Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Investors, thanks for the Climb team to join us this morning with the opening bell as we rang it in the Nasdaq. Thanks for everybody coming up. Just for everybody, well, there's some nervous people in the back. Our bus didn't show up in New Jersey, so everybody had to figure their own way to get here. Everybody was able to make it. Thank you again. I'd like to thank the marketing team for everything they do. Our teams inside Climb know this very well. For events that they perform, any things that we do touching our customers, our vendors, they get involved, and then events like this. Appreciate that.
Nasdaq has been great to us, allowing us to do the opening bell and then setting us up for Investor Day, where we could get you in. Investors, thank you. Our bankers, thank you. I know we have some PE firms in the room as well to just hear our story. A lot of you know the story, but you know the story from myself and Matt Sullivan, right? Now you get to get a bigger, broader part of the story from the rest of the exec team. You're going to hear them for the first hour. The first hour, I'll get through the safe harbor stuff. The first hour is going to be the team, and then we'll do lunch. The second hour is going to be about where we're going to take the company.
I always like to say that if you want to know what's going to happen, take a look at the last three years. We're going to be a little bit more aggressive than we were three years ago on our acquisition play, and also with our technology play, as you'll meet Vishal, our CIO, as far as what we're going to do as far as efficiencies go. With that, I'm going to kick off a couple slides. I started eight years ago here. I took over six years ago. This is what we did as a company, and it's some pretty simple things. Focused on being a sales-first company. That's the first thing. Part of sales-first company is compensation plans. Changed the compensation plan very quickly to the sales, so it actually aligned with our customer base and it went line in our go to market.
Vendor recruiting is a priority. It is the lifeblood of a distributor. You're going to get here a lot about distribution and how we go to market. That is the lifeblood. We went for vendors. We get questions a lot from investors as far as, "Why did you only pick two when you interviewed 30 companies?" Charles will give you the details on that, but that is the lifeblood. I talked about changing compensation plans, broad afield sales force, and this is something that our competitors have, but they typically have it in an overlay fashion where they have different layers for different technology segments inside their business. In Climb, you'll see that, and you can meet some of the sellers that are here. It's one throat to choke when you're at a VAR, at a reseller, at a DMR.
They know who to go to at Climb to get anything done. Use of our balance sheet. We have done six acquisitions in six years. We plan to accelerate that. You'll see some targets on some of the presentations, and we've done them all with cash. We have no debt in the company. We're pretty attractive that way from a balance sheet. I think the argument back to us would be we're not good stewards of our capital. We probably should be putting some debt on the company to acquire faster if there's good targets. Headquartered in Eatontown, New Jersey, and offices throughout the world, and our latest one is South Africa, and you'll hear from Gerard and his background. Here's what we say. Here's what we say to our vendors, our customers, and our Climb team, and that is we sell speed.
How fast and how many eyeballs can we get on your technology products into the market, and how fast can we transact it and how fast we collect? If you look into the numbers, our net working capital, we have a very strong negative net working capital because we are paying slower than we're collecting. Some of it has to do with our biggest customers that give us options to collect faster. Very important as we use our cash flow as far as we grow the company that way. With that, this is our exec team that you'll get to see in person today, and I'm going to start off with Charles Bass, and he'll talk about vendors. Charles?
You said lifeblood.
I did.
Yeah, that was complimentary. Thank you, Dale. Again, Charles Bass. I'm responsible for vendor alliances. What I hope to do in the next 10 minutes is talk about three things. Dale asked me to talk to you about what we're looking for in vendor partners and how I do that. I'll spend some time talking about how we actually do that. We'll talk about how we onboard before I pass it over to Vishal. If you'll indulge me, what I wanted to do first is maybe take two minutes and give you the strategy behind it. I actually got some really interesting questions before we started. I want to try to answer. I kind of give you some context maybe for how we do that.
I need to tell you about where we live and how we came about to the strategy we're on. It's going to be important to know where we live, especially from a North American standpoint. When this management team came in eight years ago, we were a sub-$400 million distributor undergrowing the market with no discernible strategy, right? There were three players in North America that had consolidated and bought most of the players in the market. That was Ingram Micro, TD Synnex, and Arrow Electronics. What those guys all had in common was some pretty impressive things. Number one, they were all over $30 billion in sales because they had consolidated and gobbled up a lot of the competition. Number two, quite impressively, they were all transacting more than 30,000 VARs and MSPs. Number three, they're all transacting more than 1,000 brands.
In some cases, more than 4,500 brands. Here's the hook. They have a very similar strategy. All those guys were having the vast majority of their gross margin, the vast majority of their revenue, come from a very small minority of their brands. They were all focused on these giant leaders like Cisco, Microsoft, HP, Dell. Look, it was a common theme for us to say to each other, "We're not going to out-Ingram Ingram today." We, as a management team, had to look at ourselves and say, "Okay, what's the play that we're going to have to go be more successful than this company had been?" Look, Ingram was selling more toner and printer cartridges than we were selling product, right?
We decided we were going to go look at the market and figure out where Ingram was failing and run a classic red ocean, blue ocean strategy, where we're going to go where they aren't, and we're going to go try to get to the market that was the most underserved. In North America, the way to do that was to go to the challenger or the emerging part of the market. Now, very different than Europe. There's probably between 50 and 70 distributors in Europe that run a limited line card, service-enabled play. In North American-centric, which we are fairly much today, that was the play that was left to us. Let me describe what our strategy was using a 30-year-old slide from Gartner, probably the most used slide in the world.
If you're not familiar, Gartner would use this slide to describe markets. The X-axis for completeness of vision was usually a euphemism for, do you solve a problem or problems, and how well you do that? The Y-axis was typically the ability to execute, was usually meant, are you selling a lot or a little? Early on in our cycle, we were focused on selling niche players and some visionaries and some smaller guys because that's what was left for us. As our brand began to grow, as we began to have more success, we climbed up the food chain, and we began to focus squarely on challengers. While all of our competitors are focused on Gartner upper right on the leadership quadrant, we're focused on the Gartner upper left.
Everything we do all day, every day, is finding challengers who are taking bites out of leaders, and that's the play we're on. When I look for a brand, I'm looking for a guy taking a bite out of Cisco, not Cisco. I'm looking for a guy taking a bite out of NetApp, not NetApp. That's what our play looks like. When you look at what our model looks like, again, it's a similar model. There's a common model. This is a fairly normal play. We're the only guy in North America running this play. Not an uncommon play in EMEA. I should give you a little bit of history. We started with about a little bit under 500 brands in 2018. We've squeezed our line card down from about 465 brands to about 100 brands.
70 of our brands make up 95% of our sales. Each year, I add between 12 and 18 brands to the line card, and each year, I remove between 18 and 36 brands from the line card. While we're refreshing our line card every year, we're also removing brands from the line card, adding them to our sister company called Climb Elevate, and trying to find the next challenger, successful brand like Ivanti or Darktrace or another successful brand. The success metrics that have been really tried and true for us, this will come as a surprise to some of you. I don't actually look for the best mousetrap. We don't actually make decisions based on how cool technology is. We're looking for brands that are successful in distribution.
What we found through success and failure is what really wins for us is companies that first are distribution first. Routes to market, channel mechanics, and execution are the things that make the most sense for us in terms of picking a brand. I look for companies that are more than 50% distribution. Our success rate with companies that are less than 50% distribution is close to 0%. The second thing is I look for companies with really successful channel mechanics. When I say channel mechanics, I typically mean a price model built for the channel, a margin model built for the channel, and basic partner programs built for the channel, like how they treat their partners and how they interact with their partners.
Third, and probably most important, is how they plan to execute with their partners in terms of cross-selling and upselling with other brands on our line card. Those are the metrics that have proven to us to be the most successful with our brands. As we went down from 500 brands to 100 brands, we picked six different brand categories. We could have picked 60. We could have picked 16. We picked a total of six. Security has emerged as the most important. They really haven't changed a great deal. A lot of people say, "Hey, when are you going to add AI as a brand, or when are you going to change that?" Candidly, AI has emerged as a piece of each one of these six categories. We probably aren't going to look to change our cross-sell brand categories over time.
When I look at the sources, our sources have candidly changed quite a bit over the last several years. Early on, we had to aggressively go find brands to consider for Climb. We had to cold call. We had to use the market to go find places. Today, far more brands come to us than we can even evaluate. I evaluate about 600 brands per year. Maybe 400 brands are net new evaluations each year. About 200 brands are reevaluations or companies we've evaluated in the past that come back through the cycle again because they've changed their routes to market or their management team or something like that. Of those 600, again, we'll pick about 12 to 18 that we onboard for Climb. We also use existing relationships. A lot of times, our joke is we'll bet on the jockeys, not the horses.
If we're successful with a management team and they move to another company, we'll obviously look at those guys the next time they come around. Pretty common for us. We've developed a pretty tried and true methodology. We look at financials, we look at corporate questions, we look at marketing questions, we look at operational questions. What we found is that our questions that go through, again, channel mechanics, routes to market and execution questions are far more correlated to success and failure than anything else in product. I would be happy to talk about some of those in details, but we ask the exact same 92 questions each and every time we evaluate a company. It's proven to be pretty successful for us.
Final thing I'll talk about was the last thing Dale asked me to talk through, is also a process-driven play that what we do when we onboard a net new brand. The goal for us is to use the exact same onboarding process once a month. It doesn't work like that. We think that we're going to be able to do that each and every time, and that we'll onboard one guy a month. Sometimes we try to digest a gigantic player like a Fortinet or a billion-dollar player like an Ivanti, and we'll have to basically skip a month to get our sales guys time to actually digest or understand a particular brand. The concept is the same each and every time. There's four points to what we do when we onboard.
