Thank you for having us.
Just to start, for investors that might not be familiar with the defense environment or defense services, could you mind going through a big overview of what CACI does and the key markets you are exposed to?
Yeah. CACI, a 60-year-old company, been a public company for a little over 50 years, $8.5 billion revenue business, low 11% margins. We deliver expertise. Think about personnel to the federal government, and we deliver technology. The split for revenue, 55% is technology, 45% is expertise. We like to say that we're in very narrow, deep funding streams across the United States federal government. We're involved in cyber, we're involved in space, we're involved in network modernization, enterprise IT, and electronic warfare. All of our technology is delivered with software as its basis because we firmly believed that the threats were going to continue to change. Hardware-based solutions were going to be something in the past because we believed that the threat was going to be very dynamic. That's how we built this company forward. Very purpose-built.
We're sort of where we are now, not by accident. It's actually a long-term strategy that sets us up well as we go forward.
Over these decades, right, you have been transforming what type of solutions you provide. How has been that transformation, especially the one that you started less than 10 years ago, towards technology, towards software, from more of boots on the ground expertise purely? How has that transition been and what motivated that?
Yeah. I came into the company in 2012. Timing is everything. At the end of 2012, sequestration hit and Low Price T echnically Acceptable hit. The U.S. was coming out of the Middle East wars. CACI, over the last 15 years prior to that, was really delivering people. When the wartime came down, Better Buying Power comes out, Low Price Technically Acceptable comes out, sort of say it's time for another strategic change. In the 2012 period, we were 80% expertise and 20% technology. Our margins were in the mid-eights, and growth was low to mid-single digit. We took a strategic pause and looked forward and said, "The CACI of the future needs to be more involved in what we say is stickier."
We have to come up with stickier ways to stay close to our customers. We spent the next two years, frankly, looking at the expertise, delivering labor hours, and saying, "That is a commodity market." We knew that back in 2013 and 2014, that selling labor to the federal government was a commodity. We have all gone to business school, right? When you only differentiate on price, you either got to have the lowest price or you got to be in a different market. We quickly transformed our business to focus on technological solutions.
Since we were new to that area, we were very strategically focused on everything has to be software-driven because we truly believed after the last 20 years of war is that coming up with hardware-based solutions where you can count on your adversary changing tactics every year, we believed it was going to go to changing tactics every day. Software allows you to make changes. Your iPhone has apps. Your iPhone has apps because every vendor is going to change what that app does, not on a routinely basis, but whenever they believe they want to provide you something different. We took a step back. You can look at our financials in 2013 and 2014, a lot of negative double-digit growth quarters. We were really getting out of the expertise business, out of the price-sensitive expertise type business.
What we've doubled down on was expertise where there's only two or three companies that have that knowledge to sell into the federal government. Very pinpoint focus on the expertise we're going to sell going forward. We have always been an acquisitive company. We've done over 90 acquisitions in the life of the company, probably 40 or so in the last 20 years, and really said, "Let's build a capability-based business where we can focus on seven markets and go very, very deep and provide solutions in a software manner." It worked because we believed we had, and we did prove it, a 52-year history with customers. In the DOD and the intelligence market, past performance matters.
What had happened in selling labor hours is past performance was no longer asked for because if you do not ask for past performance, you cannot get lower and lower pricing. I am watching peers in our sector lower their rates, cease investments, just sell people. That became jobs that used to be five years long, three years long, two years long. My premise is if we are competing for a book of business every 18 months, it is not really a business. Let us take all that money that we invest to re-win our book of business and apply that towards new areas. Right out of the gate, did a little 15-20 different acquisitions. Many of them were tuck-ins. Some were major placeholders and really built this technology business forward. Today, we enjoy 55% of our business as tech, 45% as expertise.
That expertise is very selective. Margins are not—we're not getting in bids where every 12- 18 months we're being asked to re-bid. We have an actual stature in the customers that we provide labor to. Very different-looking business, $8.5 billion business now, up from $3.5 billion, low 11% margins, up from mid-8%. The last five years, 7% organic compound annual growth rate, about $2.3 billion in free cash flow, book-to-bill 1.6x over a five-year window, and won 11 $1 billion-plus awards, which was new for the company because our theme was, "Let's stop bidding everything that moves because we're selling people.
