Ready to go.
All right. I think we're live. Good morning, everybody. I'm Josh Chen, Business Services Analyst here at UBS. We're pleased today to have the APi Group join us. They inspect, service, and install building systems such as fire, security, elevators, and HVAC. They also provide infrastructure services to utility and telecom markets. With us from the company today are David Jackola, CFO, and Adam Fee, IR. We're gonna do a fireside chat, so feel free to raise your hand or you can find a way to enter your questions, and I'll get it in the iPad here as well. Feel free to let us know if there are any questions. With that, David, Adam, great to have both of you here.
Great. Thanks for having us, Josh.
Yeah.
Thanks, everybody, for coming.
Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for being here. I guess overall, maybe to level set the audience here, could you start by giving a brief overview about APi Group and some recent developments, and then we can get into some of the other topics?
Yeah, of course. And thanks again for spending some time with us today in person or virtually learning more about APi and our company. APi went public back in 2019. At that time, we had about $4 billion in sales or in revenue. And today, we are about $8 billion in revenue. We're a global market-leading business services provider of fire and life safety systems, electronic security, and elevator and escalator systems predominantly. We're focused on statutorily mandated recurring revenue opportunities with our inspection-first strategy. We operate in highly fragmented markets, both the fire protection, the electronic security, and the elevator/escalator market. We have a track record of growing our business organically and through a bolt-on M&A strategy. We've done about 200 acquisitions since Russ Becker's been our CEO, since 2002.
It's a muscle that we've built and a capability that we've built, and it's helped grow our business. Sitting here today, two of our big kind of advantages are our inspection-first strategy, which we'll talk more about later, and our core purpose of building great leaders and our investing in people, and particularly our field leaders as human beings. We feel like that differentiates us in a people-first industry like we're in. Again, a lot of momentum in the business. Thanks for having us today, and looking forward to kinda chatting more.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that overview. Maybe I'll turn to David here. It's been about a year since you've become CFO, but you've been obviously with the company for longer than that. Any observations from the CEO, CFO seat, and then how has your philosophy as a CFO kinda developed over the past year?
Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for that question, by the way, Josh. You know, first and foremost, it's just an incredible privilege to be a leader at APi Group and to work with such a talented team and 29,000 phenomenal leaders all around the world. You know, more than anything, it's just something that I'm incredibly grateful to be a part of. You know, second is the opportunity in this business is just extraordinary. We were all privileged to be in New York in May for our investor day where we laid out our 10-16-60 2028 financial goals, 10-16-60 plus. You know, the most, you know, I think the most powerful thing about our 13% goal at the end of 2025 was how firmly the organization was lined up in delivering that goal.
Over the last year, Russ and I and all of the leaders at APi have been really purposeful in lining the organization around our 10-16-60 objectives to make that be our true north star, and investing time to make sure that we've got alignment up and down the organization so that each and every one of our 29,000 people knows the role that they're gonna play in making 10-16-60 plus a reality. I think that's really important. The third observation, and part of this comes from my time spent in our international business, is how powerful and how important culture is. Culture is truly what differentiates APi from our competitors in our marketplace. It is what makes us a special organization.
The way that we invest in our leaders as human beings as well as professionals, and the way that we truly and fundamentally care about our people, our teammates, our customers, and our community. That is just something that we will continue to invest in and be a part. You know, I view my role as a senior leader at APi, the most important role I play is making sure that that culture is strengthened and perpetuated every quarter and every single year.
Okay. Yeah. Great. Thank you. The inspection-led model is obviously really important to you guys. Could you talk about what benefit that brings you and where do you see the inspection service monitoring business trending over time?