We do an operational onboarding, we do an educational onboarding called enablement onboarding, we do a marketing onboarding, then we do field engagement. The operational stuff can be done in hours, not days. It's everything that is required to be able to transact. It's loading SKUs, it's understanding the linkages between AP, AR, getting our system ready, and being able to quote and ship product. It's pretty simple. Vishal will talk about that when he's up next. We do that in, again, hours, not days. It's fairly simple. It's one of the easiest things we do. It usually surprises people. From an enablement standpoint, we actually run the enablement play by our job descriptions. The most important folks for us, what every single vendor wants from me is access to our VARs and our MSPs.
The guys that own the VARs and MSPs are our field sellers that you'll meet today. We do one training for our field guys that's focused on value proposition and how they go access our VARs and MSPs. We do a separate training for our inside guy that's focused on the quote to ship process, how to get resources. That usually takes days, not weeks to go do that part. The third piece is the marketing onboarding. Look, we have some brands that spend literally $100,000 a month with us and do quite a bit of things in marketing. There's a four-part marketing onboarding. We have some brands that spend no dollars in marketing that are very successful with us. It depends on what companies want from us. We have an excellent marketing organization that has a bunch of different offerings, I won't spend time on that.
I will say it's a huge advantage for us. All of our competitors use marketing as a profit center. Many brands come to us because they feel like Ingram, Tech Data, Synnex, and Arrow are picking their pockets and forcing them to buy some terrible marketing as part of their distribution experience. They love coming to us with options on marketing, where, yeah, we'll admittedly make some money on marketing, it's not a forced play for them. Finally, the last thing we do is field engagement. Candidly, operations, marketing, and enablement are all candidly table stakes for field engagements. We win or lose when we onboard a new brand by engaging with the brand that we're onboarding in front of a VAR. What everybody wants from me is Mike Taliercio is our guy in Colorado.
They want Mike Taliercio to walk with their rep into Sandy Solutions and tell their value proposition to Sandy Solution, reach into Sandy Solutions' end user population, and find net new opportunities. That's the value they want from us. That's what they can't do from Ingram Micro, because Ingram Micro has 4,500 brands and we have 100, right? That's the value they see from us as Climb, and that's what we're going to basically try to do 12 times- 18 times a year. That's what our play looks like. I know I went through that fairly quickly, I'm going to go ahead and introduce Vishal. Hopefully, if some of you have questions on some of the plays that we run, how that looks, we'll get time during lunch to go through some of the details on that. Vishal, let me have you come up.
Thanks, Charles. Good morning, everyone. I'm Vishal Pushpa, CIO. Joined Climb just one year back. Last year in June. Didn't spend a lot of time, but enough to understand what we are doing, what challenges we are facing, where Dale wants to take the company, what we can do from technology perspective to help enable him, his leadership team, his sales team to get there. From technology standpoint, our strategy is very simple. It's three-pronged. Focus on efficiency, drive experience, secure the environment. We spend almost three years, I think probably 2022- 2025 or late 2024, doing a large transformation with ERP. We had lot of disjointed system, unclean data. Going through that exercise, what we did that we consolidated all the system of records together and ensured that we have one source of truth of everything.
That allowed us to look at the data differently. That's what led into our next level of transformation is, okay, now we have data. How can we bring AI and other automation framework to drive more efficiency? I'm going to talk a little bit more about what we are doing. The intent there is overall from lead to cash perspective, how can we move faster? Charles said that our coding is easy. Our goal is how to make it further or easier than what it is right now. The second part of the focus area is driving experience. We do a lot of things. We are very focused with our vendor, one complaint or one challenge with our resellers and customers are they do not have access of information when they want. Our end-to-end operations runs on email, phone calls, which is great.
We are a relationship-driven company. When they need something, if they want information, they want opportunity, we want to give them on their end. We'll talk a little bit more about what we are trying to do. The last one is, of course, securing the environment. Everyone is nervous right now with AI and what's happening. We are trying to onboard larger vendors and larger customer. They are concerned, "Hey, what is your footprint? How you're going to ensure that our data is secure, you are not doing uncompliant stuff?" Some of the focus there. When you're talking about AI or what I call AI-enabled process efficiency, first, like explained, we put system of record, we did ERP transformation, great.
Now the question was what I can do with that system and the data what we have from all the way lead to cash, and how can we ensure that we can do probably double the business what we are doing now with the same level of staff? That's what our focus is. When it comes to the backend operation, fulfillment, and cash, we are being very intentional in figuring out where we have mundane task, putting agents, allowing people to use AI tools within the boundary of compliance, definitely discouraging any kind of intellectual tourism, doing that. On the front end, that's where our focus area is right now. On the front end side, we are now transforming our overall CRM and marketing footprint. Charles just said that marketing is our profit center. Our vendors looks for that. We are trying to bring Excuse me.
Sorry about that. We're trying to bring better systems, better infrastructure for our entire marketing team so that they can do their job efficiently. More importantly, they can connect their data from go-to-market, from the lead to the opportunity, all the way to the quoting. The other piece is quoting. That is our biggest time consumption. Even it is easy, that's where in the operation we spend most amount of time. Just give you perspective, last year, we have produced probably almost $1.1 million quote, and 95% of them was created manually through an email, manually entering the data into the system. A lot of time consumed. The human element still have to be there. That's what we do. We build relationship. We can save all those time where we are spending, like entering the data into the system, figuring out errors and everything.
We are right now in process of building our own in-house AI-powered quoting system, which will be going live somewhere in the month of October or November, which will allow our entire inside team to get more efficient, potentially by 30%-40%. That's our prediction right now. We are putting a lot of effort there. The overall goal is reduce that manual touch point and ultimately increase the deal velocity. The second piece is, which I want to touch, is the experience sector. As we speak, we started working on that. We are in the process of building our own customer experience platform, which should be up and running somewhere probably by Q1 next year. The intent is twofold. One, as we transact end-to-end, we want to give our customer every access of data they can have.
Majority of our business is software, if you look at that, we transact licenses. We cannot tell our customer what are your licenses. It's actually not even in a format they can read right now. Renewal is another part of the business where we struggle right now. When it's a struggle, we do better than all of our competitor, but internally, when we look at our own efficiency, it's a long process from our customer figuring out what has to get renewed, then our internal team figuring out how it has to get done. Our intent here is that provide a, I want to say this probably, Amazon-like experience where our reseller can log in and see everything, then put a request of the quote, put a call out for an existing order, call a renewal, and everything.
On top of that, also act as a marketplace for our MSP providers and everyone else. Our focus right now, and like I said, we already started working on this, and potentially by Q1 of 2027, this should be up and running for at least some targeted vendor. Last one, safeguarding the ecosystem. I think Dale said, we were $400 million or so in 2020. We are transacting around $2 billion or so. We are onboarding larger resellers, we are onboarding larger vendors, they all are asking the same question. How should we trust you? How do we know that our data is safe? Now, we can always tell, "Hey, we have great security protocols. We have all kind of firewalls and everything." That alone is not enough.
What we are trying to do is that we are trying to get into some of the difficult certification or industry standard certification. We are in process of getting certified on SOC 2. We are also going after NIST 800-171, which will also allow us to sell or distribute to federal, market, state, local education, and all. We are focusing on ISO 27001. We are already certified in EMEA. We are now trying to get into North America, as well as we are getting into CMMC because a lot of our resellers already sell federal and government, and we want to ensure that they are not in trouble because as a distributor, we are not certified. We are going after all these things to ensure that our risk is reduced, but also open up the market access. From resellers perspective as well as vendor perspective.
Just to conclude, our focus again, focus on efficiency, ensure our margin footprint looks better. Focus on experience to open up new market space, new channels, new customer base, and also provide our MSPs and vendors a level of confidence that once we go to Climb, our business is going to grow, and then gain the trust of the industry. Thank you, everyone. Gerard and Carlos.
Just a mic.
Sorry? Yep.
Hi, good morning, everybody. Great to be here. My name's Gerard Brophy. I'm actually based in London, and my responsibilities are really to look after the international business, really from a regional growth, vendor growth, different brands, portfolios in the different regions, and really just the strategy throughout EMEA. Also assist Dale with targeting the right type acquisition targets, really, in the different regions across EMEA.
Excellent. Good afternoon, everybody. Carlos Rodrigues, President here for North America. I've been with Climb now just almost six years from their first acquisition of a North American distributor called Interwork Technologies, where I managed our North American go-to-market. Came over to Climb to really help build out our sales team here in North America, both on the Canadian side as well as the U.S. side, and get deeper with our vendor partners.
I just wanted to start really on the model of distribution, how it's been evolving over the last three years and where we think and we feel, and certainly investing our focus into where the future of distribution is going to. I'm pleased to say it's all very positive in all the trends that we're doing. If you look on the left-hand side, that was more the traditional model on go-to-market, just the usual vendor distributor channel and all the way through down to the end customer. On the right-hand side, this is really how we believe the future is starting to look, and it's really powered by the likes of data services, digital platforms in the market, and it's really putting us as a distributor right at the epicenter, if you like, of the ecosystem.
That's been accelerated by things like hyperscalers, different marketplaces, consultants, AI agents, these types of things coming in. We're investing our time and energy into building out the MSPs, larger resellers, et cetera. One thing that's really interesting is the end customer. If you look at on the right-hand side, the end customer is always driven by the resellers. I think one of the biggest frustrations a lot of the vendors have at the moment are they can't get the access to the end customers as quickly as they can. I think one of the reasons is the channel partners. There's a lot of selling existing to existing customers, so existing technology to existing customers. For us, really gives us an opportunity of helping the vendors.