Let's really look at things that are in this mode where we can bid less and win more because we can spend more time winning larger programs. Larger programs, as you'll hear about, is what gives us great view many more years into the future, which is why when we talk about the craziness which is going on now, we actually have a very healthy backlog. The most important part to our new backlog, instead of it being 18 months with year-and-a-half-long programs, the majority of the programs we've put in the last four years have an average duration of six years. Our backlog is over $30 billion. A very different position business going forward. It did take some quarters of negative growth and investors hanging on a way to see if this strategy played out, so.
When you think about the future, what is the right balance between this really niche expertise that you want to be exposed to and the technology?
Yeah. What's crucial to the technology that we build was hanging on to some of the expertise work. I'll give you a couple of examples. We were embedded with a lot of ground forces for the better part of 15 years. What you learn are two things. One is you learn how to build the deepest relationship with your customer because you understand what their mission is. We also had firsthand technology that worked and technology that didn't and technology that hadn't been created. If you look at our mobile and our manpack and our handheld software-based technology delivering to protect folks in the electronic warfare world, we understood where the threat was. We needed to read a specification. We moved into this model of investing in ahead of customer need.
If we have an inkling from the people embedded with our customer, that tells our technology side of our business, "Here's what you need to build. Here's what the customer is talking about. Here's what they need solved. Don't wait for a specification to come out. Actually shape that spec." Okay. We understand what our customer goes through. We're on the receiving side. Let's go front-load builds and talk to the customers about art of the possible. Really expand the DOD and the intelligence customer's mind of the art of the possible because those customers are so filled with, "Here's all you can get today." The old model is, "Here's what I'll give you today, knowing that three years I can resell all of that with something that you're going to need." Our model was software-based. You can have whatever you need, whatever you needed.
We put great business cases in place. Clearly, if we had driven revenue up, we hadn't grown margins. It would be not a really, really, really strong business case. Plenty of examples where expertise still feeds tech. That level of knowledge is what we want to hold. We also picked that expertise business that would not only be differentiated, but also would drive margins, right? If the competitive set goes from thousands of companies to three, then I can differentiate on how I'm going to solve that customer's problem. I can differentiate on the skill sets of our people, therefore garner and command higher margins that customers are happy to pay because the service that they're getting is so much better.
Sometimes it's difficult for investors to differentiate between defense services companies. It's probably because it was mostly labor-based before. Depending on who you had as a person, as a hire to position, what makes CACI unique today?
Yeah. We often get compared to folks in our sector. Those of you who follow GICS and NAICS codes, we really do not get to call that. In the sector that we are in, we probably got assigned in 1965 that we have never been able to move. Having said that, we were the first, and I would say the only that has been focused on this level of technology. We are not building platforms. There are some phenomenal primes out there that build great ships, planes, or whatever it is. We are looking to build those mission suites and those packages that ride on those. They are software-based. As the threat changes, new software comes out, you are able to more rapidly address those threats. When the government talks about velocity, quality, efficiency, that is what they are asking for.
I don't have the ability to take a ship back to shore in the middle of a fight because my enemy just changed their tactics yesterday. That's an old fight. It doesn't matter how many ships you have, how many planes you have. We have been very focused on talking about technology that you can touch. We had an investor day last November. You can come in there and look at an entire suite. People got the right message. Why are you a government services company? Because that's what my GICS code is. Okay. Some examples, I guess, that show that we're different. Our EBITDA margins are just that. There's no GMO. There's no extras. It's just plain EBITDA.
There's no A.
That's right.
No adjustment.
Right. Our growth rates have been in the low to mid-single digits because we're going to be very selective about what it is we win and because we're working on top and bottom line growth because our ultimate focus is free cash flow per share. Now, most people in the sector talk about, "Well, I do technology also." It's a statement. In some police departments, they actually call that a clue. They are talking about delivering tech now. They're talking about their margins. They're talking about that they're going to bid less and win more. That strategy has been in this company for just about a decade now. What makes us different is we're also purpose-built for where we are today. We didn't just hear what DOGE was going to do and change how we talk about our company.
I led off with the changes that we believe were going to be needed. We believe we took the best of the aerospace and defense primes, quality and process-driven, very, very rigorous. We're not building 1,000 versions of the same exact thing. We threw agility and mission knowledge, which government services providers bring in. We brought in all of the commercial software development processes that have ever been created. They were created by folks like GitLab and AWS on the cloud commodity side and others. We retrained our entire workforce. What we've been working through is retraining our customer because our customer still likes to write all the requirements up here, 12-year program, year six check-in, and start doing testing, seven realize over the last seven years, the requirements have changed. You end up in these large overrun programs.
