Worthington Enterprises, Inc. (WOR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We will be highlighting Worthington Enterprises' top management, and thank you for everyone who has taken time to join this unique events. Over the nearly 15 years TRG has been in business, we've always valued the great relationships and not just contacts that we built with our companies, including Worthington. Joining us today from Worthington Enterprises is its CEO, Andy Rose; and CFO, Joe Hayek. Worthington Enterprises spun out of Worthington Steel, completing the spinoff on December 4, 2024. TRG picked up coverage of Worthington in January, and we've had the pleasure of getting to meet the management team over the past several months. For those who may not be as familiar with Worthington Enterprises, Worthington is a manufacturer of specified, niche industrial and consumer products with high barriers to entry and leading market share, all which helped to drive superior cash generation and fast-growing end markets. They operate 3 business units, Building Products group, Consumer Products group and Sustainable Energy Solutions. Before we get started, I'm going to turn it over to the Worthington team for a brief safe harbor statement.

Thank you, Kathryn. Good afternoon, everyone. Before we start, I'd like to note that certain statements made today may be forward-looking within the meaning of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those suggested. Please refer to our recent SEC filings for a list of those factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Lastly, today's event is being recorded, and a replay will be made available later on our website. At this point, I'll turn it back over to Kathryn.

Thanks so much, Marcus. And we're going to leave it to Andy and Joe to tell story. And I want to kick us off is just first of all, just tell us a little bit more about Worthington Enterprises. And what is the relationship between Worthington Steel and Worthington Enterprises has been and kind of the why now behind it all.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Kathryn. So Worthington Enterprises today is a leading, designer and manufacturer of Consumer Products, Building Products and Sustainable Energy Solutions. We service a number of different markets under those categories. In the Building Products segment, we have heating and cooling. We have a water business. We have two very strong and profitable joint ventures, ClarkDietrich and WAVE, ClarkDietrich being in the metal framing and accessories business, WAVE being in the acoustical ceilings business. And then in our Consumer Products space, we have 11 distinct brands and a variety of different consumer products in the outdoor space, the tools space and the celebrations space. And then finally, for Sustainable Energy Solutions, that is a business that is really helping bridge the energy transition through products in and around compressed natural gas and hydrogen. So a pretty unique product offering across some pretty attractive segments. The decision that we made a few years ago to separate the steel processing company was really one that we thought was a little bit of disrupting ourselves, if that makes sense. But what we had grown into was 2 very distinct businesses. The original business of Worthington Industries was flat-rolled steel processing, which is much more capital intensive than Worthington Enterprises. And -- but at the same time, it had some very attractive growth prospects. And so trying to be good long-term investors and good stewards of capital, it really made sense to separate the 2 companies so that both companies could have the opportunity to maximize their long-term growth potential. And so, we did the separation. It was effective December 1. Both companies have very low leverage, 1x debt to EBITDA or less, significant available capital and cash on their balance sheets. And so both are now well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them. And frankly, they're just different. Worthington Enterprises, we are much less capital intensive. We are pursuing an asset-light investment strategy. And I think the opportunity for us to grow our EBITDA margins, which are in the mid- to high teens, to low double digits, low 20s, I guess, is maybe a better way to say it, and also improve our return on invested capital, which is a key focus of ours. And we think we have a great opportunity to do that.

I want to touch on your JVs with the WAVE and ClarkDietrich. They're unique structures. First, just give us a little bit more of a background about those JVs. And just for those that are not as familiar, they're both very different in terms of exposure to new construction and R&R. Explain a little bit of the balance between those 2, really kind of getting down to what types of constructions help or hurt these types of businesses?

