Coming in, but let's get started again. We're very excited to have APi Group with us today. We've got Russ Becker, who is the CEO, President of APi Group, and David Jakola, who is the CFO. Russ, as I sort of make my way to you, let me ask you kind of a softball question. Like, you know, you've been CEO of a public company now for about five years, right? Like, maybe biggest challenges and what you're most proud of so far, and then, you know, maybe it's a very unique business model, as you and I have talked about many times. So what keeps you ahead of the crowd? What, what keeps you differentiated?
Oh, what am I most proud of? Survival.
That's why I wouldn't ask you the question, because I knew I'd get a colorful answer.
Yeah.
Come on.
You know, you know, it's funny, we just were having a conversation, you know, like, when we were privately held, everybody talks about, "I never wanna be a public company CEO. I never wanna be a public company CEO. I never wanna be a public company CEO." And I've actually been having a lot of fun-
Mm-hmm
... as a public company CEO.
I think it's actually made me better.
... at my job.
And, I feel like I'm a better CEO today than I was, you know, five or six years ago. And, you know, one of the biggest challenges, and this is really not the answer to your question, but one of the biggest challenges is: How do you balance delivering a quarterly result, delivering a yearly result, yet also having the ability to take a longer view?
You know, like, so like last May, you know, we launched our 10/16/60+.
... you know, kind of the next three years of our, where we're gonna take the business. And, like, you have to be able to look out that far-
... and to make good decisions and choices, yet deliver on a quarterly and yearly result. That's not always, you know, as easy as certain folks in this room might think, and the pressure that you have to deliver that quarterly result can be tough. I would say that one of the biggest challenges, you know, is just around this whole idea of SOX, and compliance, and. Probably the biggest surprise was actually the lack of SOX compliance inside-
... the international business. And, you know, the Chubb was, Chubb was a public company for many years, going back to United Technologies and Carrier.
And yet, they were a long ways away from actually being compliant. And so, you know, even so there was that aspect of it, and then but as the private company, there was, you know, that's just that whole regulatory environment, and, you know, all the stuff that comes with that was a big lift, you know, for our business. But, you know, like, what am I most proud of? Like, the fact that we've been able to basically grow the company from, you know, $4 billion to pushing $8 billion, and yet continue to enhance our culture. You know, and our culture is centered on our purpose of building great leaders, and I think that's, like, something that is unique to APi.
I think probably one of the least talked about aspects of APi is the strength of our culture and the quality of our people, and it's because of this investment we make in them as human beings and as leaders.
That's a good answer. Then maybe just to follow up on that, Russ, like, so again, the competitive advantage of the company, like, you lead with inspection-
... goes to service. Why do you think competitors haven't been more aggressive, or can they copy you? And, you know, it seems like you can grow yourself mid- to high-single-digits in that world, inspection service, for the foreseeable future, but, do you worry about capacity constraints at some point or other market headwinds?
You're, like, the master of asking questions-
I asked, like, five questions in one.
You know-
You know that. Yeah, but you're used to that. You call me out all the time.
You know-
Yeah, go ahead.
... it's just, like, I'm trying to keep track of all the q-
All right
... seven questions that you just-
Differentiation.
Yeah.
Like-
Well, I mean, the biggest differentiation, you answered the question for me-
Yeah
... is this idea of inspections first, and then it's like, "Why don't people copy you?" And, I think that if you, if you really take a step back, yes, there's been private equity enter into our space.
But the reality of it is, the majority of our competitors remain small, family-owned businesses.
Yeah.
For those small and family-owned businesses, it's much easier for them to grab a new installation project, say, a $1 million installation project, versus building up a really robust inspection department, you know, $1,000 at a time.
Yeah.
We've been at it for an extended period of time now. We've built up the infrastructure that it takes to support, you know, building a robust inspection service and monitoring business, and I think that's something that's played to our advantage. You know, we've built out a really, really robust branch network, and that's supportive to having a robust inspection service and monitoring business.
So even if you look at, you know, one of our largest competitors in the space, they don't have the same branch footprint that we do. So they're booming around the country, doing large install jobs.