We believe in build a little, test a little, deploy. Just continue that cycle. That is a commercial build process today. I cannot find anybody else in our sector. The final statement that I will leave you all with, why we are different, is about 95% of the technology jobs that we bid on, no one in the government services sector bids against us. That is the biggest clue there is, is when we say we deliver technology, we are competing against the major aerospace and defense primes. We are not competing against people within our sector. It is easy to say you do technology. It is really hard to transform a business that has only sold hours into building it. We think we found that happy niche. We were not lucky. We were actually strategically focused on those. That is how we are addressing the market going forward.
Perfect. You just mentioned DOGE. I think that's the elephant in the room. How do you think about the U.S. government focusing on efficiencies? You also just mentioned that you have been trying to push the customers to focus more on the solutions and not the requirements. Do you think this could accelerate that approach, or?
Yeah. Based on where DOGE was last night, I didn't get any tweets this morning, so I'm not quite sure where it's at today. With all the reverence that it deserves, I think with $37 trillion of debt, we have to find a better way to spend money and be much more efficient, period. We can talk about fraud, waste, and abuse. That's been in the government forever. The fact that DOGE and other people are routing that out, that's great. That's sort of like a lucky strike extra. The focus for us has been resilient networks for our customer set, cyber protecting those, enterprise IT that can change with the needs of whatever organization it is, space-based communications very important, and everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. DOGE, when they came out, focused on the networks in the government need to be re-architected and be more nimble.
That's a true statement. Their point was, it needs to be better funded. Not that it's being done wrong, but it needs to be better funded. It has to have the same priority as building assets because if there's no networks that are to move that information, those assets are materially less valuable. They believed in enterprise IT that was more dynamic and that had continuous funding. We still agree with that. They also believe that people who spend billions of dollars should be able to audit themselves and pass financial audits. We built audit software for the federal government. It started 12 years back. We're still building it today. Thirty-some organizations in the federal government use that software. It's software as a service. I'm sort of dating myself. I used to talk about SaaS, right? But all 30 or so agencies that use it passed their audits.
100% of people who don't use it fail their audit. The Marine Corps is the first DOD service that signed on to it. It's provided by the government. This is all government software. They passed their audits the last two years. Those three areas, we strongly believe that we're in line with DOGE. I think what has happened as a public company CEO, when you say you saved a dollar, you better make sure you saved a dollar. If you saved a billion, if you say you saved a billion, it was only a million, you get one mistake. When the 11th or 12th or 28th mistake happens, and it's easy to see, it's not that DOGE is bad in trying to mislead. It's difficult understanding how the federal government does budgeting.
It's very difficult to understand what an EAC is and what an ITD is and what an LMNOP is. They're coming out with data that is later shown to be not accurate. The credibility, I think, is what's hurting there. Do we still need to spend less and spend it more efficiently? Yes. They believe that software, and if you saw the recent DOD policy that has come out, sort of a software first, we're sitting here saying we were early to that fight. This is right in line. For us at a macro level, they're saying all the right things. We can sort of stop it. We got to find different companies to go do this. I think the government has to buy more efficiently. We're sort of net, net happy with DOGE.
We have not had, we have $1 million of things that were on the wall. We had another $3.7 million, and that turned out to be a contract that had been ended many, many months prior. So $1 million worth of impact thus far.
When we think about the short term, right, how has this continuing resolution affected you so far? There's continuing resolution plus an administration transition and knowing that we'll be under a continuing resolution for a year long and probably extending into fiscal year 2026, but it's a different continuing resolution that is allowing to move money around and new starts. How do you think about that?
Yeah. It actually is better, as you note, than prior CRs. Actually, we give our guidance in a range, as most do. We craft a specific set of assumptions that go at each end of that range. When we put our guidance together, one of the things that we wanted to make sure we provided for was that we could accommodate a continuing resolution, which we have. In fact, the added flexibility probably gives us even a little opportunity, a little more opportunity than we had in our more conservative subjects. I think actually this, I'm cautiously optimistic that the continuing resolution as it's crafted, as well as some of the supplemental reconciliation items that I'm sure John's going to talk about in a few minutes, actually gives us a little bit of maneuvering room here.
I think we can see a little bit of upside in the landscape as we view it today.
Yeah. What else people should take strength from is we gave that latest guidance after upping our guidance twice. It was the end of January. It was either just before or a couple of days after the election. Actually, it was prior to the election, if I remember right.