Yeah. So we're really intentional in focusing on leading with inspections, and that's part of our go-to-market strategy that differentiates us in the marketplace. Generally, the companies that we compete against lead with a project. They'll bid on a project, secure a project, and hope that that project will lead to follow-on service work. We really flip the model on the head. We've invested in an inspection sales organization that's going out and knocking on the door of the already built environment and selling inspections each and every day. You go in and you do a great job on that inspection. That inspection is gonna generate a deficiency report that's shared with the authority and shared with the customer, which generally leads to follow-on service work.
and we believe that for every dollar of inspection revenue that that deficiency report is gonna generate $3-$4 of follow-on service work during the course of a year. You know, in terms of, like, where we see this going, you know, approximately 54%-55% of our revenue today comes from inspection service and monitoring work. We're gonna make progress each and every year towards our long-term goal of 60% or more of our revenue, coming from inspection service and monitoring. That's gotta gonna have a, a powerful impact on our margins. Generally, our inspection service and monitoring work comes in at 10% and 10 basis point, 10 percentage points higher of gross margin than our contract work. It tends to be incredibly sticky. It generates that follow-on service work, and, most importantly, it leads to great relationship-based follow-on contract opportunities.
Okay. How competitive is the inspection business, you know? In a given geography, are there lots of other providers that can provide inspection capabilities to the market?
Yeah. It's a really fragmented industry, Josh. You know, any of our markets will have multiple, multiple companies that are playing. Generally, these competitors are smaller family-owned businesses. If you think about the economics of an inspection versus a project, you know, an inspection is generally a small ticket value, small invoice piece of work, maybe $1,000, $1,500 for an inspection, whereas a project could be $500,000 to $1,000,000 or even more. If you're a small family-owned business who's going out and figuring out how they're gonna plan their year, they're gonna find the six or seven project-based opportunities that they can have to generate their revenue and go forward. If they capture some service work on the backside of that project work, that's great.
If they do some inspections, that's great too. You know, they'll make an attempt to move into the service and the inspection space, but then when a project opportunity comes along, they'll divert their team and their resources over the inspection. We've built the discipline as well as the back office structure to be able to focus on this each and every day. That's really created a protective moat around the inspection part of our business. It's made it incredibly sticky, has led to that consistent and reliable follow-on service work, and allows us to propose on project work based on the strength of our relationship rather than bidding down to the lowest possible margin dollars.
It is a really powerful strategy, and one that our focus and commitment and dedication to executing it day in and day out gives a pretty strong and powerful protective motor on that chunk of the business.
Sure. So clearly, the focus kinda makes the business more sticky. Is there any structural benefits to scale in that inspection business where you can do it, just a better job than a smaller competitor?
Yeah. I, so, a number of different reasons. First, going in and knocking on the doors of the already built environment requires a dedicated sales organization. Over the past years, our North American sales leader has done an absolutely phenomenal job of building a world-class sales organization around North America that goes in and just crushes it year in and year out, delivering new work in inspections. We talk on our calls that for 20-plus quarters, we have achieved double-digit organic revenue growth on inspections in our North America sales business. That is just a testament to the great work that team is doing.
You have also got to be able to dispatch inspectors so you can make sure that they are being productive in their time, and that they know where they are going, when they are going, so that they can meet the customer there and provide a really high-quality inspection. You have got to bill, and you have got to collect, and you have got to follow up and follow up and follow up, as well as get the deficiency reports out and the follow-on service proposal. It does take an infrastructure that, you know, you have got to invest in, and it takes time to build that makes it really difficult for a competitor to come in and do what we do at the scale that we do.
Okay.
The only thing I'd add to that is, as we're in the very early innings of it today, but as you think about 29,000 teammates, most of them are out in the field every day layering technology over that group of people, when those are investments that we can uniquely make, with our scale, is gonna benefit them in the future. We've got some early things in pilot, like APi Chat, that has the codebook and some product manuals uploaded so our field leaders can voice query, if they see an error code on a fire alarm panel and get an answer right away instead of having to call the branch and have someone look up what's going on and give them kinda feedback and delay their time at the job.
It's, you know, the technology side there, and it's also as simple as just the best mechanical tools out there, from so there's something called the Hose Monster that allows the annual fire pump test to be done with one person instead of two people and be done more efficiently. All of our branches have that type of technology where, that's, you know, not, not a standard at every company to have, like, the latest and greatest technology for our field leaders.
Yeah. No, thanks for the call. You can afford to give your branches more productivity tools to drive that. Okay. Could you talk about the presence of private equity in this space? You know, do the PE-owned entities behave, compete any differently than other private competitors?