A lot of the vendors are actually investing a lot of MDF money into distribution to try and drive end user demand. One of the reasons they're doing that is really from a solution sell. We can put a number of our vendors together into a solution and really fix the end user's problems. Rather than trying to sell point product at this stage, selling solutions is a much easier and beneficial way of getting into the resellers and selling that. Just next slide, yeah. The good news is it's putting us in a fantastic place. These numbers here up on the board is the Q1 revenue for the top six publicly quoted distributors. What you can see is 22% year-on-year growth from revenue, 60% up on profit, and most importantly, from a share price perspective, it's gone up 20%.
Not too dissimilar to our numbers and how we're growing through the year. This is a very exciting figure for us, number and a future growth. This slide actually comes from Omdia, so I haven't just pulled it off the internet. It actually comes from Omdia. There's a number of specific trends that are actually driving this behavior. These trends are the likes of digital and platform acceleration. We heard from Charles earlier around consolidation of vendors, rationalization of vendors. Our competition are looking at, we mentioned 4,000. There's often, in EMEA, they're probably coming out, they got 12,000, 13,000, 14,000 vendors on their books. Why does a vendor want to be part of that? We rationalize down to seven or consolidate down to 70 different brands, making up 95% of our revenues. Very exciting.
One thing to actually do take note of, I think a lot of these numbers may be slightly skewed because of the shortage of hardware. When you look at the bigger competitors with us, doesn't really affect us as much because we're pretty much software distributor. If you look at the big guys shifting the likes of laptops, a lot of infrastructure piece, that hardware shortage, there's a lot of, not pre-buying, but forward buying, I guess, of this hardware so their customers aren't stuck at the end of the year with a shortage of hardware. That may well be skewing these numbers, I think. From our perspective, it's very exciting because we primarily are a software driver of distribution of the vendors. Move on. Yeah. I've covered that one. I've discussed, yeah.
Perfect. I'll just jump into this next one, and this is really about what the Climb advantage is, right? There's one thing I think everybody here needs to understand, that we win when our partners win, both our resellers and our vendor partners in the channel. We've built our team specifically to help our partners win faster. Dale talked about speed and what does that mean. One, at the forefront, we have our partner-first mindset, really focused in on driving partner success. What that means is that we align both with our resellers' go to market, as well as our vendors' go to market, and make sure that we're going to market together as one unit.
A lot of times different distributors and so forth will work with our vendor partners in different models instead of together jointly. That's what we bring, as well as building long-term relationships. The second one is around the high-growth vendors. Charles mentioned this earlier. We strategically looked at our main line card, narrowed it down to 100 with 70 focus vendors. That's so that we can get deeper with those vendors, with our teams, have the expertise to be able to support our resellers the first time when we're engaged with them, when we're out in the market with them, when we're in the field. As they're looking for new solutions, they can count on our teams to really be that trusted source for them so that they can come to distribution versus having to go directly to vendors individually.
The third one is really around our engaged sales team. Charles mentioned this as well earlier. Our field teams have one of the best relationships out there in the regions with our reseller partners and our vendor partners. The reason for that is they're out in the field, they're on-site at our resellers weekly. They're partnered with them. They're aligned with their go to market. They understand the barriers that they're up against, trying to sell to their end customers, sales constraints with their teams. Really help fill in those gaps with those partners, as well as bring in our vendor partners to our resellers on-site to really have that go-to-market planning. We find that's what's really helping us drive and grow business in these long-term relationships. The fourth one is really around new business initiatives. You heard this a little bit earlier.
Really using business intelligence to help grow our business. What we've done and what we continue to do is look at our database, understand who our end customer base is, understand our vendors and their target vertical markets, understand our reseller strength, use that data to really align our vendors and resellers in the market to grow the business and move faster out there. The fifth one here is really about fast and reliable support. This is the day-to-day. This is the quote to order. This is how we support our partners. What we pride ourselves as industry-leading SLAs and supports. We support our partners within four-hour SLAs from a response time, education time, really getting back to them so that they know where they stand and where their business is. That's how we continue to win, is bringing that speed to our partners.
Lastly, the technology enablement. You heard Vishal talk about that earlier. Everything right now is talking about platforms. Our top partners are looking for integrations, APIs, EDI, renewal integration, quote automation. All that integrations is what we're building. We're going to market fast with our partners. Now, the next step, when you take a look at our field team and how we've built our field team and our sales team in general, it's purpose-built. It's really around relationships. We know relationships is what wins the business and builds the business. Frankly, I think relationships is the new competitive edge out there with technology going out there. When you take a look at how we built our relationships, in North America, we have 19 field sellers. That's across 13 regions.
We have two regional VPs that we just promoted last week to help drive and grow and mentor our territory teams. What's special about these teams is, as I mentioned earlier, they're out in the field, they're engaged with the resellers, they're having real conversations. They're part of their go-to markets. They're involved with our vendor teams. They're out in the field. They're bringing our vendor teams into our reseller partners, talking about go-to markets. I'll tell you, what we hear so much is, "Hey, we haven't had a Disti rep in our account to visit us in forever." Even with our vendor partners, our latest relationship, when you take a look at Fortinet and our partnership with them, we've now gone to all their local offices where other distributors aren't present, and they are now hosting their QBRs, their business planning in our offices.
Over the next three weeks, we have five of them. We're getting deeper and closer with teams aligning to their go-to markets and really being strong, and that's the value that our field team brings in. The next step, when you take a look at it, our vendor managers. Our vendor managers are essentially our funded vendor heads at our company. They're funded by our top vendors. If you take a look, we have 26 of our strategic vendors that fund that team. That team's roughly 90% funded. These guys are the specialists. They know the vendor solutions inside and out. Again, it's making Climb, as a distributor, the first point of contact for our resellers versus our partners having to go directly to the vendors. That's an important part of earning their trust and building their business.
The second part about this team, and it's so large, is that we're completely aligned with our vendors. Our vendors are investing in us. They want us to be successful. They want to grow their business with us. We're aligned on their go-to markets. We take a look at our top reseller partners and gain the mind share of our vendors to focus on our partners, go to market, MDF, co-op, dollar funds, really figuring out how to drive new business through our group versus our competitors.
I think, just for me, I think it's important that we give our vendors parity and our resellers parity across the globe. Whether Charles and his team sign a vendor here in the U.S. or we sign one in Europe, and we obviously send them across the different continents, it's important that we've got the same model from a go-to market and a sales perspective. I think ever since the acquisitions have occurred, we've definitely modeled our sales teams to really mirror what they're doing in the U.S. It helps our resellers too. We've got some global resellers like CDW, Insight, SHI, these types of resellers. It's important that they can have point of contacts right across the globe.
When a vendor wants to go to market and really push it from a marketing perspective, we can actually give them a one-stop shop from a global perspective. I know our competition can't do that because of the different P&Ls they run through Europe. We'd like to think we're nimble enough that we can offer that service.
Yeah, that's a great point. When you take a look at our two teams and how the teams work together, it's really how do we bring our field sellers, our vendor managers into one cohesive team to accelerate the business and the channel? There's four key areas that we look at. One is around demand creation, right? We look at our field sellers. They're really on site, working with our reseller partners, working with their sales team, identifying end user opportunities, doing account mapping, and really driving the pipeline at that level. We back that up with our vendor team.
They really bring in, they activate the vendor funding, they collaborate with our vendor sales reps, bring them into opportunities into our accounts, drive campaigns, and launch a number of initiatives to keep the mind share with our partners and really just accelerate and build pipeline faster for our company, right? The second one is around account growth, right? We really work with our field reps, and they work with our resellers. They do account planning, figure out where the gaps are in their portfolio, where they want to go to market, how they're going to market, different verticals that may be ideal for them to go after that they're strong in, or that they lack in, that we can help bring together.
They team then up with our vendor managers and align our reseller strategies with our vendor strategies that are going after the same markets and really building the business in the same areas as our partners, and we go to market together with our reseller and our vendors, and that really just brings a stronger performance from our resellers. We're seeing double-digit growth when we truly align both go-to markets. The third one is really around deal execution. This is where our field teams are actively engaged with our resellers. They're driving deals forward. They understand where we are. They're negotiating credit terms, the deal size, moving forward and making sure that everything is aligned. They team up with our vendor managers that then track that pipeline, but track it alongside of our vendor sales reps as well. It's in their forecast.
It's at their end of quarter, end of month targeting. We're making sure we're an integral part, and that makes sure that no deals slip to a competitor of ours, and that we know exactly what's coming in and closing, and that gives us higher win rates across the board when we do that with our vendor partners. Lastly, enablement. This is where our field reps are in the offices, working with our resellers, understanding their vendor portfolio, understanding their gaps, understanding the opportunity out there in the industry on our vendor portfolio. Our emerging partners are our strong top partners that will really fill that gap for the resellers.
They will bring in our vendor managers that will come in, enable, do demos, do pre-sale support, post-sale support, be that line item for that reseller to engage with and move their business further along, and that really helps us expand accounts further. Now, the next part is really around regional expansion. If we take a look at where our focus is in North America, we've doubled down in a couple areas. One, bringing in our regional VPs, right? We now have Mike Taliercio for the West, and then we have Jessica Lindroff for the East. They're really going to be managing our field teams, getting closer, getting into our top reseller accounts, building those relationships, identifying the opportunities, and really driving forward with that. We've expanded into MSP division. We had our MSP teams managing over 1,500 of our MSPs throughout our territories in different regions.
We've now built a dedicated team to go after the MSP business and continue to drive that growth and also bring a different level of service tied to with our platform as we start launching our marketplace and moving forward. We also invested in our territories. I think one thing we consistently do is evaluate our territories that are out there, look for the highest opportunity for growth and where we can expand in different regions that have a high potential of opportunity for our teams. We've split out California into NorCal and to SoCal, to really increase the business there, and we're starting to see an uptick in double-digit growth there with our partners, allowing us to get deeper with stronger reseller partners in those regions.