Right. I think it was.
We had plenty of chances to sort of say, "This is going to be too ugly here. Let's just back down and let's just run this year out." Strategy is a place where this company comes from. Everything is strategically based to an absolute driven point. We had all the information that said we're in the right markets. We're greatly funded. There's no noise out there talking about we're going to be impacted. There's a lot of unknowns. That's the lower part of the range. There's a lot of positive things going on. That's the upper side. We've been in business for over 60 years. We've seen a lot of CRs. We said, "Okay, if we stay in the CR for the full year," which was the old-style CR, "we're adequately funded." 97% of our revenue is already in-house.
We've got six months left of the fiscal year. We're a July to June company. It wasn't bold or bullish. It was just the fact of we said we're going to build a business that is immune to a lot of minor swings and also some major ones. Let's just continue up the guidance because that's the way the year is going to finish.
Are you concerned at all in any programs that you have in the pipeline to be awarded in the next six months, or not really?
You know, the pipeline per se is not looking different to us. It is worth observing and noting that the government, and maybe I'm saying government, but I really mean the people that comprise the government, are in a little bit of chaos. I mean, a little bit of unrest. People are nervous about their jobs. They're worried about their friend down the hall and all the things that you would expect them to. We do sort of note anecdotally that there are some things in the government, routine administrative things, contract mods, funding obligations, invoice approvals, the day-to-day operation of the business, things that used to take two or three days take four or five days. Is that a huge deal? We don't think so. It is also probably not nothing.
While we don't see any real effect of structured slowdown or added steps, people are apprehensive.
Yeah. I think that's normal. It's more of a human nature to comment that it is some draconian budget cuts, right? There's so much noise in the system today that it's tough for the signal to actually get out. We're continually screaming into a 100-mile-an-hour wind, right? There's just so many things people pick one item up. What's key to know about this company is we're a long-term company. Yeah, if you're drinking tea in the morning, you'll pull four cream in it, it's really tough to see the bottom of the cup. That's sort of the next couple of quarters, right? I think the government's still, people in the government are still sorting it out. Six months later, there's no more milk in there. It's a little more clear. What's important for us is we've been in business for 62 years.
We've been through this many, many times. There's a short-term immediacy. We've never been a quarterly book-to-bill company. Please don't look at quarterly book-to-bill numbers and say they're at the cliff. If I sold people, and that was my entire model, and I talked to you about how much direct labor I have and how many consultants I have on the bench, totally different discussion. I'm almost living hand to mouth. I've got to win things in the first quarter. At the end of the second quarter is driving this year's revenue. Fact is, if we get an award on January 1st or June 2nd, I don't care. I don't watch it. You can look at the last 48 quarters of press releases. We've had some three, five book-to-bills. We never said we did record awards in the quarter.
Because at some point, you're going to get a 0.3 because a customer delayed a $2 billion award by four days. People are going to say, "What the hell happened?" Please, I beg you that we are driven by much larger, longer-term contracts, which is more like a prime than it is the mile that goes with government services. 1.7 trailing 12-month book-to-bill. We're very happy with that. We had $24 billion of bids that have been submitted waiting for the government to make a decision on. Will they be a little bit delayed? Perhaps. It's not that they're not going to get funded, so.
You mentioned before that you were trying to focus on opportunities that were not competed by those sense of companies. You just mentioned that you are looking at contracts where you have visibility. Could you mind describing your bid and proposal strategy? You look at, and usually you highlight how much is new contracts, how much is technology. What is the strategy there?
Yeah. It's a mix between technology and expertise. It all comes down to timing. Okay? There's plenty of bids of things that we can go out there after. We live by that mantra to bid less and win more. Because there's a lot of fixed costs when you deliver bids. You have a pricing team. I don't want to ramp a pricing team from 15 people to 38. Because the other 23 people that we had don't really understand how it is when we price. Can we get more bids out? The metric of how big my world is, how many bids I can submit, is not the important metric. It really is about, are you bidding on the right things? Are you one of two or three? Are you one of a thousand that are going to race to the bottom on rates?
