Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see so many familiar faces out here. We want to thank everybody who's made it here in person, as well as the participants on the webcast. We've got a great event for us today, and we want to thank you for your interest in BrightView. Throughout the day, we're going to have our executive leaders do a deeper dive into our One BrightView strategy and how that's going to be driving long-term sustainable growth. Throughout the day, we're going to be making forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. I will refer you to the Safe Harbor slide, which has this disclosure. We will also be making reference to non-GAAP financial metrics. The reconciliation of these metrics is in the back of this presentation, which we will be posting to our website shortly after the conclusion of this presentation.
With that, I'll turn it over to Dale Asplund, our CEO, and he's going to kick it off with his opening remarks.
Thanks, Dan, and once again, welcome, everybody. We have a great agenda today. I hope you guys, over the course of the next few hours, get a great look into why we're so excited about the opportunities ahead of us at BrightView. We have a lot of material, and I promise we'll post it to the website tonight. We don't want you to get ahead of us. We'll show it to you during this. And then, at the end of the night, we'll post it out there on the internet so you can download it and have all the materials. But before I talk about what we're going to do today, I'd rather take a couple of minutes and just show you what BrightView is and what we do in a quick video we put together.
Every great landscape begins with a vision, a spark of imagination brought to life through passion, expertise, and innovation. At BrightView, we also believe every landscape has the power to inspire, wow, or comfort. We're here to unlock that potential. Our journey began with the legacy of two industry pioneers, the Brickman Group and Valley Crest, whose unwavering commitment to detailed excellence built the foundation we proudly stand on today. As the nation's premier single-source partner for commercial landscaping, we are proud to be the biggest, but our goal has always been to be the best. From Fortune 500 campuses and residential communities to educational, healthcare, hospitality, and sports and leisure destinations, we create spaces that inspire, connect, and endure. At BrightView, our expertise spans every aspect of landscaping.
Our clients trust us not only to bring their visions to life, but to care for them long after the initial build is complete. Through our development services, we transform ideas into reality with expertise in landscape architecture, irrigation, and specialized installations, ensuring each project is crafted with precision and creativity. Once a project is completed, we offer seamless continuity with our maintenance services, providing tailored, recurring solutions that ensure landscapes remain beautiful, healthy, and functional year-round. BrightView's greatest strength is our 20,000 skilled, experienced, and hardworking team members. While prioritizing safety and service excellence, they continuously deliver results that go beyond expectations. We are builders of trust, cultivators of beauty, and champions of sustainability. Our scale may be our advantage, but it's our local touch that sets us apart.
From coast to coast, we bring the resources of a national leader to the communities we proudly serve, offering customized solutions that meet the distinct needs of every client. When the unexpected happens, BrightView is there. Whether responding to storms or natural disasters, we mobilize quickly to protect and restore what matters most to you. We're not just landscaping; we're transforming an industry with tremendous growth potential. With a focus on customer service, innovation, and excellence, we are setting the standard for what it means to be the provider of choice in commercial landscaping. At BrightView, the future is bright, and together, we're shaping tomorrow, one extraordinary landscape at a time.
I think that video gives you a good overview of what we do at BrightView. This company services some of the best properties across North America, and you're going to get an idea today why we're so excited about the future. What are we going to cover today? When I think about what we want to show, we're going to cover four areas. It's going to start with our employees, as you heard, and Mandy Orders will cover becoming the employer of choice. These employees touch our customers every day, so they are critical to our future. Then, Michael Dozier is going to cover all about being a customer-centric organization. This is a transformation from what we've done in the past, but we need every employee focused on putting our customer at the center of everything we do.
We're going to cover unlocking the size and scale of the business. This is an area the company never leveraged in the past. We are much bigger than our closest competitor, but we haven't taken full advantage of that. That's where our first opportunity is going to come as we leverage BrightView's size and scale. Brett Urban will give us an update on what we're going to do strategically with the capital we have and make sure we're proper stewards of the capital that we worked so hard to earn. That will lead you to why we believe BrightView can be an investment of choice in the service industry. What does the schedule look like? I mentioned some of this, but I'll kick it off briefly. We're going to have Mandy cover our employees, and Michael Dozier cover our customers.
Then, we'll get you out on a quick break. We'll see where we're at with time. One of the best parts of the day, I have one of my branch leaders here, Rodney Hicks, who will give you an idea of the things you're not going to see in a P&L. It's the cultural change that we're going through and what we've done over the past 16 months to take this company forward. Those will be dividends that we pay 12, 18, 24 months from today. Chris Stoczko, our Head of Finance, M&A, and Investor Relations, will come up and just dive into that, unlocking the potential this business has with size and scale.
Brett Urban will wrap it up with our capital allocation strategy, and then I'll come up with Brett Urban and we'll do some Q&A to make sure we leave plenty of time for the people live and on the web. Let me step back and say, what is our industry and why is this such an opportunity? If you think about the overall businesses we service, development, snow services, and maintenance, it's a $130 billion business. If we just take that down to our core business, our base maintenance land care business, it's still an $88 billion business across North America, of which today we do about $1.7 billion, or 2% of that market. We have such an enormous opportunity to leverage our footprint to continue to grow that market share.
If you look at 2024, our business was broken into two segments: our development work, which I like to say is the tip of the spear when we service customers. Our development team, hands-down, does the best projects across North America. Just to give you an example of a few, a corporate campus, Apple's corporate headquarters in California. We did SoFi Stadium. We're currently doing the Obama Library in Chicago and several airports across the country, including Pittsburgh. These are large projects that you truly need design and development experts to implement. Then, our maintenance business, where we service business after we develop it, we can transition it over to our maintenance. This is a great business model, recurring, very predictable revenue for us to work with our customers on.
You're going to see today why, since day one, I put so much focus on making sure we take care of the customers we have today with our customer retention. Now, let's talk about that maintenance business and what type of customers do we service. Our average customer is roughly $60,000 of contract value. What are our primary end markets? They're really broken into two: large corporate campuses, and as we see a greater focus on return to offices, more and more commercial properties are putting a greater focus on what the quality of their landscape is as people come back to offices. Then, homeowner associations. This is not residential work. I want to be perfectly clear. What this is, is large communities that we service in one of two ways.
We either do just the common areas as part of the relationship, or we have communities that will do all the properties, including the homeowners. What you'll hear this afternoon in Michael Dozier session is exactly why technology becomes important when you're dealing with hundreds to thousands of end customers in those HOAs. You can see we offer a broad level of services across our industry, but our primary focus is on larger accounts, anywhere from $60,000 upwards of a couple million dollars a year. What do we do? This is important because every time I get people to truly go out and visit our branches, this is the exciting part. Our development work, like I said, we don't just plant bushes and trees.
We actually do full installs of landscape, both hardscape and softscape, a full range of services to implement some of the most amazing landscapes out there. Then, our maintenance group, it's not just cutting grass. We are partnering with our customers to take their existing landscape and transform it annually into what they see as a benefit to whatever their end market is. This is particularly important with that HOA segment where customers pay a lot of attention to the quality they get from their provider. Before we talk about the future, I think it's important to really look at the past from BrightView. This is critical because the BrightView that we are today is not the BrightView that we were several years ago.
The company, as the video stated, was formed in 2014, bringing two legendary companies together, two of the best in the industry by one of our sponsors, KKR. We IPO'd the business in 2018. And then, in 2019, we lost our way a little bit. We grew the business aggressively. We took on debt, and we didn't leverage the profitability to grow the business profitably. What did that result look like? We basically saw revenue grow $420 million, fueled mainly by unstrategic M&A, bringing it into our business, but not integrating it into our business as BrightView. And at the same time, we actually saw our EBITDA decline by $12 million, and the deteriorations on our margins were enormous, going from 12.8% to 10.4%. Now, fast forward to 2023, when the board made the courageous decision that we had to have a leadership change.
We took on another strategic partner in One Rock Capital, who came in and invested money in the business because they saw the upside. They saw what we can do with this business. Fast forward to now, we put in the One BrightView initiative we're going to talk a lot about today, and then we're going to go grow this business long-term as we go 2025 and beyond. What do those results look like? Yes, revenue has been flat, fueled by the divestiture of a franchise business and the unwinding of a very non-strategic aggregator business that truly hurt our reputation in the end markets. Our people worked too hard to not be the quality that they deliver as the brand that we represent. But at the same time, we've had flat revenue.
We broke through that $300 million EBITDA stand-point and last year delivered $325 million of EBITDA, with a mid-point on our guide of $345 million right now. This is what we're transforming at BrightView. Our margins still aren't back to the levels that we want, and you're going to see a path where we're going to continue to expand them. But we are well on our way to the transformation of this business. We're still in the early stages. Let's talk about what BrightView is at a high level. Like I mentioned, our revenue is roughly $2.8 billion last year. We have 20,000 employees that service roughly 20,000 jobs across the country. Our headquarters is Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, and we currently have approximately 280 branches when you include the satellites and our development locations across North America.
But as you can see on this map, the exciting part, and Brett Urban going to cover this, there's still a lot of states we're not in. That's why I look at that market share number and say we are the largest player in our industry, still not fully leveraging the potential we can have across North America. In my first 16 months, I've had a lot of people say, "When are they going to get to meet more of the leadership team?" Well, today's the day. I hope you guys get to spend time because these are the people that are helping on the transformation. If you look across the top, joining me is my CFO, Brett Urban, my Head of HR, Mandy Orders, my Head of Growth and Customer Relations, Michael Dozier, and then my Chief Legal, Jonathan Gottsegen. They'll all present today besides Jonathan Gottsegen.
Down below, I listed the names. This is important because I've asked all eight of these to join. These are truly the landscape experts in our industry. These eight average 22 years of experience in the landscape industry. There is nothing more important than what they bring to the table as they work with our branch leaders to help us service our customers. I would encourage everybody, whether we're at break or at the end of the day, meet up with those eight because they have some great insight they can also add. Now let's go back to when I joined, October 1st of 2024, and the journey we've been on since then. Actually, October 1st, 2023, sorry. The journey we've been on over that 16 months. See how time flies when you're having fun.
When I look at it, I joined the business, and the first thing I saw is I went out and visited the branches. I pulled my entire leadership team. Myself and all of you are going to go out and visit branches because the opportunity ahead of us lies at those branches, not in the corporate office in Blue Bell. As we went out and started traveling the country, I quickly saw the dysfunction we had with a separate siloed sales organization away from the people that serviced our customers every day. Now, coming from a service industry, I quickly realized if we're going to hold our people accountable to growing their branch profitably, they have to control both operations and sales. We combined those under that branch leadership. At the same time, I saw a dysfunction with both development and maintenance having separate leadership structures.
Those eight that I showed you earlier now are responsible geographically for both those businesses to drive cohesive behavior to make sure we service the customers locally under One BrightView. We then consolidated tree and golf into our maintenance division because that is just further services that you will see give us huge upside to offer that customer one-stop-shop capability at BrightView. We then sold our business, our aggregator business, U.S. Lawns, or our—I'm sorry—our franchise business, U.S. Lawns, and then we eliminated our aggregator business, BES. We launched a new commission program, and Mandy Orders is going to give you an update on this. This is exciting because our old program that was misaligned rewarded people for selling business. Mandy Orders going to show you our new program rewards people for selling business, keeping business, and renewing business. That's the way it always should have been.
Most recently, we've taken a lot of our resources as we start looking at how can we spend more time with customers and less time on back office and non-customer-facing activities. This has all changed in 16 months. Those eight leaders we have out in the field are the ones that are trying to make sure we implement all these changes. The benefit is obvious. It's working. We're just getting started on this journey. What does One BrightView look like? When I came here and I started traveling around, I knew people knew other people's names. When I found out the company operating as one unit servicing national accounts and Michael Dozier will cover our strategy on that, we had not gotten together as a leadership team since 2018. People knew each other's names, but they really didn't know people face to face.
In December this year, we brought our team together for the first time since 2018, and we had three areas we focused on. Listen, I would say this: if they just came together and spent time together, the meeting would have been a win. But we were able to get them together to talk about three critical things. First, being a better leader with their employees. Our employees are our number one asset, hands down. Second, operating their branch profitably and making sure they're managing their P&L. And third, most important, how we're going to grow this business over time. We will continue this each year to get these people to operate as One BrightView. Now, I share this with you because One BrightView is not what we talk about on investor calls. One BrightView is our culture. It's what we do. It's about everybody working together.
This is the message internally in our company we share with our employees. It's about employees collaborating together, taking care of our customers together so we can win together, we can grow together, and we can succeed together. It's about us at corporate making sure each one of those people in the branch servicing customers have the right equipment, the right tools so they can provide better service than anybody else in our industry. Only when we all do that will we become truly the partner of choice for all of them and really untap the potential that this business has. Now, I'm going to let Mandy Orders come up here in a second. We have a full day for you. I really want you, by the end of the day, to feel the excitement we have because it's so great what we can do.
Leverage the business better on size and scale. Be more focused on the customer as we go into future years, which we hadn't had in the past. Make sure, as we work together as one team, we can grow this business profitably. So, lots ahead of us. Thank you for coming once again. With that, I'll invite Mandy Orders up on here.
Good afternoon. Before I begin, I want to briefly start with a powerful video that showcases our team members and our safety culture.
At BrightView, we know that great teams don't just happen. They're created with care and maintained with purpose. It starts with safety. Establishing a safe working environment that promotes the well-being of every team member is fundamental to everything we do. Nothing is more important than ensuring everyone at BrightView goes home the same way they arrive to work in the morning.
From the ground up, we equip our teams with the proper safety gear like high-quality, durable footwear so they can feel protected and confident every step of the way. Our Orange Vest program helps identify new team members, allowing supervisors and colleagues to offer extra support while they learn the ropes. We also invest in new equipment and updating our fleet of trucks and trailers to ensure our teams have the safest, most reliable tools for the job because when the right tools meet proper training, safety becomes second nature. By installing event recorders in our vehicles, we're promoting safer driving habits and enhancing overall safety on the road. But building great teams goes beyond the work. It's about standing together for causes that matter, like proudly supporting breast cancer awareness. Our pink hat campaign is a symbol of unity and a reminder that we're stronger together.