Yeah. So we have seen PE enter into our space. You know, I'll answer this a couple of different ways. You know, one of the important parts of APi's growth in our strategy is our bolt-on M&A strategy. We target each and every year to do around $250 million of bolt-on M&A at really attractive, you know, five, six, seven-time multiples. You know, largely in that area, we, you know, we bump into PE, but there's plenty of opportunities for us to go out and to acquire great businesses at five, six times, bring them into the APi family. The value proposition that we offer to target is different than what a PE company would offer.
We offer a forever home and a place where we value people, will invest in the people on these teams, will allow them to keep their legacy in the business. And oftentimes, most of the time, they end up staying with APi after acquisition, which is very different than a PE multiple or a PE acquisition. You know, on the larger, more platform size, we do see them in the M&A space, and they're driving up multiples for larger, for large, larger fire safety-type platforms. but generally, when we see them in the marketplace, like, you know, if you're paying 16, 17, 18 times for a fire business, you're not gonna be cutting price. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, they've kinda helped to drive price into the industry, which I think has helped everybody.
That's interesting. Okay. And then, I guess, when you talk about the growth profile of mid to high single digits for inspection service and monitoring, I guess, what does it take to grow that business at that rate? And, you know, how much is pricing a part of that, and how much is sort of organizational build-out part of that?
Yeah. We laid out our organic revenue growth algorithm at our investor day in May. On the inspection service and monitoring revenue streams of our business, which is about 54-55% of our total revenue, we expect that part of our business to grow mid to upper single digits year in and year out. That is a part of our business that is statutorily or code-driven, highly recurring. You have got to have your fire suppression or detection system tested for operability, you know, one, two, four times a year, depending on the code. That part is highly repeatable, highly recurring. That mid to upper single digits is going to largely come half from price and half from share gain as our inspection sales organization goes out and beats on the doors of the already built environment.
You think about, like, you know, we will need to then invest in inspection sales leaders in order to continue to improve that growth. You know, you think about when you get to an end state or mature state, like one IMA, which is an inspection sales leader, when they're ramped up and fully running, they're gonna generate enough business to keep four inspectors occupied. Those inspectors are gonna create enough follow-on business 'cause $1 of inspection creates $3-$4 of follow-on service work to keep three or four service technicians occupied.
You know, if you think about growing this out, it's gonna require consistent focus on price, investments in our inspection sales organization, bringing inspectors into the organization, and then service technicians to do the follow-on work, which takes, you know, the infrastructure that we talked about earlier around the protective moat to be able to do it.
Okay. I guess, given the regulatory support around the demand of the business, would you say that demand is pretty much a known entity going from year- to- year? Is that a fair characterization?
I think it'd be fair to say that the inspection service and monitoring revenue streams in our business are absolutely easier to forecast, are more predictable and repeatable in nature maybe than contract work. You know, I wouldn't say that it's, like, easy to forecast. It's not. But we like those revenue streams because they're predictable and they're repeatable, and they create this sticky customer relationship, that allows us to go after the right type of contract work with the right customers in the right end markets at the right gross margin, for APi Group.
If you wanted to, could you just rapidly scale up the organization, absorb some cost temporarily to grow that inspection business even faster than mid to high single digits if you wanted to?
It does not happen overnight. This is the analogy that I was sharing just a few minutes ago about, you know, you could go out and you could hire 10 inspection sales leaders and have them go at it. They could go out and generate work. If they do, you are going to need to find 40 inspectors. You know, it is not the easiest thing to find 10 inspection sales leaders. They have to have the right DNA. They have to be a great culture fit with our organization. They have to blend well with the branch. There is a lot of criteria that come into making sure that you have the right fit in this really important role.
Once you've found that, you've gotta go through the same process to find the right inspector who's gonna be a good fit with our culture, who's gonna invest in themselves as a leader and try to make their teammates better. It's not something that you can just hit a switch and go from 10 to 20 overnight. It's a consistent process and a consistent discipline and a consistent build that allows us to grow that business at double-digit year- over- year and quarter- over- quarter.
Sure. Okay. Thank you. Any questions from the audience? Okay. Maybe switching over to the project side of the business, it's been a very strong year in 2025. So what's driven the growth this year in projects that wasn't there in the prior year?