Lastly, this is where we're seeing a ton of success come from, is really doubling down on those enterprise partners in the North American region. Really, we take a look at a WWT, also CDW. They're the top 10 solution providers that are here in North America. They have the highest opportunity within customers. With WWT, we've built a strategic team around that. We brought in Kip Thompson, which is now managing that line, working with our inside teams. We're starting to see our sales double, triple as we move forward and tremendous growth. The fact that we put that dedicated body around those lines allows us and allows our vendors to focus more around with us because our competition doesn't have that.
CDW, this is our largest partner, one of the largest service providers in North America, led by probably one of the strongest field reps I've seen, Nathan Wysocki. He's been on that account for more than 10 plus years, really knows how to build and build relationships. We've now built out that team to a team of four to really go after and build out the different regions, the different verticals, and really get deeper within those accounts. As Charles mentioned earlier, our vendors are coming to us wanting to get into these large national accounts, CDW, SHI, Insight, and our relationships are getting them in the door to move faster.
Yeah. I'll just move it across to Amir, and I think it's important to take a step back. Oh, sorry. I think it's important to take a step back and have a look at the strategy of the business. When Dale did come in, the strategy was, yes, we talked about consolidation of vendors, but from an M&A perspective, North America primarily quite consolidated. A lot of the big disties have been hoovered up, so EMEA was the market to really go after. Originally, the Lifeboat business really had a business in Amsterdam, small, internal, three or four people, and they just used to really procure some software products, the likes of Intel, et cetera, to a number of different countries. Since the strategy changed and the acquisition was key to growing the business, we've acquired three businesses in the U.K. and Ireland, you can see.
We've got three offices in the U.K. and Ireland. This is a bit of a combination, this slide, of acquisitions as well as organic growth. A number of the regions we've actually invested ahead of the curve with an idea we're going to scale out the business from organic perspective, while still keeping an eye on the targets for those regions. We've still got the Amsterdam business. We've actually grown that out quite significantly. It now trades with all of Benelux and Nordics. We have a team in Paris. We've got an office in Paris as well. That market is one of the biggest opportunities, I think, for a lot of American vendors as well as Israeli vendors. They tend to try and stay away from that market because the French are quite pernickety in the way they work, so you need to have French people.
You also can't hire teams and teams of people in France. It's very difficult to get rid of them if they're the wrong people. We've also opened up in Germany. We've got office in Munich. That's very exciting for us and obviously the latest acquisition in Athens. Exciting for me, you can probably hear I've got a bit of a South African accent. For me, it's exciting. We've organically grown. We set up a business two months ago in South Africa. We've got a team of eight people out there. One of our key vendors in Sophos, our largest vendor from a revenue perspective, they've decided to really work with us in the region. It's not just South Africa. All of sub-Sahara, South Africa is key to it.
We've hired some really strategic people in that region who've already worked distribution there, we're looking for big things coming out of that market. Very exciting market. I'm sure you're all aware, but the amount of cash that's being invested into East and West Africa, certainly from a data center perspective, is through the roof. A lot of the governments are funding a lot of the IT startups and data centers. For us, being in there and giving our vendors the opportunity to scale is very exciting indeed. We continue to look for the next target. Dale is obviously talking to a number of targets at the moment, and that's an exciting part of our growth.
From a regional perspective, key regions, obviously, the things like the Middle East for us, we definitely need to focus in on the Middle East, but there's a number of exciting conversations going on right across the board.
Excellent. When you take a look at everything we've been talking about is really around building relationships, getting deeper with our resellers, aligning with our vendors, and is that really driving the growth that we want to see here in North America? When we take a look at our first half of the year, what does that mean for us? What have we accomplished? Really you take a look at where did we win on RFPs, relationships, vendor partnerships. Alone in the first half, we did $350 million in large scale RFP wins and also about vendor transitions and engagements in the channels. Those were primarily RFP wins and new relationships with CDW, SHI, WWT, and Optiv. I think one of our larger wins there was really around the Optiv account and taking that account to the next level.
We're talking about bringing an account from a $20 million account to a $120+ million account with us over this next year. Those are the large enterprise wins that we're really getting underneath and bringing our relationships to develop. We have another 10, 15 accounts that we're building those same relationships and going to market and bidding on those RFPs and so forth. The second part is around the strategic vendor momentum. These are our staple vendors in the growth. If I take a look at these five vendors alone, in the first half of the year, we grew almost $72 million with these vendors year-over-year. That, again, comes from alignment, our vendor management team collaborating with it, our field team being out there in the field, bringing their vendor reps into new accounts, new resellers, and moving forward.
That's the momentum that we're building here and taking forward into the second half.
Just from an EMEA perspective, I'll just put up three accounts there that from a success perspective. The first one, Softcat. Softcat is the largest reseller in the U.K. We have, over the last three to four years, have been successful in doing well over $100 million with them on an annual basis, based around one of our vendors in Vast. That's obviously grown significantly through other vendors, that relationship, things are going well there. I think we spoke a little earlier around end user demand. This is a great example of where distribution can get involved and open up some doors. The large account there was actually opened up by us, by Climb, which enables us to maintain higher margins on the larger deals and stay in the fight, if you like. Again, pushing that end user demand is pushing up our margin.
SCC, that's a French win for us. SCC's a massive account in France. There's a public platform, I guess you could say, that's called UGAP, and all public spend goes through UGAP in France. That's a $3 billion opportunity that all runs through SCC. We've managed to sign up with them and get the contract finalized, and we're starting to trade quite a lot of our vendors through that, so that's very exciting. First Distribution, I had to put that up because that's the biggest reseller First Distribution is the name of the company, but they have a reseller called First Technology. They're the largest reseller in South Africa, and they've again signed up to give us, effectively, it'll be a third of our income over the next 12- 18 months, which is very exciting.
Perfect. Excellent. Then one more slide.
Yeah. Myself and Carlos often go over our seven minutes. Bear with us.
That's all right.
I always put the word relevance to what we do. I believe us as an organization trust ahead of everybody else, and remain relevant for our resellers. AI, 18 months ago, we sat down, we recognized there was a massive opportunity for us within AI. We looked at building out our own solutions. We realized we're not an AI company. You've obviously heard from Vishal earlier about what we're doing from an AI perspective on tooling. We looked at ourselves and said, "What are we? What do we actually do?" We're an enabler. We're a trainer of resellers effectively. What we put together was we named it The Skyward Project. What it is, it's effectively six steps to AI readiness for all our resellers.
The reality is, even though AI is talked about everywhere, from an enterprise level, a lot of people don't know what they want to do with their data. Ultimately, it's achieving that outcome. People are on different levels and different steps. We created our first step, which is effectively our AI academy, and that's training people from entry-level to people who are geniuses in AI. Sitting down with these enterprise and SMB companies and saying, "What are you trying to achieve?" It's a journey. We're actually on a journey. We need to get somewhere. It's not a quick fix product that you're going to stick in, and it's going to work. We want to take them on that journey. That's number one. We actually go in vendor neutral when we talk about The Skyward Project.
Ironically, what happens there, we get a lot of end user interest as well. End users and resellers come to a lot of our events and webinars. Once we have them in there, we open up the technology because we only really make money when we sell technology. This is not a money earner. It has been relevant and given access to whoever we want. Really, secondly, we open up and we give them a true ISO certification that enables them to go to their resellers and discuss what their outcomes and bring them in. We also, from a third perspective, we all know every AI opportunity is a new use case. We partner with a third party called Unframe. They have a number of different use cases, hundreds and hundreds of different use cases, which are relevant to every individual case that we see.
We take them on that journey. We also got a user group. We set up a user group. Remember Cloud came to market and the things like HCL and these types of things. We had to set up user groups for people to push ideas against each other. We're not selling anything. We're just having these conversations with peers at a certain level. We start to generate that interest. Risk and compliance, we spoke about it again, Vishal. Certainly in Europe at the moment, governance compliance is key to everything. You've got Cyber Resilience Act coming out on the 1st of September. All our vendors, our American vendors and Israeli members have to be compliant. If they're not, even us as a distributor could face fines. It's up to us to educate to make sure they're compliant. It's a key part of that.
Then obviously sixth, our marketing team, I think we have one of the best marketing teams around, and we can help our resellers go to market from an AI perspective. Again, slightly over our seven minutes. Sorry, I apologize for that. I don't know. We actually cut out five slides. I'm going to introduce Brian and Tim. Thanks.
This you?
Yeah. Forward as what? Just this? Yeah. Good morning, everybody. My name's Tim Popovich. I am responsible for sales and operations here in North America. I've been with Climb for the better part of 23 years.
We are still good morning. I just have to check after the guys ran over. Good morning, everybody. Brian Davis. I'm VP of Sales for Climb in our U.K. and Irish region. I've been with the business since an acquisition in October of 2023 and have 27 years in the industry.
Excellent. Brian and I are here to talk to you guys about inside sales and operations. As you can see from behind me, there are a lot of different groups of inside sales, right? We have our national accounts that Carlos just spoke about in CDW, SHI, Insight, and World Wide Technology. Everybody else falls into this little VAR segment, and there is about 7,000 VARs that we do work with in territory. We have our MSP team that we also mentioned. The two that I really want to point out are our Elevate team and our Basecamp. We mentioned that we have about 100 brands on our main line card. When we moved our line card from 400+ or less than 500 vendors down to 100, we didn't just fire those vendors. They were revenue-generating vendors.