Yes, sure. So the history of joint ventures is we often enter into them when we believe we have a potential partner that's going to help make the business better. And so in both of these cases, they started out as relatively unprofitable businesses. So WAVE is 30-plus years old. Armstrong Building Products is our partner. And frankly, they had a small group business that didn't make much money and we had one. We decided to put them together, take the best of both companies, which in Worthington's case was metals processing, our culture, our philosophy, our incentive structure. And then in Armstrong's case, obviously, their strong brand, reputation, exclusive distribution channels. And so what helped make that business grow and be the success that it is today is really what's going to help continue that going forward. ClarkDietrich is a little bit different. That joint venture was born out of the financial crisis, and we had a metal framing business wholly owned, ClarkWestern had one, their owner was Marubeni-Itochu, which is a Japanese trading house. And both businesses were struggling to make money. And so both -- in this case, they were 2 market leaders. They were -- they were both leading players, national players in the marketplace, and it made sense to put them together, take the best of the products that they had, the locations that they had and lower the cost structure of the business. And today, they're the leader in the marketplace. They have the broadest product line. They have capabilities that other framing distributors do not have, like the ability to deliver truckloads of steel to a job site in less than 24 hours. So both businesses today are market leaders, which is something that many of our businesses are at Worthington Enterprises. They're a little bit different in terms of the markets that they serve. You hinted at this. WAVE is about 65% or 70% repair and remodel. And that goes to not just commercial office space, where everybody has seen the checkerboard ceiling, but they go into hospitals, they go into airports and railroad stations, they go into retail. And so while today, the commercial office market is not as strong as it has been historically, a lot of these other markets are more than offsetting that weakness. And so that business is doing -- continues to do well. And then the metal framing business is actually the opposite. About 65% or 70% of their business is new construction. But again, it crosses a broad swath of different industries, some of the same ones that I mentioned for WAVE, but also things like stadiums, when they're built so there's metal framing and a lot of the accessories are very important to just about anything that's built in this country. And so both of those businesses, while performing very well today also have pretty bright futures, we think, because of some of the underlying trends.

Speaking of trends, one of the things in getting to know these companies better, and then just in general, with our work, on just across the construction, industrial value chain. We find industries that went through fundamental changes in COVID. And their product was used for just one thing and one application has changed totally differently or something happened within an industry, and so they're getting outsized market share because of disruption in the industry. And I think the WAVE and ClarkDietrich have some of these aspects. Maybe discuss a little bit more what you've seen post COVID and how sticky some of these changes you think are?

Yes. I mean each of these businesses is a little bit unique, but COVID brought some unique challenges for most businesses, frankly. But, in WAVE's case, one of the things that we did see there is an uptick in when repair and renovation happens, it's not always that you replace the grid, sometimes you just replace the tile, but we saw an uptick in the amount of grid that was actually replaced. And even today with so many people have gone to work from home as companies are trying to draw people back to the office. They're doing a lot of renovations, where they change things up to make them more appealing for employees, and we've benefited from one of those trends or from that trend. In ClarkDietrich's case, one of the reasons that they are the market leader is because not only do they have the breadth of product line and the ability to do the deliveries that other people cannot nationally, but they also have the ability when times are tough and it's hard to get steel, they get steel. And that's one of the benefits of being a large buyer of steel. Worthington Enterprises is also a large buyer of steel, and I think you hinted at this earlier, but we still have a long-term purchase agreement with our Worthington Steel partner. And because they're one of the largest buyers of steel in the country, that enables us also to benefit from that. So having the Worthington Steel calling card associated with us, with ClarkDietrich, with WAVE, benefits all of those businesses because steel production is very inefficient. It's notoriously poor with respect to on-time delivery at times and lots of things can cause that, but one of them was COVID when you had a lot of mills, that couldn't staff their operations, et cetera. And so we were able to really take advantage of that. And I think when you're able to deliver to your customers when others can't, that just builds long-term loyalty.

