Solventum Corporation (SOLV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ready. Okay. Perfect. Thanks so much, everyone, for joining us. It's obviously Patrick. I run the Medtech team here at Morgan Stanley. Before we get started, exciting disclaimers, morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. I'm sure you all be going there, very exciting. But what is exciting is very happy to have Bryan and Wayde, the CEO and CFO of Solventum on stage with us today. Exciting time. [indiscernible] starts the business and it should be a good trend. So thank you for joining us.

Yes. Thanks, Patrick.

I think maybe like -- and Bryan, if you want to sort of start and Wayde as well, some like initial high-level sort of views of how it's been, how things have started stepping back, how you see the opportunity ahead for Solventum?

Sure. Yes. It's -- again, thanks for having us. Probably good because it's a new story. And if you've already heard this, I apologize, but I want to make sure that we get everybody on the same page because a lot of new people are entering the story now. Just to give a backdrop on why Wayde and I are even here at Solventum. And for us, we had decided meaning that we worked together at Covidien and Medtronic that even though we went our separate ways, we would definitely find a place to get back together again and work together again. It was a question of when and where. So the when came and then it was where. And we decided that our primary area of focus would be Solventum versus other opportunities. And a couple of key things that really just stood out for us. The first one is it really reminds us of what we've done in the past with Covidien moving out of Tyco. We felt we had a very clear playbook to be able to move that forward and drive shareholder value. We really enjoyed that time and created a lot of value at that time. So that was one. Number two, and I think very importantly because it's rare to find, we saw a collection of businesses that weren't necessarily deeply connected but definitely were attractive in their own right. So four different business segments, all in very attractive large markets with strong brand recognition in those markets. Very rare to find that in one place. And the third was that even though they were underperforming, they had pretty consistent cash flows, which any time you come into a business where you know you're going to get debt, you really want to see those cash flows. On the negative side, we both said that, hey, we're going to be spinning out of a company, we're going to get a lot of debt. particularly in a situation where we believe 3M's major motivation was to create cash through the spin. But we felt that we were different than most spins. First and foremost, we had the luxury of strong cash flows. And secondly, we had that collection of businesses that we knew were ripe for portfolio optimization. And that gave us two pathways to be able to delever that, again, as a luxury most spins don't have. So that's kind of the setup and when we came in and why we were attracted to it. We knew it was going to be a complex separation but we've had separation experience. We put a great team in place. So far so good. We're moving down the path well. Those first 4 or 5 critical months have gone quite well. And as a result of that, our business continuity is in good shape. We saw that in the first quarter as a publicly traded company. We were able to beat and raise. That's a good start to your first quarter as a publicly traded company. And right now, we saw the value creation story coming in. And if anything, we see more opportunity than ever.

I think it's a great place to start. I mean no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. So since joining like what's been your observations in terms of differences versus maybe what your presale positions were? I mean we talked about speed of employing some of the new divisional heads but things were what you expect them to be?

Yes. I mean it's -- first of all, I love that quote. The best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy and they do change. So we came in with a playbook for sure but we knew it would adjust based on what we actually experienced. I would tell you that probably the biggest thing that was a surprise to me coming in and I've talked a bit about this before and we've been whittling down the risk associated with it. It's just the level of entanglements in the intellectual property side of the business with 3M and Solventum. And I want to make sure that I explained that because when I think about historically intellectual property, I think about patents in a drawer somewhere that you can protect from a legal perspective and you've got freedom to operate with those patents, others don't. The difference with 3M is most of the intellectual property is literally trade secrets. It's manufacturing processes that are bespoke from a manufacturing standpoint or the way you manufacture and so when you have that kind of a structure, you vertically integrate because you don't want to share those secrets with somebody else. And as a result of that, what I found is a lot of our businesses were deeply entangled leveraging that very strong IP. So the positive news is we had great IP that covered a lot of our business and protected the business. The negative side of that is you've got deep entangle that you have to separate. So that was why we spent a lot of time choosing folks that have done this before and that's going pretty well. And we made sure that we had agreements with 3M that would allow us plenty of time to pull raw materials out. So we have 10 to 12 years to be able to move away from them as a sole-source provider in those raw material areas. So that was one that surprised me but again, we were able to pivot and I think managed that quite well so far. The other one is on the positive side, very positive side is that intellectual property has created pretty stable businesses. I would just say that these businesses have been under-managed. And even with that under management, they're pretty sticky. And that would say a lot about the IP and the brand recognition and the stability of the business. They're underperforming for sure but the stability is there. So that's positive. It's a good base to start with. And probably the organization has so far behind this already, that surprised me. I thought people would be afraid of leaving 3M. That's a Century Earn brand. It's a safe place to be. It's a brand that you're probably proud to be a part of. And I was afraid people would be concerned on finding the polar opposite. As I travel around the world, we do mission ceremonies, I meet with team members. The excitement is very high. We're going to be doing an engagement survey very soon. My sense is our engagement is going to be extremely high. And that's important because when you're doing transformation, it's hard work, it's stressful. If you don't have people's hearts and minds in this thing, you're going to lose them.

