantage of the 30-hour guarantee. Okay. Most people were above that and most people, frankly, were 40 and above. However, we flexed, for instance, our Saturday routes instead of pulling out the normal amount of routes on Saturday, we reduced that by 75%. Because think about who wants garbage service on Saturday? Restaurants, right? So restaurants did need as much Saturday service. So the team did an outstanding job getting ahead of it. And of course, because traffic was low or nil, that frankly drove a great deal of productivity gain, and that helped us with our overtime right out of the gate. So there was this natural occurrence that we benefited from. And now we'll just see the hours come back. But we had very few layoffs. And the only places, frankly, where we had layoffs were in markets where the workforce was not willing to work under sort of a flexible schedule, and that was mostly due to where we had collective bargaining in a small portion of our business units. So there, we had no choice. But the lion's share of markets went along with it. Many of the CBAs, many of the local unions went along with it because they saw it was best for people and they saw that we were trying to be a good employer. A handful didn't. But the goal is always this for us: in a time like this, whether it's a hurricane, a fire, a flood, a tornado, now pandemic, add that to our resume, take care of our people, protect the assets, get ready to go back to work, which settle things down, so you go take care of the customer, and that really does take care of the investor. That keeps the cash flow coming in. And to your point about cash flow and receivables, people do see us like a utility and they depend on that. And I think because we are so responsive, I think that people reward us with paying us on time because they see the great job we do and they know the necessity of what our service is.

Yes. And maybe diving a little bit more into that. You also made a lot of investments over the last 10 years in sort of like infrastructure, customer service, consolidation of call centers. I mean this provided a sort of real life stress tests on your internal systems and your -- the investments you had made, particularly thinking around you have government shutdowns. It seems really important to me to understand which of your then commercial customers still wanted service or wanted suspension of service. So sort of looking back here with sort of a near-term history, given that we're not entirely through this, how do you sort of rate the organization? And what are the things you were sort of surprised by, either positive or negatively, on how the organization was able to deal with at least operationally pretty unprecedented type of event?

Yes. So a couple of things. I wasn't surprised. I love to brag about how good the team is, how well they work together, and their energy and their tenacity and their [ courage ]. I love to brag about them. They're doing an outstanding job. But I wasn't surprised by their effort. I wasn't surprised by their energy, I -- or their reliability in getting to work every day. We have record-setting attendance. We had low turnover. People came to work. And what I was surprised by was just how seamlessly we shifted to working from home. We were talking about that a little earlier. And how quickly we've adapted this virtual workplace. So while 36,000 employees, 28,000 or so are frontline, they have to go to the business unit to do their jobs. Technicians have to go there to work on trucks in their bay. Drivers have to drive their trucks. Now the good news is those folks are kind of socially distanced anyways. As long as they're not all having lunch together in the break room, truck drivers, most of our trucks are single-operator vehicles. Technician bays are all sort of 12-feet apart anyways, right? So they have plenty of space. But they all came, and we took good care of them. That's one of the story about how we responded and committed to serve, what we did to keep our people enthusiastic and safe. That's a great story to sell. But I was surprised how quickly, and Brian can talk a little bit about it, we moved our customer service agents to home in like 3 to 4 days. So I was very pleased that we made the decision several years ago to move our 300 different call centers to 3 over time and get a handle on that system and how we answer calls. We monitored the call, call it, quality, if you will, during -- when we moved people to home, and we didn't miss a beat. Speed to answer, time on hold, abandonment rate, all those things, we're as good or better than our best metrics. But Brian's IT team was just ready and raring to go. And we set up VPNs and laptops, and it was just outstanding. That's just one example, one -- but that's 900 people in sort of one big airlift going from 3 towers in 3 cities to working from home. If we hadn't had that ability, if we hadn't consolidated that system years ago, that would have been much more difficult. Right? We wouldn't have had the processes and the procedures and the rigor and the routines and all the call quality metrics that we have today to monitor that. So to your point, Jon, we've done a lot of work over recent years with what we call the Republic way, standardization and some centralization. Another story is procurement. We've got an outstanding procurement group. And when we needed -- we buy, of course, all kinds of safety equipment and PPE and masks at a regular basis. But suddenly, everybody needed a mask. And we needed -- go for a mask a day per employee. They've bought -- how many masks did they buy, Nicole? 600,000 masks or something, right?

Yes. Yes.

