All right. Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for joining. My name is Stephanie Moore. I'm the Business Services Analyst here at Jefferies. We're very pleased to have APi Group with us again, a couple of years in a row at least. Very pleased to have the team with us. We have Russ Becker, CEO. We have David Jackola, CFO, and then Adam Fee with Investor Relations. Thanks for joining, guys.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you.
Great. I'm going to kick it off with a series of questions. At the end, if we have time, certainly happy to open it up for Q&A in the audience. I think I'll start with probably the more obvious question in this environment. Maybe if you could talk a little bit about the demand environment for your inspection and monitoring services, as well as across specialties.
Demand, especially when you look at the inspection part of our fire and life safety business, none of the noise that's going on from a macro perspective impacts that at all. One of the reasons that we like the space as much as we like the space is that it's the statutory nature of it. A commercial office building, regardless of whether President Trump is adding more tariffs onto India, doesn't matter. They still have to do the inspections of their fire and life safety systems for functionality and operability. From an overarching demand perspective, in general, things continue to be strong and robust. I think that we've said this really pretty consistently that the end markets that you choose to play in really do matter. End markets such as data centers, advanced manufacturing, healthcare continue to provide really robust opportunities, and we continue to see that in our business.
Proposal activity remains strong. Our backlog continues to grow. I think when we released our second quarter numbers, we shared that our backlog was in excess of $4 billion for the first time. We're seeing really good demand in the business, amidst all the noise that you're seeing come out of Washington, DC.
A question we get a lot is, what metrics should we look at as we think about just the overall or what we should monitor? In terms of commercial activity, new construction, ISM activity, I think a lot of that, there's growth, as you said, in data centers, but for the most part, industrial is pretty weak. Is there anything that you can kind of point us to, or as you stated, does it really come down to the end markets you choose to play in?
There are a few things that I would point you to. Number one, just like as it relates to us, we talk about how our North America safety business has had double-digit inspection growth pretty consistently going all the way back to 2020, every quarter. That's a key data point for us and something that we continue to monitor. We look at all of the data points that are out there, whether that's FMI has industry-specific data by end market that you can follow. McGraw Hill has stuff. I don't pay as much attention to the architectural billing index, but all of those things provide data points as it relates to the overarching health of the industry.
As you're aware, we've continued to try to build and focus our model on the inspection first, with this inspection first mindset, continuing to build our inspection, service, and monitoring businesses to a higher proportion of our total revenue. At 2024, I think we finished 2024, 54% of our revenue coming from inspection, service, and monitoring. That continues to be important for us so that there's less reliance on the lumpiness of, say, the project space.
Absolutely. I'm going to touch on the inspection business in here in just a minute. Just to round out the project space, you did call out on your last call the record $4 billion project backlog. Can you talk a little bit about the visibility you do have into project timing and kind of customer capital allocation decisions for 2026 that are embedded in that pipeline?
Our average project size is probably three to four months with the work that we do. Our backlog from a coverage perspective is probably closer to 12 months in general. As we work our way into the back half of 2025 and we start talking about having a $4 billion plus backlog and you start thinking about roughly 12 months of total coverage there, you can see that we've got really good visibility and line of sight into what 2026 is ultimately going to look like. We feel good about that. For us, I think as part of that, the quality of the backlog is just as important, if not more important, than the backlog. That's really been an area of focus and emphasis for our business leaders. We feel really good about what we're seeing, what we're hearing from our customers.
We even have people reaching out to us looking to, what would be the right way to put it, I don't know if formalized is really the right word, but to enhance working relationships and building partnerships because of some of the demand in semiconductors, data centers, and things like that. Some of these project sizes are so big that you need to have the right partners in order to be able to execute in the timeframe that your clients are demanding.
Absolutely. Thank you. Maybe switching to the inspection services side, as you noted, it has continued to grow at a really nice clip, even through 2020 and the like. As you think about that growth, how would you characterize the major drivers? Is it new business wins, growth of existing customers, pricing?
It's a little bit of everything. I think for us, everybody always wonders about price and stickiness and everything else. The reality of it is that we're building price into our inspection agreements. We're trying, our sales leaders are incented to sell longer-term contracts, so their compensation is higher for selling a five-year inspection plan versus a three-year versus a single-year. We're building price right into those agreements. We are taking price and continuing to take price, and that price is sticky. I think one of the unique things for us, though, is that we continue to build out that inspection sales leadership across the portfolio, and we're taking share. When we start talking about double-digit inspection sales growth, there's an element there that's going to be price, obviously, but we're taking share because there's very little material included in that.