I think we had chatted briefly about like attrition rates as well being, I think, probably lower than you expected to your point, like in a bunch of spend. Sometimes people get anxious and leave and -- but it sounds like attrition has done better than expected and being able to hire the divisional heads for you've been a bit faster than you anticipated?

Yes. It's been really fast actually. So any attrition that we've, for the most part had, it's been us moving in a specific direction. And we've had a really good time bringing people in. And I want to be clear, it's not just at the L1 level, so the people that report to me, that's all happened very quickly. Wayde and I had a pretty thick role at exit people that we knew we wanted to bring over and had a lot of contacts. But it's further down. It's all the way down to level 3. And those critical positions. Level 2, Level 3, we've already brought people into the organization that are very confident, very capable in the area. The thing that you worry about in that situation, as you're changing the culture of an organization because we will move faster, we will be more accountable. And some people love that. They love the decentralized decision-making and the accountability that comes with that. Other people just aren't going to love it. And in those situations, you're likely going to see some churn. And we're okay with that because we got to have the right culture with the right people.

Maybe if we switch to some of the divisions, maybe starting with Medsurg. How has the performance there been versus your expectations? I mean, obviously, the environment utilization is very strong but volumes maybe been a little soft. I'm aware it has a lot of different products in there. But maybe help people understand the volume performance and what you inherited with the Medsurg?

Yes. It's -- the Medsurg business, I think most people probably know enough about the story to say that's the largest part of the sub into business. It's about 60% of our revenue, just slightly under 60% of our revenue. And like the other businesses, unfortunately, is underperforming its markets pretty much across the board. And I would go back to just root cause analysis. Why is this occurring? And that business, in particular, has had 4 presidents over a 5-year period of time. I don't know about you, but for me, that probably means you haven't had a lot of focus in the business. As the President comes in, what you typically find is they have their own agenda that typically shifts the strategy and then you delay any execution of that strategy. And so that's just lack of focus and maybe a lack of direction as a result of that, have been a barrier. And just across the Board in Medsurg, what we've also found is a disconnect between whatever strategic direction there is and the R&D output. So there's money being spent, actually, pretty good money being spent in research and development with very competent people. There's just a disconnect between what's in the NPI pipeline and where the strategy actually needs to go. And that's why what you're seeing is good R&D spend, very low output of that R&D spend. Beautiful thing about that, that's pretty easy to fix. It takes a little bit of time, but it's pretty easy to fix. So those are the primary things that I'm seeing. And even in those areas where you had product launches, what you did not have was a sophisticated and strategic commercialization plan. Now if you're doing this right, you have a new product coming, you start about a year ahead of time on your commercialization plan and you separate the organization, you specialize, you put incentives in place, you build capacity plans. That process just doesn't really exist. And so those are the things that we're making changes in now.

Did the new products and innovation, do you have kind of like a field of dreams build and they will come style before you arrived. Is that -- was that in...