We also believe that every voice matters. Through open town halls, we create spaces where ideas are shared and conversations spark meaningful change. Listening doesn't stop there. With our employee engagement surveys, we actively seek feedback to shape our future because understanding what matters most helps us grow together. We never miss an opportunity to celebrate. Whether it's coming together to recognize milestones, honor achievements, or simply take a moment to say thank you, these moments remind us that our people are at the heart of our success. Giving back is also at the core of who we are. Through community service projects, we're proud to make a difference in the places we call home. Whether it's helping to build a playground, supporting local charities, or volunteering to pack meal kits for families in need, we're committed to improving the lives of others and strengthening the communities we serve.
At BrightView, we're creating more than a workplace. We're building a safe, inclusive, and engaging culture where everyone feels supported, valued, and celebrated. Together, we're inspiring people, nurturing landscapes, and making a meaningful impact.
As I said earlier, welcome. I'm excited to be here today because I get the opportunity to speak to each of you about our most important asset, which is our people. I'm going to take you on the journey of becoming the employer of choice. We're going to start with safety and driving a safety culture. Sending our team members home the exact way they came every single day is critical for us. I'm going to talk to you about investing in our teams and technology. Rodney Hicks and Brett Urban and Chris Stoczko are also going to cover parts of this with you also.
I'm going to talk to you about One BrightView, embracing one team winning, breaking down silos, working as one group. You heard Dale Asplund discuss this just moments ago, and you're going to hear Michael Dozier, Chris Stoczko, and Brett Urban talk about this. But Rodney Hicks going to take you through a day in the life as a One BrightView manager. And then I'm going to talk about incentivizing profitable growth. Dale Asplund mentioned that. You're going to hear each and every one of us talk about this today. Driving a safety culture, everything we do begins and ends with safety. In addition to taking care of our teams every day, our national clients actually demand this level of safety from us also. We have made big strides this year, but there's still so much more for us to do.
While our TRIR is less than half the industry average today, make no mistake, our goal is zero every single day. You just saw the video. We've made some great investments so far. We've invested in safety boots for all our frontline employees. You heard us talk about the Orange Vest program. The great thing about that Orange Vest program is that Orange Vest allows the seasoned team members to be eyes and ears for our team members and watching out for pitfalls they just simply don't know about yet because they're too new. You saw the cameras. We're working to get in-cab cameras in every vehicle we have. Then we can never do enough training. So, there'll be a continued focus on training with safety. We have the best people, hands down, in this industry. They are our differentiator.
We have roughly 20,000 team members, and they're tenured. We have eight years for our crew leader average, and we have roughly four years for our crew member. You're going to hear us continue to talk about retention today and retention of that workforce. By retaining that workforce, it allows us to remove the seasonality need. I wish it was completely. But remove the seasonality need for that up and down in our workforce. It makes a big difference for us. We focus on competitive wages and reliable work. You're going to hear us talk about, in the places where we can, four 10-hour days allow the ability for our teams to ensure they get paid for 40 hours a week. That's so important to any of us, especially that group.
Another large differentiator for us, which is huge, is we are the only national landscaping company that uses E-Verify across every branch. That is a position of strength for this organization. When we talk about our team members, how do we know how they feel? We asked them. We went and did a survey this fall. We found out that 78% overall happiness in our hourly workforce. That is a 20% increase from the last time we did a survey in 2022. The best part about this is our team members tell us that they feel empowered, they feel safe, they feel a sense of belonging, and most importantly, they love what they do. What do we do with this information? We keep prioritizing our frontline team members. Our turnover is down roughly 20% in the last five quarters. The best part about that?
We can take those dollars that we have to invest in constantly rehiring—we've talked about that 15%- 20% turnover that we're constantly rehiring for—we can take those dollars and we can invest them back into our current team members today. We've made huge progress with retention, and we have more work to do. Think about it. If we take one click off that turnover that we talked about and the savings, not training, onboarding, hiring, and recruiting, we've been able to take roughly $5 million of that savings and invest it back in our frontline team members. That's huge for us. You see the investments we've made at the top? You'll hear Brett Urban talk about trucks and mowers. You've heard me talk about boots, service hours. Affordable benefits are key for our frontline team members. We need them to be able to afford healthcare, flexible schedules.
You're going to hear me in a moment talk about HRIS, Human Resources Information Systems. And then also, one thing that Dale Asplund and I are very committed to is figuring out a way to provide PTO to our frontline team members. It's very uncommon in this industry, but we are committed to making that happen for our group. As we talk about investing in technology, if you look at the first half of this slide, how we do this today is very disjointed. We've got different systems that sit on different platforms that don't talk to each other. They don't connect. They don't work together. Much of it is on Excel. This is an inefficient way for our teams to be led in the field. We have not made it easy on our leaders to be able to manage their own team members.
Looking to where we're heading to the future, we're looking at an HRIS system, a platform that houses all central information that connects, that syncs up together, and that allows our systems to work together, but also give our leaders in the field the information that they need to be able to manage their teams. The crazy part about this is the view on the left and the view on the right, there's really not a cost difference for us. So, it's a no-brainer to make the investment to help our leaders at the end of the day manage their teams more efficiently. You heard Dale Asplund. He almost stole my thunder, actually. He talked about incentivizing profitable growth when we started. But we really revamped how we manage and reward our teams. Our sales comp is now aligned with our branch compensation, and it's focused on route density.
Our old program, if you look at it, we had multiple plans, quota-based. We had retro payouts, and there was no incentive at all to retain the customer. We had over 30 different plans we were managing before. We now have one single plan. It's a flat rate incentive. It's paid over 12 months while the customer is an active customer, and they actually are paid to keep the customer at the end of that year. We also have our branch plan aligned with our sales plan. Under the prior branch plan, if you look at the budget side, the teams would create a budget. The budget could be shrinking or growing, but the team was paid if they hit that budget dollar. Under the new plan, it rewards profitability versus prior year. This ensures the incentive dollars that we are spending at the branches is delivering profitable growth.
You're going to hear probably every one of us talk about this today, but this has been a huge change for our business. The employee retention really remains the key to how we retain our customers. Michael Dozier going to discuss this with you in great detail here shortly. There is a direct correlation with the retention of our employees, the customer service level we deliver, and keeping those customers. On the left portal where you start, you will see the highest turnover employee branches have the lowest customer retention. As you move your way across the screen, you'll see on the right where we have the lowest employee turnover, we have the highest customer retention. So, in short, the direct correlation is you retain your teams, you service your customers better, and you retain those customers.
As I wrap today, I'm going to leave you with a couple of points. How we win is by becoming the employer of choice. We are going to be a world-class safety organization, and we will continue to focus on that. We will embrace our employees, and we will listen to what they have to say. When they tell us something, we will drive change from that. We will prioritize our frontline team members who, in turn, take care of our customers every single day. We will incentivize profitable growth. At the end of all this, I think the thing to take away is our people are at the heart of this business, and we, hands down, have the best ones in this business. I thank you for your time today, and I'll hand this over to Michael Dozier.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for joining us on this chilly day. I get the pleasure and the honor to speak to you today about growth in our organization. Mandy Orders mentioned a couple of things about employer of choice that I'll refer to many times in my presentation, which is becoming the employer of choice, why that is so critical, retaining those key members of our teams, and building that tenure. As she said, those tenured employees are what drive us to get tenured customers. That makes us, as Dale Asplund alluded to, wanting to become the provider of choice for our clients. I'm going to talk to you, as Mandy Orders alluded to as well in her presentation, four key things. I'm going to talk about go-to-market strategy. We're going to refer to some things around our revenue growth drivers, and we'll get some detail of that for you.
We're also going to talk about capturing the wallet share of our clients and how we continue to be able to drive that through our tenure and our relationship partnerships. We're going to talk about really the scale and advantage of technology that we're now employing in our business every single day to drive our business forward. That's what we're focused on. At the center of that, as Dale Asplund said in his remarks, we are doing all of that with the customer at the focus of everything we do. That is the core of which all of our principles and growing this business moving forward are built on. These key areas, and let me go first to the go-to-market strategy. A little bit of legacy. As we've talked about in the past, our sales and operations were siloed. They were separated.
Our business units were not talking to each other the way that they should have been in the past. We also had what we called suboptimal alignment around our incentive plans. Many different plans aligned around different ways in which those individual entities approached their business. We were less technology-based, to be very candid. We were not optimizing technology in the field that we felt was the way that we could really optimize and grow this business. Last but not least, we really did not have a centralized strategy. We were focused on what I'll call individual performance in various geographies across the country. As Dale Asplund came into the organization, we sat down and said, "How do we become a better partner to our clients? What are the ways in which we can do that?" That was really the beginning and the genesis of the One BrightView strategy.
We changed the reporting structure. All of what we've talked about, bringing sales and operations under the same umbrella, making sure that those leaders had those individuals within their organization talking to each other every single day about all the great things that each one of those entities was doing. In the past, those conversations, quite frankly, were just not occurring. We changed the selling plans. We changed the compensation plans and the way in which we rewarded behavior that was going to drive that future growth. We also, quite frankly, invested in some tools and technology that really helped our teams, and I'll show you this in a little bit, of what we believe our competitive advantage is that no one else in this industry can offer.
Last but not least was really just being those true partners to our clients, really engaging our customers at a level to make sure that we are the provider of choice for them, and how do we build that partnership so that we can continue to grow with them. As Dale Asplund mentioned, we are an extremely different company than we were just a year and a half ago. I'm so excited about the future of our growth platform as we move forward and the opportunities we have.
Also, and Mandy Asplund mentioned this a little bit in her remarks, we are reinvesting, and you'll see this, and I'll allude to this a couple of times, reinvesting back in our sales organization, not only in technology, but adding about 50% capacity in the short- run to our sales organization, the savings that we had from G&A, investing back in our sales portion of that to really drive sales into the future. Let's talk about five pillars that we're really focused on. First was that new sales growth. Again, the capacity of re-adding sellers back into our business and investing in technology to really drive growth into this business. Second, our development teams. Dale Asplund mentioned this, and we'll say it a couple of times today. Our development teams are the very best in the business at what they do.
We build some of the most iconic projects in this country. We want to continue to build on that backlog success, and I'll show you some data that shows where that's been and where we're going in the future. But that success is what's the platform for us for our next pillar, which is how do we continue to take that work and then convert that into maintenance opportunities. That's the real opportunity for us because we have a competitive advantage there. It's projects that we built, that we've been working with the client. How do we then continue to make those recurring long-term maintenance partnerships? How do we continue to build that tenure and that relationship with our clients so we can gain a better share of that wallet, that precious discretionary dollar that our customers have to spend on ancillary?
We want to make sure that we're able to continue to drive that. Last, our national account sales strategy has been totally revamped. We were spread across a lot of customers with a lot of partnerships, and I'll show you a little bit of detail around that later in this presentation about why we feel today with our new sales strategy, how we can continue to really grow this business and the opportunities and runway that lie ahead for that portion of our business. All of these things are built on two principles. One, continued improvement in our customer retention to drive profitable growth. Let's get into a little detail of the retention journey. I think Dale Asplund alluded to this.
You can see in 2018 when we became a public company IPO in this very building, which it's hard to believe that that was that long ago. But when we were here, we had retention with our two legacy companies around 85%. You can see over the last several years that retention has begun to dilute a little bit as we move forward through some initiatives. In 2021-20 22, you can see a significant drop, about 300 basis points decline in that retention. That was a period in which we were heavily doing M&A, some of that very non-accretive to our business, and it affected the core retention of our clients. Down to a point in 2023 where we hit a low of 79% as a business model. That's when we said, "No more." We implemented our One BrightView strategy.
The One BrightView strategy is nothing more than just us beginning to take all of our businesses, all of our legacy businesses in the silos that we had created to say, "How do we go to market? How do we begin to bring all of these individual resources together and approach the client as One BrightView?" That's the incredible opportunity that's in front of us. As Dale Asplund said, we're just beginning that journey. But we've already seen improvement. We've already begun to see that. You see from the slide in the last year, we had a 200 basis point up-tick in our retention last year that just the beginnings of that process and that cultural shift to make sure that the customer is at the center of every single thing that we do.
Those things are just built around the fundamentals that Mandy Orders talked about, making sure that our employees, our frontline employees, are taken care of, that they have the resources to be able to do that, that they have the technology, they have the resources at their disposal from not only the technology standpoint, but all the things they need to grow their branch and grow their business. You'll hear from Rodney Hicks in a little bit the success of what he's done in his branch to be able to take those tools and make that success. You can see here, our goal is not to get just back to the 85% that we were prior to this. It's to go to best in class and have every single one of our branches be at that 90th percentile and above.
We believe we have a very core foundation to be able to deliver that. We have many branches today that are up in that upper quartile that grow their business significantly. You can see here on the next slide, this is really the core of what we're talking about. 60% of our branches today sit in that 60th percentile bucket. Those are branches that grow at high single digits and beyond. We transparently have about one out of five of our branches that sit somewhere slightly below that. We have about one out of five of our branches that sit below 70%.
Those are the branches that we are razor-focused on to make sure that we get back up into those upper quartiles and that we begin to use the technology, the tools, the investment in them to be able to make sure that they are back up in that upper quartile. One of the things that we have talked about here is what's the question we get is why some branches are at 99% and why some branches are down below 70%. The answer is very simple. It comes down to the leadership that's at that individual location. Our goal, and as Dale Asplund has mentioned before in the past, we're going to continue to look at every single one of these and make sure that they have the support, the tools necessary.
If not, and they're not able to, then sometimes maybe there's a place that is a different place in our organization for them. But our branches have to be able to drive their retention up into those core high-end levels to be able to grow their business and be effective. I talked about technology. One of the tools that we're so proud of is BV Connect. BV Connect is really our proprietary cloud-based portal that we developed to basically connect with our customers on an ongoing basis. Why that tool is so, I think, exciting for us and the opportunity as we've implemented that into two of our largest verticals, our HOA space and into our office park space, you're seeing our clients really engage with us on a level that we've never had before.
We think this is a huge competitive advantage for our organization to really be able to connect with our clients in almost a live format. You can see that since we've implemented this over the last couple of years, we now have over 17,000 users of that system that back and forth on a daily basis communicate not only information that they need or requests that come through that portal, but our ability to connect with them on a mass scale is a very, very competitive advantage for us that we're taking advantage of with all these clients. We continue to add clients every single day that are engaged and want to be part of this portal. That's one of our tools. Another tool we call our Total Addressable Market tool. This was not in existence with us literally as close as to a year ago.