And that works for them. That's where their interest lies, but that's not how we're trying to build our business. We're trying to build our business with, you know, the inspection-first mindset, and I think that's one of the biggest differentiators. And it takes effort.
... to build that out, and we feel like we have the scale to continue to grow it. I don't know if—I think one of your questions in there was around, you know, like, will we run out of runway? The answer is no. If you look—you know, if, like, if you just take the largest metropolitan areas in the United States of America, I don't think there's a market that we have more than 5% market share.
And so for us, and our ability to continue to drive inspection growth, which leads to pull-through service work, the opportunity is boundless.
I knew you could keep track of my questions, so there you go.
I try.
You, you're pretty good at it. So this one might be for you, Russ, or for David. Like, you came out today, you served my next question, which was about, you know, update on the quarter, because you kinda gave us that. So, like, any sorta highlights that you wanna talk about? I think you guided, within your algorithm, sort of mid-single digit plus organic. You know, margins look pretty good, I think, versus the street. Any sort of highlights you'd talk about as you left Q4? I think you said you'd be better than the midpoint of your guide for Q4. So any highlights you wanna talk about? What drove the business? Any highlights about the guide? Obviously, we'll find out more when you report next week, but we kinda force you into this every year, so sorry about that.
Sure. I'll give it a go. You know, the fourth quarter was, you know, as we described it in the press release that came out earlier this morning, a lot like Q3. There's a lot of great momentum in the business, both on the service inspection and monitoring revenue streams, as well as on the project work, and our business is being propelled by a really strong project environment right now.
Fourth quarter was our best quarter of the year from a year-over-year margin expansion perspective. We felt confident that our margins were gonna improve second quarter into third, third into the fourth.
And they did that, and so as we exit 2025, we're going into Q1 in a really good position. The backlog's strong, there's a lot of momentum, and nothing really that looks to knock us off the momentum in the business right now.
Got it. And just, you can not answer this question, David, but just seasonality in 2026, normal?
Normal.
Okay, thank you.
How come he gets the softball?
Yeah, I'll give you more softballs. So but to that point, David, and maybe this is for Russ, like, you've talked about general strength Safety Services, but maybe what's driving the organic growth as you transition to 26? Like, I know we don't like to talk about specific projects, but is it all the same areas, data center, advanced manufacturing, semiconductor? Any other I'm not mentioning, and generally the same things as 25?
Well, I mean, I think for us, critical infrastructure continues to provide opportunities more so in Specialty Services space. Healthcare continues to be-
... you know, robust. You know, you hear more and more people talking about life sciences, which creates opportunities, especially in certain, you know, pockets-
... you know, in the country. So, it's you know, there's a lot of opportunity out there if you're in the right end markets.
I often think to myself, like, I shouldn't ask Russ the question of TAM, because each project is different. At the same time, the more complex the project, the more there's a need for inspection and service, right? Like, so, you know, these big data centers have more TAM for you guys, as an example.
Well, for sure. I mean, you know, a new data center that comes on, you know, like, I've shared in the different investor meetings that we've had this morning, you know, one of the biggest things that's changed, like, with the new build size of, or new build component of data centers, is just the size-
... of the projects. And, you know, just because the data center installation work is worth $50 million, doesn't mean you're gonna have $5 million a year of inspection, service, and monitoring. It's gonna be significantly less than that, especially in new facilities.
'Cause you're not gonna generate the same pull-through service in a brand-new facility-
... that you would in an older facility, and that goes for data centers, just like it goes for warehouses-
Everything.
... just like a medical office building. And so, you know, for us, like, we wanna make sure that we're taking good care of, you know, our data center customers that we're doing their inspection, service, and monitoring today. That leads to, you know, a different environment when you're, you know, proposing on the work.
Because they're more interested in you because of your ability to get the work done safely with a high degree of quality in the schedule and the time frames that they've laid out. And that's what's important for us, but we clearly... You know, our priority as a company is to grow the inspection, service, and monitoring of our business first and foremost, and the project work is gravy.
Just, is the project work... Like, 'cause maybe two years ago, you know, we started asking about data centers, right? And, to your point, you wanna lead with inspection and service, but given how much demand is there out there, can you find projects that are better than you thought in terms of pricing or, you know, install margin or whatever you wanna talk about?