Kathryn, everything Andy said, exactly right. There are a couple of other things. And it's hard to say, was it COVID? Is it the general political climate that we're living in? Or is it just the evolution of things here domestically, but a couple of things have happened that really have shined a brighter light on the capabilities and the competitive advantages that a lot of our businesses have, but certainly, it's true for WAVE and ClarkDietrich. And the first is innovation as it relates to scarcity of labor. And so there are fewer and fewer people in trades. That was exacerbated by COVID. 7 or 8 or 9 years ago, WAVE really set about to feel their customers' pain. And so if you're installing ceiling in a hospital, in a school, in a multistory office building, you have 2 types of costs if you're that contractor. You have your material cost and you have your labor cost. With labor costs, labor scarcity, they have spent so much time in so many really, really good resources on understanding the labor component and making their systems easier to install, faster to install, ultimately saving the users there significant amounts of money, and that's enabled them to keep and take additional share. ClarkDietrich has done largely the same, right? There are certainly -- we believe that there are benefits from -- that exude to all of the companies that were a part of through best practice sharing and things like that. But ClarkDietrich did something very similar understanding the components of a system. It's one thing to have steel studs and cross beams, but around corners, around doors, around windows, all of those accessories can really save time for the folks that are being involved in the installation of those products. The other piece that I think is worth mentioning is really around the types of construction that you're seeing in North America, right? It's reshoring or it's other things. You look at the -- I think -- everybody talks about commercial, right, and office vacancies. I think Moody's said at the end of 2023, it was 19-plus percent. That's as high as it's been in quite a while. And there's -- you read about potential fallout from a bank or from the tenant, landlords or whoever it is. Ultimately, people are going to own those assets, and they're going to want to have those assets occupied and they're going to want to have those facilities be as appealing as possible to potential tenants. And so that bodes well for the R&R market over time. It bodes well for both JVs. But even getting away from that market, you look at the reshoring and you look at data centers and you look at CHIPS facilities, right, all the money that's gone into infrastructure and all the things that are happening, I think 30% of the -- this might be like no relation, a Thompson report, right? But the 30%-ish of construction dollars now are going into manufacturing or clean room environments, things like that. That lends itself very well to grid ceilings, whether they're hardened from a data center perspective or not and also to steel framing studs versus wood because there's scale, there's load bearing and there's fire, natural disaster sensitivity. So these businesses are exceptionally well-run, but they're also in a pretty good spot, as Andy mentioned, as we look at the next 3, 4, 5 years, in part because of the secular trends that we think are going to provide some tailwind.

Okay. And so those JVs make up more than half of building products. So just in terms of earnings contribution, about 2/3 of it. But let's talk about some of the other growth categories within Building Products. And one of the reasons for spins is to be able to run a little bit harder and to really focus on growth is all of your business. But just sticking to the Building Products, what are the key growth drivers? Maybe talk about some of the products in -- are some of the secular trends like the population shift, the reshoring, is new residential construction always good for you? Maybe helping you to understand more on that the other parts of your Building Products group and growth.