What we watch is the size of our programs and the duration. It's a pretty simple business case, right? If we're bidding jobs that last five, six, and seven years, and we're entrenched with that customer, it's sort of the prime model for winning contracts, but we're software-based. We're continuously delivering. Our belief, and we've already proven, if you continue delivering in a softer manner, the customer stays with you. Not because you provide a vendor lock and you can't do anything without my sign-off. It's because we're easy to work with. You're not buying people. We procure the software and engineers. Those people are fungible to our entire business. It's a completely different business model. We did retool our entire business development team starting a decade back. It's not anything that moves bid strategy.
It's not, "I've got to put $30 billion in or I'm not going to get $2 billion out." That's not a way to run a business. We are very selective. We stay in the seven markets. People used to ask me, "So what's your eighth market?" I've got a $250 billion addressable market in the seven areas that we provided today. We are a $500 million company. Our word is focus. Okay? It is making sure when people come in, "Hey, I heard this job is due?" No. The answer is no. We learned to say no a lot. Okay? That really changes how we incentivize. We have a business development team that is capture funded. Everybody in our business development team is on a bonus program. It is for revenue captured, not for awards won. Why is that?
Because a lot of companies win a $2 billion award, and then they complain to you all they can't find the people. They can't find the people because they bid too low. Okay? We fund our bonus program for business development by revenue. That drives a very different model. The fact that we invest ahead of customer need really is that differentiator that we've got a relationship with that customer. Not the individual, not Julie or Johnny. We have an understanding with that customer that says, "Buying agile software in an incremental manner makes a lot of sense. They spend less. They get more. It's a perfect business case." Frankly, we make better margins because we should. Because we're hiring the people ahead. We have 100% of the risk. Jeff, anything?
Yeah. The other point that I'd note is John talked about bidding fewer jobs, larger jobs, longer duration jobs. One of the other things that's important to the strategy is that you see those farther away. John talked about investing ahead of need, but it's not super speculative investment. I mean, it's disciplined, deliberate demonstrations, working with customers, talking about alternative solutions. That shaping, that ecosystem that we've been describing, the shaping that that lets us do is an important part of the business development differentiation. It really brings a couple of those things together and is a distinct quality of our process.
How long or how much time ahead you have to prepare before the, I don't know.
Request for information is out, right? You have to be ready with the software.
Yeah. On our BEAGLE program, we run the three largest agile software development programs across the federal government. That is a marker. We worked with Customs and Border Patrol about two and a half years before they put their recompete . They were traditionally procuring 400-500 people to update all the applications that a Customs and Border Agent uses. We told the story five years back. It really did not have any teeth to it. Now I think there is a lot of teeth to what goes on the border. We worked two and a half years to convince that customer to buy the application. You got 140-some apps. You want to update them four times each year. Perfect. Write a one-page spec. Do not talk about labor hours and time and material rates because people will hit those rates.
You are going to be stuck managing 500 people trying to do a major software development effort. It took two and a half years to convince that customer to put a very thin RFP out. The majority of the people who bid on it continually asked, "You did not provide me labor rate guidance." Which to us said we had differentiated enough that you cannot even bid on the job. That is two and a half years. Spectral, major electronic warfare software-based attack system for all Navy surface ships. That was a five, almost six-year investment screen that led to that. Why was that? Because we were going after a program, which is a statement program, which is, "Can we go directly against aerospace and defense primes on a major program win?" We pulled two prime contractors to put them on our team.
Everybody else bid against us, and we were successful at winning. That was a longer-term setup. The payoff for that job is in billions of dollars.
When you think about software, right, where are the key areas where software-driven solutions will make a difference? I'll say in the near term and then in the longer term.
Yeah. Very much in electronic warfare. When we say that, it's all of our counter UAS systems. All of our counter UAS systems, we have thousands of those around the globe for every type of drone, which is out there, Class 1 through Class 5. Hundreds and thousands of confirmed kills. Those are systems that the tactics of the enemy changes every four hours. Think about putting a system out in a field. Every four hours, a threat changes. It changes enough that I can see it or I can't see it. That's a major threat model that doesn't exist today. We look at major software systems there. It's very germane to our business there. Our network modernization, software-defined networks, very, very important. The networks of today that we're designing are going to carry everything from unclassified to secret to top secret data over.
We have to know everybody who's on that network, the access that they have, the access that they don't. We also have to handle resiliency for our networks. Today, a lot of the government networks are manually rerouted, believe it or not. We have an outage here. It's a manual reroute. Software-defined networks came out 20-some years back, right? It is very important to make certain that these networks are more resilient, more dynamic, especially when we get in the areas where we have the tyranny of distance, which is in INDOPACOM, not a lot of landing spots. There's an awful lot of water. How do we create resilient network space and the like? A lot of what we do in the technology area, the majority is all going to be software-based. That's not because we believe that to be so.