It's a little bit and it served, I think, 3M very well over the past. They've created some technologies at the center that then go out to the businesses and it's basically a hammer looking for a nail. And there's been some very attractive ones. In our space, I believe that the cadence of innovation needs to be better and the vitality index needs to be higher. If you're going to do that, you can't wait for the big innovation and then go find a home, you've got to direct traffic on where R&D should be spent period. This is the spaces I'm playing in. Here are the barriers to being able to grow the market, the challenges for the patient or the customer, how do I solve those for them and just push the R&D in that direction. So again, I can't knock what 3M has done in the past because it's worked for them. I think in this model, in this type of business, I need faster cadence of innovation, more directed innovation.

Was that the churn on the presidential level, was that also reflected further down divisionally with a lot of rotation in people in mid-level roles?

Yes. What we found -- and again, this is, I think, worked well for 3M, but it's a kind of a rotational job that you typically see in pretty high-level positions, you find people that will move across 3M. Gain experience across all the businesses, so they can build future leaders that can manage the broader 3M organization. The problem with that is you put people in roles that don't have Medtech experience in a Medtech business. And even though they're extremely capable individuals, intelligent individuals, they don't have the deep experience in that space to be as effective. And if you're there for 2 or 3 years and you're rotating out, you really haven't done anything if you're at a high-level position, it takes longer than that to leave a mark. And so what you've been finding is a rotation at high levels and as a result, less focus and that is a trickle down in the organization.

Within the Medsurg like portfolio, there's quite a lot of assets, there's the Acelity business and a whole bunch of other things. Were there some areas that particularly jumped out to yourself and Chris, like that you were like that's super interesting?

Actually, yes. I mean I talked about some of the gaps on the R&D side. There's also been some bright spots that we found. If you look at the Acelity acquisition, which is really the old KCI business, that was a really good acquisition. I mean, that was a $7 billion acquisition that 3M did, you may or may not know it, just one fact. That's the largest acquisition 3M has ever done, not just in health care but ever. That was a great acquisition right before the pandemic, unfortunately. And there were some decisions that were made around integration of that, that hurt the business a bit but that's an attractive asset. Inside of that, you have negative pressure wound therapy, which is a market that we have the lion's share of position in. It's relatively slow growth but that's only because we haven't done the market development work. If I think about negative pressure wound therapy, my team tells me it's dramatically under-penetrated. They give me a number that I won't quote right now, but it's dramatic. If they're half right, there's a big opportunity here. And so what we need to do is to take the role of a leader in that space and develop the market. And that just means you got to put a specialized sales organization, change incentives. You got to look at your R&D pipeline to be able to change what products you have, so you can make it more accessible to patients and customers around the globe. One of the things that they've done a nice job of in that area is a product launch that we just started talking about, which is called peel and place dressing for negative pressure wound therapy. And that does not sound that great, it doesn't sound that sexy, but it's a pretty big deal. It is a technology that would take the dressing change in negative pressure wound therapy from about 6 minutes in a complicated process that you typically see in high acuity centers down to about 1 minute, where if I trained all of you, you could do it pretty easily in 1 minute. And I could train in a few minutes, it doesn't take a long time to learn. That's a big deal. That changes 6 minutes to 1 minute and it democratizes the technology. The other part that we focused on here is to have the changing occur not 3 to 4 days, but every 7 days. That's a big deal because if you're trying to get into the home care market where we're relatively nascent, that's the typical cadence of a nurse visiting the site. So that's exciting as well. And we've all done some other things too, to make it less painful for patients when you change the dressing. It sounds like small things, but that opens up a lot of opportunity for expansion of the technology. What we haven't done going back to that commercialization plan is set up a commercialization plan capacity, new structure for a specialized sales organization to drive it. So that's what Chris and team need to put into place and really kick off as we come into 2025.

Would it be effect characterization to feel that Medsurg is probably like a bit of the core of the business in some way. You love with your children, of course, but you know what I mean.