Sure. Do you want to me to take that? So when we think about organic growth, right, it comes in 2 flavors. There's revenue growth, and then there's profitability growth. We want both. And we're determined to find both. But so when we think about our end markets, there's a handful of things that are trends that over the course of time, we think, will be our friends. In the large -- so we think about this as heating, cooling and construction and then the water business. And so it's a mix between repair, remodel and maintenance. A lot of times, actually, there is maintenance. So every time on our cooling business, every time you need to think about fixing, repairing or refilling your air conditioner, odds are that the HVAC technician has one of our tanks to put the puron or whatever the right refrigerant gas is into that system. And so that's going to grow with the population. And as people continue thinking about where they're going to live and how to live a more comfortable life, right, that's something there. In the very large propane tank business, there are a handful of applications there that we think are pretty interesting to us. We mentioned in December that there's some destocking going on in that business for us, and it's likely to continue for a quarter or two. But getting beyond the very, very short term, there are still 5 million homes in the U.S. that are heated by heating oil. A lot of these homes are in the Northeast. There are a number -- I don't know what the exact number is for Canada, but that's a market that we play in as well. And if you don't want to use heating oil to heat your home anymore, it's certainly about the dirtiest fuel you can think of. And so as people become more conscious of emissions, propane becomes a very good option for that household. And the spread between -- do we actually look at -- the spread between heating oil and propane has widened quite a bit in the last 1.5 years. And so we think there's kind of a long way to go in helping people make that transition. Our water business is pretty similar. It's a little more -- and our Building Products business certainly is exposed to new residential construction, our foam and adhesive business, the water business to an extent. But ultimately, there's a replacement component to each of those. And so as the economy grows and as people continue to move and recognizing that right now, interest rates are high and home sales aren't going gangbusters the way that they did. But all that returns to, I think, a more normal cadence over the coming months and certainly in the coming years. But the other piece for that growth is the profitability growth. We've mentioned that we have a couple of businesses that aren't running at full speed right now. We have a pretty well-owned playbook in terms of how to make those businesses better and we absolutely expect that over time, those business will improve their profitability. But then the other piece is really on NPD and new products. I don't know if you can see that, it says power core, it's that cylinder that's a shell right above the Worthington Enterprise is signed. That's what we call water-based adhesive cylinder. And, we launched that product for the first time in May or June of last year. It's a developing market, but ultimately, people have never been able to put water-based adhesives into a pressurized tank because the water and the solvents would erode and rust the inside of a tank. And just make it not a very good solution. We -- our engineers cracked the code there. And we're already iterating on the next generation of those tanks. And so when you see SmartLid, which is Internet-of-Things. And when you see power cord and you see things like that, it's certainly true in our consumer business as well. But the other piece of that growth, and you're going to see some growth through our ability to price, to raise price where it makes sense and hopefully, to buy well on our input cost. But then you're going to see innovation, and you're going to continue to see that. It's something that -- we've invested in for, gosh, the last 10 or so years. And I think, in the next 5, you'll see a lot from us, that might not be Grand Slam home runs, but there'll be singles and doubles, and those add up to pretty good enhancements in growth.

Yes. So -- and one thing I want to tease out a little bit from what you're talking about, the question is really focused on Building Products, but you definitely preferenced some of the Consumer Products categories. Is there more -- when you look at just building products, it's been our impression, there's more M&A opportunity, consumer products will get to. If you were to look at the earnings growth drivers for Building Products beyond the JVs, is it a balance of new products, M&A, better operations? What are the balance -- where is the balance drivers for just Building Products and we'll switch gears to Consumer Products.

Yes. I would say it's all of those. Frankly, Joe referenced, there's some base business improvement there that's already happening, particularly in the water business. But there's actually more and more innovation opportunities in the Building Products, the wholly owned Building Products segment, partly because it's just not historically been that sophisticated of an industry. And so when we bring things like the SmartLid, which is an Internet-of-Things lid we put on a big propane tank, so you can see the location and the fill level and the propane marketers don't have to show up and try and refill a full tank. When you bring that kind of capability to a market like this, you win, because other people just aren't sophisticated enough to do that. And so we're bringing those kinds of applications to a lot of our products. And I like to talk about innovation. It's one of our 3 key value drivers. Transformation, which is how we improve the businesses we have. It's kind of a lean based playbook, M&A and innovation. And innovation was something that we really started to be proactive about, about 10 years ago. And in all honesty, it's taken a little bit longer than I had expected to really get our sea legs on that front. But the sports analogy I sometimes use is you go from playing high school sports, to college sports, to the big leagues, when you're playing in the pros and we're definitely out of high school. We're at the college level now. The ball is rolling downhill. We have some extremely talented people that have cut their teeth at other very sophisticated organizations, and we're bringing that level of innovation into not only our Consumer Products business because everybody that's easy to see, but also to the Building Products space. And frankly, the opportunity to win there is arguably just as big or bigger because of the sophistication of the competition.