... Well, the short answer to that is yes.
All right?
Now, in the same breath, you are, you are committing resources to these large data center projects.
Yeah.
So you're taking resources from some place.
So, like, for us, you know, because we have separate departments for inspections and separate departments for service-
... we're not taking resources from there.
We're taking resources from different project opportunities-
... and putting them on data centers.
Yeah.
And so if you're going to sacrifice other, you know, project opportunities-
... you need to make sure that you're getting a higher margin, you know, on the work that you're doing, and you should. These data centers, the size and the complexity of them, they're not super complex, but the size makes it complex.
They're in remote locations.
You know, more and more often, they're in remote locations because they're being sited next to available power.
You know, like, one of our clients has a project in northern Louisiana, and not everybody can man a project in northern-
... Louisiana. We can.
You know, and because of our ability to do that, you should, you should be able to price that in.
Yeah.
You know?
I agree. Is data centers 10% of the business, something like that?
What's that?
Is data centers 10% of sales, something like that, or-
So, well, actually, I thought it was about 10% of sales, but apparently I was corrected this morning. It's 8%-
Okay
... revenue in 2025. Probably headed towards 10%, in 2026.
Okay, helpful. So maybe an update. You mentioned your branches, and so one of the big sort of things that you're doing is branch optimization, as you've talked about many times. And so at your last Investor Day, you said a little less than 10% of your branches in North America were not very profitable. That means under 10% margin. While you had 40% of your branches internationally that were under 10% margin. Maybe you could update us on the progress of getting these kinds of branches up. Like, I would assume you're making progress, but you tell me.
So at our Investor Day last May, we reported that our North American Safety branches' median margin was 17%.
Internationally, I think we said 13%.
You know, we will improve on that over the course of this year. I would guess that it'll be some place around 100 basis points.
We will be able to move that median-
Great
... to the right.
We have an established goal that we want every one of our branches to perform at a minimum of 20%.
And so obviously, there's opportunity there, for us to, you know, continue to work on it. You're always gonna have a straggler or two, that, you know, that you're dealing with for a myriad of different reasons, and that's kind of the nature of it when you have as many branches as we do.
Yeah.
But that median will continue to move to the right, and I've got a lot of confidence that we'll be able to do that.
Russ, I mean, I think you've done a good job, especially internationally, versus what most people thought Chubb could do, you know, way back when. So to that point, like, when I see still 40%, you know, that are relatively low margin, how hard is it to get those branches, you know, to back to, like, I think your rate that you wanna be at international is 18, right? So how difficult is it? 'Cause it seems like that would be the low-hanging fruit, right? To go after the least profitable branches. But it's easy for me to say, as I just sit here. It's a lot harder to do it.
Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that people have to understand is that a really high-performing branch, it's got nothing to do with the playbook.
It's got everything to do with the branch leader.
It's got everything to do with the branch leader. And so, you know, you know, like, we've been on this journey of leadership development since 2003.
You know, so we have a 20-year jump, you know, in North America on the international business as it relates to, what does that look like? And in one of our meetings this morning, we actually, somebody asked about, like, "Where do you branch leaders come from?" And almost every one of them is promoted from within-
Yep
... which means that we're growing and developing and you know, bringing the right people into our branches that ultimately can take on a branch, you know, leadership role. I mean, that's been a 20+ year journey, and our international business, you know, we're four years into it.
So they're just, they're behind, and, you know, it's like, it never moves as fast as you want it to.
But until you can, you know, really ascertain and determine, like, "Do I have the right leader at this branch?" you know, you'll never, you'll never get there. It's like I joke around all the time, this is my favorite time of year, 'cause I get my favorite report of the year.
That's my rolling five-year branch history report. It's revenue and EBITDA.
... every branch in the company.
And so I can see if it's going like this over five years...
... this-
... this.
If it's going like this-
You know what to do.
... well, you have to start asking yourself, the first question you ask yourself is, "Do I have the right leader?
Yeah.
Then you have to be able to, you know... If you can ask yourself that, then you have to be able to answer yourself objectively.
Right.