What we did is we had calved off Elevate, which is run by Michael Bernstein here, and we transact in a fulfillment fashion. These fulfillment vendors do not get access to our field sellers. They don't get the ability to participate in our marketing and events, and we don't maintain their price books, right? They are truly a one-off vendor that we provide fulfillment for. Many of these companies, and especially the larger guys, they call it long-tail management. They also want to only focus on the lines that bring them money. If they're participating in an RFP for one of their big end users, whether it be Exxon or Citgo or somebody else, Bank of America, they have to procure everything. They just can't procure some things. They look to Climb to procure all of those products, and that's what our Elevate group is for.
The other group is Basecamp, and that is mostly our order entry group. We utilize EDI as a technology, and we have over 20 reseller partners that are on EDI. All of those orders are coming in based on quotes that the inside sales teams have created. Our Basecamp group are the ones that process those orders and send them off to our vendors. We put a few notes down here. Fast response equals faster results. We are by far the quickest company in this industry to provide a quote back to any customer. You'll see on a future slide that we have a four-hour SLA. However, we get most of our things done within two hours. As Vishal automates our system, that's probably going to become a shorter timeframe. Our reps have been here for a long period of time.
I've been here for almost 23 years, and I think I might be the fourth longest or have the fourth longest longevity in our company in this room. Right? We have people that have developed relationships with our partners, and those people have stayed at those resellers, where we have really furthered the relationship because we've just known each other for that long. Right? We say that quoting is not hard, it can be. We have 100 different vendors, and they all have different rules of engagement. They have standard pricing. They have deal registration pricing. They have special pricing. Some people require information, periods of performance. There is a lot of data that goes into a quote. All that data will be shrunk and make us faster as we automate through Vishal.
All of our inside sales reps are sales certified, and they're experienced within the groups that they exist. Carlos mentioned we have 19 field sellers. Each of those field sellers are backed by four to five, and in some cases six or seven inside sales reps that support that speed. Our inside sales org is where the speed comes from, and that's part of the other reason why we win outside of relationships.
Thanks, Tim. What we're looking at here is our EMEA inside sales footprint across seven locally based teams in seven markets. We have a team in the U.K., a team in Dublin, Ireland, a Benelux team covering the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, a France-based team, a DACH team covering Germany, Switzerland, Austria, but also into Poland and up into the Baltics, a Greece team covering that southern Mediterranean region, and our most recent office, our South Africa team in Johannesburg, covering, as Gerard mentioned, all of sub-Saharan Africa. What's important to note is these teams are local to their customers. They're local to our vendor teams that are in those regions, and they understand the local buying cultures, which are very different across each country in this region. By being local, we're able to drive speed.
What a customer in this region wants is they want the distributor to come back quickly, accurately, and knowledgeably with the information they need to win business from their customer. Climb are the best distributor to deliver this, and that's why consistently we're winning over reseller partners across the region. We've all heard that adage that people buy from people. Let me tell you, French people really do only buy from French people. It's actually more than that. Our value to the market is we understand how to sell to the German mid-market. We understand if a vendor wants to access the public sector in France and how to get them into that market.
If one of our vendors wants to go sell to the NHS in the United Kingdom, we know which partners hold the right accreditations and are on the right framework agreements to give them access to those accounts. Using our teams and the knowledge within our teams accelerates our vendor partners' route to market locally. While our teams are local, our operations sits in a shared services engine centralized within our U.K. and Irish business. That encompasses our sales operations, our procurement, and our vendor operations. That provides a consistency of experience to all of our vendors as we sell across the region. It also provides consistency for any partners we're working with in our North American business that want to access or service customers in the EMEA region. It's the same experience across EMEA as they get in our North American business.
When we moved into South Africa, we didn't scale out a new sales support team. We didn't scale out a new finance team, a new procurement team in the region. We just extended the capability what we already had. The cost for us, or the marginal cost for us to enter a new region in EMEA is a fraction of the cost of what it costs us to enter our first region in EMEA. That operating efficiency, the revenues generated from that flow straight to the bottom line. Within our shared services engine, we also have a lot of experienced people within the business, as Tim mentioned, tenure. Everybody has a very long tenure in our business, so they understand not only the buying culture, as I mentioned earlier, but the challenges with actually doing business in specific regions.
That is exacerbated not too long ago by Brexit in the U.K., where all of a sudden it became a lot more difficult for some of our vendor partners to manage the shipment of hardware into the U.K. or into the EMEA region. By having logistics facilities in both Dublin within the EU and in the U.K., we can facilitate both markets seamlessly without any disruption to our vendors or our customers.
Yeah. I'll just say it's easier to buy than it is to build, especially internationally. Our speed to market has been minimalized so greatly being on a unified global system. Okay, these are just some stats. I really want to talk about the scalable commercial engine, but as you can see, we've processed almost 271,000 orders across the past trailing 12 months. As Vishal noted, there's about five quotes for every order that we place, right? There's a lot of options that these customers are considering. We've worked with more than, or almost 800 different vendors, which means Michael Bernstein's Elevate Group is transacting with almost 700 of those. But the commercial engine and the scalability, it's easy to add a new vendor and then plug them into a machine that's already running.
We can sell things that are more than just software if we really wanted to, but we'll probably just stick to our specialization. We can plug them into a partner ecosystem that we've already shown and that we've already proved works. As long as Charles is working through his vendor profile and signing those guys that have more than 50% of a distribution viewpoint, those guys are going to plug right in and be equally as successful, right? Our inside sales growth engine is simple. We add people as we do more business, right? There's always a revenue threshold that tells us, hey, there's X amount of quotes, there's X amount of orders, there's X amount of revenue coming in, and this is the time that we go, and we add. Take the bottom two.
Very similar from the EMEA perspective. The numbers you're seeing here on orders processed, these aren't projections. This is real through-push through our business, through our teams. The teams that are there at the moment already in the territory can scale from almost 50,000 orders processed to the next 100,000 very efficiently. We're not growing by just getting bigger. We're truly scaling our business in EMEA across the region. We transact with almost 360 different vendor partners, very similar to the North American story. A focus within a small number of large vendors that we work with in each region, and that can be a very different picture when you move around the different regions within Europe. We're working with different vendors in some countries, wider number of vendors in others.
That's allowing us to develop bespoke, localized go-to market in each of the regions we're operating across the EMEA region, which is really important. From our reseller and MSP base, almost 3,500 customers we sell to. The hardest part is always acquiring a new customer. With the number of vendors we have, we're all about now monetizing repeatedly the customer base we have, then compounding that and driving that compounded growth in the region. Again, speed gives you share. Having a fast SLA, looking after the sellers within your customer base with fast and accurate response will bring business to you repeatedly. Often what happens is, the reps in those reselling partners just won't even bother going to our competitors because they know the service they get from Climb is far superior. Effectively, what we've built is this scalable, capital-efficient engine across all of our business.
One where we can take one of the new vendors that Charles talked about earlier, take that vendor into our existing partner ecosystem, now leveraging the field and vendor teams that Carlos and Gerard talked about earlier as well, putting our inside sales engine behind that. Everybody putting their shoulder to the wheel and driving incremental growth for Climb, also for our customers and our vendor partners.
Inside sales and operations is really blocking and tackling, right? It's the necessity behind how we go and we sell. Our entire thing is speed and accuracy. Even for as fast as we are, people would like us to be faster, right? The amount of email that we have incoming is insane. The partner portal, the reseller portal that Vishal talked about, it's a self-service portal. It's going to help minimize the amount of things that we have coming in. We also like to utilize our own self-service portals when vendors offer them. We can go and we can grab quotations quicker. We can get that out to our reseller partners quicker, right? Which leads to a quicker sale. Our automation, I'll tell you down here, we utilize XML, EDI, API, and soon marketplace to get to our customers, right?
Receiving a quote from a vendor in a PDF, copying it, and paste it into your own quote tool is long. It takes a long period of time. If you have a 60 or 70-line item quote, it is going to take you an hour to do a quote, right? With XML, we can take that file, we can drag it and drop it into our quote tool, and every line item automatically appears for us to do, right? Our inside sales rep's job changes from creating the quote to reviewing the quote for accuracy and sending it out. It allows us to upsell and cross-sell other products that we can now add to the quote, and that is really a key for us. Our bid wins. Carlos had mentioned that we had already won $350 million worth of business across a CDW, Optiv, and a couple other bids.
We are probably the sixth biggest distributor in North America. There is a reason why people choose to work with us. It is the relationships that we own, it is the speed in which we work on the inside, the accuracy of the quotes that we provide, and how quickly we can help them close a sale. We win because of our relationships and because of our speed. We do not have the biggest rebates, we are not the biggest distributor out there. They probably have other technologies. They just do not do it better.
Vendor exclusivity?
I thought I would give you a couple of examples of what has been happening in our region with vendor exclusivity. One of our largest partners, Sophos, in our North American business, made a decision this year in our Irish market to terminate the relationship that they had with two existing distributors in that region and replace them with Climb as a sole, exclusive distributor in that region. That was because, first of all, they have had an amazing experience working with Climb in our North American business. Secondly, we have the same systems and platform globally, so they trusted and knew that they would get the same operational experience with us.
Thirdly, our go-to-market strategy in the EMEA region delivered what they needed from a growth point of view in new customer acquisition and new partner acquisition in that territory, which had kind of slowed with their existing model. This is something that we're seeing recurring over and over again now, and we're part of multiple conversations every month with vendors who are looking to talk to us. Either they're dissatisfied with their current incumbent distributor in the region, or one of the countries within the region, or they're looking to enter a market for the first time, and given the experience they've had with us in other markets, they choose us from the beginning to have an exclusive relationship. That allows us to continue to invest in, or to expand our investment initially in those technologies.
We have more people from the get-go on the ground to support that vendor in region.
