Thanks for joining us. Really excited to have CACI here to take us through their story. It's a company that's extremely well-positioned for all of the geopolitical threats that we face and the DOD's need for modernization. We have the company's CEO, John Mengucci, here to take us through the story. We're gonna do it in a fireside chat format, and go through things. If you have some questions towards the end, maybe give me a little bit of a hand raise, and I'll try to get to you as we work through it. But, John, welcome.
Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having us again.
Yeah, my pleasure. John, let's level set the story for folks. Maybe help the audience understand your scale, your customer base, your breadth of offering, and really how you measure your business success internally.
Great. So, CACI, 62-year-old company, as Brian mentioned, serving the national security and government modernization space. If you look at how we're funded, roughly $7.5 billion company. About 30% of our revenues come from the Intelligence Community, about 50% from Department of Defense, 50% from the rest of the government, and 5% by accident, you know, from just other sources. Very much focused on delivering technology and expertise to the federal government. I'm sure we're gonna talk about that in more detail. Really looking at areas such as anything in the electromagnetic spectrum, so think about electronic warfare C ounter- UAS, cyber, AI, network modernization, and the like.
And again, delivering both technology, which is delivering outcomes to our government customer, but what makes us unique is delivering that plus expertise as well. So the old-style government services, a lot of companies do that today. That's about half of our business. So, how we measure, we're all about free cash flow per share. In the past decade, we've been focused on getting margins up from the 7.5%-8% range to the high tens, getting growth up from, you know, flat to low single-digit growth to mid single-digit growth, and now really working on free cash flow per share, and I know we're gonna talk a bit about that today as well.
Yeah, really, that's a great overview. I really do see you as a free cash flow-compounder over time. If you look at that, if you pull that up on your screens out there. Let's zoom out real quickly before we talk more specific to CACI. Wanna quickly talk about the budget macro.
Okay.
A lot of people have interest in the audience on that. This year, a Continuing Resolution, that's not uncommon. What's a little bit unique is this two-tiered process, plus your customers seem to be still spending a lot in the face of this. So can you maybe just talk us through why they're spending, if they're continuing to spend, and really where we go from here?
Yeah. So that's the number one question, right? And you probably get 1,000 answers. At the end of the day, the world's a dangerous, dangerous place. I don't think there's ever been a time where we've seen as many different issues going on around this globe. We sort of have a pseudo near- peer fight, you know, us watching Russia and their issues with the Ukraine. You got the Israelis issue. We like to talk about near- peer, but I really can't talk about near- peer without talking about counter-terrorism. So you have a customer that, you're absolutely right, doesn't have a full year budget. They're operating under a CR, but they're continuing to spend. Why is that? Because it's cyclic, right? Because the world's a really dangerous, dangerous place.
You got parts of the federal government that are spending as if they're not under a CR. So then where does the government go? It is an election year, and we get asked, "What if an R or a D ends up in the White House, what happens?" Defense is one of those areas that both parties work out at the end of the day. It's very bipartisan. So it doesn't matter that we're in the budget fight and what the Rs and what the Ds want. At the end of the day, the world, the nation's gonna spend what they have to spend. To put that in perspective, the size company we are, $7.5 billion company, $250 million-$300 million addressable market, some $1 trillion of government spend.
I don't watch how the budget dynamics turn out, whether it's going to be a full year CR or we'll have a full appropriations bill because there's supplementals and the same body that writes the laws about whether we kick back into sequestration, it's the same body that, when it comes time, usually changes that law 'cause they don't wanna face actually having to make cuts. So there's no political opinion in that, just sort of the way our market, our marketplace rolls. So we really focus on how we're gonna position customers to fight today's fight and make certain that we are positioning them for tomorrow, tomorrow's fight.
I think you make a really good point about just how big the ocean is for you to fish in. Can you talk about with... Let's talk about CACI's positioning within that. When we think about the geopolitical threats and the near- peer threat, more specifically, what are the top three markets that you serve that either have accelerated, should accelerate, or will definitely accelerate as you kind of think out forward?
Yeah. So one is network modernization. Right? So whether you're talking about cyber attacks, or you're trying to push everything from Unclassified to Top Secret data over the same network, the government has literally thousands of networks, and they're looking to do two things. One is to consolidate them, and the second is to therefore let's push common, different information over those same networks. So they have less networks that they have to protect. So if you look at CACI, we're a highly acquisitive company. We've done 89 acquisitions. We're a 62-year-old company, just about half of those in the last 15-20 years. So what that means, network modernization is, we did an acquisition about 4 years ago called LGS. Have a great, high-end network company.