Yeah. It's a strong and robust project environment right now. You know, we talk a lot in our business around how end markets matter, and our business leaders are really intentional about focusing our field leaders on project opportunities in end markets that have the margin profile that we look for as well as some secular growth drivers behind it. The strength that we've seen really in the project environment in 2025 has been across a variety of end markets, including data centers, of course, advanced manufacturing, warehousing, semiconductors, critical national infrastructure, healthcare. The growth is really across a robust set of end markets.
You know, as we've been coming out of 2024, it was a year in which we were intentionally very focused and disciplined on projects and customer selection, partially in our specialty business. We were really careful about the type of work that we were doing and the margin that we were doing. We're coming off a year in which we contracted revenue in the contract side of that business. Now we're starting to grow off of that base, and we've got a really strong backlog against a diverse set of end markets, yet really healthy gross margin. We feel good about that space.
Mm-hmm. You mentioned data center is clearly a, an area of strength. How big would you say your data center business is? How fast is it growing? Maybe we can talk about sort of what capabilities you have, you know, to do work for the data centers just as a, as a big picture.
Yeah. I mean, we go out and kind of measure the amount of work that we do in various end markets once a year. I mean, we operate in a somewhat, you know, decentralized model with different systems. And so finding this data at the tip of finger point isn't easy. At the end of the year, you know, we estimate between five-6% of our revenue, give or take, came from the data center space. Data centers have absolutely been a part of our project revenue, contract revenue growth in 2025. You know, I suspect that we'll end 2025 at, you know, if we were at five-6% at the end of 2024, maybe seven-8% at the end of 2025.
You know, it's one of those things that's an opportunity that's in the market and that we're absolutely taking advantage of. We wanna be very, very focused and disciplined about not overextending ourself in the data center space or in any end market, for that matter. We're really intentional about the jobs that we do and the type of work that we do in the data center space. You know, most of the contract work that we're doing in data centers is really coming on the back of already in place inspection and service relationships. It really is a terrific example of our inspection-first flywheel strategy in action.
Mm-hmm. Okay. How do your operating companies kinda prioritize data center versus other verticals? You know, is the margin profile of these projects better than the rest?
Yeah. These jobs are data center projects are generally, you know, what I'd say is they've got a technical element to it that not every competitor in the marketplace can deliver against. They've got a size element that not every competitor in the market can deliver against. And they're in geographic locations. Like, the MEDITREX project is in the middle of Louisiana, and not a lot of competitors have a branch in the middle of Louisiana, but we do. So we're able to go out and deliver and execute against that work. Those three things, though, you know, put you in a position where we may be competing against one or two other competitors on a national scale who could do that work.
Because of the technical nature of it and what it requires, we're able to do that work at gross margins that are above our fleet average for project work.
Okay. Is it too early to think about the data centers that are newly built now being a source of inspection service monitoring, your revenue stream?
No, I, I don't think it is. You know, a lot of the contract work that we're doing in the data center space today is, like I mentioned earlier, on the back of the already in place inspection and service relationships that we have. It really just is a great example of how that inspection and service work is tightening the customer relationship. That tight customer relationship then opens the doors for high-quality, high-margin contract opportunity, which is then going to allow for follow-on inspection and service work.
Okay. So then, I guess, stepping away from data centers, as you look into 2026, what kind of, you know, verticals do you see strengths or weaknesses in terms of kind of end market demand from a project perspective?
Yeah. Great question. You know, I commented a few minutes ago on our backlog. And our backlog has been growing each and every quarter this year. We entered the third quarter with backlog at record level at really great margins. You know, as important as the size of the backlog is the quality of the backlog. The quality of the backlog is the type of projects, the customers that you're doing work with in the end markets and what you're doing work in. You know, our backlog as we exit 2025 is at good margin. It's at a high level. Most importantly, it is across a diverse set of end markets.
You know, one of the things that we talk about with our business leaders month after month, quarter after quarter is not over-investing or over-indexing on any one given end market. 'Cause at some point, like, there may be a slowdown in data centers, and we don't wanna be left hand, you know, holding the bag, with the revenue hold-up fill. We're really careful and selective in making sure that we've got a robust backlog against critical national infrastructure, healthcare, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution, as well as data centers.