All the while, the government was trying to buy the same masks we were buying, right? But we saw ourselves and said, we are an essential service. We need the mask just like everybody else does who has to show up at work every day. So having that really finely tuned procurement group that we've invested in and a great leader in that group, tied with our operating team, didn't miss a beat, right? We had all of the safety equipment our people needed to feel comfortable going to work. So there's just 2 stories. And Brian, you probably have some more color.

Yes. I mean you mentioned on the -- I like to joke on our contact centers, our CRCs, that, that was probably the largest scale pilot we've ever done in the history of the company, right, in moving, to your point, 900 people home in a matter of days. And then it wasn't just those 1,000 employees that are working at our contact centers, then with the other 5,000 employees that we're going to transition to a remote working environment. And again, had to spin up virtual networks in order to give connectivity to the system, and we're able to continue business. And when you think about a remote accounting close and the other things that those support roles were doing, I think the word used, Don, was seamless, and I think that's spot on. So again, this is one of those things. It not only opened our eyes to what's possible given the pandemic, but it also opened our eyes a little bit to what's possible in our new normal and as we look forward. And so this is something that we were always kind of talking about, about what are those opportunities that we could do and how can we do business differently, we've now proven to ourselves that we can.

When this thing first started, and I've told this story a couple of times, Jon Vander Ark, our President, and I got together, and then we met with the larger team, the executive team. And we said, look, there's 3 things that we're going to do during this, right? One, we're going to prove our values. We're going to be true to our values. We're going to prove that they -- that we -- these beliefs will become our behavior. So all the things we talk about: great place to work, take care of your people, all that, we're going to prove our values. That's one. And 2, we're going to prove the investment thesis, the predictability and stability of the investment thesis. And 3, we're going to learn a ton. And so no one would have asked for a pandemic, but there's always kind of this crazy silver lining in life that you have to look for. We're going to learn a ton. And we've done all 3. We're still learning, frankly, but we've proven our values through and through to our frontline team. We're proving out the investment thesis as we speak. And we're learning a ton. And those learnings are going to benefit the company, benefit our teammates and they're going to benefit owners. And I love Brian's point about the biggest pilot ever. It was a hold on to your hat kind of a moment. And -- but if we hadn't laid the groundwork, if we hadn't had the team in place, if we didn't have the technology in place, if we didn't make some of the investments we made in the Republic way, flying 1 flag, we wouldn't have been able to do it. And just kudos to everybody for cooperating the way they did.

Yes. I appreciate those comments. We're obviously talking a little bit before we hopped on to this call about some of the changes that have happened in my industry as well as a result of this. And there will be changes that stay more permanently as it gives you an opportunity to sort of readdress maybe why or how you're doing certain things, and then the successful companies will take advantage of that learning process, and like you said, make a silver lining. You create some value out of a pretty unique situation. Maybe along the lines of COVID, but then also sort of moving towards recycling a bit. The increase in residential volumes that have happened throughout this has given you an opportunity to go reach out and have some more conversations with some of your residential customers. Recycling prices have come back at the same time. Do you see this as possibly speeding up the trend of changing recycling as a business to more of a risk-sharing arrangement with customers? Or does the upward pressure on recycling prices start to delay that?

No. I think it helps it because, look, we can go into the customers that we've already converted to the fair share arrangement and say, "Hey, this worked pretty well for you, didn't it?" And they can look at us with a smile in their face and say, "Yes, gee, I'm sure glad that I've got to see some ups along with some downs here." So it's no different than I described what we did many years ago with the fuel recovery fee. We got a little benefit in fuel recovery fee in the beginning of the year because there's a lag. But over time, it equals out, right? It's fair. And when you walk in and talk to customers from a point of fairness, it is easy to have a conversation about a mutual benefit in a fair arrangement. And that's what we've done. And we were able to do it across the board with fuel recovery fee, great success story. That's a decade old or more. We were able to really see a difference in what we've done now converting 1/3 of the CPI escalator to a more fair escalator, which is, by the way, is held up during this time. And then we've made headway on recycling. And so I think, frankly, when you can -- we can show that this wave, if you will, you may ride it down, but you get the ride back up again. I think that's a little more enticing. And I think -- I've said from the beginning, when there's skin in the game for the municipalities, and frankly, for the residents, then we can move toward more cooperation in recycling. People doing their fair share, recycling correctly. And then, we can start to deal with this contamination issue, which is still hovering over recycling. And if we can't get contamination right, we're not going to invest $400 million in capital to fix contamination problems. We're going to fix it through contract negotiation and contamination fees and penalties because that's the way it has to be. So -- but we're making headway. And Nicole can give you an idea of where we're at in that, but I think this helps us. Again, I don't think it hurts us.