Well, because I'm a good father I'll never say which child I like the best, for sure. But I mean, you just -- you can't help it. You've got 60% of your business in one category, you better make sure that you're focused on that category, right? So we have to win -- for our organization to be successful, we have to win in Medsurg. And quite frankly, that's why I brought in a leader in that business. That has run multibillion-dollar Medtech businesses before. He's been a CEO of a publicly traded company and has the capability to run it in a way that people previously haven't had. And that person has already done a cascading of talent changes to make sure that we've got the right people in the organization. That is a space that we absolutely have to win and it's a great space. Medsurg is a high hit rate area. You make the investment in a market that's growing like it is 3% to 5%. We make the right decisions on the right markets and you build scale in those markets, you can absolutely bring your weighted average market growth rate up in profitable businesses.

Maybe if we shift to Dental. Maybe to help level set if some people are familiar today what you're offering in Dental and some of the key focus areas?

Yes. So first of all, I don't want anybody to read into the fact that when I was at Zimmer Biomed, I spun my Dental business out. It was a different business, obviously. It was a smaller scale business, very low profit. And the amount of investment that I would have had to made there to keep it and make it relevant, just didn't make sense given the profitability of the other parts of the business. So I don't want to draw any parallels to this one. And they're different, quite frankly. It's a bigger scale in the Dental business that we have. It's more profitable than I expected to see. So that's all the good stuff, more scale, more profitable, really strong brand recognition. The challenges were in the slow growth areas. They're not the sexy areas, they're pretty consistent, but they're just not fast growth, nice profit, but slow growth, where we have to win in the dental to be -- to make it interesting to invest significant money in Dental is in the aesthetics market. Right now, we have a clear tray aligner us and bunch of other people. That excites me, but not as much as if we had a different solution in aesthetics and we have some other things that we can bring to the table with material science and data science capabilities. But I want to see that team and they've got some ideas. I don't want to talk about it now for competitive reasons but on how we could have a different solution in that aesthetics market, change the game and potentially shift significant share to this company. Now if we can do that, that becomes exciting. That's a profitable space. It's a fast-growth space. And that would then say that, hey, this is a place we should invest. If we can't do that, we can't make that strategic bet work, then you'd say it's probably not going to get the same level of investment because of slow growth, even though it's high margin.

Kicks off cash and that matters too?

Yes. Yes.

Is Filtek Matrix something that you'd be willing to talk about in general? Is it...

I actually like the Filtek Matrix, and it is an area in the aesthetics play. I don't know if you know this, but Filtek is a composite that is probably the strongest brand recognized composite around the world. And people say, so what is composite, what's the big deal? It's billing cavities, it's fixing a chip to that kind of thing, but it's not an overall high cost in a procedure. But if it doesn't go right, the dentist is not happy because it can cause a lot of problem with the patients. So they're typically willing to pay for the best in that composite area. So that's a really trusted brand. One of the first composites to be tooth colored that's where Filtek really got its name. But what they've done with that is to give a patient an opportunity if they're not happy with their smile aesthetically, to be able to come into a dentist, sit in the chair, get their mouth wanted. That then goes into our Irvine factory. We use 3D printing to put a matrix together. We send it back to the dentist. Patient comes back in, sits on the chair only one more time, puts that matrix in their mouth and they put the Filtek inside of it. The beauty of that as you take that off and in that second sitting, you've got basically a set of in years that would change your smile, the color, the shape which is pretty attractive. Again, great technology, very interesting. Nobody else is doing that right now. It could -- in my view, could change the game in aesthetics but we just haven't done much with it. So what I'm looking for now is that team to supercharge the advertising, the sales channel, the podium speaking about this technology, and let's see if we can win. I like -- we talked about this openly, so it's out in the market now, people know about it. We just haven't seen the traction yet and I'm going to push the team to drive it.

I think of the 4 divisions, the one I get the least question on because I think people just don't look at the areas as much as some other areas Medtech HIS. So maybe it'd be handed to help people understand what you offer in HIS, how that fits into the broader picture of Solventum?