Okay. You're not seeing any slowing in data centers at this moment, though?
Not at this moment.
Okay. That's good.
Not at this moment.
That's good. I guess the project strength has, obviously, been very positive for the top line, but there's been some margin impact in the recent quarters. Could you talk about kinda the drivers of that, you know, margin effect and then, you know, how that's expected to kinda flow through as these projects progress?
Yeah. So, you know, as we exited the second quarter and I guess a little bit in the third quarter as well, we, you know, our specialty contracting segment kinda had a point of inflection where they went from a decline year over year into some pretty significant organic revenue growth in the second and third quarter, largely on the back of a robust project environment. And, you know, just kinda the nature of projects is at the early stage of a project, you generally are conservative in where you mark your project and percent of completion accounting.
As you go through a project and you become more comfortable with your estimates, the work that you have in front of you, things like that, you're able to, you know, release some of that cautiousness and you kinda move your margin up, through the course of a project. We just ended up in a position in Q2 where we had a lot of new projects that were coming on board. We were annualizing against a time in 2024 where we were being really disciplined about project and customer selection. We were actually closing out projects at higher margin. It just created a year-over-year drag on gross margin on the project side of the business. Now as you get into Q4, you know, our margins on contract work improved Q2 to Q3.
They'll improve again Q3 and Q4 because you got more and more of these projects going from early to middle and middle to end stage, and you're in more of a natural project cycle rather than at a point of inflection. It's something that we'll see margin and margin expansion in our projects as we end 2025 and move into 2026.
Okay. So it sounds like Q3 was just kinda like a timing pinch point.
More of a timing compare year-over-year point than anything else.
Okay. Okay. In terms of the total company organic growth, you know, we talked about both services, projects. I guess on a blended basis, what's the right total company growth kinda going forward?
Yeah. I, you know, we'll keep going back to our organic revenue growth algorithm that we shared at our investor day in May. We're gonna consistently drive mid to upper single-digit revenue growth in the inspection service and monitoring part of our business. That's just what we do day in and day out. Half of that growth is gonna come from price. Half of it is gonna come from our inspection sales leaders knocking on the door in the already built environment. We'll be able to continue to move that. We've targeted our businesses to go after low to mid single-digit growth in the contract part of the business. Now, that's a little less predictable and, I guess, you know, forecastable as we talked about earlier than maybe the ISM stream. There'll be some variation around that.
We're at a point in the cycle where, you know, you target two to five and you end up getting upper single digits. There may be a point where it's a little bit low. Over time, you'd expect to see low to mid single digit on the contract, mid to upper on the service. That's gonna continue to push our service mix to 60% or higher and is gonna continue to be margin accretive in our goals and our path to our 16% goal in 2028.
Okay. I guess projects growth are clearly running ahead of that long-term algorithm. How important is it for you to manage the rate of project growth now in a strong environment so that there won't be like a tough comp or some disruption in that line kind of in future years?
Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, there is, there is such a thing as, as too much project work. And, you know, we talk a little bit about, you know, the only thing, the only thing worse than being, you know, not busy is being too busy. And, you know, to deliver a great project means you've gotta have a great piece of work in front of you in a great end market with a great customer. And that customer's gotta have a great project manager on the job. We've gotta have a great project on the job. You gotta have a great team around. You know, there's a finite level of resources.
You know, if you get to a point where you don't have a great project manager on the job, that's probably where you gotta, you know, put the brakes on contract work and focus on the stuff that you know you can deliver with high amount of quality, at a high margin for customers that you have relationships with through inspection and service work and is gonna lead to more follow-on inspection and service work.
Okay. Okay. Cool. Any questions from the audience? All right. Maybe talking about margins here, I guess you talked about the phasing of the projects, impacting kinda the incrementals this year. I guess looking past this year, what's the right range on incrementals going forward? And then, you know, how does mix factor into that?