Yes. And to Don's point, we've made really good progress. On the recycling collection side of the business, we've successfully increased prices of restructured contracts for about 35% of those customers. And on the recycling processing side, we're even further along and have renegotiated about 55% of those contracts. And you can really see the results of our efforts. Our effort -- our objective was to reduce the risk and volatility associated with commodity prices. And in the past, we used to say that every $10 change in our average price per ton was about $0.04 of EPS or about $18 million of EBITDA. And today, that same $10 change is about $0.03 or $13 million in EBITDA. And so as we continue to have these discussions and change this model, our volatility, we expect will continue to go down over time. Now it won't completely go away because, as Don said, it's good to have skin in the game on both sides. And so we just want to make sure that it's an appropriate level of risk, so that we can ensure, in good times and in bad times, we're going to make an appropriate return on the capital that we invest and that we deploy.

And well, by the way, this surge in recycling prices isn't permanent. It's supply and demand. China is still doing what China does. And there's just more demand with tissue products during this time, right? I mean when people are paying $80 for a package of toilet paper online, and the shelves are empty. Think about all the TP, all the paper towels and all the -- even the sanitary wipes that you buy and a plastic can of Clorox, whatever, that's all paper products. So that's what's driving this. So will America be a cleaner place for the next several years? Will there be a residual effect of germaphobia around this? Probably. But over time, it's going to come back down and paper prices will do what they do with normal supply and demand.

And we're already starting to see and hear about fiber prices coming down a bit in June. And so as Don said, we think this increase in price is event-driven and optimistic that there could be a portion of it that stays for a period of time as we see increase in demand for paper products.

Yes. And as I promised to Chuck Serianni in the past, for those of you that aren't sure what's recyclable or not, Republic Services has a fantastic website to help educate yourself and your family on what's recyclable. I've been working with my family for a year on that. It's a struggle. I am part of the contamination problem, but we're getting better, and we'll continue to work at it. Maybe I wanted to move on to one of the bigger themes in the industry and just to get your sort of updated thoughts, Don, on what sort of you think deal flow looks like over the next 12 or 18 months. I think there's a theory out there that the pain, certainly in terms of debt financing cost, is widely asymmetric in this business. That companies like yourselves are pristine credits, open access to cheap funds in the debt markets where maybe smaller players in the bank market are having a little bit more difficulty with liquidity and that possibly driving a bit more opportunity on the M&A front. Just really interested in any thoughts you have on the sort of medium-term outlook for deals in the industry.