It's why most people probably don't even know that 3M had HIS, unless you're really following the story. To be honest, as I was doing my diligence, I was a little surprised to see it in 3M. And by the way, it's decades old. They've had their business for decades. There's a couple of different facets of HIS that you've got to think about. The revenue cycle management, which is the largest portion of that and for people that don't know, that's basically the process that you would go through in a DRG system to ensure that you're going to get paid as a hospital for the services that you're providing and you're going to get paid appropriately for those. So we handle that for the hospital systems, given our technology and our capabilities. That's a really good business. It's an attractive market, 4% to 6% growth market. We have a very large share, 70-plus percent of the hospitals use us from a technology standpoint. So we're really trusted brand and it's sticky. Because you don't want to mess around with moving it because there's a lot of pain associated with it, it could take a year plus, and it could risk your revenues as a company and also compliance to doing reimbursement the right way. So I like that technology. I like the space. On the front end of that, when you look at transcription, what we call our clinician productivity solutions, that's how you would use ambient listening capability to take surgical notes that then eventually feed into the revenue cycle management, but it's a separate category. That's a really fast growth category. It's exciting. The potential is very big. We bought a company called MModal back in the day, which is a great acquisition. Unfortunately, again, it was around a time that the pandemic hit and we didn't spend the money we should have, so we got behind in that area. I give you all that because what I've got to understand is can we win in that clinician productivity solutions area given some of the other investment from other companies in that space and the really significant opportunity. And if we can, what's the investment level going to be? If we can win in that area, that becomes pretty attractive. If we can't, then I've got to understand the implications to revenue cycle management. So we're going to sort through that, understand it and determine, is this an area where we want to invest for the right reasons? Or is it not? The other thing we're looking at here is in revenue cycle management, the data collection is pretty interesting. So I'm looking at, is there a potential to leverage that across Medsurg. Could it be a 1 plus 1 equals 3. I think theoretically, there is, but operationally, can you actually drive value from it. So those are the things that we're looking at today to better understand what kind of investment we'll have in that business. But today, it's a solid business.

It's always hard to execute on things that, in theory, sound but actually is the person going to speak to the other person and actually have that conversation?

Well, I mean, a perfect example of that is value-based health care. We've been talking about value-based health care forever. And for the most part, when you talk to hospital systems, they want to have the conversation, when it comes to actually moving it forward, they go back to transactional stuff. So again, theory, value-based health care is amazing and really getting it done and moving it forward is more challenging.

And then for Purification and Filtration, it's obviously there's a lot of different parts, but the sort of 20-ish percent that everybody was seen on the bio-processing side. And I guess a couple of bids for that. I think, obviously, because it was incredibly fast growing and there was a destocking event for the whole industry. One, it seems like -- it seems like you guys are coming out of that a little bit before some of the other players. You've actually kind of outperformed last quarter on that side of things. How -- first, how are you thinking about the whole P&F business in totality? And how do you manage to have a slightly better performance in the bio-processing side than some of the others out there?

Yes, thanks for noticing that, by the way. I'm sure the team listening is very happy that you said it. So I would say, first of all, if you think about the Purification and Filtration business, we talked about this before, but it's about a $1 billion business for us in somewhere in the neighborhood of a $41 billion market. So a gigantic market that actually has pretty good growth almost across the board. But it would speak to the fact that we're a relatively small player in the space. The good news is, even though we're small, we've got some technology differentiation that is meaningful and some brand recognition that's meaningful. So that's, first of all, when I think about the business, it's pretty attractive. From a margin profile standpoint, one of our lower-margin businesses, we've talked about that and a bit capital-intensive, but generally speaking, in attractive business and attractive markets. Bioprocessing, we are pulling out a little ahead, although I believe the overall bioprocessing market is recovering. We have some specific customers that moved pretty quickly that we are big customers for us. That have made some orders that came ahead of the market turnaround, but we are happy to take them and like those customers. That's an interesting business because bioprocessing inside of Purification and Filtration is the highest margin business. It also has the longest lead time to being able to start innovation and actually get any kind of return from that innovation could be 5 years. But the benefit is once you're in, you're in. It's an annuity. It's a very nice return on investment once you're in. So it's again, again, overall, a pretty attractive business, bioprocessing probably being one of the bright spots in that business.