It's mostly labor, and you're actually selling the inspections, and you're taking that from somebody else.
I guess it's just a follow-up. You know, who do you think you're taking share from? I mean, it is an industry that appears to be consolidating. A lot of mom and pop, and you know, PEs definitely have been involved, some mom and pop. How would you characterize, I guess, the competitive landscape and then who you're taking share from?
Even with some of the consolidation in the industry, the industry in general remains highly fragmented. I would say, in general, you're taking share from small family-owned businesses. You don't see, you know, even some of our peers that, you know, like EMCOR has, you know, a fire protection business, but their fire protection business is focused primarily on project-related work and not focused on the inspection, service, and monitoring piece of it. To have a really robust inspection, service, and monitoring business, you need to have bricks and mortar. You need to actually have physical locations in communities in order to be able to properly service those clients. That's really how we've built our business versus, say, just booming into town, doing a large project, and then packing up our bags and leaving.
Absolutely. As you think, I don't know how many years forward, how consolidated can this industry become?
I mean, if I had a crystal ball, Stephanie, the reality of it is, like, I don't even really lose sleep over that, to be honest with you. If you think about it, we're the largest player in the space. If you look at every major metropolitan market, in, like, just say the United States, we have for sure less than 10% of the market, and I would say probably less than 5%. I know Buffalo is not Houston, but just to give you an example, we've had a company that we've owned in Buffalo for a long period of time. We did a small acquisition in Buffalo and bolted it onto this business. Our team thought that they were crushing it. They thought, man, we've got Buffalo locked up.
The woman who leads national sales for us, her and her team were out there for some training and development stuff. They did a market study and analysis, and we only had 4% of the market. Our team thought they had, you know, like 50% of the market share. I can tell you, we can go to St. Paul, Minnesota, we can go to L.A., we can go to Houston, and we're going to find the exact same thing. The opportunity to continue to build our business is really robust and real. It's not some fictitious thing. It gets me excited. The reality of it is, even with the entree of private equity into the space, that doesn't really concern me either. The reason it doesn't concern me is because companies that want to sell to private equity probably aren't going to get through our kind of analysis.
I talk all the time about the different gates that we use when we evaluate potential acquisitions. The most important of those gates is culture, values, and fit. We want, you know, we're going to own these businesses forever. We're not selling the business in three years. We want companies to join the APi family that fit our culture. They don't have to have the exact same values, but the values have to align. I always kind of make a comparison to Thanksgiving dinner. If you have a choice when you're inviting people to Thanksgiving dinner, excuse my language, you're not going to invite an asshole. You don't always have a choice for Thanksgiving dinner. Everybody's got those family members that, you know, maybe fall into that category. If you have a choice, you're not going to invite an asshole.
It's no different when you buy these small companies and you bolt them onto your business. You're inviting these people to a permanent Thanksgiving dinner. I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to know that I just want to work with really good people that share kind of our value system and are going to be additive to what we're trying to accomplish. If all they care about is price, then they should sell their business to private equity. If they care about a forever home for their team and finding the right place for their people to land, then that's us. That's how we're going to continue to build our business.
Got it. Two follow-up questions to that because I think it's important. The first is, how do you generally measure culture? I think, Russ, especially at your Analyst Day this year, you talked a lot about the importance of culture. You obviously just talked a lot about it now. How do you constantly manage the culture of your organization as you grow, as well as as you evaluate new organizations? Maybe if you could talk a little bit about just your focus leadership development program as well.
I could take the next 20 minutes then. It's kind of like I'm going to try to separate them. Like assessing culture during the M&A process. When we're looking at small bolt-on type M&A, geographic fit is important to us. The services that the business offers are important to us. The financial profile of the business is important to us. Culture, values, and fit is the most important gate that we have to work our way through. The only way you assess that is by spending time with these people. I've got my own little funky things that I like to do, which includes going out to dinner with people and seeing how they treat the wait staff and the hostess and those types of things. You tell a lot about people just walking around their business.
We have one of our business leaders, a newly acquired company that's with us. I was just in their office, just, I don't know what, four or six weeks ago. Not even that. You walk through and you can just tell. This is a funny story. Anyways, I walk into the office and there's a picture of me on the front desk. You know what I mean? I'm like, that's really weird. I go turn it over. Every workstation in every office, they had a picture of me in it. It was actually like you couldn't make it up. It was so damn funny. The next thing you know, I'm walking into somebody's workstation just to say hi to them. I'm looking for the damn picture. You know what I mean? It was the weirdest thing. One of the guys that was traveling with me stole one of them.