Bought another company two years back called ID Technologies, which gave us our own intellectual property in Commercial Solutions for Classified. That's sort of how the last mile, the edge device, connects to that network. So we put all of those together, been winning a large amount of network modernization work. The second one, based on just where the overall globe is, is what we've been focused on the last 10-15 years. That's everything in the electromagnetic spectrum, right? What we're all learning today, live, is that everything emits RF, everything emits a signal. It's really important to not only know that there are things emitting signals, but where are they? How do I geolocate them, and how do I take care of them? That marketplace is large. It's always been large.
We are one of the nation's leaders in providing Counter- UAS solutions. You wouldn't think about that given all the issues, but that marketplace is in its infancy stage. What we are seeing drones do today is nothing to what they'll do 48 hours from now. We're involved in the drone-based issues around the globe, whether it's in Ukraine or whether it's over the Red Sea. Everything is impacted. Commercial shipping is impacted, naval ships are being flown over, and at the end of the day, you got to be able to find them. And our enemies, they are changing their tactics every 48 hours.
So the days of building big, large systems to find those, understand how to counter, counter those, are now sort of catching up to where our model was, which is best ahead of customer need, and really make certain that you can non-kinetically find them and non-kinetically defeat them. 'Cause the economics of taking a $20,000 drone out with a $2 million missile just don't make it, and it's never going to make it, and it's gonna continue to get worse. The last area I would say that is really impact as well is space. You know, it wasn't that many years ago, I've been in the marketplace for 41 years, we used to own space. It was the U.S.'s domain, and now I think we all know that it is, it is no longer that way. So we are in the optical communications terminals market.
That is how satellites talk to each other, and how satellites push information to and from the ground. It's gonna move over the next 20 years from RF to optics, 'cause it's pretty hard to jam an optic signal on a device going 22,000 miles an hour, you know, at least 20,000 miles above the Earth. So we like our odds there. We're the only U.S. developer, provider, and manufacturer of those Optical Communications Terminals.
We've got a couple of competitors worldwide, but at the end of the day, where this fight's going is protecting all your data coming down from space. And it's not our bet, it's actually our, our assertion that our U.S. government customers are gonna wanna use U.S. suppliers in the entire bill of material and the complete chain. Those are three areas that are... You know, set us up very, very well, given that the world's a dangerous place.
Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think we teased on a couple of the themes that you're gonna answer this next question with, but, but by far the biggest question I still get, even after you've been public for, for multiple decades, is really: How do you differentiate CACI from the rest of the government services space for this investor audience? You certainly differentiate with your customers every day, on your go-to-market and in the RFP process, and you're winning an awful lot, more than your fair share. Your positioning is different, different than others. But if you could condense that and synthesize it for this group, I think that'd be very helpful.
Yeah. So we'll go back to the GICS, NAICS, SIC codes and, you know, by all of those codes, by another name, we're a government services company. So what differentiates us? We do provide what we call expertise. We deliver, talent to perform the government's mission, whether it's at, an organizational level or whether it's, getting some part of their mission done. But our strategy is completely different. That's about 45% of our business. Used to be 80 , 80%, a mere 10 years back. So we are now 55% tech and 45% expertise. So our strategy, and we have one, and it's been working very, very well, is to make sure that we're going to customers we've known for 50 years, who we understand their mission extremely well.
So how do we get involved in the technology delivery? How do we move up that stack from just providing people to actually providing outcomes? We've done that, and we have invested in that over the last 8-10 years. We differentiate ourselves because we have a world-class business development team. When you say you're gonna move from delivering expertise to tech, you've got to reset your entire company. You've got to teach, first of all, how to sell tech. You've got to build an engineering organization. You have to have some limited production capabilities. And then you have to look at your customer and say, "Past performance expertise, very different than on the tech side." So how do we prove that?
We have a philosophy where we are the company that invests ahead of customer need. So let's look at Counter- UAS in the entire drone market, right? We've known that drones have been out there flying around for 15 years. So 10 years ago, we started to focus on: How do you counter those? Understanding that the threat level to those was going to build over time, until now it's at a horrific level, where literally 48 hours, Houthis can change their tactical procedures and fly a very different drone, built with very different parts, operate at completely different frequencies within 48 hours. And it costs them about $20,000 to do that. So we differentiate in the government services area because we actually deliver technology. I have peers that talk about, you know, they do expertise, and they do tech....