Okay. That's very, very helpful. Let's switch gears over to Consumer Products and then have you just tie them both together. But with Consumer Products, there are some applications that a little bit tweeners. There's some that you can clearly see like the tank that you have next to you, Joe, for parties et cetera., but then there's others they're not. Help us understand just very brief on the range of products, but perhaps more importantly, how do you track the health of this business? Is there a type of thing where you focus on Home Depot, low sales -- is it more general consumer spending? Is it more outdoor trends, which there are a lot. How do we track the trends and how the products is sold? And then growth on top of that.

So maybe I'll take -- what was the last piece?

And then growth on top of that, kind of the type you have built into the product?

So the -- so the answer in Consumer, in terms of how do we track it, there's not a great metric like housing starts, for example, where you can track residential products that are sold into residential housing. Each market is a little bit different on that front. And so the honest truth is there's not a go-to metric that we have. There are a number of things that we do look at. For example, our products that are serving kind of the outdoor space, like the little propane cylinder here. We can look at outdoor activity. We can look at some of the big box retailers like the REIs of the world that are servicing that space. This guy, which is a hand torch cylinder in our hand torch product lines. Obviously, repair and remodel activity is the big indicator. The big box retailers, Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace Hardware, who are all big customers of ours, we can track their sales activity to sort of look at that. And some of the other, I'll call them, tangential indices, like housing starts might be indicative of what's happening there. But there's not a great sort of one go-to metric. The opportunity in Consumer is actually, I think, pretty fantastic because we have, as I mentioned, this sort of great innovation capability. But over the past 4 or 5 years, we've really become a much more sophisticated consumer products company. And so I'll use a couple of examples. We bought 2 businesses, one a couple of years ago, one, 4 years ago, I think, GTI, general tools and then Level5. GTI had kind of a portfolio of different brands. Level5 was a drywall tools company. Each of those brought us a capability we didn't have before. In GTI's case, it was the first time we ever bought a business that was fully outsourced manufacturing. They don't make anything. They have designers, engineers, and warehouses. And that actually opened our eyes to a really unique way to develop new products, have them made by a third party. If they get to critical mass, then maybe we consider bringing the manufacturing in-house. Level5 was a different experience. It also was an outsourced manufacturing play, but their entire business had been built on direct-to-consumer marketing. So they didn't sell product through the big box retailers where we have great relationships. And so we looked at this thing and said, they have the best product out there. The concept which I've even learned recently, a challenger brand, right? It's a great product, but they don't own the market. We looked at that and said, "Wow, it's direct to consumer, it's the best product. We can go to Home Depot, we can go to Lowe's. We can go to Ace Hardware, Sherwin-Williams. And if it's the best product, they're going to want it. And so we can push it through a distribution channel that they haven't tapped into yet. And so as we think about the Consumer Products business and the growth prospects there, we have our own NPD engine where we're developing things in-house. But we can really accelerate that by going out and buying products that either don't have the capital, don't have the relationships or maybe you're only selling through one of the channels, not both of the channels. And so where we can bring a level of sophistication and really accelerate the growth of those businesses. And the one thing sitting here, this is the Halo pizza oven. We just bought a company a week ago that is in the growth space. And of course, it makes sense because we're already in the propane space. We make the fuel to make these things work. But this is a relatively small business with outstanding products. Started by 2 founders that needed capital, needed relationships, needed know-how to really take the business to the next level. We can help them do that. And so when you just think about there's always inventors and smaller businesses out there developing these products. We are now a natural platform to help them kind of take it to the next level. And so that that should be a model that works for us for a long, long time.

So it sounds like with -- on the Consumer side, in particular, you have the ability to -- the M&A flavor is a little bit different, in that you have the same innovation overlay that you have with your Building Products group, but you have either entirely new products or niche products that we have the opportunity to help with not only just putting it on your platform and synergies from that, but you can introduce these channels and really expand the growth in a way that the company that is a stand-alone could not. Is that a fair way to assess it?