I showed up on Monday for a meeting and he's got one of those pictures on the conference room table. My point in sharing all that is there's culture there. These people love their work and they love what they do. That's what we're looking for. When I think about APi 's culture, our culture at APi is centered on our enduring purpose. Our enduring purpose is building great leaders. We've been on a journey of leader development since, really, 2003. In a business that's structured like ours, where we have 500 branches across the world, every person in our organization deserves to have a great leader. It starts at the company level or the country level, then it moves to the branch level, and then it moves to the department inside the branch. Every person deserves to have a great leader.
We've actually moved to a point where we say this all the time. That's one of our foundational beliefs at APi , that everyone everywhere is a leader, which means that every person in our organization has the opportunity to be a leader. It's just that your role is different, and that's OK. When you think about leadership and leader development at APi , we look at it through like it sits in three different pillars. The first pillar is leading self. The second pillar is leading others. The third pillar is leading teams and businesses. Every single one of us, including me, has an opportunity to be a better version of ourselves from a leadership perspective. What am I doing to improve my leadership in how I show up every single day? I think it's something that's important to us.
When I think about APi and everything else, like everybody, you ask somebody what keeps you awake at night, the first thing they're going to say to you is, can't find enough people. I just call kind of BS on that. That's an excuse. We've all known that this competition for good people, we've been talking about it for seven years. For me, it's like, what are you doing about that versus using it as an excuse? I view that as more of an excuse. For me, what keeps me awake at night is culture and how do we continue to not only maintain our culture, but build our culture. For us, it's centered around our purpose of building great leaders and the investment we're making in every single APi team member around the world from a leadership perspective.
We want to invest in people as human beings, versus training and all that other stuff that comes with it. It's a big part of who we are.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
That's how I get a little excited about it.
I do think it's important. It is a people business at the end of the day. On the same thread, as you think about your inspection for strategy, through our conversations, we've talked to maybe some competitors or some smaller players. We really haven't heard of many that follow that approach. I guess, could you walk through maybe just the competitive moat that you created with the strategy, why you don't think competitors have followed? Maybe it is to some of the culture you just outlined, but maybe just talk about the strength that you get from this inspection for a strategy.
All right. I'm going to answer this one. You got to ask these guys a question. I think that, you know, number one, again, going back to this highly fragmented nature of the industry, and you're still competing mostly with smaller family-owned businesses, to build a really robust inspection sales execution kind of piece of your business takes resources, it takes time, and it takes energy. You know, if you're a $15 million a year company, it's a lot easier for you to go out and, say, book a $750,000 new installation project than it is to build $750,000 of revenue $1,000 at a time. Your average ticket size for an inspection is going to be about $1,000. It takes a tremendous amount of infrastructure to execute all of that work, because you got to have somebody sell it. You got to have somebody dispatch the inspector.
The inspector's got to go do the work. There's the deficiency report. Oh, by the way, we have to invoice for the work. We have to collect it and all that stuff. It takes infrastructure there. Typically, when the industry would see slower periods of time, you see people try to migrate towards, like, I've got to build a robust inspection service and monitoring business. As soon as the industry recovers, they just snap right back to doing project-related work. For us, we have that infrastructure. We've been on this mission for an extended period of time. We have those resources there. For us, we're at a position now where it's scalable. As we continue to add inspection sales leaders, we're backfilling with inspectors. We're backfilling with service people to do the pull-through service work. To me, that's the biggest, biggest part of it.
We saw actually a small company that came up for sale that had a similar philosophy as us, that we were interested in potentially acquiring. For whatever reason, it didn't work out. Small firm, you know what I mean? For whatever reason, it just hasn't been adopted. It takes hard work. That's probably the biggest thing. It's not easy.
Got it. I'm going to give you a break, Russ, and maybe kick it over to David. We can talk a little bit about margins here. On the margin front, I think we've talked a lot, or you guys have talked a lot about branches eventually getting to 20%+ EBITDA margin. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about the levers it takes for the kind of percentage of your current business that is still trying to reach that level.