But the way I measure that is every technology bid we have submitted since 2012 has not seen anybody in the government services space bid against us. The big aerospace and defense companies are those folks who are competing against us. So we differentiate by wanting to build mission packages to ride on those large platforms, on the F-35, on everybody's satellites, on everybody's ships, to make sure that we're that software-driven technology provider. The last, last part of that is we are software-driven. Software is our superpower, so all of our solutions have to be software-based. I'm not looking at building large production facilities. I'm looking at building small racks of equipment that have memory, that have processing power, and let the entire mission be done with software, because the threats today change too quickly.
So those large programs that are out there today cannot move fast enough because they're hardware, hardware-based. How do we differentiate? We have a phenomenal business development team. I think every CEO would say that. We actually have win rates and recompete rates that show that, and we invest ahead of customer need. What does that mean? We sit with our customers 2-3 years before a request for proposal comes out, and we're that company, the only company that sits with them and walks through art of the possible. In our marketplace, when you show the customer the art of the possible, and they get to see what they can do, they actually shape the request for proposal to be more like what we showed them versus something they're not sure is available or not.
And that is why win rates in CACI are so high. That is why, I hate to say we dominate, but we win a hell of a lot more than we lose, and we win our recompete work because we're always bringing additional work to bring in into that fight. So that's, that's us in a nutshell. It's why we can differentiate, because we deliver both expertise and tech.
Well, speaking of winning, your contracts awards over the last year have been kind of borderline gaudy, if, if I can say that. Some of these have been the biggest awards in the company's history, right? I think certainly one and two are very close to it. It also seems like they're ramping rather quickly. Can you take investors through some of those big wins, talk about how they progress, and really then, just give people a flavor for how you've gone out and captured this work?
Yeah. So if you look at both expertise in tech, the ramp-up period, how quickly can we generate revenue once we've won something? In the government services world, expertise ramps up quickly. So we won a 5-year, you know, multi-billion dollar job with a highly classified customer to do cyber and network protection. That's an expertise job. That job ramped up in about 90 days. It's got some more ramp left, but then that will deliver at that level for the next N number of years, however long that contract is. That one happens to be 5 years. Then we won two technology jobs. One large one with the United States Air Force to modernize and consolidate all information technology across the United States Air Force. It's a 10-year, $5.7 billion job.
That's a technology delivery job. That job is gonna ramp up, where we're doing design, development, going to all 400 Air Force bases and installations, understanding what they have today, modernizing that, and then when we get that design done, delivering that to 400 Air Force bases. So that ramp is a little bit different. It's gonna ramp up slowly. It's gonna add some level of organic revenue for us, and then when we get out another couple of years, that will start to really deliver because we're doing full-scale deployments. Spectral is a large Navy job. That is the Navy's most modern electronic warfare kit that's gonna fit on all surface ships below the deck. And that's a large technology job, a lot of design and development there.
Again, that job's gonna ramp up with Preliminary Design Review, Critical Design Review, getting the first article tested, and then deliver that to N number of ships over a 7-year period. So three large programs, all multi-billion-dollar awards. A new business rate this past couple of years in the 40%-60% range, and we used to talk about $200 million jobs that we were, you know, finally successful at winning, and we've got another dozen of those below that, the three jobs we just mentioned.
So, and how do we win? Again, it's just about staying core, it's staying true to what we know how to do. You're talking to the CEO of a company; when we submit a bid, we understand what that bid costs. We're not taking undue risks. If it needs an undue risk, we just won't bid it. Again, $7.5 billion-dollar company, $250-$300 billion-dollar addressable market, we can be selective as to where we want to go to go bid.
Makes a lot of sense. I think it's interesting the way those last two are ramping, right? The enterprise IT contract is Enterprise IT as a Service.
Correct.
A little bit of a different delivery model-
Mm-hmm
in the way the government's buying, and then certainly the way you described, the Navy work at the end as well. Well, how do you top that, right? That was a prolific year last year on the award front. What's the pipeline look like, and really-
Yeah
... what's next? Because I'm sure you got a couple of tricks up your-
We're gonna continue to win and learn. All of our sales team understands that bonuses get paid out at the end of the year, and then that big tote board goes back to zero, right? You start all over again. We measure it two different ways: bids that are submitted, that we're awaiting the decision to come out, and bids that we're gonna submit in the next six months. Total is $25 billion of business. $11 billion has been submitted, are still waiting to award. We've been averaging a trailing twelve months book-to-bill of 1.2 times for as long as I can remember. Another $14 billion in bids to be submitted in the next six months. And contrary to what I hear in other circles, getting back to your budget question, customers-...