Now, every single one of our branches, and you will again hear Rodney Hicks talk about this when he's up here, the ability of each one of our branches to look at their specific geography, to have a tool at their disposal now that allows them to look at where their existing locations are, where the current customers they have with all the data that goes along with that, at the same time looking at future vetted customers as well as customers that we are trying to prospect.
At the end of the day, what it does is it allows our sales and operations team to sit down together and say, "How do we go to market in our particular geography?" We have the ability to look at capacity of routes along that way and build efficiency into our current routing structure to make sure that we're being as efficient as possible. Those two levers give us a tremendous advantage as we go to market to make sure that we are connecting locally in that geography and being very specific about target marketing to customers that we want to continue to grow our business with. I talked about our development business. Again, we have the best development business in this business, our amazing projects that these individuals work on every single day. We're so proud of the work that they do to continue to build these iconic projects.
It gives us a platform from a growth stand-point to leverage off of that. In the past, as these individuals or these entities were somewhat siloed, we were not able to communicate with whether they were working with a GC or whatever the case may be. Our ability now to know where those projects are at any given stage. We have a process where every single development opportunity today begins the communication at the very forefront of that opportunity to convert to a maintenance opportunity. Why that's so important? Two things. You can see the success that we've had to continue to build that backlog, but more importantly, how do we convert that customer to a long-term maintenance customer and begin to build that recurring partnership from the beginning of the process all the way to the end of the maintenance cycle?
As Dale Asplund mentioned, this is just the tip of the spear of our ability of one piece of our growth lever to really be able to drive this portion of our conversion into our strategy. Let me give you a little bit of how that works. So in our development business, as everyone knows, those are larger projects. They have a large portfolio that they're bidding on projects all the time. Those work come into our business model. And over time, on average, and it varies depending on the project, the scope of the project. Some projects have more landscape. Some projects have more hardscape. But at the end of the day, it's roughly about 7% on the dollar of that development revenue that we believe is maintenance convertible, if you will.
If you take just rough math on our $900 million or so, give or take backlog, about 7% of that, so about $63 million of that, quote-unquote, becomes convertible on an annual basis. As that business grows, obviously, that baseline grows, but our ability to convert is where the opportunity is. You can see here, as short a time as back as 2023, we were not doing a good job of converting our development work into maintenance. Again, more so because of that silo effect. We had less than 10% high- single-digit conversion rates. About a year ago, in 2024, we were up into the mid to high- teens. This year, we are on a path to be in the mid-20% of conversion rates.
We feel extremely confident in our ability to get to a point where we can convert as much as 70% of our development backlog into reoccurring maintenance contracts. That's the goal of this backlog and the opportunities we have to continue to drive this forward. Our sports turf and golf course opportunity. We're unbelievably excited about this one. Our sports turf and entities right now are very separated entities. We have a sports turf development team that, as we sit here today, currently is working on a soccer field, FIFA soccer field for World Cup inside a SoFi Stadium, building a real grass turf on top of an artificial surface. It's an amazing project that we've been working on for several months that will be played in some of the World Cup events here coming up in a couple of weeks.
Our golf maintenance business, which is sort of a boutique business for us, which is we do about 60 golf courses across the country as a maintenance provider to that industry. There's tremendous opportunity ahead of us as we begin to build that business. The third leg of that is we are the official consultant to Major League Baseball, as I think as many of you know. Today, as we sit here, we are building right now in Taiwan for the Major Baseball Classic that's coming up next week. We are also building, as we speak, the field in Tokyo that will be the home opener for Major League Baseball this year between the Dodgers and the Cubs in about a month from now.
We are also working on an iconic project that will happen sometime in August where we are actually building a baseball field for Major League Baseball inside of the Bristol Motor Speedway. I believe that's the first week of August. These are just some incredible projects. The opportunity for us is that these three entities and all this great agronomic technology and expertise that is in these three fields have always been separated. Now, as One BrightView, we are going to market as one sports turf entity to really drive this business forward. Today, as we sit here, we have about $100 million of that business. That is a platform in a Total Addressable Market north of $3 billion. We are just beginning the tip of the iceberg of what we think is the potential runway for this segment of our business.
I think Dale Asplund mentioned this. We want to be the one-stop shop for every one of our clients. Where we can offer all the expertise and resources and experience and tenure to build that partnership is where we succeed. This is something that our clients have asked for. They want to have us be that one-stop shop to provide all the level of services, whether that be development, maintenance, irrigation, tree care, sports turf, golf, whatever they need in their particular portfolio of their business model. They want us to be able to provide that. I'll show you some slides here in a second that why we believe there's such an opportunity as we go to market as One BrightView to be able to do that, something we have not done in the past.
We have just not, as we've alluded to, not taken advantage of that size and scale to really go to market with all of these entities under one umbrella. I'll talk briefly about our snow. Snow comes up a lot. As everyone knows, snow is one of those places, and you can see here, when we were in IPO, we had more of a fixed model around our snow business. Over the last few years, that's become more of a variable model for a lot of reasons. Some places got snow. Some places didn't. Customers sometimes want to play that game.
At the end of the day, what we want to do is continue to build that model back to more of a fixed model, a fixed model that's more predictable, less reliant on the ups and downs of the snow and whether it's going to snow and where it's going to snow, but getting at more of a fixed model as we move forward. Last, we want to be that one-stop shop. So a lot of our land customers want us to do their snow services, and we want to be that provider, but we want to get away from most of those and only have a little bit left. It's just a snow-only contract.
We want to continue to be that provider that provides that for those customers that want it, but we want that model to be more fixed so we continue to have predictability and forecastability around that part of our business. I mentioned why retention is so important and why we're so excited about continuing to build that journey of our retention and tenure. You can see from this slide, capturing the share of wallet of our customers. Customers who we have tenure with, they spend ancillary dollars. That precious discretionary dollar they have to be able to spend, they spend with us. The longer that tenure is and the more that relationship and partnership gets tighter, the more they spend with us. We want to continue to drive that forward.
You can just see here, just moving each one of our clients today, the baseline clients that we have, moving them each to one more year of tenure in our model brings another $75 million of opportunity for us. We're incredibly excited as we begin this journey to really get us back to those higher retention levels, what the opportunity is in front of us for our growth. I'll mention tree care. tree care is one we haven't talked a lot about, but tree care on the West Coast, where our tree care divisions were basically born many years ago. We have about 10% penetration rates in California, primarily the largest state where we have the best penetration.
Getting our tree care businesses as we move across to the Southwest, to the middle of the country, into the East Coast, a lot of our branches in the Midwest and East Coast do not have tree care resources. We want to change that. We want every single one of our branches that has tree care opportunity to be able to build this into their model. When you take this model and just look at it, just getting to the level of the 10%, which we believe has tremendous upside in and of itself, just getting the rest of our branches to that 10% penetration model is north of a $100 million opportunity for us. We're incredibly excited. We have some tremendous tree care arborist and teams within that group. We want to continue to spread that expertise across the rest of the country.
Last but not least, national accounts. We were a very different company, as I said, just a year and a half ago. We totally revamped our national account strategy, and we basically have taken all the measures of that thing. We sat down with our customers and we said, "How can we be a better partner to you? How can we be a better provider and work with you on a national scale to make sure that we meet all the needs that you need from a landscape provider?" We sat down, and quite frankly, we heard some tough conversations from some clients. We needed to be a better partner and align our partnership. We need to measure our progress. We needed to communicate better. We needed to enable tactics, things that we were not doing on a global scale.
What we did is we sat down with these clients and listened to them. At the end of the day, our One BrightView strategy parlayed greatly into what these clients need as a national account. Today, we have put our business down to where we have some very key clients that we are building that business model in partnership, and we have tremendous runway with each one of these opportunities. I'll give you one example here. This is a client that we have that literally a year and a half ago said to us, "You got to be a better partner if we're going to have a national relationship," to be very honest about it. We sat down with them and said, "How do we communicate better with you? How do we help you make sure your business model works?" They have about a $75 million landscape spend.
We were doing about 15% of that literally 18 months ago. Just met with them recently. They said to us, "Our market share now is about 20% of that spend. We want you to grow more with us. You have proven your ability to change your model and help us in our business to grow our business. So how do we continue to grow with you?" So we believe we have an opportunity just with this one company to get north of a 90% market share. You can see here, that's worth this in and of itself, 90% of a $75 million, one particular client national opportunity. That's what we're doing with every single one of our national account players today.
I've covered a lot in a short period of time, but rather than listening to me, I'd like you to hear some of our customers to see some of the things that we're doing for them.
Here in Jacksonville, I work with BrightView on five of our communities. My experience with BrightView is nothing short of exceptional. Our residents are pretty demanding. They like to have the lawn cut. They like to have the flowers done. They like to have the shrubs a certain way. Our previous vendor couldn't quite figure out what we wanted. BrightView came in, helped guide us, and it's worked out fantastic. The Biltmore has partnered with BrightView for the past 10 years on all of our horticultural needs with regard to our golf course and the main Biltmore grounds.
I'm a demanding owner, but I'm demanding for a reason, and that is because the course itself is such an iconic location here in South Florida. They looked at our landscaping, our landscaping needs, and then tailored a program through which we negotiated that met our needs. Consequently, the neighborhood has been ecstatic over the colors that have come out in the spring, the things we do during the summer, and how we wrap things up in the fall. We are always getting compliments from residents, from prospects on how our landscape can sometimes be the difference in whether they decide to lease with us or lease with a competitor. Having that competitive edge on our curb appeal brought to us by BrightView is very key in our industry.
The Biltmore chose BrightView because of the fact that it's in effect an efficient one-stop shop, which addresses all of our considerable horticultural needs. On any given day, we might have a wedding doing over 115 weddings a year. The general appearance and aesthetic of the grounds, or if you're on the course itself, not just to the playability of the players, but to the aesthetic appearance of the grounds, all of those things are what truly enhances the property. BrightView knows what they're doing. We had our branch manager, our account manager talk to us weekly. They came to our board meetings and participated in our board meetings to make sure we were happy with how this thing was going and that our expectations were met.
From the branch managers to the account managers to the crews, the people that are on site, everyone has been nothing short of professional. They are a one-stop shop in landscape. They can do the maintenance. They can do the irrigation. They can do the installs. Anything we need from them, they're able to provide. One of the things that BrightView really impressed us with was they have a website that you can put in work requests. You can put in different things you want. They flip that around in a day, and it's worked out very, very well for us. For anyone that's considering using BrightView, I would highly recommend them for their professionalism, their taking ownership of properties, and their high attention to detail. They're one of the best in the market.
The partnership has positively impacted the community by that our residents are more happy with our landscaping. It's as simple as that. They've expressed great pleasure in what BrightView's done. My team doesn't have to reach out to them to say, "This is something that should be done." They have already thought of that and proactively addressed it. That is what I look for in a partner, and that's what I have with BrightView.
It's a great video. It always makes us very proud when our customers tell us we're doing a great job and doing great work for them. I know our team members are very excited to hear that kind of feedback. I'll wrap up here by how are we going to move forward growing profitably? First of all, we're going to be high focus on customer retention.
We are going to make sure that we are the partner of choice for every single one of our clients and continue to grow that relationship. Second, we're going to build capacity back into our sales organization, not only through numbers of sellers, but technology. Third, we're going to make sure that we continue to build that great backlog that we have and make sure that that backlog continues to be the foundation of which we have the opportunity for number four, which is convert those opportunities into recurring maintenance contracts. Fifth, we're going to make sure, again, that partnership and we continue to build that relationship and tenure so we are able to continue to build on that ancillary discretionary dollar of our clients that's so precious.
Last but not least, we are revamping our national account strategy to make sure that we are the partner of choice for our national clients. With that, we believe very confidently that we have the tools in place and the foundation to grow this business in mid-single- digits and far beyond for many years to come. You heard Mandy Orders on this journey of One BrightView talk about being the employer of choice. Our customer-centric focus to be the provider of choice is going to be the future for us to grow this business. Thank you very much. I'm going to turn it over to Dan.
Thank you, Michael. It's been a great presentation so far. I hope everybody's learned a bit about the power of the initiatives we have underway. Just a little housekeeping here. We're going to take a brief break.
We'll come back promptly at 2:20 for the webcast listeners, and we'll kick it back up with Rodney Hicks, our branch manager. It should be a great presentation as well as the video. So we'll see you back at 2:20.
[Foreign Language] . Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our presentation will resume in five minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our presentation will resume in two minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our presentation will resume momentarily.
Great. Welcome back, everybody. There we go. Welcome back, everybody. Hope you found this early session very, very helpful. Our next speaker is Rodney Hicks. He's a Senior Branch Manager down in Jacksonville, Florida. He's a veteran of the company.
He's a highly valued teammate and one of the folks that helps drive our success as a team. Before I invite him up here, we're going to watch a brief video on a day in the life , the branch manager, and how the BrightView culture is improving that day.
Good morning. A typical day for me starts around 4:15. I wake up in the morning. I come into the shop. My name is Rodney Hicks. I'm the Senior Branch Manager at BrightView. I try to get here about 5:15. I sit down at my computer and I do all the paperwork that I need to do before the day starts. Here at the Jacksonville branch, we're a $30 million branch and we have 180 employees. We provide maintenance, tree care, and irrigation. Our branch services 186 clients.
I've been here for 17 years and the biggest thing I'm proud of is how this company takes care of their employees and the respect that they treat everybody with around here. Enjoy. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. I get to the shop every morning around 6:00. I enjoy coming to work every day. I get in the office, go over the job plans for the day and the instructions to give to the guys. Operations managers at BrightView wear a lot of hats. What it really boils down to is you're behind the logistics of what crews are doing on a day-to-day basis. I create the punch lists every morning for the teams before they go out. Knowing what needs to be done and communicating with the customer allows me to create a detailed list.
It allows the guys to have the appropriate tools that they need going out into the field. Everybody want me to go? Green grass. Green grass. No weeds. No weeds. Pretty flowers Pretty flowers All right. Roll that. One of my favorite things to do at BrightView is stretch and flex. Roll that. All the way to the right. Roll that. Roll that. All the way to the right. Roll that. Roll that. I get the guys loose and going, just really loosen them up to get their day started. After stretch and flex, we normally have a safety stand down topic that we talk about in the morning amongst the guys. What sets BrightView apart from our competition is really our crew members. They're highly skilled, well-trained, and they really value safety. Come on, Leroy.