Yeah. It's a great question. And if you look forward to our 2028 goals, we'll, you know, grow revenue organically at the mid single-digit rate. We're gonna have to capture 300 basis points, give or take, of margin expansion over a three-year period. Just the math of that suggests that you're in the 25-30% incremental margins as you go forward into 2026, 2027, and 2028. I would expect that 2026 is gonna be a more traditional inline algorithm, incremental margin year than 2025 was.
Okay. I guess outside of organic growth and leverage from that, what levers do you have to drive that 300 basis points of improvement over three years?
Yeah. The beauty about our 10-16-60 goals is that the same levers that got us to 13% adjusted EBITDA margin are gonna be the levers that get us to 16% adjusted EBITDA margin. And, you know, you kinda walk across and we'll continue to emphasize inspection service and monitoring work. Like, I think we've mentioned a couple of times, but that work tends to come in at 10 percentage point higher gross margin than our contract or project work. That mix effect is gonna contribute to our 16% goal. We'll continue to get margin accretive pricing on the inspection and service and monitoring revenue streams, which will help us towards our 16% goal. We're at the early stage of our procurement journey.
And we've got a real opportunity over the next couple of years to do a lot better at leveraging the size of our organization and the buying power that comes with that size, to drive down cost and to improve margin in our business. Over the last three years, we've been kinda building the infrastructure needed to be an $8 billion public company. And now that's at a point where we'll be able to leverage our SG&A costs as we grow organic revenue. And that's gonna contribute to the 16%. The most important lever that we've got in that business is really what we call branch and field optimization. That's just the opportunity that we have in each and every one of our branches, to be better in 2028 than they were at the end of 2025.
You know, if you think across our North America business, where our fleet average is around 17% or 18% EBITDA margin for a branch, you know, we've got branches that are below that. We've got branches that are bumping up or bumping over 30%. You know, there's the same type of profile in our international business. There's really no structural reason why any of our branches in North America or international can't be performing at a really high adjusted EBITDA margin. Part of the path to getting to 16% is each and every one of those branches taking advantage of the inspection-first mindset and going forward and leading with inspections and getting that service and then allowing that to flow through high margin contract work.
The more we do of that, the more we're gonna move on to 16% adjusted EBITDA margin. You know, one of the things I love about APi is we've got this friendly level of competition in our business. We're all kind of competing with each other to get a little bit better each and every year. Every month we stack rank the performance of our companies and our branches. We know who is at 30%. We know who's at 20%. We know who's at seven and 8 at the bottom of the list. If you got a competitive bone in your body, you're not gonna wanna be at the bottom of the list. You're gonna push your business harder.
You're gonna call the guys whose branches are at the top of the list, and you're gonna learn what you can do to make your business better so that you're moving, moving, moving on up. You know, I think that type of visibility and transparency, as well as the friendly competition that it inspires, is something that's gonna continue to propel our businesses to get better each and every year.
Sure. Okay. So you talked about going from 10 to 13 and then 13 to 16. I guess, you know, when you got from 10 to 13, you did have help from a really large acquisition where you were kinda taking out costs. I guess going forward, you do not necessarily have as big of a, you know, a lever perhaps. So do you feel confident that you can still achieve the same cadence of margins without a big cost takeout from, from like a Chubb acquisition?
Yeah. I think it comes down to the levers that we just talked about. I mean, you know, our margin expansion journey in the international business, even as we're coming out of the Chubb value capture program, is far from over. You know, we had a slide in our investor day presentation where we shared the median, you know, branch performance in international, and we shared the median branch performance in North America. Like, you know, I said it earlier, and I'll say it again, there's no structural reason why our business in the international market can't perform at the same level as our business in North America. It just takes time and commitment to the inspection-first mindset and the inspection-first model to get there.
You know, just because we're out of the Chubb value capture range doesn't mean that there's not an outsized opportunity in our international business to continue growing the top line, to continue growing EBITDA dollars, and to continue to move our margins upward in a meaningful way.
Okay. Okay. How does pricing work in the business? You know, do can you usually price at or above wage inflation, or how does that equation typically work?