Yes or no?
Right.
And if the answer is yes, then you're gonna take a different path. If your answer is no, you're gonna take a different path.
Yeah.
Sometimes answering that question objectively is harder than you think it is.
Interesting. It's good Specialty Services, you know, the growth over the last several quarters has inflected. I think you're waiting for some bigger government projects to start, but maybe what changed in your business to allow that inflection? I'll keep it to one question for now, and then keep going.
Can you say that again? I didn't-
Specialty Services is inflected, and you know, I think you're waiting for some bigger government projects to start, but what else happened in the business? Like, you're obviously exposed to telecom, utilities, so where is the growth inflection coming from in Specialty?
Well, I think you gotta, you gotta take even a step further back.
And if you, and I'm sure you remember this, but, you know, like, some of that was purposeful on our part-
Of course
... where we were, you know, had an increased focus on project and customer selection, and very specifically and purposefully pruned-
... some of the project work, you know, that we were doing in the segment. And it took us, you know, a little longer, so to speak, for that to kind of turn and get headed back in the right direction. And we feel really good about, you know, the end markets that we're in in Specialty as well. And so leadership matters. I think one of the things that we did, you know, we realigned the HVAC-
... piece of our business in Specialty. We feel like the leadership there is better, in a better position to help that piece of the business. I'd also tell you that the leadership inside the HVAC businesses stepped up their game-
... and, you know, are delivering a much better result, you know, on top of it. So I think there's a combination of things that have happened there that have allowed that business to really get going, you know, in a really, really solid direction.
Got it. So Russ, just, like, so was it more that, you know, you cleared out the, in quotes, "lower margin projects" or whatever, in 2023, 2024, and then you kind of allowed the business to grow again in 2025? Or did something else happen in the market? So was it more... Because you had, to your point, you had controlled projects for a couple of years. So was it more, you got everything out, and then you, you allowed Specialty to grow, or did something else improve, like, one of the main markets or maybe a competition?
Well, I mean, there's an element there, too, Andy. Like, we learned, as we went through this, you know, you kind of alluded to it, but, like, we took on a government, you know, a government program that, you know, as we built into kind of our projections and our forecasts, government were ramping, like-
Yeah
... in a scale like this.
Yeah.
Like, that's a mistake-
Government
... anything government-related, you know what I mean? Like, and so our people learned a hard lesson on top of it.
Yeah.
So, you know, on the project side of your business, and this is one of the reasons that, you know, we're building our business to be inspections first.
... and service first, is that when you dedicate resources to a project, and a project slips, you still have those resources. So what are you gonna, what are you gonna do with those resources? So, like, in this government program that I alluded to, you know, it slipped dramatically, you know, out to the right, and you still have those resources, and it's gonna have an impact on your business, so you have to plan accordingly. And I think that was a valuable lesson that our business leaders learned-
Yeah
... is, like, plan accordingly, and budget and forecast accordingly.
Yeah. Discount when you need to.
Discount where you need to.
Yeah.
You know, the reality is, we could have taken other programs, because we had available resources, but we didn't think we had available resources.
Got it. It's helpful. I'm gonna open up to the audience in a second, but let me ask you one more question about Specialty here, around margins. So, like, margins may be a little more sluggish to turn than growth. I mean, it does seem like margins turned positively recently, but do you see sort of more consistent positive inflection now? And I think you've talked about a lot of initiatives, right? You've talked about project execution, fleet optimization, G&A efficiency. Did they begin to kick in now more significantly?
Yeah, we expect... We, you know, going all the way back, I think, to the second quarter of last year, we said that we would see sequential margin improvement across Specialty-
... as we worked our way through the year, and you saw that.
Well, you'll see that, I guess, when we release next week. Maybe I'm giving you some foreshadowing.
Yeah. You know, you already reported this morning, so you're fine.
You know what I mean? But, I'm not worried about it, actually.
Yeah.
And, uh, um-
... but, so you know, that we expect to see margin improvement in that business as we continue throughout 2026 as well.
Yeah.
We have the same high expectations from margin in Specialty as we do in, you know, in Safety.
Maybe they'll never quite get there, or they'll always be chasing it-
... but the expectations for margin improvement are there.