No. I think that's 100% accurate. And it doesn't -- it doesn't mean we can't do larger M&A deals, more mature products that also have good growth prospects. It's just this model should be -- we should be able to do these -- a few of these a year for the foreseeable future and just really build out our portfolio. And really, I'll give you one example. So Level5, the drywall tools company was all direct-to-consumer. We went to Home Depot and said, "Hey, these are great products. You should try them." They try them in 200 stores. And the next thing you know, they want them in all their stores, okay? Small companies don't have the capital and the resources to do that for a large organization like that. So it's, I think, just a natural model where it makes sense for us. And the other aspect I love about it is we talk about innovation. I don't know how long it would take us to develop the suite of products that Halo has, but I'm pretty sure it'd be at least 3, 4, 5 years because they have a full line, pizza ovens, griddles, grills. They've got new products coming all the time. And we get that NPD engine that's already rolling. We also get their existing products, which are basically sold direct to consumer today.

Yes. That's great. So when you look at consumer products, how much of growth is driven -- and this may be an unfair question, but I'll still ask it. How much of a growth if you just look on a trailing 12-month basis, or forward 12 months, is driven by acquisitions versus internal innovation on -- and I would say, innovation for assets you've done for more than 18 months versus other aspects like just core industry growth and pricing?

That one is -- it's a little bit cyclical. As you know I mean post-COVID, there was a big surge in people spending less money on experiences and more money on stuff. And outdoor activities and outdoor equipment was a big part of that. And then so now, obviously, when the experience economy comes back, you see consumer retailers, especially outdoor, focus over the last 12 months, right? Those earnings have showed some of that moderation. The same certainly was true for us when we talked to people in December. But I think if you get into kind of a normal year in a normal cycle, you're going to have a portion of your growth that's just sort of GDP-centric. You're going to have a portion of your growth that comes from new products, and you're going to have -- if you're good, you're going to have a portion of your growth that comes from good smart M&A. The component pieces of that are hard to pin down on kind of a predictable annual basis. But over time, we think all 3 of those will be important for us to get where we want to go.

So it's not like M&A is driving 80% of your growth, that for overall, it would be a little bit more of a balance, just from a bogey standpoint, for consumers.

I mean we've said publicly, our goal is 6% to 8% revenue growth. About half of that, we think, will be from M&A and half would be from call it, GDP plus innovation, which is stuff. I would be probably disappointed over the next 5 years if we didn't exceed that. But a lot of it depends -- M&A is lumpy, right? You got to find the companies. You got to agree on value. Sometimes it's going to be a smaller deal like a Halo, sometimes -- if you do a $200 million deal, all of a sudden, you really bounced the needle on revenue growth. So it'll probably just depend on the types of companies and the size of those companies in terms of that mix.

Okay. Shifting gears to SES, the Sustainable Energy Solutions, which -- in my Louisiana terms would be a little bit like laying lagniappe, a little bit of something extra. It brings us to Worthington Enterprises. It's not the main course, and neither it can be a big side dish, but it's something that could be big in the future. But kind of big in the future. I think there's a lot of perception that's -- with SES is that well battery power is the only way to go. And if you aren't doing that, there's real -- not meaningful growth. Help us understand why -- where you think there may be some chinks in the armor to that? And then why CNG, what -- is there a market for CNG and help us understand, kind of why and your vision for that division.