Yeah. Exclusivity is hard to come by. There's very few vendors out there, whether they're selling direct or selling through a distribution model. Nobody wants to put all their eggs in one basket, right? If you think about that in North America versus internationally, they really don't want to do that because generally different distributors exist internationally. We've managed to secure a bunch, and I think it's all of the things that Brian talked about. You look at Ingram and TD Synnex and Arrow, we call those guys broad line because they offer so much. We're more specialty. Every vendor wants to have a broad line and a specialty distributor. After working through specialty, they just kind of always want specialty because it delivers that much more. We're able to accomplish that both in North America and internationally.
I think next we'd like to bring up Matt Whitton, who's going to talk about our solutions and our marketplace.
We're going to make a little change.
We make changes? Okay.
Thanks, guys. Thank you.
You got it.
Real quick. Carlos and Gerard went too long, that's why we're moving around. They always do that. Anybody else understand what persnickety means? I don't know what that means on that side. We'll have to figure that out. I'm busting on the French. What we're going to do is we're going to go to lunch now and we'll come back. Matt Whitton will kick off, and then we'll get into the numbers. The second hour is going to be really where Climb's going to be going, which I know that is a lot of the reason you guys are here, understanding us, where we are, but where we're going to go in the next three to four years. Let's go get to lunch.
One thing that was mentioned, as far as a lot of the sales teams here, the last thing is, Sandy DeVico's got to be upset that she wasn't on that one slide, Carlos. I have no idea. I know. I could feel the heat coming there. Please intermingle with our teams. We have vendor manager directors here, our field sellers, our operations, our credit, everybody. Please get to know everybody, and pick their brains on what we're doing internally in Climb, but thank you. We'll be back in an hour.
[Break]
Hey, everyone. Is that working? Yep. Awesome. Thank you very much. I hope you all had a nice lunch. We've saved the best bit until now because I'm going to talk a little bit about parts of the business that maybe some of you aren't quite as familiar with. I'm Matt Whitton. I'm the COO in EMEA, and as part of that, I also run our Grey Matter brand globally. I joined the business about five and a half years ago as part of the CDF acquisition over in the U.K. That happened. I've been with the company now 26 years, so a long-timer, as Tim was talking about earlier on. What is our solutions business? It is Grey Matter, which sells mainly to ISVs, so to developers that are building IP to sell on.
We sell both to them and through them. There's Climb Global Services as well, that I'll go into a bit more detail with now. Starting with the numbers. Our solutions business, although in 2025, the AGB was about $90 million, so not a massive part of our business. From a revenue standpoint, from profitability, it punches above its weight. From 4.6% of our AGB drives about 13.5% of our gross profit. We're able to do that because of the way that we work. It's where you add more value, you can retain more margin. Grey Matter, as I said, sells to ISVs, but what does it sell? Majority, about 86% of what Grey Matter does is Microsoft, but there's some niche areas of that where we work there.
Where you've seen the vendors that the other guys have talked about earlier on in Europe, we are a Microsoft distributor. I'll go into some more details about that a bit later on. Grey Matter essentially help developers to build an application, provide them the tools to do that. These are people that are adopting AI as fast as you can take it. They're people that are quick to adapt and adopt new technologies to see how they can build their business. They need somewhere for that to run. They need some people to help them secure that, because when they're working, software is their business, so they really understand what they're talking about.
Our salespeople, our marketing people work in much the same way as the Climb team, the operations that you've seen earlier on, they're working with these companies that are using the technology to help build their business and go forward. Climb Global Services serves both Grey Matter and the Climb Channel Solutions part of our business, it serves that with pre-sale support. It serves that with post-sale support, so first and second line, whatever the vendor's needing, Climb Global Services can provide that into our major vendors. They also help drive licensed sales. That's what we're all here really to do. They do migrations, optimization, in some circumstances, managed services, helping MSPs adopt those technologies early stages before they build up that themselves. We're training MSPs and resellers to scale that as they look to grow.
They also give us the technical certifications that we need, that many vendors require. Certainly, yes, that's for Microsoft, for many other vendors as well, to either be a distributor, to be a partner in some way or other, and have increased margins. That gives us our credentials. One area with Microsoft that they now have a frontier distribution program, we are very well-placed to become a frontier distributor because of our services business that we have there. What that will mean is that we're, again, able to retain more margin, get leads, be able to build that business as we go forward. The third piece I'm going to talk about as well is the Climb Marketplace. Again, you've seen some bits of that. In Europe, we already have a well-established marketplace that is in operation.
This is, again, centered around our Microsoft business, but also with other vendors that we have there. This is really helping us serve a market that otherwise would not be profitable for us to do so. When we're working with MSPs, where there's a low average sell value, where the margins wouldn't otherwise support us putting headcount against that, having these partners self-serve, much like a Pax8 sort of model, if you want to look at it in that way. We have the support personnel around that. We still have that personal touch, but we have those marketplaces there too. Delving a little bit more into Grey Matter and how we go to market. We're working with ISVs, independent software vendors. Vendors, we'd call them in Climb land, right?
We're helping them to build their application, providing them the tools to do that, as we've already said. They mainly go to market on the Microsoft cloud. They're building, they're deploying to Azure. We help them sell, we grow from that consumption revenue that's going to come back from that. The two things that come up in any conversation that we have, AI, AI. I've already touched on the fact that developers are among the first people to adopt AI. It turns out that everybody needs more code. They want to generate a bit more software that they can take to market. Okay, how are they going to scale that? Does it commercially make sense? We can help them with that by going to market through the Azure Marketplace.
We need to also help support them to manage their cloud spend. What's their FinOps strategy? How can we support them to have a sustainable business going forward? Are they secure? We have a seven-layer security assessment that we run these ISVs through as well. That really looks at all areas of the security stack and bringing in different Climb vendors. It's a great cross-sell opportunity that we have there to open that up and help take our vendors into these ISVs as customers. Couple of stats on the bottom there. Grey Matter's business, 65% of it is true recurring. This is not just subscription renewals that you've got out there. This is 65% of the business as we come in, is going to come through every year, and 40% of that is monthly billing.
We're seeing a real shift to a recurring model. It's moved to annual over the years, now it's moving to monthly, and we're seeing that really drive growth. I'd like to just touch on a couple of niches as well that we work in. We are a mapping distributor. That's Microsoft Bing Maps, that's HERE Technologies, that's TomTom. Some areas that you probably haven't heard of or touched on for some time, but this is where developers use APIs to bring location intelligence into their applications. They need a distributor to really serve that market. We fill that gap, we're able to retain great margins because of the pre-sales service that we offer around that, which really pushes up our GP. In other licensing areas as well.
A couple of examples on there is SPLA, which is a Microsoft licensing scheme for hosters, and ISV Royalty, which is for if you're embedding SQL Server or some other Microsoft tool into an on-premise application, then we are distributors for that as well. It's not that exciting to other providers. It's an area we've really been able to grow that across Europe and use that to bring more MSPs and more ISVs into our stack. Stepping away from the Grey Matter part of our business and really focusing on Microsoft as a vendor that we work with. Clearly not a challenger when we look at where they stand in that Gartner matrix. However, the opportunity in Europe is huge, both for us all up, but especially with our Microsoft business there. I'll say it again.
We are Microsoft distributors in Europe, both originally, Climb already were, and then through the interworks.cloud acquisition that we've made. That's really bolstered our numbers there. Where Microsoft use distribution under their CSP licensing scheme, that they term it, really to serve that SME market. That is growing year-on-year. It's looking like out to 2035, that's going to grow 20% every year. That's exciting for us, and obviously we are not a huge part of that market as it stands. Our growth opportunity there is huge. Microsoft are looking to disties to serve more of that market as well. They've driven some consolidation by making resellers, which is this direct bill threshold piece here. They've got to be transacting at least $1 million a year to be a direct partner with Microsoft.
We know that's going to increase as time goes on as they move more and more of these smaller partners through distribution. That's a great opportunity for us to pick up on this business. What we're really offering to those partners is, yes, the marketplace, but then as you look at the areas where Microsoft want to grow the business, which is where they put their largest rebates, that is very much around AI, it's around their Copilot, it's around security. That is where our Climb Global Services business really comes into place. That's how that's driving that extra margin back into our business. There are other areas as well where this partnership can help us take our existing vendors out to market. These two more acronyms, unfortunately for you. REO and MPO.
Resale Enabled Offers and Multi-Party Private Offers are ways that Microsoft are offering traditional Climb vendors, and obviously many others as well, routes to sell to end users via Azure spend, essentially. They're getting enterprise customers to sign up for a MACC. They get them signed up to, they can have a certain amount of Azure spend. They can retire that using us and using Climb vendors to do that. Through this partnership and this understanding, not only is it in itself a good business opportunity for us, but it is for our vendors, too. In Europe, Microsoft really underpins our MSP messaging. As we're going out to market our MSP business, Microsoft is the cornerstone of that.
We're able to add on margin and add on value through the other more niche or more emerging technologies that we're able to cross-sell into those MSPs. Once we get them onto our platform, doing that attach sell is a lot easier. Year-on-year, we've grown. Over the last six months against the previous six months, we've grown our AGB on Microsoft in Europe by 45%. That's excluding the Interworks acquisition. Interworks are also growing at an accelerated rate since they've become part of our business. It's an exciting place to be. It is different to the rest of our business. It's going to grow, and I can see this being really a part of our acquisition strategy in Europe as we go forward and across the Middle East and Africa as well.
As we have these tools, we have these platforms, we have these expertises in place, it's very easy for us to scale that. Quick bit on interworks.cloud. They only sell via the marketplace. I feel like I'm saying marketplace far too often, but there you go. We already use the same technology to do that. From an integration point of view, this is very easy for us. We're already integrating the teams. They're working together to add value there. They don't quote. They think it's crazy that we do five quotes for every sale that we do. They're like, "Why do you do that? Why don't you just sell through a marketplace?" We're also educating them on the wider Climb business.