Any questions from the audience? Anyone want to ask a question? I'm gonna get a question from the audience one of these days. Okay, so price versus cost. I think you've said many times that a margin-accretive pricing is very important to the business. So maybe, has that evolved as you've been a public company? Like, you changed at all how you price projects or...?
Project specific or just pricing in general?
Inspection and service, pricing in general. I shouldn't have said projects. I should have said pricing in general.
Well, I mean, actually, they're kind of two different animals-
Okay
... you know what I mean? Because your project work, you're pricing it in real time.
Yep.
You have to make a decision as you price the work on what your margin expectations are.
You know, but you should be taking that price, and you should be, so to speak, maximizing the pricing opportunity in every one of your projects.
You know, I think inspection, and service, and monitoring, you have to be more disciplined in how you look at price on a year-in and year-out basis, in making sure that you have escalators built into, you know, your agreements.
If you're taking on, say, five-year inspection contracts, you need to make sure you have adequate price built into those, into those agreements. I would say that we have, for sure, gotten better and more sophisticated at how we look at price. I'm not even gonna say since we've become a public company, but since we acquired Chubb.
David can speak to this because he lived it, when, for the 2.5 years he was over there. But, you know, like, they did leading up to our acquisition, they did a poor job of taking price on a regular basis-
... if at all.
We inherited a number of, you know, poorly priced contracts that we had to be very aggressive on, and I think that provided actually a wake-up call to the North American Safety business, saying, "Oh, maybe we need to be thinking about price a little bit about a little bit differently.
I think we've gotten better because of that. I think, really, it's more because of how poorly Chubb had done it-
... had been, a lesson learned for the entire organization. I don't know.
No, I think that's, I think that's spot on. And, you know, like, delivering price year-over-year is really about having a mindset that the services that you're providing in the marketplace command value, and that, that, that we owe it to our, our shareholders, to our teammates, and to our field leaders, to be getting that value for every, every work that we do. And just getting that mindset into our teammates is really the discipline that it took.
I mean, the reality of it is, Andy, when you think about, like, an inspection-
... you know, your average inspection-
... is $1,000.
So, if when you think about the whatever facility it is, the annual budget for that facility-
... if it's $1,000 or $2,000, it's, like, really nothing.
Noth- yeah.
And so-
It's really, really important.
... And so, like, if you're doing a kick-ass job, you know, of taking care of that facility, and that property manager, and that building owner-
... whether you're priced at $1,000, or $1,100, or $1,200, doesn't matter.
Because their time is worth $200.
You know, and I think sometimes folks lose track of this idea that, like, how much of a team sport the inspections are.
You know, 'cause you're going into these facilities, and, you know, you're interacting with the property manager or the building owner. You know, you're tripping fire alarms. You might be running water, which means you're flowing water out into the parking lot, which means you have to maybe, you know, cordon off part of the parking lot, so people's cars aren't in the way, and all of that stuff. Like, these property managers, they... You know, I shouldn't say they don't care about $200, because I'm sure they do care about $200-
... but they also recognize the fact that their time, you know, is worth $200. You know, so-
Yeah. Yeah. So I don't worry about price versus cost for you guys, really, but, you know, commodities are volatile. Sometimes you have exposure to metal piping, things like that. Do you guys feel good about price versus cost right now?
100%. I mean, we watch it. Every Monday, we get kind of an update on, like, what's happening in certain commodity prices.
You know, the one that I focus... I suppose I focus on, too, but I, I primarily focus on hot-rolled coil-
Yep
... 'cause that's an indicator of what's gonna happen with pipe prices.
And, you know, we've seen, I would say, a slow increase, like, which I'm gonna say, I'm gonna put into manageable-
Okay, yeah
... category. I also watch copper, too, but-
Yeah
... but primarily, I watch hot-rolled coil. We talk about it all the time. You know, we have what we call monthly leaders' calls-
... where we probably have, I don't know, David, 250 people from around the country, or around the world, participate in these leaders, leaders' calls. Probably every other month, we'll have a procurement update, you know what I mean? Where they're providing updates on what's going on inside procurement, but also, what's happening with commodity prices. If we start to witness any sort of, say, rapid, you know, escalation in commodity prices, you know, we're talking about, like, protect yourself, you know, at the time of your proposals, when your proposals are going in. So like, you know, even, even, you know, before President Trump won the election, you know, in his previous administration, he used tariffs as a hammer. He ran on tariffs.