After that, I meet with the guys at the gate and we get all the crews out and do check-ins. We send them out with a specific list of items that need to be accomplished in the morning. We send them out with a correct route. That's the most efficient way to the properties. We make sure the crews have everything they need for the properties and we get out the gate. Be safe. From there, I typically have a one-on-one with my account managers, which we discuss what we're going to do for the month, and then we're out in the field with our crews. Making my community look better, whether it be from the curbs or all the way to amenity centers or around office complexes, it's something that we take a lot of pride in.
It's important for me to work closely with the crews to make sure we're exceeding our clients' expectations. In the middle of the day, it's visiting the crews on site, making sure they have everything they need. As a branch manager, I meet with clients every day. Customers are king. What we do every single day from sun up to sundown is all oriented around them, making them happy, making sure that their needs are met, but then more importantly, making sure that the properties that they oversee are left behind us in better condition than when we found them. My job as a business developer is about making our clients happy. It starts off with the first impression that we make, and it leads to the longer-lasting relationship. The open line of communication, trust with the clients, just like any relationship, it's very important. We are a service industry.
If we're not taking care of our customers, somebody else will be. I take pride in making the property look clean and beautiful, and nothing makes me happier than when the client comes out there and says, "Great job." Instant gratification being able to look behind you and see a property look better. On top of that, for us to live in the same place that we get to work is a great honor. The end of the day is one of the most important parts of the day. It's very important to check in the crews and get all the debris out of the trucks. After they dump their debris, they park their trucks and trailers. After their trailers and trucks are parked, the crew members talk to the account managers and let them know what services were finished and what tasks were completed.
It's breaking down, making sure that everything was accomplished, and then making sure that the next day is ready to go. That is a wrap on the day.
Now that's a video, huh? I don't know who that guy Rodney Hicks is. Well, he deserves a Grammy, I think. What y'all think? It's an awesome job. Do you see the end of it? That's the wrap on the day. How embarrassing could that be? That's the worst thing. I won't ever live it down. When I go to the shop, they're going to be like, "What is this?" Jokes aside, that video is impactful, right? It's awesome to have a group of teammates that rally around you like they did for me.
When I was asked to do this and I said I would, you know, I was thinking it's just going to be afternoon, fly out, boom, gone. Then I hear we got guys coming in, they're going to do a video, and you know, I'm just adding stress to my team, right? My job is to make sure my team has no stress, no problems, do their job, provide them the resources they need so they can get their work done. Here's Mr. Branch Manager making things harder for them, right? I sit them all down. Hey, we got this going on. You know, we're going to visit some jobs. We're going to be important people in town. Let's get prepared. I'm expecting rumbles and frustrations. No, I got the exact opposite. What can we do? How can we do it?
Do I need to be earlier? We need to switch dispatch and make sure it's done. They were thinking about things that I wasn't thinking about to get ready for it to help me get to the position where we can be successful and have this video and I could be here today. That, in turn, makes me realize how blessed I am as a manager. I feel like I have one of the greatest teams in the world, right? It doesn't matter what we're doing. We're going to do it together. We do it in a fashion where we support each other. You can't ask for no more than that. A little bit about myself. I've been here 17 years with BrightView, same location, same branch.
Been through a single owner, bought by a corporation that was a single owner, and then into BrightView, which was into an IPO. So we've seen a lot of changes at that branch, right? We've seen good, bad, worse, better, great, almost there, right? We've seen it all. My whole job is to be a resource for my team. When we go out, meet with clients, say, "Hey, this is my boss." No, I'm your resource, right? This is your job. This is your client. I'm here to support you, right? That's all I do. Allowing my team to be a team. I allow my team to be leaders in themselves, right? Be able to get direction. You know, I bring all this to you because doing that in an environment where your leadership isn't on the same page as you is difficult, right?
It causes problems. Today I want to kind of explain to you where we're at and where we're going and some of the goods and pros and just walk through it. Today's discussion is going to be a day at the branch, which we saw some of that video, benefits of new equipment and how it impacts the branch. It's a very big deal. Total addressable market and how we use the tool, right, in our branch. Technology and One BrightView and how that's helped us be more efficient and better operators. We start off a day with stretch and flex. Y'all seeing it up there. It's a portion of it. I think it's the best stretch and flex in the company. If somebody thinks different, I'm more than happy to see it, right?
Nobody does it like our crew leader that leads that stretch and flex. I think it's awesome as it can be that we have a crew leader leading our teams every morning. That's what's involved, right? That's what leadership is about, is empowering people to be able to do things that you know they can do it and giving them the pathway and the resources and the tools to be able to do these things. After that, we typically have a one-on-one meeting. In these meetings, we go over the current week and our plan for the next month. So it's a rolling meeting. So three weeks into four weeks, three weeks into four weeks, right? Every conversation. Then from there, it's out in the field, visiting with clients. From there, we get back in the shop and get the clothes in, get everybody checked in.
That's the most vital and important thing that we can do. All right. So sleep. This is probably a touchy subject for a lot of operators that was in my position two to three years ago, right? We were asked to grow and we couldn't buy trucks to grow with it. Like, what are we doing, right? I'm selling work and I can't get vehicles. I've got employees out here working. We've got them trained. We've got them educated. Things are breaking down and they're driving their transport employees, right? They're moving equipment back and forth so we can get things working. We're picking and choosing what equipment we want to repair to keep our P&L together. Breakdowns are a morale drive down, right?
Anytime you have any piece of equipment, anytime you've gone on vacation, you had a flat tire, anytime you've gone on a plane and it's got rerouted, it just drives the morale down. When that happens on a consistent basis, on a day-to-day basis, it really destroys things. For the first time in 17 years, I'm looking at a fleet that's as new as I've ever seen, right? And it's awesome, right? I've got trucks that are less than four years old, almost every one in my fleet. And my mowers on the 15th of March all will be a year average or less. It's the first time ever, ever. I'm seeing the costs being driven down in our repairs, right? I'm seeing the return on the gains and losses from us selling the vehicles. These things are intangible stuff that I wasn't thinking about as a branch manager.
All I was trying to do is make sure I had the equipment in my yard so when I sell work, I can be able to do it. Learning how to operate a business, how to sell capital, and how to do these things that actually bring revenue back into the P&L, it's awesome. Total addressable market. This was a tool that was brought to me and I was like, "Here we go again. Drag on corporate, dragging something else down and giving me something else to do." Luckily, I realized, "Hey, you know, I got a new business developer. He came in at the same time. We're going to work this tool together, kind of look at it." So we got into the tool. They asked us to go through and select which jobs work and vice versa.
We did a 30, 60, 90-day plan to where he visits so many jobs in 90 days. We did it off of density. We tied that plan to account managers going with them to go review. We looked at work that we currently have, met new clients, and then looked at work that we wanted with the account manager. It was a double-edged sword that was awesome. Because of that, we're seeing results from those sales now. We're seeing density in areas where we've got new vehicles that don't need to go further, right? It's even better. It's a tool as a branch that I didn't know I needed. You know, we always feel like we're selling in the right places. If you want it, we come in, right? That's what you always think.
But when you start looking at how you can increase margins, increase operation, increase the time that your managers can be in front of a client because you sell work in the right places, it really changes your direction and your focus as a branch manager and what you're looking for. At BrightView, we've always operated as one in our branch, right? That's how we work. That's what you've seen in this video, right? That's how we are going to be successful and how we always stay successful. What's great is that you have a corporate structure that follows you and supports you in being that One BrightView and provides you the resources that you need. Out of the years I've worked here, I can say right now is the only time I felt hand in hand with our corporate leadership on what I need.
I know if I sell some work, I'm getting the vehicles. I know it. I know if I need some help, I'm getting the help. I'm not going to be heard on deaf ears. The biggest part about this when Dale Asplund came to our shop and let us know, "Hey, you get new vehicles." He came in, said it. He left. We had a meeting after us. "Hey, guys, look, you know, CEOs always come here and talk stuff, right? Don't. We ain't getting no vehicles, right? Don't worry about it. Figure it out. Figure it out, right? Don't worry about it. Figure it out. We'll be okay. He came in. He's a great guy. He bought us some pizza. Be happy." Then six months later, vehicles just start showing up.
It's like, "Rodney Hicks, shoot, send me all the vehicles that you got are 10 years old." I said, "Okay. Here's another pointless thing to do. Let's send it over. Shoot it over. Get it back. Rodney Hicks, there's trucks pulling. I'm getting calls from our branch. I hate it. Five trucks pulled up from the VA. What's going on?" I called our regional equipment. I said, "Yeah, those are the trucks I told you were coming that you didn't believe the whole time." It's terrific. Silos is one of the biggest things that helped us. Breaking down silos is probably the biggest tool for me. When I sat down with our business developers before the silo, he'll sit down across my desk and I'll be like, "Hey, which silo are you in right now?"
"You're in my silo or are you in business development silo?" He's like, "Well," I said, "There's only one silo in this branch, right? Is it my silo?" Finally, we worked together and figured out how to get through it. But the stress that it puts on two different sides by having two different directions. You want one path. You want One BrightView. That's what you want, right? That's what we expect from a company and a business and an operator. That's what I expect from our corporate leadership. We are the individuals that know how to get the work done. We are a branch that's full of the best landscapers on the planet. All we need is support. That's all we need. The new technology that's coming out, I haven't used it yet, but I've been reading on it, PowerPoint, sales service management.
It's a great tool. Currently, we do schedules through Excel sheet, get all labor dollars, stuff together. I take that revenue, pass it on to my account managers. They take that revenue, break it down per job, and then they create their schedules. My portion of that takes about 18 hours to do. Then I pass it on to my account managers. Every month, it takes them five hours to produce a schedule. Just if you just take my 18 hours twice a year and then their five hours from my account managers, that's going to bring back 420 hours to my team that can go out and meet with clients. Anytime my team can be in front of clients, we're successful. Period. Anytime you pull my team away from clients, we're going to struggle. We're going to lose work.
We're going to have a problem with ancillary services and sales. Our teammates aren't going to be the best teammates on the planet. Anything that can provide my team more time with the client, I'm all over it. With these tools and with everything that's been happening over the 18 months, I can literally go on for another 30 minutes on how excited I am about the stuff that's taking place and how surprised I was at how our CEO backed up everything that he walked in my office and said. It was a complete surprise for me. I stand here today and I'm here today only because I believe in what we're doing at this moment. I wouldn't stand here today if I didn't. To be heard by people who don't need to hear you, right?
Which is a thing that you don't hear often, right? We do what we're told to do as operators, right? That's what we should be doing. That's what we're going to do. But it's great when somebody hears, "Hey, we need some help here. We need this here." And it gets and it happens. So on that note, I'm going to bring up Chris Stoczko. But before we go, we close out all meetings the same way. One finger up, everybody. Say it after me. Green grass. No weeds. Pretty flowers. All right. Thank you, everybody. Awesome.
How am I supposed to follow that act? Wow. Thank you, Rodney Hicks. Good afternoon to everybody.
All kidding aside, it's great to see such incredible energy and enthusiasm from operators like Rodney Hicks and across our business as we just pave the path forward here to drive profitable growth and transform this business. So we often get asked the question if size and scale matter in our industry. As the number one player in the commercial landscaping space, we have incredible opportunities to leverage our size and scale. We merely need to unlock them. I'm going to focus my comments here over the next few minutes around four strategic areas where we believe we have the most upside to unlock that size and scale, expand our margins through operating efficiencies, and drive shareholder value. I'll begin with a focus on our frontline labor. You just saw through the video and through Rodney Hicks comments, incredibly manual in process today, right?
But through improved job scheduling, routing, and communication, we have the ability to drive both customer retention improvements and gain margin efficiencies. I'll then shift to a focus on our centralization and automation, particularly within our SG&A function, where we believe we have the ability to drive efficiencies within our business and improve our operating leverage profile. We'll then take a look at purchasing power, where we as the largest landscaper in our industry should have unmatched scale advantages. Again, we merely need to unlock it. Finally, our fleet management strategy. Rodney Hicks just showed it. Dale Asplund talked about it earlier. Our refreshed fleet should drive significant opportunity for us on improved service levels, cost efficiencies, and better capital returns as we manage the lifecycle of those assets. Before I jump in, I want to just start real quickly with some context.
As an organization last year, as you can see here outlined on this slide, we incurred approximately $2.6 billion in cost across our organization. We have the ability to be more efficient with both how and where we allocate our spend moving forward. I'm going to outline that over the next few minutes here. But I wanted to simply start here to just set some context so you can see the composition of our spend, which is predominantly within our labor. I want to kick off with frontline labor and how we manage it today. Again, you saw the manual processes that Rodney Hicks stepped through. As you would imagine, or probably imagine, servicing approximately 20,000 jobs across our business and dispatching over 4,000 crews on a daily basis. It's no easy task. Again, it's further challenged by our manual processes today.
You saw, or you can see here on this slide, a whiteboard. You saw spreadsheets. You saw paper upon paper upon paper in Rodney Hicks videos. Very manual. But that's okay. We're going to fix that. We're stepping into the 21st century with a tech-enabled approach that's going to enable more real-time communication with our employees and our crews alongside more efficient routing in how we schedule our jobs and dispatch our crews. Rather than hear this just from me on why we're so excited about this and how it's going to be a game changer for us as we move forward, let me show a quick video.
For years, managing dispatch and routing crews meant relying on outdated manual processes. Whiteboards, paperwork, and last-minute changes led to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and wasted time. But that's about to change.
BrightView is transforming the way we manage and empower our teams with a new field service management system, a modern technology-driven solution. With FSM, a standardized process ensures consistency across locations, while a centralized master schedule streamlines work assignments and daily operations. Optimized routing reduces fuel and labor costs, improving efficiency and sustainability. Better resource utilization means every team member and every piece of equipment is used effectively. Instant access to real-time updates enhances responsiveness, improving customer satisfaction by delivering exactly what was requested. With reduced administrative tasks, our teams can spend more time where it matters most, serving our clients. Real-time performance tracking empowers managers to make data-driven decisions and continuously improve operations and customer retention. Proactive customer communication ensures we're always one step ahead in delivering the best possible service experience. At BrightView, we're embracing technology to work smarter, serve better, and lead the industry forward.