On the whole, have made their decisions pretty much on time. So you would think that if budgets were tight, the customers would start to slow down on releasing the RFPs and be slower to make their decision. It's just the opposite. So, you know, either we're lucky, or we're good, or we're both, but that's how we're positioning. We are going to continue to win. We have some great bids out there, and the second part to the equation is your recompete business. So we've got an above 90% recompete win rate. That is work that comes up for a bid after a number of years, 3 years, 4 years, 5, 5 years, where the government rebids that work. So the quickest way to not grow, of course, is to lose the book of business you already have.
My model is to make certain that what we're bidding has the longest duration we can possibly get from our customer. Because every time we bid a job at 3 years, recompete, I'm gonna spend a material amount of investment dollar just re-winning the business that we have. So the measure that we track, 8 years ago, the weighted average duration of a program we put in our backlog was 3 years. The last 6 months, it's 72 months. It's been between 5 and 6 years since. So we're very focused on bid once, live there forever, and then delay any of the recompetes there are. All those $ millions can get plowed into winning new business, which allows us to continue to grow this business.
Maybe just following up on that thread, on the longer duration, how's your on-contract growth been? Have you seen kind of a bump up there as well over the last few quarters?
Yeah, what you find when the customer gets to know you for both expertise and tech, you cover the entire landscape, okay? In a very agile manner. We're software driven, so our solutions are software driven, whether they're in a software-defined device or whether it's an overall tech delivery, it's very software driven. And so what we look for is once we get in, we land and expand. We land, the customer knows we're going to perform, we staff our jobs responsibly. We make certain that if we're gonna bid on work, we can actually deliver that, and that usually comes on the expertise side with staffing. But the teams have done an outstanding, outstanding job at driving on-contract growth. So while you're there with that customer, odds are there's somebody somewhere near you, within one degree, that's not delivering.
So talk to that customer about bringing that work into our fold. If not during our current contract, during our recompete, bring somebody else's work along and recompete both. We're that confident that we can hold on to the work that we have. In the last few years, with a recompete rate of greater than 90%, that's what's now starting to be the final priming of this growth, growth engine, so we can drive even better top-line growth.
Excellent. I think you've been transforming the CACI portfolio since you joined the company back in 2012. It's been a minute now. One of the more visible shifts has been this technology addition to the portfolio, really overwhelming the size of even expertise. Would you talk about the interplay of these two businesses, how they feed off of each other? You've done it a little bit, but maybe expand on that. And then really just help people understand on that technology side, general sizes of some of these really big markets that you've talked about in space and other areas, to the extent that you can.
Yeah. So, we do the interplay of technology and expertise in the following manner. If I've been with a customer delivering expertise for 40 years, 50 years, I know how that customer budgets, and in some instances, a lot of instances, we're deployed with them. That's the part of our mission and expertise business, where these high-powered Joint Expeditionary Teams that are in wartime, in all 24 times... 22 time zones, are led by somebody from our company. So you learn a lot about what capabilities are needed. You also learn a lot about capabilities that you're given that don't work or don't work the way you need them to work. So we call that expertise informing tech.
So it's true, we get a leg up on understanding where we're gonna invest in our technology because we know exactly what the customer wants. Most times, with all due respect, before a customer does, 'cause we're in the field, so we don't have to wait for the UON or the JUON to be written. There's already phone calls coming back. "If you could make that handheld device deliver a cyber payload and find drones, that would be everything that Special Operations Forces need." So another couple of months after that, we'll hear that from our special operations customer. We're already running down that path. That's how expertise informs tech. The flip side of that, is how do we win so much expertise work against the people who are in the government services space? Because technology should enable better and higher quality expertise as well.
So the days of a customer asking us to provide 400 people to manage a network operations center, if I'm in that customer meeting at a very senior level, my first comments are: "What do you need done? What's the objective?" "I need the network operations center running at 99.999% availability." "Great, how about you just put that in the statement of work? Don't harm me by asking for how many people." And we have, time and time again, delivered solutions that we've won. We've delivered not that number of people at a lower price, but I'm making more.
So if I cannot have the risk of finding people, but deliver tech to do some of the mission, then as the customer, as long as you're paying less, stop worrying what I'm making or, or stop worrying as much, 'cause you're gonna get budget back that you can spend on other, on other things. And that model, the combination of these two businesses are why they're not standalone inside of CACI. They're very complementary, and one informs the other, and then one allows me to deliver much more cost-effective expertise. That drives top and bottom line growth.