It's because customers are asking for it.
When you think about these opportunities and/or even analyzing what you see like it's going to be in the warfare environment five years from now, how do you think about building those capabilities organically versus going through them for acquisitions?
Yeah. I mean, some of that we've already done, right? A lot of our software-based solutions, we sort of invest ahead of customer. We do a little test of it. We're out there investing prior to. I'm going to harken back to the fact that we were embedded with troops, whether it was Army, Navy, and every last incursion. We have a good understanding of what we have to build and what the customers are looking for. That allows us to invest ahead of need and make certain that we're providing the right solutions. Jeff?
Yeah. I would, because you kind of brushed up against M&A there. If you talk about organic, you have to talk about inorganic. Our pipeline and our acquisition strategy very much gap-focused. We do not buy scale. We buy presence. We buy technology, customer footprint, access, past performance. We maintain a list, maintain a pipeline that we are kind of continually refreshing and monitoring, which obviously ties into our broader capital deployment discipline as well. Acquisitions are, we are and have been and will continue to be a serial acquirer. It is an important part of the strategy.
Do you want to discuss what is the capital deployment strategy generally?
Yeah. The capital deployment strategy is really driven by the fact that we like to be kind of between 2.5x and 3x trailing 12-month EBITDA, which we think is the right combination of reducing our cost of capital by having a meaningful amount of less expensive debt in our capitalization, but also giving us the ability to flex opportunistically up to 3.5x or so for brief periods and then get back to our target range. If you look over the last 10 years, I think we've done that three or four times, jumped up to sort of mid-high threes, and then quickly over a series of ensuing quarters gotten back to where we intended to be.
Within that, when we get toward the lower end of our range, we're really looking at alternatives in the pipeline and market dynamics, obviously, on the share price. Then often the return analysis is kind of a relative one. Both of them happily have given us plenty of opportunities to deploy capital in a way that's accretive to our returns. We're well above our WACC. We're able to just look at the acquisition pipeline, see how things are coming together, when they might be right to transact, and balance that against share repurchases.
One more on M&A. How strong is the pipeline today? Do you have any expectations of this change in administration, change of focus?
Yeah. I think in the near term, it's probably less conducive to M&A. I think valuation volatility is part of that. Sellers generally process multiple contractions more slowly than do buyers. I think if you're in the mode where you think you might be in a position to sell, many of those counterparties are thinking, "Well, I'm going to wait for a quarter or two or three to see how things fake out." That's part of it. Also just broadly, I think a lot of the things that the government has undertaken will get more clear over the next few quarters as we're starting to see some of the decisions we've already seen, the continuing resolution, some of the budget decisions. The presidential budget request here will be out hopefully in a couple of months.
All those things will bring a little bit of clarity to our view of what's in store over the next year or two.
Yeah. A lot of moving parts, right? But a long-term strategy, right? We put a three-year guide out in November. We could have easily changed those numbers. We could have said, "New administration, what's going to happen? Worry, worry, worry, bead." You're sitting on four years of backlog, and a lot of it's six years long. You can sort of look at your future differently. High single-digit three-year growth numbers, $1.6 billion in free cash flow. Margins in the mid-11s, but the most important number is $1.6 billion in free cash flow over the next three years in an area where there's a little bit of turmoil, a little bit of uncertainty. If you're a long-term company, you got to be talking long-term. Probably don't talk about quarterly book-to-bill.
It's probably don't talk about quarter points in our guides because it's a lot of wasted effort. We're going to hit our numbers year over year. It really does play into we're a capability-based company. M&As are done, as Jeff said, to fill gaps, not to buy revenue. If I'm buying revenue, I'm buying my competitor's book of business to gain market share is how I see it. That's the worst spend of dollars. You might as well just beat them in the open market. It's cheaper. It's more enjoyable. People get a bonus for actually winning. There's a lot of positives in it. That's how this company rolls. We're in seven markets. We ought to be able to win the jobs we want. We want to win. You start with business development, and you drive everything through.
Free cash flow per share for us is the ultimate metric. Jeff will continually say, "Our three-year plan takes zero credit for the $1.6 billion in revenue.
What I was getting ready to add.
Go ahead .
No, no, no. You just said it. There is no assumption about the deployment of the capital or any attended returns in those three-year revenue and margin targets.