That's pretty cool stuff right there, right? It's going to be a game changer for us as an organization. We're really excited about it, as you can tell from that video, as you could hear from Rodney Hicks a little bit earlier. We're going to begin piloting this across a few of our markets here in the spring and looking to roll it out across the broader organization in the near term. Really going to be a game changer. All right. Let's now turn to SG&A, where we have made significant strides over the past 15 months. We've streamlined our field operating structure, and we've centralized key support functions across the business that were previously entangled across all different facets within the organization. But what we're most excited about are the opportunities that lie ahead.
Our focus will continue to be on centralization of those key support functions in addition to investments in technology and automation, particularly within G&A, to drive efficiencies in how we support the business and also be in a position to improve our operating leverage profile. The benefit will be twofold. Number one, from a central support perspective, our consistent and efficient support model will enable branch managers like Rodney Hicks and his peers to focus on their employees, their customers, and growing their business. The central support model can handle all the back-of-the-house stuff. Secondly, the efficiencies that we'll be able to create within G&A will put us in a position to reinvest back into the sales force and of SG&A and accelerate that growth profile, the growth strategy that Michael Dozier outlined a little bit ago. We're really excited about our plans here, investing in technology and automation.
On the procurement front, as I said in my opening, we are the largest in our industry and should have unparalleled scale advantages in how we procure. Today, we have a vendor network of over 20,000 vendors all across the 50 states, with less than 1% of those vendors being strategic in nature, meaning they have a fixed pricing model or a volume-related rebate. Our strategy moving forward is simple. Shift to a vendor network that has predominantly preferred vendors and get better utilization from our branch network to make sure we're leveraging those relationships to buy smarter, buy more efficiently. Take for case, a simple illustrative case study on here. You have two branches both procuring locally.
Unfortunately, they're missing out under a fixed pricing model and the volume-related rebate that they would get from spending through one of our strategic vendors, effectively leaving margin and dollars on the table. Moving forward, the branches will be incentivized to spend in such a way with those strategic vendors. As Mandy Orders outlined earlier, the new incentive plan rewards profitable growth. Every dollar that can come back to the branch's P&L is a win for the branch. It's a win for their team. It's a win for BrightView as a whole. Fleet refresh has been a key capital strategy for us, as we've talked about for the last several quarters and will continue to be moving forward. Brett Urban will outline that a little bit more in the next session. We've made great progress over the last 15 months.
As you can see here, we've taken several years off the age of our trucks. By the end of this spring, we won't have a single core mower that's greater than 15 months old. You saw a real-life example in Rodney Hicks branch and the significant investments and the effect it's had on his employees and his overall team at the branch. When managed right, our fleet of over 15,000 vehicles and trailers should carry significant scale advantages. We have a huge opportunity ahead of us to better manage the lifecycle of our assets from the purchase of the asset all the way through the disposal. The benefit will be multifaceted. Number one, we'll see improved employee and customer experience with less work stoppages on equipment failures. We'll also see a reduction in cost, right?
The newer our fleet, the less repair and maintenance, the less need there is to go out and rent equipment. We spend approximately $50 million today in repair and maintenance costs as well as rentals. We have a significant opportunity there to drive some cost efficiencies. Last, we'll be in a position with this strategy to create a virtuous cycle where we manage the lifecycle of these assets and we dispose of them at the optimal time. We'll be able to dispose of these assets to get closer to 40%- 50% on the dollar as a capital return versus in the past when we were effectively selling scraps of metal for pennies on the dollar. Huge opportunity for us. We're really excited about it. Before I move off fleet management, let me just say this: fleet management is a strategy. It's an absolute strategy.
We'll unlock significant scale for us as we move forward. Let me just put a finer point for a second here on why size and scale matter with some real data. As you can see here outlined on this slide, we broke our maintenance branches out into four quartiles based off the size of the maintenance branch. As you can see, the smaller branches, no surprise, less profitable. It's very difficult for them to clear their overheads and deliver profit to the bottom line. As you move up to the second, to the third, where Rodney Hicks branch falls, the fourth quartile, these branches are bigger. They're more profitable. They're able to get the benefit of operating leverage. Again, remember, as we move forward, I'll say it a second time. It's worth saying the new incentive plan rewards profitable growth.
Unequivocally, larger branches translate to more profitable branches. The most exciting part about the data up here, this is data under today's operating model, right? This doesn't even take into consideration the four strategic unlocks that I just walked through. This is why we're so excited about the opportunities ahead and can only imagine what this data set will look like as we execute upon our strategy to truly unlock that scale. I'll close out with the same way that I began: do size and scale matter? Does size and scale matter? Hopefully today you've seen that it does. We have a clear path, and we plan to execute against that strategy to unlock it through frontline efficiencies within our labor and dispatch, gaining operating leverage through SG&A and efficiencies, unlocking our purchasing power as the biggest in the industry, and implementing our fleet management strategy.
We believe we can unlock approximately $100 million in cost benefit and drive two to three points of margin efficiencies within our business. We are positioned to capitalize on our spot as a number one in the landscaping industry. But as Dale Asplund said earlier, we don't only want to be the biggest; we want to be the best. By doing that, we're positioned to expand margins through operating efficiencies and drive value for all shareholders. With that, I'm going to hand it off to Brett Urban, who's going to take us through our capital allocation strategy and long-term value creation.
Thank you, Chris Stoczko. Look, really excited to be here and just thankful as I listened today to be part of such a great team.
I mean, if you haven't got it from the first couple of presentations, this is a team that has so much passion for the business and so much passion for the people in the business and truly care about each other. Just thankful to be a part of a team like that and what opportunity we have ahead of us. You heard Dale Asplund kick the day off, right? Focused on the fundamentals of the business, our employees, and our customers. The journey just begun. He mentioned 16 months into the journey. When you're still counting months, you know you're in the early stages. Mandy Orders spent time showing how we take care of our most valuable asset, our employees. We know we saw it from Mandy Orders slides. The lower our employee turnover is, the higher customer retention is. Michael Dozier taking us through our new unified go-to-market strategy.
Not just one or two opportunities to drive growth, a significant number of opportunities to drive growth under One BrightView. How awesome was it to hear from Rodney Hicks? I mean, thank gosh I wasn't Chris having to follow that. That was fantastic. Rodney Hicks, you get to hear it from our most important part of this organization, the Rodney Hicks of the world that make up our 280 branch locations out there. Those are the most important people we got to continue to focus on. Back when Dale Asplund showed the history of the company, we lost sight of that focus along the way. Happy to report 2024, taking right steps in the right direction, and 2025 will be more of it. That was awesome to hear from Rodney Hicks and his team. Just need to continue that focus.
Lastly, Chris Stoczko, just laying out tremendous opportunity we have to drive efficiencies in the business and unlock the true size and scale advantage of BrightView. I'll spend some time today reviewing our capital allocation strategy and how that will drive long-term shareholder value. I'll start with our core business. We have tremendous opportunity within our core business to take care of the branches and the customers we already have. I'll spend some time today talking about how we're allocating capital to make sure we take care of our core business. I'll move to accelerating revenue growth. A lot of things that Michael Dozier talked about earlier, how do we put capital dollars to make sure we accelerate that growth in the business? Next, I'll move to accretive acquisitions.
There's a number of opportunities out there in such a large market that we operate in, but we'll talk about the different opportunity areas that we're focused on when it comes to acquisition. And then lastly, what that all means for shareholder return. Now, look, all these capital investments are made possible by the recent proactive management of our balance sheet. We're in such a great position on the balance sheet. The left-hand side of this chart, you'll see our free cash flow. On the right-hand side of this chart, you'll see our debt and leverage ratios. Now, Dale Asplund and I weren't in our chairs in 2022, but the culmination of minimal free cash flow generation, M&A that was not accretive and frankly was purchased with cash the company didn't have, minimal liquidity all led to increased debt levels, increased leverage, and a balance sheet that was extremely stretched.
Reset, great news. 2023, we welcomed in a strategic investor, One Rock Capital, many who are here today with us. One Rock Capital's investment, along with our free cash flow generation on the balance sheet, allowed us to de-lever the balance sheet significantly in 2023 and really reset the capital profile of the business. We did more of that as we progressed in 2024, as you can see our leverage ratio continuing to come down. At the same time, we hedged our interest rates on our debt, essentially fixing the majority of our debt, and we increased and extended liquidity lines, which brings us to our debt structure. As I mentioned, we have a very opportunistic balance sheet coupled with no long-term maturities to 2029. Additionally, we have significant liquidity available to us to invest in the business.
As I mentioned, most of our debt is fixed, so we're not watching the markets out there every day. We're not subject to that volatility. Our average cost of capital is right around 6%. So the balance sheet I showed you and the debt structure that we have gives us significant opportunity to deploy capital into the business. I'll start with our first pillar, which is really reinvesting back into our core business. Chris Stoczko was up here a minute ago, and Dale Asplund said this since day one that we started. Fleet is a strategy, okay? We didn't run it like that in the past. Rodney Hicks said it was the squeakiest wheel kind of got the grease, and you had to squeak and squeak and squeak in order to get some grease, right?
Maybe we said a piece of equipment was coming, and it might have never showed up. That's not the way we're running the business. You heard it from Rodney Hicks, right? We're not even waiting for Rodney Hicks to ask us for equipment. We're looking at our age, and we're sending trucks and mowers and trailers to our branches that need them. We feel like we can do this and execute the capital strategy all while keeping our intensity for CapEx, net CapEx, right around 3.5% of revenue, right? So what does that mean? That doesn't mean we're not going to spend more to refresh our fleet, refresh our mowers, refresh our trailers. We are. We're going to spend more gross capital.
But as Chris mentioned, instead of selling equipment for 5 cents- 10 cents on a dollar, we're going to create this virtuous cycle where we're selling equipment for 40 cents- 50 cents on a dollar. We're going to keep newer equipment for our people and our employees to use, which are our billboards to our customers. That's going to cut down, as Rodney Hicks said, on all those repairs and maintenance and breakdowns we have in the field that will lead to that efficiency that Chris Stoczko talked about. Now, keeping with our core business, one area that has been neglected in the past is really our investment in technology. We have huge areas of improvement here. Really, just simply some of these move ourselves into the 21st century. Mandy Orders stood up here and mentioned our HRIS system. Our number one asset in BrightView is our 20,000 employees.
We cannot manage those 20,000 employees on an Excel spreadsheet anymore. We are going to invest in better management of those employees. Michael Dozier and Rodney Hicks stood up here. They talked about growth and the selling tools and growth technology that we're putting into the business. That's not only going to allow us to sell more, but as you think about efficiency and route density, and you saw some of the video, that's going to allow us to be more efficient as we sell. Chris Stoczko mentioned field service management. We're going to invest so that folks like Rodney Hicks in the field don't spend 420 hours every six months in front of our computer creating schedules.
We're going to invest in technology that allows them to get off of the whiteboards and get off of the paper and move on to the 21st century, to get that time refocused back with our customers. A tremendous opportunity in technology that we have to further differentiate us and unlock the true size and scale advantage of the BrightView. Now, shifting allocation, capital allocation to focus on our acceleration of growth. This is critical. As we stand up here today, Chris Stoczko showed in his slide, out of our total SG&A, we have roughly 80% in G&A and 20% in selling. We need to be diligent to shift that weighting, and we will. We're going to continue to invest in sales and technology, and we're going to shift that weighting to more sales in the business. That will lead to future sustainable, profitable growth.
Michael Dozier mentioned we're going to add 50% to our sales force, all right? That's a big number, 50% of our sales force. That's great because we can do that by leveraging the size and scale of this company and still drive significant margin efficiencies in total SG&A as we grow. It's a huge opportunity here. I just think, again, accelerating revenue growth. As we invest in fleet, technology, and our sales force, we also have a tremendous opportunity in greenfield markets as well as getting deeper in the markets we're already in. BrightView operates in 36 states today, which is great. Largest national provider, five times the size of our nearest competitor. That means there's 14 states that we're not in. That's significant. 14 states with very attractive markets that we're yet to get into.
Additionally, in the 36 states that we're in, our development business only overlaps in 20 states of those 36 states. We have by far the best development team in the business with the most expertise. This is a huge opportunity for us to expand development into the states we already have maintenance presence. We already have a branch. We already have a yard. We already have some equipment, right? We have a brand reputation. It's going to be easy for us. We will expand development into those states where we already have maintenance. If you think about market density on the right-hand side of the slide, Dale Asplund mentioned huge market. We have roughly 2% share. If you kind of look at the outline of the states, in any given state, we kind of cap out right around 5% of market share.
That's far too low for the number one player in the industry. But it starts with One BrightView. It starts with working together, right, and being able to earn more market share in those states. We have so much opportunity through greenfield, through development overlapping more with our maintenance business, and to grow in areas we're already well established. So acquisitions. Question Dale Asplund and I get asked a lot. It's been a while since we've done one. Agnostic to the core revenue opportunities that I just presented, we have tremendous opportunity through acquisition. As we think about acquisitions, we're generally thinking the focus is going to be in land maintenance business. There's a few key areas we're focused on. One is expanding the suite of services that we're able to offer our clients, either through service line density or through adjacent services.
As you think of service line density, Michael Dozier stood up here. He showed a chart on tree, right? If you're a client on the West Coast and you choose BrightView to be your service provider, you also have an opportunity to choose BrightView for the tree business. Almost every one of our West Coast clients uses us for tree. That's not the same across the nation. Actually, it's quite the opposite. Very few of our clients outside of the West Coast use BrightView for their tree service business. That's a huge opportunity for something we already have expertise in the business to build out across the whole enterprise. Then you think about adjacent services. Take a look at aquatics up there on the screen. That's really pond maintenance as you think about it. 1/3 of our business is homeowners associations, most of which have ponds, right?
We don't do that service today. We should. We're already out there. We're on the property. We're outdoors. We're mowing around the ponds. We just don't do that service today. If there's opportunity areas in acquisition where we can add an adjacent service and bring on those expertise to BrightView, we'd be looking to do that. Next is market expansion, right? I talked about we can greenfield ourselves organically through market expansion, but there could be areas of opportunity if we see a land business in an area we're not in to immediately add the impact of that acquisition, to immediately get into a greenfield market. It might cost a little bit more from a capital perspective, but you get the immediate benefit and returns. Lastly, market density in emerging markets. Huge opportunity here. I just showed a chart.