Fantastic. John, since you became CEO, you've really broadened out the capital deployment. You've incorporated many more share buybacks into the mix as opposed to what it had historically been. What's maybe the ideal mix between the two, or capital deployment in general? What do you, what do you think about when you have capital at, at your disposal?
Yeah, so we like to call that flexible and opportunistic, but don't look for balanced, right? Because the world changes, and what we see on any given week or any given month is different than what we may have seen the month or month prior. So we're really looking at flexible and opportunistic. It's true the last couple of years, the M&A market has not been what we'd like it to be. So what is a highly acquisitive company like? I love it when there's properties out there who have thought of an idea before we could think of it, and they've progressed it further than we can in the amount of time. If that's not the case, then we'll invest internally. If it's something that is commodity-based, we will partner. The last option is to acquire.
But those acquisitions, those companies, even though they have great capability or customer relationships that give us long-term growth, it's got to come at a valuation that makes sense. And frankly, the last couple of years and where we're looking for assets, valuations haven't come down in line. So, flexible and opportunistic means, let's go look at what it means. Let's look at how our stock is valued. So since last January, we bought back 6% of our shares. We have another $370 million on a current authorization that we haven't put into action yet. We used to be at a maximum leverage rate around 4.5, but then unfortunately, interest rates got up then, so we're about a 3.5 times company.
We're just north of 2x leverage. So I like how it's setting up. I like the fact that the M&A market is coming back. There's some things that we'd like to fill some gaps on, but again, flexible and opportunistic is, I'll always believe that our company is undervalued. So share repurchases are always there, and the fact that we're looking at free cash flow per share, we're gonna be looking at that even more.
Maybe if I just follow up on the pipeline of deals out there. It's an election year, so how is that changing things? Secondly, are the types of companies you're looking at smaller size as you evaluate a portfolio? I know one size doesn't fit all, so I know that's gonna be your answer, but I feel like I ask it anyway. And then I guess, are these coming from private equity, carve outs of bigger companies? How do you really think about what that portfolio consists of?
Yeah. One size doesn't fit all. Look, we've come to really enjoy the small to moderate size acquisition. We think we do those really, really well. Of course, as a CEO, we've done large ones, too, and I'll tell you, we do those extraordinarily well. But the small to moderate, based on what we've purchased and the gaps that we filled, works for us. We will take book deals any day of the week to go look through those. It keeps our folks modernized with what's out there today. But we've also have a number of them that we've done direct dealings with, and, you know, we sort of look for a reserve price, and if we really like an asset, we like to have those discussions one-on-one.
So small to moderate ones fit us very, very well. You know, we will. We're looking in the areas of still in cyber and electronic warfare, digital signal processing, things that have a long shelf life. These are things that are never gonna go away. RF will always be out there. There'll always be signals. We wanna know what it is, and where it is, and how do we defend against it. But doing something that's like our size, that's not where we wanna head. We don't buy revenue, frankly. We buy capabilities and customer relationships. I don't need to buy on top of what I already know how to do, and I win 40%-60% of the time.
Wasting money on buying revenue just has never worked for us, and I don't really think in our marketplace, scale matters as much as people make it out to be. Usually, people who love scale are the largest ones out there. I don't have a problem winning against scale. So, it's a well strategic plan. We look at gaps in our market, and that's how we look at it.
Last question from me, it's not really a question.
Mm-hmm.
This is your drop the mic moment, if you will. Take 45 seconds, talk to the investors directly. Let them hear from the boss on why they should consider CACI for investment.
So we differentiate within our market space. We are software-based, so all the technology that we deliver has a very long shelf life, and by the way, better than the hardware refresh cycle, software refreshes in some of our systems every week. Because the world's a dangerous place in a very different manner, and that's that everybody is changing how they operate every 48 hours. So the software upgrade market is large for us. We are very, very focused on a strategy place where we come from. We're very free cash flow per share centric. We're gonna make absolutely certain that we can deliver a predictable or organic revenue growth, margins that also allow us to continue to invest. We're not a quarter point company that's got a short-term investment to meet one single quarter point.
We're gonna make sure that we are, you know, CapEx light and very cost conscious, and make absolutely certain that we deliver with the best workforce there is. We have high retention rates, able to staff all of our programs. And at the end of the day, we deliver extremely well. That's why we have so much repeat business coming back to us. So thanks. Appreciate it, Brian.
Great. Thanks, John.