So the reason we're in this space is, if you went back several years, we had a segment that was actually called Pressure Cylinders. And so we've been making pressure cylinders, we're world-class at it for decades, and we make all types of cylinders. We make steel. We make aluminum. We make carbon fiber. And, it was a natural extension of that business to sort of go into the CNG space first, which are steel tanks that a lot of buses, you'll see today are CNG-powered. They've got the tanks on top of the bus. And then sort of the nirvana, as far as going green for transportation and backup power is hydrogen. And the knock on hydrogen historically has always been a cost, it's not cost effective relative to other alternative fuels. There's been a lot of investment in that space, mostly driven by the government. And so we naturally -- I mean, we were making hydrogen tanks 17 years ago for Honda. And so we have the technical know-how. And the way we've approached it is, we are long-term focused in terms of how we invest. But we also want to be very good stewards of capital. We don't want to be wasting shareholders' money, having it burning a hole in our pocket for a decade, waiting for the hydrogen space to come around. So the way we've approached it is we've made a few select investments in places where we think the market will come sooner rather than later. And specifically, we have assets in Europe, which is moving faster to the hydrogen space than the U.S. has historically. And so we can use our old legacy steel manufacturing to make certain applications for the hydrogen space. So we make these hydrogen bundles, which are used to transport hydrogen and maybe give backup power or fixed distribution. But there's also the mobility applications where you make fuel tanks. And so we're trying, just like everybody else to figure out how fast this market is going to develop. But what we don't -- what we're not going to do is go spend a gazillion dollars, build an empire of assets and have them sit there and burn a hole in our pocket. So we believe in the market. It goes through fits and starts, for sure. But we're trying to maximize the return on all of our assets. And you said this one, it's not the main course here at the SES business. About half of that segment is old legacy industrial gas and about half is kind of the newer stuff. But the newer stuff is -- it's still developing. And we'll just have to kind of be patient, but we're also trying to be frugal with shareholders' money as we are patient.

So it sounds like it's about the newer stuff. That portion is really more of the margin -- relative margin drag versus the legacy. And so with any improvement in market with some of this more cutting edge, that's really where the real growth will come from that segment. Is that a fair statement?

It's fair. And maybe just a little more color on why that is. When you develop these new applications for hydrogen -- and this is a barrier to entry for a lot of folks. There are very stringent requirements, whether it's Department of Transportation, or other organizations in Europe, that require certain specifications, but then you have to go through testing protocols and basically get your product certified. And there's only so many places you can test, the testing centers cost a lot, their backlog. So it -- not only is it taking longer to do those things, it costs money to do it in the interim, so that you can get a product that then is qualified to be sold to kind of the end user. And that's why it is, you mentioned a drag on margins because there's an upfront investment even before you get to the point where you can make money selling the product. And that's the quandary, I guess, that folks face. And there's not a lot of businesses out there that are hydrogen-focused mostly that make money. And for better or for worse, we're in the business of owning businesses that cash flow and make money and generate higher and higher returns for our shareholders. And so that's the part we're trying to solve the riddle for.

Okay. Earlier in our conversation, you referenced about some of your margin goals. What -- and each different segment has a different margin profile. What are the biggest drivers for kind of your margin upside as you think about the business as a whole. And when you really think about what are the components of it, and I think if that's this year, let's say, in the next 3 years, what are going to be some of the bigger drivers for that margin upside?

Yes. So Kathryn, as you know, our LTM is roughly $280 million of EBITDA and $1.3 billion in sales. And so our EBITDA margin is 21%, right -- our adjusted EBITDA margin was 21%. And our long-term goals that we've talked about, and you mentioned part of this, 6% to 8% revenue growth over the -- over a reasonable period of time and then growing our EBITDA margins, right, to 24%. So taking them up into -- from the low 20s to the lower side of the mid-20s. And so we get there in a handful of ways. One, base business improvement. We've talked about some of that today in the last 20 minutes. We also have a market right now where you've got some headwinds in a handful of our businesses, right, in the Consumer space. We talked about that in December. And then certainly in some of the things that are happening in Building Products. It would be hard to say that the last 12 months have been fantastic from a market backdrop environment. And so we'll get base business improvement if we're good through running our playbooks and using the Worthington business system that Andy described, and just fundamentally getting better. We'll also, we believe, at least, over the coming several years, be in a more normalized Building Products/Consumer spending environment. We'll get reasonable contributions, I think, continued reasonable contributions from all businesses, including the JVs. But we also have to make smart, accretive M&A decisions. And so part of our planning, if you will, part of the Worthington business system is selective acquisitions. And so for us, that's going to be margin-rich targets. Not just because we want to say we acquired a company with good margins, but we view margins sometimes as a proxy for how valuable somebody is to their customers, right? If you make 5% margins, that's might be just fine in certain industries, but it goes to the value that you are being awarded for by your customers. So the higher the margin, the more sticky you are, the deeper your competitive moat is, so to speak. And then asset intensity as well, right? We want to make as much money as we can while deploying as few dollars as we can into the assets necessary to drive those cash flows. And as Andy mentioned, we'll continue to be focused on getting those things to be where it's more kind of institutionalized and thoughtful. And that ultimately, we believe, will drive free cash flows and more opportunities for us to redeploy that capital into higher returning assets and opportunities.