We have no more than 5%, really, + or - , in any given state for market density. It's a huge opportunity to build out not only the markets we're in. We're in 39 of the top 40 MSAs in the United States. That's pretty good, 98%. But when you take that number and you say, "How many of the top 60 are you in?" We're only in 50, which is right around 80%. So we're in 98% of the top 40, but we have huge opportunity to start looking at emerging markets and places that are growing to get into those markets. Acquisition could be an opportunity for us to do that. But I want to be clear. Before we do M&A, and we've learned how not to do M&A in the past, before we do M&A, we will make sure it fits three key areas.
It needs to fit our culture. It needs to fit our culture of employees first and customers first. You heard that throughout the whole day. Second, it needs to fit strategically. You're looking at our strategy of how we're going to grow this business moving forward. If it doesn't fit culturally and it doesn't fit strategically, we're not going to look at that acquisition. But if it does, then lastly, we're going to look at the financial fit and how we as BrightView can become better owners of that asset, right? We're dedicated to making sure acquisitions we bring on will be accretive to BrightView. This industry is enormous, and we're a very small share of it right now. So we will do M&A.
You'll see in our financial models later on that we have M&A built in there, but we have to ensure when we do M&A, we do it in the right way. It fits culturally. It fits strategically, and it's accretive to our earnings. I know we're all waiting to get to the financial models. They're going to come up after this slide, so we didn't post this publicly. We'll get there in a second. But before I get there, I really do think our winning formula is straightforward. We have the balance sheet. We have the liquidity, and we have the capital allocation strategy to win in this industry. We feel extremely confident about that. We need to make sure, as Mandy Orders stood up here earlier, we continue to focus on our employees and the fundamentals of the business.
We know lower employee turnover leads to higher customer retention, right? Michael Dozier and Rodney Hicks stood up here. The higher our customer retention is, we know will lead to growing branches. Chris Stoczko stood up here and said, "The bigger our branches are, the more money we make." We feel confident that we have the right strategy to execute, and we have the capital resources able to do it. Without further ado, let's get into the financial models here. We believe there's a very reasonable path to $4 billion in revenue in our future. Very reasonable. Dale Asplund began to say that we are on a journey. The journey has just begun. Keep that in mind. We are in the early innings of this journey. Revenue growth starts with the foundation, our employees and our customers.
Layer on the development backlog growth, which in the last few years has been very, very consistent. That development backlog growth will allow us to have opportunities to convert that to recurring maintenance, as Michael Dozier talked about. You think about the new sales investments we're making, not only in ramping-up our sales force, but also adding technology to support that sales force. And the additional service offerings we can offer our clients. As you think about building out that full suite of services and making sure we can offer our clients in every state that we operate in a very consistent suite of services. All that's possible, by the way, under the shift of One BrightView and the culture that exists in the field. That's before M&A.
Then you layer on some of the acquisitions we just talked about a minute ago and some opportunity areas that we have. We feel like a $4 billion path in revenue is very reasonable for this company. Now, as you think about the journey, not all revenue is linear and not all growth is linear. So we are taking tremendous strides in our landscape business to ensure that that foundation is rock solid. We saw back in 2019, 2021, with Michael Dozier retention chart of how just growing the business at all costs with things leaking out the back door, never going to be sustainable, and it's never going to be accretive to earnings, all right? If you think about this transformational journey we are on, I want to just give a quick view of how we see our landscape business growing.
Very similar to the guidance we gave in 2025. We see the early years right around 1% to 3% growth in our landscape business. That's really as customer retention starts to improve and we start to add technology. Then you get to the middle years, right? We see that growth ramping- up pretty significantly. We're somewhere around 3%- 6%. That's really as technology's adopted, our sales force is ramping-up, and we're starting to get closer to that development conversion goal that Michael Dozier laid out. Then you think about the later years. As we get kind of all strategies in full swing, we feel like we can grow this business mid to high- single- digits as we move forward. Now, as we think about EBITDA, we feel like we have a very, again, reasonable and strong path to 16% + margins.
The path doesn't heavily rely on M&A. It's really, as you think about it, it's that revenue growth of roughly $750 million that I showed a few slides ago. Our gross margins are north of 20%. So it's that revenue growth coming through at a 20% drop-through that's going to come directly to our bottom line. Additionally, Chris Stoczko laid out, we have so much opportunity in efficiencies in this business, whether it's through labor management, the use of technology, whether it's through our fleet strategy, which is less repairs, maintenance, rentals, or whether it's procurement, whether it's getting folks all moved in the same direction and getting those savings through our procurement initiative, or whether it's leveraging our size and scale of the company. We feel like there's $100 million, roughly, of EBITDA in this bucket that we can capture in the near term.
Lastly would be M&A. As you think about opportunities and acquisitions, we're not relying on acquisitions to get to that 16% mark, but as you think about acquisitions coming into the business with the technology we're adding, with the sales force we're ramping-up, we should become better owners of that asset, and that asset should be accretive to BrightView. The opportunity for margin expansion is significant. As you think about our 2024 results, we posted 110 basis points of margin expansion, and our mid-point of our guidance this year shows another step forward. Lastly here, before I wrap up, I just want to show what the impact of revenue growth and margin expansion means on our balance sheet. Left-hand side of the slide is the free cash flow generation of the business.
Last couple of years, our conversion rate's been about 25% free cash flow conversion. We feel like with $650 million of EBITDA by 2030, we feel like our free cash flow conversions will be above 40%, which is more than $260 million of free cash flow, all while executing the capital strategies I showed you on the page. With the cash we're generating through the business, even after potential M&A, we feel like leverage could be somewhere in the 1.2x- 1.5x range based on this model. Significant opportunity to drive shareholder return. Before I turn it back over to Dale Asplund to wrap up with some closing comments, I just want to show a powerful video of our team members out there in the field, all 20,000 strong, who are quickly embracing the One BrightView culture.
Without these guys embracing this culture, none of this would be possible.
I'm excited about One BrightView because we actually work better together. We're more collaborative. All the departments, we get together, and we understand each other, what everybody's doing a little bit more than we used to. One BrightView means working as one, unified together. No barriers between our divisions, just working as one. We all seem to be pulling in the same direction, and that's very powerful to come to work knowing that your team's behind you all the time. We're not just saying it. We're doing it. We're out there. We're doing the hard work. We're talking to the customer. We're being proactive with the proposals. We're giving them exactly what they're asking for and needing. Ultimately, it's teamwork. It's having a great team, whether it's your sales team or your production team.
But ultimately, when we're meeting client expectations, that's when we win. We take pride in what we do. I feel like that starts with our people, and we do have the best people. We want to have the best-looking properties. Now that we're One BrightView, I believe our clients see us as one team, not two separate companies. The One BrightView initiative allows us to deliver to our clients and drive them the same experience across the board, whether it be equipment or technology. It always keeps us at the forefront of the landscape industry. I love my job because it's what I do. It's what I am. It's who I am. It's something I enjoy. I want to come to work. I want to come and experience this with the team that I have around me because it's something that we've built together.
This company gives you that opportunity to be able to do that. One BrightView. One BrightView. One BrightView. One BrightView.
We're almost to the fun part of Q&A, but I want to leave you with two final messages. I know we've shared a lot of data. Let's go right back to where we started. As you can see, we have significant opportunity to make sure we in the service industry are the investment of choice. I've said it from day one. It starts with our employees. Mandy Orders covered that. Making sure everybody knows the importance of our customers, including the people at corporate that have to support people like Rodney Hicks in our branches. Then, of course, we have to become better at taking advantage of our size and scale. Doing all that, being responsible stewards of capital, will drive this company forward.
If there's one slide that I want you to remember as we leave, it's this. There is truly a path in 2030 for this business to generate roughly $400 million of revenue with EBITDA margins above 16%, generating somewhere north of $650 million of EBITDA and returning 40% in free cash flow conversions. We are going to keep giving quarterly results, but this is our destiny. This is what we're going to work towards, not each quarter. This is what we're going to drive our company towards over the next several years. With that, I'm going to ask people bring the microphones out we can get any questions. People on the internet can ask questions. I'll have Dan. Is there something that we do? Email in, Dan? Is that the message?
Yep.
We're going to start out on site here.
We'll do questions on site here, and then we'll take some online. There's some over here. Let's go back.
Okay. You ready?
Super.
Hi. Bob Labick from CJS Securities.
Hey, Bob Labick.
Hey, that was fantastic. Really great presentations from all of you. Thank you so much for that. Lots of great information backing up a lot of the stuff you've told us over the last 16 months now and giving us facts and numbers behind it. Great, great stuff. I wanted to start off with one of the key themes, right? One BrightView's the theme, and being the employer of choice is the beginning of that journey. How close are you to achieving being the employer of choice? What are the next steps, and how does that impact the P&L kind of getting there?
Yeah. We've come a long way. Mandy Orders said it.
When we see we have great tenure in our frontline workers that touch our customers every day. That's critical. We still have that lowest portion, call it the bottom 15%- 20%, that we technically turn multiple times a year, which costs us money to train, to onboard, to bring those people onboard. When I was in Rodney Hicks branch in Jacksonville, I talked to our employees, and they said, similar to what Rodney Hicks said, "Dale Asplund, you did everything you said you're going to do. When are we going to get PTO?" You heard Mandy Orders say, "We're going to get that done." That's our next step.
I agree with tremendous things for our employees, and it starts there, right? You go back a few years ago, it starts with the team of Rodney Hicks, right? It's most important. He's the most important team we have.
If we can take care of that level, and you heard Rodney Hicks say it's 17 years in the business, right? 17 years of CEOs and companies coming in and saying, "We're going to do this for you." It's been 16 months, and you can ask Rodney Hicks over a cocktail here in a minute what Dale Asplund saying he's going to do, we're doing. I think that's the most important thing, and it starts with our employees. We got to get this foundation built first, right, before we can start to accelerate the sales force and bring on acquisitions. Because without this fixed, we're just going to continue to turn those employees. Our customers will continue to turn as well.
Great. I'll just ask one more, and then I'll pass on the mic. Thank you.
Just in terms of, so obviously, lower employee churn equals lower or higher customer retention. You've given us a few facts on that as well. What's the timetable for that retention growth? Is it linear? In other words, if you get every new point of retention, is that much more growth, or are you just dedicating more resources towards retention and less towards sales of new wins? Can we think of it as you march from 81%- 90% or wherever, and that's nine points of growth? Or how does that translate to the P&L as well?
I think long-term, if we could get every branch to 90%+ retention, you saw what happens when we get 90%+ retention branches. They grow. They grow up 9% on an annual basis. So that's a win. It's not going to be linear.
We're not going to go up the same amount every year, but this is the foundation. When I joined, somebody told me on day one, "We can't control our customer retention." I said, "Let me tell you something. There's only one thing we can control, and that's taking care of our customers and making sure they're happy and we listen to them." That's what we can control. Stop trying to outrun your problem of not having customer service. Fix the customer service. Take care of what we have today. Then bring in more customers so our branches are ready to take care of them. Trying to run faster and spend more money to find new accounts where you're losing more on the back was never going to be a sustainable strategy. I would love to say 85% is our target. It's not.
It's going to be each individual branch. Somebody asked me at break, and this is important, because somebody said, "When you look at the data, and we tried to show you as much as we could, it's amazing what you see. It's not market-driven. It's not when there's one branch in this city we do well, and if it's in a different city, we struggle with retention. We have branches that are very close to each other that are at 90% and are at 70%. It comes down to the Rodney Hicks that we have." I mentioned what we tried to help them with at our annual meeting, making sure they take care of their employees, making sure they can manage their P&L, and getting out and spending time with the customers. So it's a great foundation builder for us. It's a great way to keep building.
Each year, we've shared it for the last several quarters where we're at in the journey. You're going to have timing always on when we report a loss and when we don't. It's a non-GAAP metric. So I don't want people seeing that metric bounce along as we go forward and overreact. But we want to give you visibility because I truly believe it is the one thing we control more than anything. Culturally speaking, we have to make sure every one of our senior leaders down to our employees in the field understand their responsibility in taking care of those customers. Do you want to add anything, Brett Urban?
The only thing I would add about it, it's a great question. But if you think about ramping-up the sales force, as Michael Dozier talked quite a bit about, we couldn't have done that 15 months ago. We couldn't.
When you're losing employees and you're churning that bottom 15%- 20% five and six times in a year, we couldn't add sellers with employees that weren't able to take care of those customers that they sell. With retention rates below 80%, anything you brought in the front door is walking out the back door. That's not the way to create the sustainable growth model we're looking for. I think 2023 was a balance sheet reset year. 2024 was a cultural reset year, focused on our employees and customers. As you see in 2025 and beyond, some of the things Michael Dozier laid out, now we're going to start putting the allocation of dollars into our sales force.
Super. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Bob Labick.
Absolutely.
Tim Mulrooney William Blair. Just building on that question, you talked about reinvesting G&A dollars back into the sales force.
I'm sorry if I missed this, but did you give a timing on that 50% increase in the sales force? Is that a 2030 target? Is it a more near-term target? How are you thinking about that?
Yeah. I'll start. It's much nearer term. I feel like we're in a position today, and we are focused. Mandy Orders spends an incredible amount of her time with Michael Dozier making sure we're adding customer-facing resources today. This is not just in 2030. We are going to add the sales cost now to invest in the growth as we go into the back- half of 2025 and into 2026 and 2027. We believe long-term, we're going to even spend more money on sales people because we're going to be able to fund that with more of that savings from G&A. We missed a huge opportunity.
When you think about what we should give for size and scale advantage, we have under-leveraged technology to help our branches. Coming from a service-based business that's decentralized in my career, every moment we push non-value-added work to our branch leaders takes time away from the most critical thing we should have them do, spending time with the customers that they're closest to. Michael Dozier said this. What causes us to be successful in growing this business is making sure we have the right branch leader in place. Those branch leaders have to feel comfortable, like Rodney Hicks said, spending time out in the branch, out with the customer, not just being behind the computer. So that sales investment we're making, we're going to grow significantly this year. We have a committed number of people we're adding that's going to grow that.