Perfect. Now I'll open up to Q&A. If someone has a question, please raise your hand.
Yeah.
Yeah, here.
There's a huge demand in European defense. Is there anything that you can sell into that?
Yeah. We currently today have legs into Eastern Europe for some of our high-end software-based electronic warfare equipment. You can imagine why we went there first. Our central focus there is in Poland. As we look at the defense budgets, as we look for certainty there, which is that it's in the books and spend begins. For a smaller company, it's not an easy task to say, "Tomorrow afternoon, we'll go into the international market." I actually came from that world in my previous job. You can spend a lot of money in the international market without a lot of gain. Having said that, there are nations out there who we have discussions with through the U.S. government customers that are very much more than enamored with the electronic warfare equipment we have, whether it's counter-drone work or whether it's sort of assessing all the signals in any given space to make sure you know where the red forces are and where the blue forces are.
That is a strong possibility going forward. I'm going to need to see how that money is spent. Is it going to be EU-only money? Is it going to be partner partnerships that we're going to need to sort of take the logical step? As a CEO who builds a lot of these things, I love to say, "Yeah, that's a ginormous market, but you're not going to hear spin from us." It's really much of we are assessing it, making certain that we can address that market. And when and if we have a very willing U.S. customer who already is a strong user.
The second way we'll hit that market is through programs like Spectral. A lot of countries out there and the Navy is already talking about this. This would be the company's first large-scale FMS case as we go forward with the upgrade of the Navy's inventory. That's probably another avenue, perhaps slightly safer because it's backed by the U.S. government for us to deploy these software-based kits. There are a couple of different avenues there. Far more upside than there is downside. It's not a market we'd have to chase because we already have product that would be useful there. Thank you for the question.
This is my last question because we're coming on time. Hiring is important and how you attract people. You describe how you have this bonus program for the bid and proposal team. In general, you have a structure where you try to, I don't know, meritocracy is something important in your structure. Do you mind discussing how you treat that and how you align the incentives of your employees and the company?
Yeah. You do not get to continue a 60-some-year-old company without taking care of people. And people, whether it is expertise or tech, you need individuals. You need really bright people, people who enjoy being upskilled, people who enjoy changing what their skill set is. There are a lot of studies out there about how long the current skill set lasts. What we began a number of years back was an employee referral program. This has been a gem. That plus our internship program is pretty much what we focus on. It simply is if you refer someone, there is a bonus payout. It did a couple of things. One, great people know other great people. People who love working in a high-tech world know other folks who enjoy a high-tech world. Do you have to have a national security focus? Yes.
I was asked a number of years back, three or four years after during COVID and afterwards. People can go to the high-tech world and they can make a hell of a lot more money. We've hired a lot of those folks because we actually provide longer-term employment. We don't overhire and then send anybody else back out to the market when we realize we grossly overhired. What's important about the referral program is it helps attrition. It raises retention, lowers attrition. Because if I refer you as an employee, our statistics show over an eight-year period, the odds of you leaving are draconianly less because you referred somebody to the company.
People come to the company as a referral, their attrition rate is draconianly less because the second thought they had between, "I had one bad day," is, "What's Mariana going to say if she nominated me and then I left within one year?" It works. People build on that. We're also an acquisitive company. We're consistently bringing new ideas in and new folks. That is a positive. We're not the company that says, "We bought your house. We changed the countertops. You're going to do it our way." We actually listen to how somebody's company's got to be successful. We don't have all the best ideas. A lot of the processes we have in our own company today have been modified by smaller companies coming in and saying, "Have you thought about that?" It's that culture that actually drives folks.
Do you have to have a bend for national security? Absolutely so. Okay. It is what drives us. Last point I'll share is 40% of our employees are veterans through a lot of reskilling programs. That drives a great ethos, and it drives a great understanding. When we look at our stock price four months back, when we look at it today, there is a lot of noise in the system. We are a long-term company doing everything we always do. Frankly, if any of you came into our business and you stayed with us for the next 90 days, you'd rarely hear the word DOGE. You'd rarely hear anybody focused on, "My Lord, what's happening other than our stock price?" People are going to go forward and do their mission. We are burning off the backlog. We are doing the right things.
We're delivering to a customer that enjoys the best performance that we deliver. The way we attract people is the way they want us to because it drives a longer-term relationship with these folks.
Perfect. Thank you both very much.
Thank you.
Thanks, Mariana.
Thank you all.