Yes, yes. So think about the companies that maybe, could be, would be for sale or maybe companies that were interested in this kind of a grid, right, and kind of a matrix. And there are -- on this grid, there are good operators and there are bad operators, right? Good operators tend to run a pretty good business. They can grow their business with population growth. We would grow ours. They can work hard in their business and they can make it a nice little business for. Bad operators can sort of never go anywhere with their business. They frankly don't have what it takes to get up every morning at 3 AM and run a small business like ours. And frankly, those are businesses we're not ever all that interested in. But the good business, the good operators, let's talk about that because they're the ones we like. They're the ones who actually grow a portfolio of business. They're like not just the residential business or not just the temporary roll-off construction business, but a nice portfolio of business, a lot of reoccurring revenue business. That's the stuff we really like to pay for, because we know what our keep rate is. When we buy companies like that, we have a high keep rate because those contracts sort of roll over into our contract system pretty easily. But what I try to remind people always is, if you're of an age where you have plenty of runway to run your business, grow your business and you're a good operator, you're probably going to keep running your business, growing your business. You found your groove. You're going to keep running this business to someday sell it as your retirement or hand it down to your kids or do whatever. If you're of an age where you're in the window, right? You're in the window. And well, an event may then drive you closer to making a decision. A tax law change may drive you there if you're in the window. An illness may drive you there regardless. It may create the window. Sometimes, it's this disease, divorce, those kind of things that drive people to sell. So it's usually an event. And it's oftentimes just basically estate planning. You're getting to the age where you want to retire. So my point is, pandemic doesn't really change your mind if you're a good operator and you're of an age where you've got a lot of runway left to grow your business. Pandemic may because you had to work twice as hard. It was emotionally distressing. It may have put a crunch on your situation. If you were already cash strapped in running your business on a very tight credit line, this may put you over the hill. So -- but saying all that is, look, I don't see that there's going to be this huge wave of people coming to us or us going to them and convincing them now is the time to sell because of pandemic, which frankly underscores the strength of the business. When you're a good operator in this business, and you get to a certain size and scale, you can maintain and grow your business at a steady enough rate that you can manage through sort of thick and thin. And so we'll have our opportunities, no doubt, but -- and we may have a few more, but I don't think this is going to create this big wave of opportunity in M&A. But -- so I always remind people, we have a whole staff of folks who get up every day, and that's all they think about is buying businesses. They don't worry about whether we pick up the garbage. They don't worry about whether we're buying back shares. They don't worry about anything else. But beating the bushes, so to speak, in their markets and working on deals and filling a pipeline full of deals. And so when we talk about our M&A pipeline so confidently, we use Salesforce. We use a true sales pipeline to manage our pipeline of M&A. And we have M&A leader, Brian Bales, our Chief Development Officer, who's pretty hard driver when it comes to these things. And so when we talk about, hey, how much we're going to spend in M&A? We've got a pretty good handle on it. And there's -- as we've shown in the recent years, there tends to be a little more upside. So I'm not -- and I'm not being coy, we're going to have a good year in M&A. There's one larger deal out there that's been announced -- or not announced, but sort of leaked, so to speak, we've admitted to. And that seems to be on track. So -- and we've got the balance sheet to do it. And if there are more, if I'm wrong and there is a wave, the good news is, we've got plenty of dry powder to handle that. Isn't that right, Brian?

Yes. Yes. Look, I mean, to that point, we've kind of talked about optimal leverage being in that kind of circa 3x, which is where we've been recently. We can obviously flex that up a little bit for a good quality deal, and we will do so. And it kind of leads right into capital allocation as well. We've talked about our first priority, right, being -- after we reinvest back into the business, our first priority being buying those good quality deals, right? And then thereafter, returning that excess cash flow to our shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. In the beginning of the year, we talked about $200 million worth of investment in acquisitions and about $400 million worth of share repurchases. On our Q1 call, we talked about $600 million to $650 million worth of acquisition investment. And there could even be more. And we've been consistent in saying that the way to fund, right, that additional growth is through potentially pausing on the share repurchase, right? In order to give us that capacity, which is the way we view it. And so that is a consistent practice that we've had in place, and it's definitely the way that we will continue to work in the future.

But remember the formula, right? When we're buying cash flow at the right multiple, you can continue to spend money and buy cash flow, you can even borrow to do that and still keep your leverage stable at 3x?

Yes. I've always said that the share repurchase is such as a safety valve on deals in both terms, right? While it keeps you sort of sane on valuation for M&A because you can always buy back your own stock, it's a large quantum of money you spend every year on share repurchases, which means if opportunities pick up, there's a lever to pull and fund some pretty significant upticks in M&A if they present themselves. Brian, maybe a couple of questions here from the audience, Brian. One is for you. Just interested to get how you're thinking about approaching the role.

Yes. Maybe the way I'll position this is that I don't view it as much as what I'm going to do is significantly different. I would say, what I'm going to do in addition to? Right? So Chuck has done a phenomenal job around creating a strong balance sheet, a great optimized capital structure, maintaining the strong capital allocation practices that we've talked about. What I'm bringing in addition to that is also I've retained both IT and cyber as well as the data management functions. So I feel very strongly about the power of both data and technology in our business. And I think when harnessed, it can create significant value. So if you look back at our history and those investments we made, you talked about some of those before, about some of the investments that we made that enable us to seamlessly transition our workforce to a remote working environment. There's other things we're doing as well, right? And so we've talked about our RISE platform, which version 1.0 of that was really inwardly focused on our dispatchers. It's a visualization tool that more effectively or lets us more effectively and efficiently route our trucks, which is going to drive route-related costs out of the business, whether it be labor, maintenance and fuel. Version 2.0 of that is going to start connecting the customer with the cab, right? You think about giving customers information through the channel of their choice, that is powerful, right? It's powerful not only because it's going to reduce the cost of not having those calls coming into our contact centers, but also what it does from a customer experience perspective. And you think about being able to retain and attract customers based on this differentiated offering, we think that there's quite a bit of value creation there. So one of the things that you know about us is that we're going to -- we have made these investments, we will continue to make these investments. But within kind of our normal self-imposed constraints around our capital spending, right? So we've kind of been a 10.5% to 11% CapEx as a percent of revenue. We've been able to sit there and do that consistently while making these investments and really creating value for the future.