It's not quite 50% this year, but it's a significant number of resources that we're adding because that's the foundation. I truly believe we have momentum. That's the word. All the things that people see in the financials are great. But what you don't feel is the momentum that you get with the people like Rodney Hicks in our branches that say, "Finally, we're getting new fleet. Finally, we're able to keep our customers. Finally, we'll get new equipment." All these things that they needed in the past, they're getting. That's where we can start putting more sales in, bring more customers in, and grow this business profitably. Not for the sake of growth. Grow it profitably. Top line, 20% flow through to the bottom line.
I'd just add financially that pie chart of 80/20 is roughly $500 million, as you can see in our 2024 financial statements.
Do the math. About 20% is $100 million in our sales force. Our SG&A in total is just below 18%, right? We're committing to two things over time. We're committing to taking that $100 million we're spending in sales up significantly as more weight of that pie. We're also committing to operating leverage coming down significantly over time. That's 17.9% that we posted in 2024. We're saying it's going to be somewhere around 16%- 16.5%, all while adding those sellers as we move through time.
That includes your investment in sales.
It includes it. Yep. Exactly.
Switching gears here to free cash flow, you touched on it at the end there, but 40% conversion up from 25% today, that's very powerful to the financial model. Can you just help us understand what's driving that?
I mean, I get that better EBITDA margins should drive higher free cash flow, but curious what else working capital or otherwise will help drive that improvement.
First of all, that's my favorite topic, is free cash flow. I'll stop talking about that all day. But look, we've made great progress in the balance sheet and great progress when it comes to generating cash to the business, right? You look at 2022, $7 million of cash flow. We spent over $100 million on acquisitions. Then we spent money on some other things, over-levered the balance sheet. Those days are gone, right? 2023, we reset the balance sheet. 2024, we generated north of $145 million of free cash flow. Now, some of that's timing with CapEx, right? But we can see those numbers tick up significantly over time.
$650 million of EBITDA, still spend about 3.5% net CapEx on $4 billion long-term, right? That's about $135 million. You're going to have some networking capital to grow the business. We're still going to pay interest, but we don't expect our debt to increase really throughout this time. Our interest today is between $50 and $60 million, right? We're going to become a little bit bigger of a taxpayer. But if you think about some of the variables in there, we feel like CapEx is sort of fixed at 3.5%. Our interest is fixed at $50million- $60 million. That's what's going to cause that conversion to continue to tick up over time.
When Brett Urban and I—I let him answer it first. I usually like to take the first question. [cross-talk] . It was a good one for him to start with.
When Brett Urban and I looked at that model and, "Look, we have to earn the right to invest in M&A." And when we looked at what we were going to give for our estimates today, I said, "Should we include M&A? Should we not include M&A?" The leverage numbers we had there include us spending $450 million on M&A. That's what's so exciting. The scary part becomes if you don't spend $450 million and you expand margins and you get to even that $3.5 billion level, what your leverage will look like. So we have to—we have positioned this company to be able to do what any national consolidator should do. Do M&A, but do it right. Do it strategically, not like the company's done in the past.
There is a path where if you get your ability as a company to be better at providing tools to your branches so they can service customers better, buying companies, you can be a better owner by having them use your toolset. We didn't have that in the past. Our technology stack wasn't there. We didn't give them the best fleet. We are changing all those things. On a go-forward basis, when we bring a company in, they'll have all those benefits by being part of BrightView. It's good questions, Tim.
Alex Hess. Alex Hess? Greg Palm?
Is it me first or?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks. Greg Palm from Craig- Hallum. If we could maybe start by unpacking the growth targets a little bit. In the back, the last couple of years, you talked about kind of 5% to 7% growth in the core land business.
Maybe some underlying assumptions behind that price, volume, where retention would be at that point, and then any color on kind of ancillary services and kind of the recovery to get back to where we were historically and maybe even beyond.
Yeah. I'll talk high level. As much as Michael Dozier had a great slide that he showed every lever we have to pull and what we can do, I've shared with you the retention number. Our quarterly calls could really get a little crazy if I gave you every metric, and we tried to give you every quarter update of how those metrics bounced around. But I want to assure you this. Our commitment is to improve customer retention every year. We had 200 basis point improvement last year. We feel like it's 100+ basis points that we can improve this year, maybe as high as 200 basis points.
We'll work that through. Then we see consistent change every year. What we showed you, our ancillary penetration, which is ancillary as a percent of our contract business, has declined. In fact, what we said on our first quarter call is our lack of growth in our core business was 100% due to ancillary. So as a percent of revenue, it declined. What drives that is simple. Michael showed you the longer a customer stays with us, the more of that discretionary spend we get. That discretionary spend is not just basic mulching and flowers. It also is all those other services that when you have the right relationship with a customer, they ask you to become their tree provider. They ask you to do other work. When we do proper maintenance, they ask us to do their development work.
They ask us to do all the other work that traditionally we didn't earn the right for. So Greg Palm, look, I think there's constant improvement. I think we are going to see a benefit from increased new sales will be the biggest one of these levers that we can pull. Our development group continues to grow. Brett Urban mentions it. When we talk about M&A, I always ask myself, I have multiple people in my development group. I have people that are in the room that came out of that business. It's a balance because I say to myself, "We're going to focus M&A activity on our core land business. We're not going to buy snow companies, and we're not going to buy development companies." I don't want that to be taken by my development group as we're not going to invest in that business.
I have seen what that group does. I would take any investor, I would take any analyst to see the jobs they're doing. Michael Dozier talked about what we're working on today. We are building a natural grass field in SoFi Stadium above an artificial turf stadium field. Our group can do that all over the country. All I need to do is give them capital, give them real estate. We will grow our development business because we have the best people in this industry. They haven't been funded. They haven't been given the opportunity to grow. But if we give them that, we can expand that business without doing M&A because M&A, we're not going to get talent as good as what we have in our business today.
Greg Palm, I hope that gives you a little bit of all the different levers, but I hate to just metric it out. Here's the scary part. I hate to say, trying to predict which one's going to go when. All these levers we look at every month. Brett Urban and I cover it. I review it with the SVPs. We are always looking at we're going to get give and take on each lever, but every one of those gives us opportunity. I would just note one thing there is that price-volume mix in that equation is about 50- 100 basis points per year, Greg Palm. The majority of it is not price-volume. It's coming from those levers we talked about.
Yep. Okay. Thanks.
But to be clear, you're sort of saying a normalized growth rate when we're, I think, through a lot of these transformations could be 5%- 7%. I'm just, does that imply that retention rates are at 90% and ancillary levels are... it's not okay.
No. I would tell you, without sharing our model with you, we did not model that our growth was dependent upon getting back to 90% retention. What I've said is just get it back to the historic levels. Anything above that just gives me more upside. So our model, you guys can try to—we gave you as much detail as we can. You guys can almost plug in some of these numbers to say what has to be true to get to that $35 million-$50 million on land-based revenue.
It doesn't imply we're going to get new sales growth, plus we're going to get the development conversion, plus we're going to have to get retention to 90%. You get retention in the mid-80s, you're already on a path to growing this business nicely. And as crazy as this is, that is not as hard as it seems, okay? You saw the math. We have branches below 70% customer retention. We must fix those, and Michael Dozier said that. We have branches below 80%. We must fix those. That's our opportunity. That's 40% of our branches below 80%. You fix that 40%, you just get it to 80%. You're already at 85% because of the branches that are overachieving. Let alone if we could get every branch manager to be Rodney Hicks. Our number one branch, number one branch on customer retention was over 99% last year. Over 99%. It is possible.
When you talk to that individual, you will see why. When he gets me in the car and we go out and visit customer sites, he knows who he's dealing with from the customer. He knows the customer's name. He's not sitting at his desk. He's talking to his customers. When there's a quality of service issue, he knows about it before his team tells him about it. So we're going to get there, Greg Palm. I feel this is the exciting part. All these things are levers that we can pull. We don't need every one of them to be a home run. If we got all these signals, we can grow this business the way that we predicted in this model.
Perfect.
My last one has to do with some of these ancillary or adjacent service offerings, whether it's tree or aquatics, like you mentioned, pest control. How many of those or how much of that could be built out organically versus through an acquisition?
Every time I go out and I spend time with our branch managers, they give me so much input because there's a list of other things. Some of it, Greg Palm, is how can we be able to keep our employees all year long? We do have seasonality in our business, and some of our employees leave us in the season. What could we do in markets such as Florida that we could keep those employees during those winter months when the grass goes a little more dormant? So there's a litany of them, Greg Palm.
Rodney Hicks gave me a couple this week as him and I had dinner last night, and it just keeps opening up my mind to say the more we can do for our customer, the better partner we can be for them. But you have to earn that, right? If your base maintenance business isn't the quality we need it to be, you don't have the right to have any other services with them. It starts with providing that better customer service.
Okay. Thanks for the call.
Yeah. Alex Hess, right behind you.
Hi, everybody. Alex Hess on behalf of Andrew Steinerman here today. Hope you're all well. I want to start with the sort of nexus of employee retention and customer retention. I believe earlier in the day, you highlighted some of the data-driven work you've done around employee satisfaction.
On the customer side, does BrightView maintain a net promoter score? Is that coming? How has that trended? How are you going to sort of be as data-driven on that side as you're on the employee side?
Yeah. Good question. We do do an NPS score, but more importantly, we do what's called our CSAT, not to use an internal term, but basically our customer satisfaction score. What we do, instead of sending them a 100-question questionnaire, we give them a simple, just like you see at a restroom, we send them a simple survey once every 180 days, typically, where we say, "Are you happy? Are you content? Or are you sad?" That triggers actions with Rodney Hicks level group to go out and find out if a customer doesn't feel like they're happy with the service, what we're doing wrong.
It's almost like a much smaller NPS score that we get much quicker. People are real quick to just click on that red, yellow, green to give us some immediate feedback. Can you give any color on the trends in those metrics? Yeah. Look, I think you can see with the customer retention, we're up 200 basis points last year. So we were up 210 basis points. We announced at the end of Q1. Customers are going to say they're happier when they stay with you. Here's the best part. We use AI today. Alex Hess, we can predict almost 80% of the customers that are at risk of leaving us, whether they're going to leave us or not. We send that out to our branch leaders. Any account over half a million dollars, I get a copy of it.
I reach out to the branch to say, "Are we at risk with this customer and what's wrong with it?" So we can come up with our target accounts, and our branches are out there saying, "We are doing everything we can to keep them."
Got it. Thank you. One last one, if you'll hear me. So a big part of your model here is based on refreshing your fleet, keeping those fleet ages shorter. Of course, that means exposure to residual model dynamics, residual value dynamics. Can you walk through for mowers, for the sort of trucks you buy and trailers they're pulling, what those residual dynamics that investors need to be aware of are? What drives residual value in that market?
Yeah. So great question. I came from a business.
I think many people know I came from a company called United Rentals, where we managed lots of assets. Every asset, Alex Hess, is going to have basically an optimal point of sale. And it's all based on total cost of ownership. There is never going to be a single point where you're going to say you're going to sell it because what you have to take into the calculation is much more than what the residual is that day. Residual values go up and down, just like the cost of acquiring new equipment goes up and down, just like the cost of maintenance, both parts and labor, goes up and down based on what the supply and demand curve has. So all those metrics, Alex, actually go up and down every year to say, "Should we sell it at 45 months?"
Should we sell it at 60 months? And it changes every year. Our assumption that we used was us recovering roughly 40% of an asset's value, selling it at the right time. Now, if we see, like the whole economy saw in 2022 and 2023, as the supply chain was constrained, that residual values go up to 70%, but the cost goes up much higher, we're not going to look just to liquidate fleet because it hits an age. We're going to manage every year what's the optimum point to dispose of assets. That's our goal. So it's going to fluctuate, but on average, over the next five years, we believe using roughly 40% instead of the 5% we get today in the past is the right model for us to do. I hope that answers.
Maybe just one last one since y ou've got the mic still. Will you be adding back gains on sale into Adjusted EBITDA and net income?
Yep. Gains on sale are part of Adjusted EBITDA today, right? They're fairly de minimis as you think about overall EBITDA, $325 million last year, mid-point $345 million this year, but they will be added to EBITDA.
I would tell you losses are added today too, Alex Hess, when we sell assets that unfortunately we lose money on because we kept them too long. But yes, if we get gains on assets, it'll be part of our overall bottom line.
Thank you.
Thanks, Alex Hess. Yeah. Jeff Stevenson, we got Jeff right in front of Alex Hess.
Thanks. Jeff Stevenson from Loop Capital.
My first question is, how long are you expecting it to take for the new HRIS system and field service management system to be fully operational throughout the entire company?
Yeah. Great question. I wish it could be tomorrow. Here's the crazy part. When you get the tool in front of we've got our geographic regions are each getting two branches that we're starting come April to put up live for the field service tool. Let's start with that one. You're going to learn things, Jeff Stevenson, during that process. Our biggest challenge with IT technology at BrightView is when you do what's called a pilot, you do a pilot and you learn, and you fix things, and then you do another pilot and you learn, and you keep doing that until the tool you deliver to your branch helps them be successful. We almost had a logic.
We use people as guinea pigs. We're going to make them use a tool, and if it doesn't kill them, we'll say, "Okay, good, we can deploy this everywhere in the company." So as much as I'd love to say the initial, call it 16 branches we roll it out to are all going to love it, and we can actually get it rolled out in the fourth quarter quickly for the field service. We're going to make sure that what we roll out as we go through those 16, it meets our customers, which are our branch's needs. The HRIS system is a much bigger journey. We believe come the fourth quarter of this year, we will have the system implemented as a base system. We still, in our branches, capture time through barcoding through another tool.
When we can capture time through our HRIS system, it'll even be better long-term. Here's the crazy part. We use time capture in our branches today. We scan our employees' badges when they go job to job to make sure we have visibility into how much labor it takes us to do a job. With the tool that we're putting in place, there's technology where we can geofence those jobs, so we don't have to do that anymore. When our employees are driving between jobs, we can recognize it as windshield time, and when they're on a job, it checks them in, and when they leave the job, it checks them out. Technology can make people's lives easier, and that's what these tools are going to do. I will tell you, I wish I could see us using five or six other game-changing tools like that.