Yeah. I mean, margin accretive pricing is, is part of our, our path and our algorithm to, to 16% adjusted EBITDA margin. And if you think about in, in inspection, like I think I mentioned earlier, an inspection is a relatively small dollar invoice piece of work. It could be $1,000. It could be $1,500. And if you think about that within like the cost to operate a building like the hotel that we're in today, that's a very small part of the overall cost of operation. If we were to, you know, commit to being here at 6:00 P.M. on a Monday morning to do an inspection and the parking lot's empty and the building's empty and like our customer is ready to go and we're not, like that's a real problem. And we've disrupted their operation.
You come in and you do a great job in the inspection and you, you know, you know that you're gonna be there and be reliable and do it each and every time you come in. Like your customer's not gonna take a risk at trying to save $10, $15 on an inspection and take on that kind of business disruption. You know, you've got a relatively small invoice ticket. You've got a high cost of fail system. And then you've got the stress on the operation if you don't deliver what you say you're gonna deliver.
Those dynamics put you in a place where you can go out and you can get pricing each and every year so long as you're delivering on your commitments, delivering a great inspection, and then delivering great follow-on service work afterwards.
Okay. Yep. Maybe, maybe switching to M&A here since that's an important part of the story. You know, how does the pipeline look currently? What types of assets are attractive to you, you know, at this juncture?
Yeah. Our pipeline continues to be, to be really, really strong. You know, we'll end 2025 right around our $250 million bolt-on M&A target. Our pipeline going into 2026 is strong and robust. And there's still, you know, ample opportunity for the foreseeable future to go out and to be able to bolt on small fire and life safety companies at really attractive multiples into APi Group. The pipeline in that area is really, really strong. As we get into 2026, you know, you talked about, you know, kinda entering the exiting the Chubb value capture phase and moving more into business as usual in the international business. Part of business as usual as a life safety company at APi is going out and applying that bolt-on M&A strategy.
As we go into 2026, we'll be more intentional and more focused on executing bolt-on M&A transactions in the international part of our business. We've also committed to building a $1 billion elevator services platform. We've got a long way to go to get to a billion dollars, and bolt-on M&A in that space is something that we'll be taking a step forward on in 2026 as well. I think, you know, generally, if you look across the portfolio, it's continuing what we do well in North America, and starting to really roll that bolt-on M&A strategy in international and in the elevator space.
Sure. The analyst, they also kinda contemplated the possibility of having some platform deals, as you call them.
Yeah.
You know, what does that entail, and how do you decide when or what is the right platform deal for you?
Yeah. Great question. So first and foremost, you know, we're gonna be disciplined in our platform M&A. That's part of the core and part of the DNA of APi's M&A strategy. And that's first and foremost. When you think about platform, it's gotta be a good geographic fit. It's gotta be a good strategic fit. It's gotta be consistent with our long-term financial goals or accretive to it. And most importantly, it's gotta be a great culture fit. And you, you think about those criteria, it's a pretty high bar and a pretty high standard. So we'll continue to be really disciplined and intentional about platform opportunities. And when the opportunities come along that fit those criteria, we'll be in a position. We've got, you know, flexibility in our balance sheet, to be able to, to do platform-type M&A.
It's just about being disciplined and finding the right structure and fit. And then you think about the makeup of the business. You know, I think we've got the legs of the stool, so to speak, as, you know, we've got a really strong fire alarm and electronic security business in, in our international business. And we've got an opportunity to do more of that in North America. We've got a really strong fire suppression sprinkler business in North America. We've got an opportunity to do more of that internationally. And then you've got the elevator space too.
Okay. Maybe lastly, for the businesses that are in your portfolio, do they have to meet certain criteria to kinda remain in the portfolio, and any businesses that could become less core over time?
Yeah. So, we've been pruning our portfolio, so to speak, for the last couple of years. And our 10-16-60 framework that we laid out in May, you know, really caused, I think, all of us to look in the mirror and to assess all of our businesses and all of our branches against that framework. You know, it isn't to say that every business in APi needs to be a 16% Adjusted EBITDA margin business. That's not the right standard. But every business within APi has to be accretive to that 10-16-60 framework somehow. And if a business isn't, we've gotta look in the mirror and think, can we make it accretive? And if the answer to that is no, then we've gotta think about, you know, different, different portfolio type decisions.
Sure. Okay.