Let me add to that, too. Just to brag on Brian for a minute and I'll brag on Chuck, too. Chuck came into the role at an important time in the company's history to help us sort of stabilize things and do all the things, that Brian did a great job. He came up through sort of an old school traditional path of, in Chief Accounting Officer. He did a short stint as a Regional Controller, which gave him some great operating experience. And then I called him up to the big leagues because we needed to make a transition in the CFO role. And that was fine. He did a great job. And of course, when it came time for him to retire, it was no secret, frankly, to the organization that Brian DelGhiaccio was the heir apparent to that job. We've been career-pathing Brian throughout his 21 years with the company, so he's honest. What is -- was this now your eighth assignment?

Yes, yes.

So there are many times in Brian's career where I surprised him and said, "Hey, can you come into my office, and I want to talk to you about something." And I said, "Hey, I got this opportunity for you." And what do you mean you want me to do that? Wait, what? BTO, right? So when Chuck and I sat down and talked about the succession plan many years ago, frankly, when he first became CFO, we talked about how we would sort of build the best future CFO and what career path that needed to take and how we could do that. And so Brian's been a product of that. Do you feel the pressure on your shoulders, brother?

I do. I do.

Yes, that's great. But look, we were very diligent and very intentional about building the future leaders of the business. And again, Brian's move to CFO, Nicole's move to SVP, BTO. And listening in with us today is Nicole's replacement in the IR function. Stacey, who's one of our best and brightest up-and-comers in the business. And so we do this as well or better than anybody in the business when it comes to intentionally career-pathing people and building a strong and diverse team of future leaders. And that's what you've seen happen here over the course of the last couple of weeks. And so to answer your question, Jon, Brian brings a broader set of experiences to the role than Chuck did. And that's not a knock on Chuck, right? That's just -- my predecessor didn't do succession planning. My predecessor didn't really do career pathing. And that's why Chuck was camped out at CEO for so long, okay? If I had been involved, Chuck would have been moved around to other things. But there's only so much time left in someone's career. And so today, we've got a lot of really bright young people, 30 somethings and 40 somethings moving into great roles that will lead this company for decades. So anyways, that's what Brian is going to bring, a broader point of view.

Great. And then that's certainly, getting to know the team over the last 2 years and being on the road, at certain times, we hear them, that always came across how seriously Republic Services takes career development with their team and the depth of the management bench. So I appreciate you both sharing your thoughts. We have run out of time. There are a couple of questions coming through the website, but we'll have to leave those to some of the one-on-one meetings to cover that. So to all the participants who joined us for today's chat. Thank you for being here. Don, Brian, Nicole, thank you so much for your time. It's always super insightful to hear your perspectives. And I appreciate taking the time. Don, how about I turn it over to you for any final comments, and we'll wrap it up?

Thank you, Jon. Well, look, we appreciate spending time with you today. We frankly value you. And I'm sorry we didn't get to some of your questions. I apologize for being long-winded. That's not going to change probably. Look, we've got a great business that we've been building over decades. And we talked about the strength of the team. We talked about the power of the portfolio. We talked about the structural nature of the business, the necessary service, center service, all the things that make this business great. I think in a time like this, we are proving that this business is even more resilient than people thought. We covered that and talked about that today. I think that's what we're going to show you when we talk to you about our Q2 results. As I said, we look forward to moving into the second half of the year and putting this pandemic behind us. There's an incredible amount of learning that we're going to employ and deploy into the business. The future at Republic Services looks bright. I'm happy to see the stock moving up to $87-ish today. It's still a bargain. We're looking forward to driving it back toward $100 and continue to grow this business and doing the great work that you've seen us do over the last several years. So if you own us, thank you for owning us. If you don't own us, we'd love to meet you and let you kick the tires and show you more about Republic Services.

Great. Thanks, Don. Enjoy the conference, everyone.

Thanks, Jon.

Thank you.