Across Southern Europe, there is a good cross-sell opportunity for us there, taking the existing Climb vendors through their sales team and through their marketplace as well. All of their business is recurring, and they retain about 5% EBITDA. It's a good profitable distribution business that they have there. The fact they're in Greece, they're in Malta, they're in Cyprus, they're in Bulgaria. These are not areas that have high penetration from the more broad line distributors. Again, we're able to retain more of the margin that we make there. 74% of their business is Microsoft. The next biggest is Acronis that's in there, which ties in nicely to our North American business. They're a certified Acronis training center and very well thought of by them.
They're going to help us take the Acronis brand right across the rest of Europe, help us build that out. I've covered marketplace enough, as I've already said, I think the piece that I would like to pick out on that, it's a must. Every distie needs a great marketplace, and we're already there. As Vishal covered earlier on, it's only going to get better, and we're going to add more value here to what our resellers and our MSPs really need. I think an important part when you're working in countries where language is different, where tax rules are different, where there are more complications around that, having a consistent marketplace infrastructure that you can then localize, it's really going to help us go to market a lot quicker, as we add new regions or expand across existing ones.
It lowers the cost of entry for us because we just need a few salespeople, and we use the existing Climb and the InterWorks go to market that we have there. They have a great MSP lead generation and conversion system. The stats there, which I won't quite quote now as part of this, but we're looking to make sure that that's driven by the Greek team because they're already doing a fantastic job of that, and we think we can drive great growth as we move through the rest of 2026 and beyond. Now it's time for lunch. Right. Let's go. I'd like to bring Dale up. Thank you.
Well, Matt's coming up here. We're getting into the finance part of things, I want to recap from this morning, just some things that I think you could see that were a strain through a lot of the presentations, that is the distribution is becoming much more in vogue. As we were going through different cycles, it's coming back where we are seeing private equity companies, we're seeing investment companies pushing their teams to get more efficient. The channel already exists out there, both the distribution channel and the VAR channel. Why would you go direct to the end user and spend all those dollars? They look at it from every nickel and dime, it's good for us because we are seeing so many more targets.
Charles could probably use a team or two or three just to look at the incoming vendors and then us trying to vet through them as fast as possible. Just the strain that is exciting to us as we continue to grow in these next four or five years that we're going to talk about, I'll let Matt kick off. Oh, you want the clicker?
Yeah.
You want control.
Good afternoon, everyone. The next few slides will talk about 2026 and beyond, going out as far as 2030. Just to level set for those who have followed along are very well aware of the key metrics that we track to, but those are gross billings, gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA. Then further down from that, we track gross profit percentage, which is the gross profit dollars as a percentage of gross billings, and effective margin, which is the adjusted EBITDA dollars as a percentage of gross profit dollars. We filed this presentation with an 8-K earlier today. Included in there is the appendices that reconcile the gross billings, which we call a key operational metric to net sales, and also reconciles adjusted EBITDA to net income, similar to how we do in our earnings releases and in our quarterly filings.
Just starting with 2025, we did $2.1 billion in gross billings, $105.3 million in gross profit, and $42.9 million in adjusted EBITDA. Breaking down those gross billings and gross profit numbers a little further, $1.75 billion of those gross billings were generated in North America, while $350 million were generated in EMEA, which breaks down to 83% in North America and 17% in EMEA. That was generated in North America, while $28 million was generated in EMEA, 73% from North America and 27% for EMEA. The difference is the higher margin profile, which is a key point to keep in mind as Dale gets to some of our future goals in the next couple slides. In 2025, we generated 4.5% gross profit margin in North America, where in EMEA, it was 8.1%.
A much higher profile as you're competing against regional distributors in EMEA as opposed to here, some of the larger broad lines for the most part. The first step we did as we're modeling this out is model out to 2026. From an organic perspective, we've looked at the top and bottom line, all three numbers here, gross billings, gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA, growing at about 10%. Then on top of that, we've layered in, which we'll get into a bit more again in future slides on the acquisition strategy. We've layered in an aspirational target on top of what we've already completed this year. The target profile that we used for that is similar to the Interworks acquisition that we completed earlier in 2026.
They have a much higher gross profit percentage than we do here in North America and even in our existing EMEA business. To get through to there, we ended up with $2.3 billion as our gross billings target for 2026, $119 million for gross profit, and adjusted EBITDA of $48.5 million. To sense check all of that, year-to-date results with our top 15 vendors are tracking at a higher growth percentage than that 10% that we used here in this model. Then looking ahead, we carried this out all the way through 2030.
We used that same top-line growth rate of 10% on gross billings and gross profit, we used a higher growth rate on adjusted EBITDA, which the theme of today is we continue to get more efficient, gain operating leverage, our operations become more efficient, more of those gross profit dollars will flow through to adjusted EBITDA. Highlighted here, we'll talk about acquisitions in a later slide. How we get to those gross billing growth metrics in 2027 through 2030 is a number of things. We continue to deepen our relationships with existing vendors. Today, we have 45 vendors globally that we do more than $10 million in gross billings with. If we look back to 2022, that was about 22 vendors. Significant growth there. As of today, about 80 vendors represent 90% of our total consolidated gross billings.
Looking back to 2022, that was about 50 vendors. There's deepening the relationships with the existing vendors that we have. Also, we continue to sign disruptive vendors like we have over the past few quarters. Some notable ones there, Darktrace in early 2025. They now represent one of our top 20 vendors globally. The Fortinet vendor relationship that we signed at the end of 2025 that we've talked a bit about on recent earnings calls, that relationship continues to ramp up today. Lastly, the Ivanti relationship that we just announced a couple of weeks back. We're very bullish on what that can provide to us in 2026 and beyond. On top of that, we continue to maintain a very diligent focus on credit. Eva Pinto leads our global credit team.
To date, we have $3.65 billion of credit extended to customers globally, whereas our bad debt expense is $100,000-$200,000 annually. We continue to keep a very diligent focus on that while we are growing with these existing vendors. Lastly, on top of all this, we have the acquisition activity that we plan to execute upon, which I'll pass it over to Dale here.
Thanks, Matt. Acquisitions, right? We've talked about them. We've done six in six years. We're going to get much more aggressive with this. We had a lot of things going on in the last couple of years with our ERP. We needed to have a platform globally that we could actually add acquired companies to and be able to platformize them in North America and Europe as our two bases and then grow from there. Because what we want to see is marketing and sales in regions like we talk about in regions in the U.S. We want them there, but we want our operations and all our back office, North America and Europe in those two spots. I can tell you with acquisitions, the M&A team is standing right here. It's Matt and I, right?
We use our teams, we use our vendors for picking targets, for looking at what is out there. Our teams run into different distributors or compete against them. We will take a look at those, we have a pretty robust target list. What it takes the most of is the energy to actually do it, right? Once you get involved in it takes a lot of energy. We have consultants that we use from the legal side, from the financial side, tax side to make all this happen. We want to just get this more into a repeatable exercise on some of these smaller distributors that we want to acquire. We have a strategic plan for acquiring, I will take you through that.
If you just please remember Matt's first slide when he talked about how is it possible that it is 17% of the gross profit or 17% of the adjusted gross billings is overseas, but 27% of the profit is coming from overseas. We want to continue to double down on that. The acquisitions in the U.S. have already happened. There is very few targets left. The roll-up happened of 40 distributors over the last 20 years. If you look at Europe and beyond, there is probably hundreds that we could actually look at and target that fit us perfectly as far as software, security, in our little ecosystem. We do have the energy to do that. Why? We are an opportunistic company.
The team knows, even though we have a budget set, if we see something like a Fortinet that is not in our budget, and we are going to have to spend dollars to get that or to spend dollar to take it to market, we will do that. If we look at and say, "Hey, we want to split territories because we got to a certain amount," we know the cost is going to come to Climb first, and then we will start seeing the results. We will split territories, and we are just a very opportunistic team. Vendors, they want faster expansion, and part of the acquisition play is that technology starts in North America and moves to the rest of the world. It is just how it is.
If you talk to our vendors, the majority of them are 60% in North America all the time, and the rest is, of course, the rest of the world. What happens, and it is our life as many in this room were at Ingram, it took Ingram 18 months to two years to launch vendors in other areas, right? They were just launching them in the U.S. and then eventually go to their other teams. We think we can launch, and we sign global agreements. Charles signs an agreement globally. We think we can launch, and if the team wants them in those regions, we can launch them within weeks of launching in the U.S. Much faster to market, much faster ahead of our competition. Reduce multiples.
The reason I put this in there is because we want to buy companies at a reduced multiple that we're trading at, and we've been very successful at that. Our multiple, of course, has gone up and down, as you've seen. Our acquisitions are typically between four and eight on a multiple scale. Margin expansion, I already talked about that. Distributors and region. Here's what happens with the big three. The big three are in regions around the world, but what they did is they set up shop someplace, and then they just have some basically agents that are out there trying to sell in-country, and they just do an okay job with it if you're selling Cisco or HP, but not when you get down the line card into vendors that we compete with them against. We think we can do a good job with that.
Solutions and services, Matt went and talked about that. We do our shared services between our Grey Matter technical team and the Climb teams. Matt heads up both of those. That's on our radar. Should we look at a services company to get us stickier with our vendors, sticky with our customers? I just don't want to compete with my customers if they're doing the services already. Where are we going to go? We're going to go into Europe as we already have. Matt showed a target on there that we're going after now, the DACH region. We have a team there, and if you remember, Gerard mentioned that sometimes we'll just invest in that territory, get to know the landscape, and then we'll look for an acquisition target there. The Nordics, France. I'll just mention the Greeks, we acquired them.