Yeah, absolutely. At the investor day, we shared a chart that had the margin profile of our branches. If you look back at 2019, I think something like 9% or 10% of our branches in North America were north of 20%. In 2024, that number was closer to 40%. When you think about that, it first starts with the leader of that branch. When you have a great branch leader, great things happen. We talk all the time about how having a great playbook is important, but if you don't have a great quarterback who's leading that playbook, you're not going to cover a lot of yards. It all starts with the leader. Second, I think, is really adoption of the inspection-first mindset that Russ talked about earlier. We've got branches that are at various stages in that journey, but the adoption of that inspection-first mindset.
One of the things that we started to talk more about is this critical point in a branch's life journey where they're able to cover their entire overhead cost from the gross margin that they generate from inspection, service, and monitoring revenue. When that happens, that's really when the magic in the branch starts to happen. It allows them to become so much more focused and so much more disciplined on the projects and the customers that they're selecting. Not only are their inspection, service, and monitoring margins moving upward, but you're able to get really accretive gross margins on the project side as well. That's really the playbook in getting to that critical point where your overheads are covered by service work, which allows that extra level of customer and project selectivity.
Maybe just as a follow-up, as you think about, obviously, you have a lot of branches all over the world. Is there anything unique you can point to certain branches? Does it matter what market you're in? Does it matter, pricing, growth of that market, retention, when it comes to kind of ultimately hitting a 20%+ branch-level margin profile?
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. We believe that every branch within our network has the potential, with the right leader and the right mindset, to be a 20% margin or more. No issue there. One of the things that we do across the business is we rank order and we stack order the performance of our branches all around the world. We share that performance with our operators. One of the most important things we talked about, over and over again, is mindset. In the international business, when I was over there for the last two and a half years, when I joined, they did not share branch performance across the business. Everybody was going along thinking that they were delivering 12% adjusted EBITDA margin and they were doing a great job. They didn't know that there were businesses within international that were north of 20%.
You show them what's possible and you get those competitive juices flowing. All of a sudden, you start seeing performance across the network improve, and that's really important.
Sticking on the margin front, maybe switching a little bit to the projects or specialty side of the business. I think on the quarter, you did talk a little bit about margins just being pressured just given project starts. Could you talk a little bit about maybe the margin trajectory as projects progressed and then how we should think about just margin expansion in the second half of this year and just as more project starts come online?
Absolutely. I'll talk about the two different reportable segments. In specialty, our margins were down year- over- year largely due to project starts, as we mentioned. We expect margins in that segment to improve sequentially Q2 into Q3, Q3 into Q4, and then be year-over-year accretive as we get into 2026. In the safety side, I think you'll see margins in the back half of the year improve sequentially much at the same rate as they did in the first half.
Got it. At your Analyst Day, you did provide some medium-term margin targets, I think, in total consolidated margin of 16%. As you think about the trajectory of hitting that target, how would you kind of outline the path to hit those targets over the next couple of years? As you think about any major tailwinds, how should we think about the major buckets as well?
Great question. Largely, the levers and the drivers that got us to our, well, we haven't finished 2025 yet, but the midpoint of our guide is north of our 13% 2025 adjusted EBITDA margin goal. Largely, the levers that got us to 13% are going to be the same levers that get us to 16%. It's investments in systems and processes that will allow us to grow our SG&A at a slower rate than we're growing revenue, the mix impact of inspection, service, and monitoring, which on average has a higher gross margin profile than contract work, being really disciplined about the customers and the projects that we work on, getting margin accretive pricing year-over-year, and benefits of procurement. Most importantly, the improved performance of our branch network year-over-year. The drivers really haven't changed.
In terms of cadence, this year, because of the mix of project work that's driving our revenue growth year-over-year, will be maybe a little bit lighter than the margin expansion that we saw in 2024. We haven't started the 2026 budget process yet, so I can't give you a great answer of how that'll go 2026, 2027, 2028, but my expectation is that it'll be largely consistent across a three-year period.
Great. Just being mindful of time, I do want to touch a little bit on M&A. Russ, you talked on some of this a little bit, but maybe digging in a little bit further, wanting to get a sense of, and anyone can answer this, but wanting to get a sense of your appetite for maybe larger deals. We talked a little bit about the Talking NF deal and that pipeline remains robust, as you noted. Now that you've digested Elevated, talking about your appetite for maybe doing something the size of Elevated or even bigger, and then kind of what area of your business you would be most interested in or if there's any new services you would look to enter into.