Like, so if you didn't know he was gonna you know, use tariffs as a hammer, then shame on you.
Yeah.
And-
Yeah
... so we feel like we have been out in front of that wave, you know, since day one, you know, in protecting ourselves, and everything else. So, I feel like we've done a pretty good job-
Yeah
... on that front.
... cellphone, then obviously M&A is an important part of your overall strategy. I know you've committed $250 million of bolt-on M&A per year. I think you've talked about taking a step forward, adding to elevator service platform to get closer to that $1 billion in revenue, and then adding maybe to your international business this year. So can you give us more color in your M&A pipeline? Can you find deals at reasonably attractive valuations?
Yeah. So like we've been sharing, you know, through the course of this morning, the pipeline remains really robust-
-for bolt-on M&A. And I would tell you that the pipeline is maybe opening a little bit because we've opened up the aperture to the international business.
And so we've got some really good stuff going on in the international business for really the first time since we've owned, you know, Chubb.
Yep.
Which is, you know, which is exciting for us. So, feel like, you know, we're still able to buy bolt-ons for, you know, 5x, 6x, maybe 7x. But what you'd consider reasonable multiples to acquire these companies. Companies that are in that 20 million - 30 million or maybe 40 million of EBITDA, especially in the fire and security space, continue to attract a lot of PE interest-
and they drive up the multiples.
They're paying, you know, very, very high multiples for these businesses. You know, we recently announced the acquisition of CertaSite. We're really excited about this business. It's not a huge company, you know, it's ±$90 million in revenue.
We paid a healthier margin for this, or multiple for this business-
... but 90% of, plus of their revenue is inspection and service work.
That's what you like.
And so it's, like, straight down the fairway, you know. So from a strategic fit, it's not like we just bought more-
Yeah
... and paid, and overpaid for it.
Yeah.
This is a great strategic play for us. So we're excited, and we're really excited to welcome, you know, the CertaSite team, you know, into the APi family. But you're still seeing a lot of pressure in that $20 million-$30 million EBITDA kind of range from private equity. As it relates to the elevator space, like, we're really, really excited. We did one deal last year. It was more of a tweener.
So it's a standalone business that sits next to Elevated underneath APi Elevator. We have a number of real, real live bolt-ons that we're working on right now in the elevator space, that that I suspect that, you know, will get done in relatively short order.
We're taking a walk before you run approach in the elevator space. Let's get one done, get it integrated, see how it goes, learn our lessons, and then we'll go do another one.
But we 100% see the opportunity to take that business to $1+ billion in revenue.
It's good to hear. Russ, I mean, you did, as you know, 'cause you showed a scribble on a napkin, you know, the 1-2 deals to get to $10 billion. We're expecting that at some point over the next few years. I think, David, you were at a competitor conference talking about fire alarms, electronic security, fire suppression, elevator service, all areas where you already had a leg, but you could add to it with a larger deal. It seems like from what you're saying, Russ, Russ, on the $20 million-$40 million, that it's harder to do larger deals right now. You tell me, I don't wanna put words in your mouth. You know, a bigger transformational deal, when? It's probably not if, it's probably when.
I would say that when the time is right.
Okay.
How's that?
That is, I mean, it's-
You know
... succinct.
I mean... Well, I mean, I think the beautiful thing about where we're at today is we don't have to do anything.
That's a great place.
You shouldn't let me push you into something.
I'm not going to.
Good.
That's one thing I-
Yeah
... nobody here has to worry about, so-
Good, good
... but we don't have to do anything. You know, we constantly, you know, look and take a peek under the covers, you know, at larger, you know, transactions, and it's gotta be the right fit. Feel like we've demonstrated our capability of doing larger-
... transactions with Chubb.
But we still have to be disciplined in how we look at these larger deals, and make sure that it's the right fit for the business. And, I mean, everybody, you have, you have our word on that, that we're gonna be disciplined that way.