These two tools, by the end of this year, will be significantly deployed across our business to help our branches. We'll keep adding features over time to see what we can do additionally in HRIS or with field service.
That's very helpful. Brett Urban, thanks for all the details on the M&A strategy and how you're thinking about things moving forward. How important will be the feedback from the local level on your M&A strategy and targeting competitors at the branch level? They view our strong competitors or adjacent areas they think will help them compete in certain markets.
Let me start. I'll let Brett give you some more detail, Jeff Stevenson. Much greater than in the past. Let's start with that. Where it starts, where there was zero input from our branches. You have to earn the right to get M&A in your region.
I tell my people that all the time. Some of them are ready to do it today. They've earned that right. But they have to be the ones to suggest who we should look to buy. They are the ones that need to manage the business. And remember what Brett Urban said. This is very important. You can always convince yourself financially to do M&A. There's a model that you can put together that will say, "We can make this financially work." That's irrelevant. Strategically and culturally are much more important. If our local leaders don't feel that those businesses that we're going to deploy that precious capital on can come in and be part of our team, I don't care what the financial model says. It's a loss.
It might not be a loss for the next 12 months, but you'll look back on it after 36 months and say, "We shouldn't have done that deal." Brett Urban, I'll let you.
No, I would agree. Several years ago, the M&A model was sit in the boardroom at corporate, identify targets, and go buy them. The eight operating SVPs are in the room around you. We have a chance to talk to them. They got delivered acquisitions post-purchasing them, saying, "Hey, good luck integrating them." Never talked to the owners, never talked to the people, never saw the equipment. It didn't work. You can understand why we failed in the M&A strategy in the past. We haven't done some in a while. Jeff Stevenson, it's a great question. The synergy needs to be between the operating team, letting us know what are good quality.
Quality is a key word too, right? Because in the past, we were buying things and touting the fact we bought things at four multiples or five multiples. Buying stuff on sale, you're usually getting a company on sale, right? You can see in the model up on the screen, we're planning on somewhere between seven and nine multiple pre-synergies, and then we'll obviously put a path together for synergies. But making sure that local team is bought in, either bringing you the opportunity or being brought into very early stages so that they're fully aligned with how not only do they integrate the company so it fits culturally and strategically, but that we can get those operating synergies.
No, that makes sense. Thank you.
Thanks, Jeff Stevenson. Back in the quarter, Andrew. Thank you.
This is Harold Antor for Stephanie Moore.
You guys talked about in the maintenance, I think you are in 36 states and development is in, I believe, 14 states.
20 states.
20 states, sorry. 14 is how much you're—14 ststes, 16 states is how much you could grow. I guess as you expand development, potentially in the more states to overlap with all of the maintenance, is there a way for that development conversion to grow from 7% to maybe 8% or 10%? And then just anything you could talk about with the expected backlog growth that you could potentially see as you roll it out in more states.
Great question, Harold Antor. Let's start with, on average, it's 7% of the development revenue turns into reoccurring maintenance. We have jobs that are 10% of what the development work was for ongoing maintenance. We also have jobs that are 3%.
It depends on the type of job you're doing. If it's a lot of hardscape, concrete, pavers, that might not have as much annual maintenance as something that's a lot more living-type plant installation. So we use 7% as a generic number. I wouldn't want to say, "Look, maybe we keep getting it so successful that the 70% that we think we can convert goes up." But I would just keep in your head, use 7% of that development revenue that you peg as a way to do it. Every year, we'll try to give you a better idea of what we're converting, and you can come up with it. We said it was mid-teens last year. We did just over $800 million of development revenue. So you can kind of do the math to guess how much we converted.
But I wouldn't try to run away and say, "Could it be 8%?" It's nothing structurally we're doing wrong. Just on average, with the customers that we do development work for, we are seeing it's roughly 7% looking at the historic values.
And I'd say there's huge opportunity. By far, they all mentioned this, development's kind of the tip of the spear. We by far have the best experts in the industry when it comes to development and construction projects. Most of them are in the room today. Some of them are in the room today. Those states, those 16 states, we already have real estate, which is expensive. Going to buy a piece of real estate is expensive. We already have real estate. We already have equipment. We already have a brand reputation.
As we think about acquisitions, that's why we say we're focused really on acquisitions for the land business, because we feel like in our development business, we can cold start into these states we're already in and get an anchor job and build that business out. Over time, Harold Antor, to your question is, as that backlog builds in one of those states, yes, the maintenance opportunity is going to build right along with it.
We have one of our regions here, our Midwest region. That individual has one development branch, one development branch in Chicago. Yet he covers so many states from Minneapolis to Wisconsin, Minnesota to Wisconsin, over to Michigan. We could expand to probably a half dozen development branches in those markets we are servicing today.
Development work is interesting because you can set up temporary sites to service it, but we're servicing the Pittsburgh Airport out of Washington, DC. We're servicing a big job we have in Dearborn out of Chicago. We have that capability because we have real estate and our development team can work. But those are the jobs that we have to use for anchors to help us get more business in those markets. What that silo in the past of development not working with maintenance created was when we did share real estate, we literally had fences in the middle of the yard to say, "That's your half of the yard. This is my half of the yard." That's not our future. Our future is saying, "If we get more development, it helps our maintenance group."
The better quality maintenance we do, the more development we're going to get. It's a vicious cycle for us to keep going in. That's One BrightView. That's everybody working together.
Great. Thank you for that clarity. I guess the other question that I think Rodney Hicks highlighted with the inclusion of fleet, he was seeing lower maintenance and repair costs. I know you guys have received a significant amount of fleet this year, but you still have a lot more fleet investment given your 15,000 fleet. So if you could just give us a sense for how much repair and maintenance costs have come down and how you expect that to impact the margin profile as you continue to change that fleet over time. Then I guess on the snow business, I know you're moving back to a fixed rate.
Should we just think of that business as like an annuity-like business where you get $160 million- $200 million in revenue every year as you move through that fixed rate? Because that's what you guide to this year with the [BS] and U.S.L divestitures removed.
I'll take the snow business first there in the question. We'll come back to fleet. From a snow perspective, built into these models, we're assuming very little growth, right? We want to make sure we can provide snow services to the customers who also use us for land. In the model, you may see something like 1% to 1.5% growth, but it's pretty De minimis because we're not looking to really create more volatility in the business, right? But if a customer we have for land wants to also use us for snow, we will absolutely do that.
We'll look to move that to a more fixed, predictable model. Michael Dozier showed that in his slide. Several years ago, we were really 2/3 fixed. Previous administration said, "Let's really roll the dice and make that 1/3 fixed," meaning 2/3 of the business, it has to snow. Good news is this year it's starting to snow a little bit. Our strategy is to take advantage of that now so that next season and the seasons after that, that business is much more predictable.
Let me add real quick on snow because Michael Dozier talked about it. It's about 7% of our business, our snow revenue. We talk about it a lot because in the past, it created huge issues with our predictability of our business model.
What we've committed to, and Brett Urban and I, when we gave guidance this year, we're not going to use snow as an excuse ever again. I don't know where it's going to snow. I don't know when it's going to snow. I don't know how much it's going to snow or how fast it's going to snow. Who cares? We're going to run our business and take care of our customers and focus on our core development maintenance business. When they use us for snow, if it snows more, we'll deliver good news to our investors, good news to the analysts. We don't like to deliver surprises because for some reason we didn't get snow or it didn't snow in the right markets. So snow, Brett Urban right.
We almost flatlined it and think of it as the cost of inflation a little bit at about a point onto what we predicted this year. That's all we did with snow. The growth you saw in that model is land and development. It's not snow.
I'll take your second part of that question. In the margin bridge that we provided, the path to 16%, by the way, we feel that's very, very reasonable. There's a bucket in there, roughly $100 million bucket of EBITDA that we don't have today. Harold Antor, the way I'd think about that bucket is about a quarter of it is coming from our fleet strategy, which is less repairs, less maintenance, less rentals, right? There's about another quarter of that that's going to come from procurement, right? Chris Stoczko showed the example. We have branches buying from similar providers in different markets at different prices.
We feel like a quarter of that $100 million will come from there. Then you think about field service management and some of the technology we're adding into the business to manage our employees. We feel like there's about a quarter of efficiencies that will come in there called $25 million bucks. You think about leveraging the size and scale of a company, right? As we grow, shift more resources to sales, right? Less out of G&A, that percentage is going to come down. We feel like there's another quarter of that $100 million in that bucket of just size and scale advantage. So that's the way we think about that $100 million. Hopefully, that's helpful.
Yeah.
Hi, Peter Bernard from Halliburton. Do you guys currently have a SWAT team to go into the branches that are lower than 80% to help fix it?
What is the actual mechanism to fix it?
Yeah. The way we're structured, Peter Bernard, is we have the eight field leaders that we have today out there that I shared with on average 22 years of experience. Under them, think of it as we have roughly 24 different market leaders. Those market leaders are the ones that interact on a daily basis with those branch guys. You do the math. Overall P&Ls that we share, we have roughly 180 P&Ls in the maintenance business that we manage. If you have 24 markets, there's about seven branches in each market. That one person is the key to the interaction. If I go out to the field, I want to go see our struggling branches more than our successful branches.
I wouldn't call it a SWAT team, but it's a focused effort by our field leaders, our operations leaders, our finance leaders, our regional leaders, and our market leaders to make sure we go in there to help those people.
You're welcome.
Thanks, Peter Bernard.
We're going to take one from the webcast here. This is from Carl Reichardt at BTIG. Can you speak a bit more about the journey to improving route density and optimization? How are you going to measure and track this going forward?
I'll start. Route density, windshield time kills profitability in any route-based business. It starts with what Rodney Hicks said.
Rodney Hicks always had, when I went out and visited the successful branches, I saw, even though they were siloed with a separate leadership structure in our sales group from operations, I saw the branches that were successful, the branch manager talking to the sales guy that he worked with. But putting them together is what's key. Then giving them a tool that we showed you that all of our branches have that creates complete visibility to, "Here's our route. We can see," I told you earlier, "profitability by route and how much money we're making or not making and what the margins are by account on that route." I've said this from day one. My goal is to never get rid of a customer.
I want to find a way through route density to be able to service customers more efficiently so we can keep all of our customers and grow them over time. I've often been asked, "How many low-profit customers are you guys looking to get rid of?" I said, "I don't want to get rid of any customer. I want route density to be our avenue to actually creating every one of our customers more profitable." Our real estate. Many people have asked to come out and visit branches with me. Many of our investors and a lot of the analysts. Obviously, you heard Rodney Hicks start of his days. He's at his branch at 5:15 am in the morning. We have to have people out of those branches in busy markets to get trucks and trailers out to our customers very early. Come 7 o'clock, they're empty.
There's nothing left to see. I say, "If you're going to come, you got to come in the morning with me. Do stretch and flex and see us do dispatch." Because by the time the day's going, all of our employees are out with customers as it should be. That real estate to store those trucks every night is expensive. The more we can leverage that, the more we can drive, the better we are off. The more we can get on route density, the more revenue we can put through our existing facilities. You saw with Chris Stoczko work, bigger branches, we leverage the SG&A better, and the margin goes shooting up. Brett Urban, you want to add?
No, Carl Reichardt, it's a great question. The only thing I would add is that we're at the very beginning of this journey with route density.
We just launched this technology. Just like we're just about to launch HRIS and we're just about to launch field service management. So as you think about the efficiency we can gain in the future, not only to sell more, to equip Rodney Hicks, like he said in his business developer, to go out and sell along the routes we want, but the efficiency from route optimization, we haven't really even touched that yet, right? So that's a huge opportunity for us as we move forward.
We're going to take one more for the webcast here. It's from Andrew Whitman from R.W. Baird. This is on national accounts. Can you share some perspective of what percent of revenue today and how does that business grow when so much focus is on the branch-level operations?
National accounts is probably our greatest untapped capability. Michael Dozier has 100% confidence from our field team.
I told Michael Dozier when I first started spending time with him, "How is it that we are the national player in the landscape industry and our only go-to-market for big accounts is an aggregator business that doesn't leverage our team to provide the service?" National accounts is about consistently delivering service across the network. Now, in my closing speech, I made sure every employee, every branch manager in that room knows there's one thing that they have to take ownership in. If you go back and look at our action statement, they have to make sure they're accountable to deliver service to the customer. Those national accounts are going to see us based on our worst-performing branch. Not the best. They're going to only see us at our worst. That's why we have to get everybody up to a level of service that our customers expect.
National accounts is an untapped capability that BrightView should have. You saw Michael Dozier use one example of a customer that when Michael Dozier went out and met with him, he said, "A year ago, my goal was to figure out how to get rid of BrightView in the remaining business I had." This year, he said, "The culture has changed. The service levels have changed so drastically. You have earned the right to get more of our business." That's one account. We saw national accounts as people that had branches all over. National accounts have to be customers that we can service through our branches all over so that they get the true quality that BrightView displays. It's untapped. National accounts is our biggest opportunity as we grow this business because it's almost an irrelevant number today. It's insignificant.
Our branches have to get the benefit of it when we move that revenue to them, and hopefully, they see it as a way to grow their business in addition to their local team selling locally.
No, I agree. Untapped opportunity. Again, these are all the things that we're laying out in our strategy, our long-term strategy. Most of them really haven't started. We're just starting them now. As you think about what Michael Dozier doing with the national accounts, think about one example of a $75 million portfolio. When Dale Asplund said it best, 18 months ago, they wanted to say, "Hey, you have 15%. We spend with you. We want to kind of take it to zero." We've fixed that. We've now focused on our employees. We've got new equipment. We now have the customer valuing our service. We're partnering with them.
Now they want to give us 90% of that portfolio. So Dale Asplund said it best. That's one customer nationally, but there's so many examples like that that we really just haven't tapped yet.
We're right at about 4 o'clock here. Is there any one last question? Otherwise, we can wrap it up and continue to cocktail hour.
We'll have plenty of time to interact. I would just encourage everybody to talk to the people here. The teams here, if you see somebody from BrightView, please engage them. I don't want to keep you from cocktail hour, so I think we're better to let you guys go to there. But we'll all be available to talk to anybody. Thank you again. Thank you, everybody, for coming.
Thanks for coming. Thanks, everyone, on the webcast. Appreciate it.