Everybody always wants to be [indiscernible] get them off. I think maybe then taking a step back and before a couple of financial questions as well, but taking a step back to the business overall. You kind of alluded it at the start. There is some commonality between the assets and the thing overall, but there's also a degree of lack of commonality between some of the deficients. And I guess for you, how do you feel -- what is your vision for the business longer term? And what do you feel is the glue at the center of it. I mean like what is it that makes Solventum and is the key attribute that is going to be the most useful one to win and take back share basically?

Yes. So I think it's interesting there's so many different facets of who Solventum is. But if I take at the core, what we're going to keep from 3M is the intellectual property that we have that really does differentiate the technologies. You might think that a transparent dressing how differentiated it could it be. I can tell you that the Tegaderm technology that leverages a lot of intellectual property, different chemical formulations from 3M is phenomenal. I used to compete against it decades ago and it is still one of the strongest brands out there, and it has no pun intended significant stickiness. So it is an area that we're going to continue to leverage. But that intellectual property is very valuable to us. And that's why we negotiated with 3M that we would get field of use rights to those -- that intellectual property, which is hard work because then you've got to duplicate the process and you've got to bring it somewhere else, you've got to continue to leverage it. But that's a big foundation, and it does leverage -- that is leveraged across the businesses. So Medsurg, Dental, more than any others, but even Purification and Filtration uses some of that IP. HIS is different. It's a completely different business model. The connection point you could see with HIS again is you're calling on the same customer base as Medsurg, is there a way to drive some connective tissue between those 2 businesses. But if I think about the future of the organization, it's leveraging that intellectual property, the brand recognition we have in these attractive markets, but organizing and focusing our strategy so that we start to direct traffic with our spend, both commercially and research and development to get our fair share of those markets. And that's what we have to do. Now the beautiful thing about that is because we're in attractive markets, end markets already. It's a low-risk proposition. I'm not saying it doesn't take time. It takes time, but it's low risk. The probability of success is higher than if I was in a slower end market.

Maybe to shift to a few more short term and make sure of financial questions as well. You guys have called out Q3 tougher comps and so more of a flattish sort of a sales outlook comparatively. That's mostly comps generated. How do you feel about those expectations? What have you seen tracking into that still feel comfortable with that vision of the world?

I know you're going to be a manipulating the answer. He had got 7 minutes of it.

Happy to jump in on the financial one here. So we're not providing an update for Q3 at this point. But to reiterate what we had talked about is, just as you said, Patrick, is we do have a much tougher comp coming into Q3 and there's a couple of dynamics in the first half of the year that we also wanted to make sure people are aware of. We certainly had a much larger pricing benefit in the first half, as we annualize the pricing increase from '23 into '24, and that benefited the first half of the year quite a bit, and we're not going to see that. That pricing benefit is going to wane in the second half of the year. We also had a nice service recovery, back order recovery in our Medsurg business. That was a discrete improvement in back orders in Q2. We're not expecting that in the second half of the year. And so the guide for the full year, we are really happy to raise the positive territory now up 0% to 1%. We were just around 1% in the first half of the year. Taking out those two tailwinds, we think we're going to be somewhere in that range of negative 1% to plus 1% in the second half of the year. As the business continues to perform, and if we see good performance in continuity with the risk that comes with any separation, we did a great job of not feeling really any major problems from continuity in the first quarter as a public company. If that continues in the second half year, we can see us performing at the higher end of the range. So yes, so we're very happy to raise the guidance for the year. We're very happy with the continuity. We do have a couple of comp issues to deal with here in Q3, but the comps actually eased in Q4. So the net of those 2 quarters is what gets us to the full year guide.

Yes, make sure we don't get too excited in Q4 and the unrealistic numbers into '25?

Yes. You have to watch out for that for sure.