And Kathryn, I'm at the risk of piling on here. I think Joe touched on M&A, but our 3 value drivers that I mentioned earlier, transformation, M&A and innovation. Joe touched on M&A and how we will raise margins there. The transformation playbook, there's a number of different components to it, but -- on the operations side, it's lean based. That's about making your operation more efficient, reducing your unit cost, taking cost out of the operation. There's also a commercial side to that, which is our price desks and pricing strategies. So we think by employing both of those through transformation, you raise margins by not only raising price, that's probably the easiest way to do it, but lowering your costs. And so you get kind of margin expansion that way. And then innovation, one of the beauties of innovation is if you develop new products or enhance products, not only do you hopefully gain share because you have a better mousetrap, but also you can charge more for it because you're presumably adding more value. And so each aspect of our 3 value drivers really should enable us to raise margins over the coming years.

Okay. And as we're getting close to the conclusion of our discussion, want to pose one last question for you. Are there aspects of Worthington Enterprises that you think are either under-appreciated or misunderstood by either the industry or Wall Street?

Yes. I think there are probably two. One, I just talked about, which is the Worthington business system. I think sometimes people just don't understand exactly what it is, how the playbook exists, how it was developed. But I think we will endeavor to do a better job of talking about it and hopefully showing results from it. The other one is a little bit softer, and I think that is a culture of Worthington Enterprises. And, for those folks that aren't as familiar with it, the culture really is a reflection of something that was penned by our founder in the late '60s. It's called our philosophy. At the top of it, it's a set of principles by which we run the business. At the top is, we're in business to make money for shareholders and increase the value of their investment. It says we're a Golden Rule company. But it goes on to talk about suppliers and customers and the communities that we invest in. And probably one of the most important aspects of it, it says we believe in incentives, and that's profit sharing or otherwise. And so we actually have an organization that is incentivized from not only the top, everybody knows that the executives get incentivized, but all the way down to where we share profits with our employees. And what that's done over time is, it has created a performance-based culture. We have everybody that works, lives and works in Worthington Enterprises, thinks like a shareholder. They think and understand if we make more money, they make more money. And so what it does is it creates this culture of doers. We got all these people. They'll run uphill, through a brick wall. They just need the tools to be successful to help them do their jobs better. And that's why when we talk about the Worthington business system, the transformation playbook enables folks. It gives them a system to do their job better and accomplish their goals. And so we have top to bottom goal setting. We have the incentives. We now layer on the tools, and that just helps people do their jobs better, grow as professionals, and if it works, and we think it does, everybody kind of wins in the end. So it's a really cool thing. I came from private equity. Honestly, if you'd asked me 20 years ago about culture, I'd have said, "Yes, I don't know." But I will tell you, it is a huge competitive advantage for us. People are our most important asset, and I truly believe that. We just have this amazing culture of people that want to be successful and want to do well.

That's fantastic. Guys, thank you so much for your time today. We look forward to seeing you again in the near future. Some of you at the International Builders' Show, which we will be attending the end of February. And thanks again for your time today. Have a great week.

Yes, it's been great.

Thank you, Kathryn. Thanks, everybody, for taking time for us. Much appreciate it.

It's been great. Thank you.