Then I have to ask you the obligatory Safety and Specialty together question. So any changes in the thought process? I mean, you obviously have a good strategy to make them both better, you know, but maybe you can talk about, are there synergies these days between the two businesses? Like, how do you feel about them? And if someone came and offered you a bag, would you take it, you know—one of those? What's that?
Well, the old adage that everything's for sale-
Yeah
... everything technically is for sale. So, that, nothing, nothing changes, you know, on that front. There's more synergies there than I think most people think about. You know, when we talk about data centers, I think most people actually think that, we're talking 100% only Fire, Life Safety, and Security.
Yeah.
That's not true. We actually, as a percentage of total revenues, I think our Specialty business had more data center work as a percentage of their overarching revenues than our Safety business did. So, you know, like, leveraging customer relationships with some of these hyperscalers, like, it's happening every single day, and we're taking advantage of those relationships that are swinging both ways.
Hmm, interesting. And then I think at the Investor Day, you talked about needing to build systems and applications to, you know, make that $10 billion sales platform. So maybe just an update on how you're going, how you're doing with these systems application, and are you using AI at all to help you to build a stronger APi?
I'll talk a little bit about AI, and then I'll turn it over to David to talk about the system stuff. So at APi, we view AI as an opportunity, not as a threat.
We've actually stood up an AI team inside the organization, and we took a really, really smart leader of ours-
and he's got five people on his team, and his mandate is to focus kind of his early work on our field leaders, the men and the women that work in the field, and how can we develop some tools that will make their jobs easier, make their jobs more efficient, more productive? You know, they can see more of our customers. But like, you know, just to give you a simple example, like, you can see a day where AI designs the fire alarm system for a new tenant improvement project, and you're not— and your designer is basic. AI is taking it, say, from 0-85%, and our designer is taking it from 85%-100%.
Like, you can see that day coming.
You know, same thing on the suppression side, same thing on the-
... security side. And so we're investing the resources to make sure that we're, I don't want to say we're on the front end of it, but we're out in front of it, and we're taking advantage of some of those, some of the capabilities and tools that are already present today.
Got it.
The system project. So the system project is, you know, one, a lot of hard work. But, but we're where we want to be on that project. So we've done the data cleansing work that you need to make a successful system implementation. The system itself is designed and built. Our teams are actively testing the system as it is, and we'll roll it out or deploy it in our pilot company, sometime in the first half of this year. So a lot of hard work, where we want it to be. But, but the added benefit, I think, is, like, to, to really maximize your AI investment as well as to get a, a new system, a new business system working as it should. It really does require putting a lot of time, energy, and attention on your data.
The clean data that we're getting as a result of this system work, I think, is really going to enable us to do a lot more with AI, once that system is providing the solid foundation for our business.
Got it. So we're running out of time, so let me ask you this last question, Russ. So what are the top two or three innovations and structural changes affecting your company over the next five years? And are there any emerging industry trends that are perhaps being overlooked in the current discourse?
Well, you talk so fast, sir, I don't know that I really even caught the first part of your question.
Top two or three innovations that you're focused on and/or structural changes?
Well, I think one of the things that is a little bit unique about us, I mean, probably, you know, AI and technology enablement would be the-
Yeah
... the way I'd answer those questions. But I think that, you know, if you go back to the Investor Day, and you go back to 10/16/60+, you know, we've said that basically, the drums that we need to beat to achieve those, those goals aren't changing.
I think if you think about, you know, organizational discipline and about, really good companies, there's no flavor of the day. They don't feel-- they don't, like-
Consistent.
Like, we don't need technology-
... to necessarily enable us to achieve our goals.
Technology will help us-
... achieve our goals, but it's not an excuse to not achieve our goals. Does that make sense?
It totally does.
We just want it to help us be more efficient. It's gonna help us grow our business-
... because it's gonna free up people.
To me, like, what we're doing and being consistent in our behaviors and our ability to execute is what's gonna deliver 10/16/60+, and that's exciting to me.
Awesome. Thank you very much, Russ and David.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, everybody. Appreciate you being here.