The -- on the margin side of things, there's always this sort of tension between wanting to invest incredibly heavily in the business and reposition it and drive the top line and take advantage of all those opportunities. And how that's like juxtapose between like having a stable margin or however that ends up shaping up. How are you guys thinking about the interplay between those two and also the like timing of it? Because you can front-load a lot of sort of work and sort of get it done early. But then also sometimes you can only invest so much in such a time period. So how do you think about the interplay between growth and investment?

You want to start?

Yes, sure. Happy to. You actually touched on it, Patrick. We're looking at levers to invest in the business. Our primary objective is to improve revenue growth rates over time. And as Bryan just covered really well, we've got strategies running in each of the four segments to improve our growth rates and get into that higher mid-single-digit market growth rates. We think we should be getting our fair share of those market growth rates. So we want to make sure we make the investments to improve our growth rates share, get our share of the market over time. And then as we think about the investments, we're also balancing that with efficiencies. So we have an opportunity with the spin to rethink the structure of our company. We have a project running we call Solventum Way. And that is really rethinking how our structure should be and how we can optimize it. As Bryan mentioned, we're doing a lot of work on culture and driving accountability and trying to move faster and making decisions and really trying to accelerate the business in order to achieve those higher growth rates. And really moving accountability and authority deeper into the organization, so people can make decisions and move faster. And some of that is removing layers or impediments and really making sure that we've got the right structure. We think we'll get some efficiencies out of that. So just as you said, what we're working on now as we move forward to launching our 2025 guidance and our long-range plan in our Q4 earnings call is assessing what is the right balance of efficiencies and investments. So we're working on that right now. We don't have guidance yet in that regard but it's an exciting opportunity for sure. We've got a lot of levers to pull.

I'll go on the record and say invest heavily, take it upfront, but that's a personal view. You guys have now been doing more of these public meetings and spending more time with the investment community and speaking to analysts. Is there anything that surprised you? I mean, obviously, the work that you're doing internally, you spend a lot of time on certain topics that may not get airtime externally. Do you think there's anything that maybe the market sort of underestimate or don't appreciate about running the business?

Yes. I mean -- so U.S. side, I think -- because you asked a lot of these questions, but not many people ask about culture. And I don't think people understand the potential implications of a culture shift. And so we don't get as many questions as I would have thought we would get in that area. And I'll just give you some views of it. Culture change is not easy. And particularly when you're moving from a slower, more hierarchical culture to a faster flatter culture, with accountability is one of the key metrics that we're going to focus on. That is a hard shift to make and structure is a part of it. Talent is a part of it and just modeling the behavior is a part of it. But what you find is you've got three groups of people in a situation like that. And this is what's important is you've got one group that is like hallelujah. I've been waiting for this. This is exactly what I want it to get out of the way here we go. You got another group that doesn't know that they can do it, but they can with the right modeling. And then you've got another group that just aren't going to get there. And that could be a sizable group. And those people will opt out. And what people have to pay attention to is what are the implications as those people leave the organization because they will not because won't necessarily even push them, they'll just know it's not the right environment for them. And if I just think about one of the biggest risk areas of that happening as we move very fast from a commercial standpoint is at the sales rep level, right? If we start to say, hey, listen, there's going to be more compensation tied to growth, not just because you have a pulse in your here. That could scare people. It could excite other people. If people lead does it risk revenue. And if I was in orthopedics in a 1099 structure, I would say that's a dangerous move to move too fast because they take business with them. In this environment, it's more contractual in nature, it's more W-2 in nature, and you have less volatility because you've got contracts in place. So you can get more aggressive in changing the culture and you benefit the organization versus driving risk in the short term. But I haven't had a lot of people ask me that because it's a natural consequence of changing the culture. But I feel pretty safe in this environment. Of course, we monitor it all the time, of moving very fast as a result.

I think you can't put culture in a mobile very easily?

Exactly, it is a long-term game.

Yes, exactly. Perfect. I mean I think we're almost perfectly in terms of time. So massive thank you for going through this. And thanks everybody for listening.

Okay, great. Thanks, appreciate it.

Thanks, Patrick.