I think I can comment on your last part of your question first. As it sits right now, I'd say not necessarily looking at adding another leg to the stool. I feel like we have a lot of work to do building out our Elevator business. We've said publicly that we see an opportunity to build out a billion-dollar-plus platform there, and we're really just in the bottom of the first inning on that journey. I feel like there's a lot of work for us to continue to do that. All that being said, if the right opportunity came along, we would dig in and do some work on it. Appetite for something bigger, like I don't look at Elevated like it was a very big deal. The headline number might have been fairly good size because we paid up to kind of get our entree into the space.
Basically, it was just north of a $200 million business from a revenue perspective, so I don't really view that as being very big. We'd do something like that tomorrow, you know what I mean? If that opportunity came, if the right opportunity came along, something bigger, I think that we've shown that we're pretty disciplined. If the right fit came along for us, we're always kind of doing some work in the background and digging in on certain opportunities. For us, it's really about finding the right fit and businesses that are going to be accretive to our long-term goals and objectives. Are we doing anything, like, you know, Chubb-esque right now? No. Are we sticking our nose underneath the covers on a few things? Yes, you know what I mean? There's nothing that's imminent.
If there's something that fits us, we'll do the work and make sure that it is the right fit. I'm not really answering your question, but the answer is yes, if it's the right fit. We would be interested and willing to take a peek.
Great. You touched on Elevated a little bit. I do want to touch on that a bit. You've owned that asset for, you know, over a year now. As you think about, you know, what are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned from that business, cross-selling opportunities? How have those kind of materialized? Maybe combining sales teams. Would love to get a bit of an update on just that asset.
It's not an asset. It's a company.
Sorry, company.
It's a company. It's a whole living, breathing organism in it.
You can tell they've never run a company, Russ.
These guys are wondering if I was going to bust your chops about saying that. You know what I mean? I hate when people call our businesses assets because an asset is this table. Companies are people. To me, there's an important differentiation there. I apologize, Stephanie. We're happy with where that business is at. We think that there's, like a lot of these companies, they have a tendency to take a little dip post-acquisition because everybody's so focused on getting the deal across the finish line that they kind of take their eye off the ball on the day-to-day stuff. We saw that in Elevated just like we see it in probably 90%+ of the deals that we do. We're really happy with it. We bought another elevator company. We call it a tweener because it's not quite a bolt-on, but it's not quite the size of Elevated.
We're continuing to expand in the space. We see the opportunity for those businesses to perform at the same level as our life safety and security businesses. Super happy with the business. We've taken one of our best and brightest and put this individual in charge of our elevator business. We're calling it an APi Elevator. As we continue to build out that platform, not everything's going to be bolted on to Elevated. We felt like we needed to dedicate some additional leadership to the space as we continue to build it out. I'm fired up. We're hopeful that we'll get something done here in the next month or two, which would be more of a pure play bolt-on to Elevated. That will be a good test for that business.
I didn't say this when I was talking about the hurdles that we evaluate bolt-ons through, but one of the hurdles also that I failed to mention was the company that we're bolting it onto has to have the ability to take it, accept it, and integrate it. Elevated hasn't done any sort of bolt-on even going back three years, I think, prior to us owning the business. We need to buy one, go through that process of integrating it, see how that goes, before we go and buy another one. The pipeline is really, you know, we're building a nice pipeline of opportunities in the elevator and escalator space. I'm really optimistic.
I think, you know, the investment we make in people, the culture that we have, you know, kind of our branch-led operating model that we have allows these businesses, the sellers who become leaders in our organization to maintain some individuality and the, you know, being entrepreneurs in their businesses is attractive. I think we're going to be an attractive place for people to sell their businesses in that space, just like in the fire and life safety space. I'm really fired up about it.
Great. I've monopolized a lot of the time here. Anyone in the audience with questions for the team while we have them?
Talk a lot about.
It's not going to be done yet. I think there are tailwinds, not just on the project side, Brad. I can easily see that, more on the inspection side. Is there anything? Could it get a little bit easier if you had a couple of points to the earthquake there? What do you think?
I think positive economic times are going to be positive for everything in some way, shape, or form. When you think about the inspector goes through and does the inspections on a building, they're going to identify things that are deficiencies. Some of those deficiencies, the code is going to mandate that they make those repairs, and some of it, the client gets to decide whether they want to make those repairs. If everybody's a little bit more flush, you know what I mean, are they going to be more likely to spend a little bit of that, some extra dollars on some of those discretionary items? Yeah, for sure. People are going to be thinking a little bit differently about things maybe that they've deferred and put off and all that stuff. I think that really robust positive economic times is going to help every aspect of our business I do.
All right. I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Thanks, Stephanie.
Thank you.