It was opportunistic for us to make sure we maintain our Microsoft relationship at a $30 million rate. We know that that number's going up. What Matt didn't mention is that our trailing 12 months between our combined groups now is in the $40 million range. We'll continue to grow because we know that Microsoft's going to put another bar and everybody consolidate underneath probably $60 million. Anyway, we've already been prospecting in the Middle East. We have some targets in LATAM. We're nervous about the market. We'll be very careful there. Then APAC, we've looked at this years ago, and now that John McCarthy, our chairman's not in the room, I can say it out loud, that I was shunned from going there because I'd have to get on a plane to fix things.
I said, "Okay, I would have to fix something in Europe maybe and get on a plane." That's back on the table. We'll look at those distributors there. I'll go back to some things Charles tells our teams all the time. There could be two or three Climbs at $2 billion-$4 billion each and we still wouldn't run into each other, or we'd still have that much more opportunity. There's that much to go after. There's that many vendors looking for a route to market that we provide, and we see it as just opportunistic that way. The first thing that most every target that we've acquired or have talked to, when they're not in the States, their number 1 thing is, it's so hard to sign vendors, right? The vendors are not coming to them in their regions.
The vendors, they have to go find them. They have to spend time in the U.S. We're finding it easier and easier to sign in the U.S. and move to a global contract. That's another reason for optimism. I'll let you kick off the next one.
Over here we have our return on invested capital. When you look back at the company historically before we started on our acquisition journey back in 2020, the return on invested capital was in the 8%-10% range. As we've layered in here kind of where all the different acquisitions took place over time, and there's ebbs and flows depending on earnings in a given quarter, but every single one of these acquisitions have been accretive to the company's business, for the 6 that we've completed to date.
I was thinking about when the guys were speaking. Just real quick of the exec team. Interwork Technologies, Carlos came from there. Matt Whitton from CDF, Gerard from Spinnaker, Brian from DataSolutions, and then we have Stamatis in Greece, on that side. The exec team makes up, they become part of the Climb family, and that's, like I said this morning to the team, that's part of our culture that we build. We bring the team members in, make them part of our family, and then we become a one Climb go-to-market.
That's part of the vetting process we do as we go through the M&A process as well. As we identify a target, not only do we want to make sure that they're a cultural fit for us, we want to make sure that they're a cultural fit, that they fit in our culture as well. Brian, Matt, Gerard, and Carlos, they're the perfect examples to talk to as we go through that process.
Good. If you look at the logos underneath the ROIC slide, those are vendors that we have acquired through acquisitions. The ones on the bottom are vendors that we've moved through territories, right? The goal is, like we started with our acquisition plan, is that we want to sign vendors in the U.S. and move them to the rest of our regions. We've had some come back to us. We've had some that Charles pushed over, and then they came back. I think it was Canonical, right? That you pushed over to the Europeans, and they came back. We want to see more of this cross-pollination between the different regions and eventually, and of course, be one region. Let me go to the next one. Highly competitive. I've talked about the big three disties.
If you don't know them, Ingram Micro, Synnex Corp, Tech Data, they're both $60 billion plus. Arrow is in that $40 billion range. Margin is competitive, and that's why we're seeing the margin compression in North America has always been there. We have to compete with them, and you're saying, "Wait a second, you're selling emerging tech." Sometimes they have it, sometimes they don't. It's a mindset of the resellers in North America that I'm sorry, the mindset of the vendors that are like, "Hey, we know that distribution should cost me between 3% and 5%." It's just the pressure that we have, just signing a new vendor line right off the bat, that that's the expectations that are out there because they're factoring in what is it going to cost me to the reseller market and beyond.
That's why we have it here more than we have it anywhere else. I think if we looked at that one time, the big three, the majority of their sales is also North America. This is a little messy slide, but I want to talk about and go back to what Matt was saying before. As far as North America gross billings, 1.9, 87% gross profit, is 76% of it. This is what the organic growth play is for us to 2030 that Matt made up. What do we want to do? We want to have an equal number of sales outside of America that we do in America. If you think about it, right? I think you said 4.3%, right, is our gross margin in North America, 8.1. Almost all of our targets are over 10% in margin that they have.
If I can play that game, I can almost one and a half times my margin as an overall company. Because if you think about it, if I can acquire companies and build outside of the U.S. at $1.9 billion, I'm going to move my margin profile up into the sevens and eights, which is a definitely game changer for us as a company and the drop-through. One thing I will caveat is that, and Vishal, he just runs the same kind of mindset that I run as far as how can we do this more efficiently. We've got to stay as efficient as we are in North America as we expand to other regions. If not, we're just going to be basically on the hamster wheel. Here's what we're doing.
When Matt put the slide up before, our forecast plan is we are going to acquire up to $100 million in companies from here on out, right, through 2030. There are some big targets out there that are way over $100 million a year. There are some that are smaller, and we are going to be opportunistic in territories. But if we look at it, they are going to be all outside of the U.S. There is still a couple sleepers in the U.S., so I will not say that we can or cannot get that done, but they would be strategic companies that we would look and acquire.
We think this is doable to do $100 million in acquisitions a year. It might take two or three acquisitions to do that, to get to $100 million, or we will have one year on some targets that could be $400 million or $500 million.
We talked about it before, and that is we have no debt in the company. We have done all acquisitions with cash. Should we take on debt? I would argue we probably should on certain acquisitions if it makes sense. Should we use equity? We are going to shy away from that. We feel like we are underpriced right now. We would not use that, but we would get a lot of input from Sean, team, and a lot of you before we do things like that. That is where we are going to go, and that is how we are going to forecast the numbers out. Matt showed you all the organic side. Now we are going to show you bolting on acquisitions, and some efficiencies with that. Here is the back to the slide, the $2.3 billion in organic growth, 10% a year flat lined out.
Target one that we are working on right now, and this is what it looks like for 2030, right? This is organic, 10% growth, and then putting on $100 million for the next four years. We think that we can basically double our EBITDA by 2030. I can tell you that we have made this pretty conservative for what our internal forecasts are. We think this is something that you should see where we are going to go, kind of a mindset that our exec team has going forward, and where we are going to take Climb. Of course, there will be headwinds along the way. We always deal with those. This is our plan for the next four years. With that, we are going to go right to Q&A.
With that, can I have the exec guys come up so that you guys can answer questions that Matt and I might miss out on? Go ahead. We are ready for them. Yes, sir.
It makes sense with where your stock is not to issue equity and to looking more at debt and other options. At the same time, the stock isn't that liquid, and to what extent are sellers interested in potentially rolling over their stake into your company in return for equity? Have you considered those options?
We've had a couple that we've looked at that wanted to roll. Back to what Matt said, we want to get to know the exec teams at the targets because sometimes we've walked away because it's not a good fit for us, right? You can just tell culturally we will not get along. I got to be careful. There's one specific target that we just hit it off, and I'm like, "How is this possible?" Because it was just a totally different region, and it's like, "This is so in our stream and culture," we are going down the road much farther with them. Back to that, we had a couple that looked at taking equity because they think we're underpriced. They would take the equity thinking with that bolt on, they were going to move our stock price up.
It really depends on the seller. Right now, we've never issued any equity. We've only done it with all cash, and taking over, we've done earnouts on multiple deals. You're right. We are thinly traded. We got pushback, of course, by doing our stock split and killing the dividend. We want to get it out of the way and just get it behind us, we think we'll get back to where we were a year ago.
Let's get a mic for the webcast.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Can you pass that down?
If the webcast picked up anything on John McCarthy, I apologize ahead of time.
Yeah, Dale, you're talking about doing significantly larger acquisitions, and there's a lot of rationale to that. Your scale business, et cetera. You've had success in your past acquisitions. The risk will go up, right, if you're doing bigger deals. Maybe you could tell us what are some of the lessons learned from previous deals that should give us comfort?
Well, you know what? I can ask some of these guys that have been acquired, right?
Yeah.
We can talk about that. I think some of it, we need to get to know that team. Back to how we do vetting, it's pretty easy for us to do it because we can talk to our vendors and ask them about a distributor in a region. We can learn more about them than you can imagine, through a distributor. We go to our sales teams and find a reseller that buys from them and see what the experience is there. It really depends on what that exec team looks like. Like for in Brian's instance, we knew that the owner was going to move on. How good are his next lieutenants down? Are they good? Do they have the same philosophy we do? Go to market. What's their vendor relationships? You can vet that out pretty quickly in the marketplace.
Are we going to make a mistake? We're going to do our damnedest not to make that mistake on acquiring somebody, but you're right. There's two targets that are plus $500 million that are on our list that would be more transformative to us. We'll take more time with that.
Okay.
I don't know if you guys want to talk about being acquired and how bad it was.
Well, I will. We'll be careful on this one. When I think about the acquisitions and the acquisitions we made over the years, and the successful ones and the ones that maybe took a little longer to integrate into our group, I think we've taken the right steps to build out a platform globally for our team, so that when we go and acquire companies moving forward, we quickly integrate them into our systems, into our culture, into our people, and roll it out into our teams. I think the faster we actually integrate our acquisitions into the rest of our teams and our management teams, the more successful we're going to be when we launch. I remember when we first got acquired, we integrated instantly. Within a few months, we were already integrated, and our teams were amalgamated.
A little different in North America, but I think that is going to be where we'll succeed. With the new platforms that Vishal's building out, it's going to make that much easier.
When we have vendors in common, it's even better, right? Like Sophos, doing stuff like that. The vendors that we're so tight with. For instance, Sophos, we have more market share in the U.S. than the other big disties almost combined, I think. For us, when Sophos pushes us into a region, they give us the targets and say, "This is one good, this is bad. You'll see if you guys get along." Because they know our culture as well at Climb.
I can jump in. I met Dale, 2021. Charles and Dale came across to meet me in London. I was the main shareholder of the Spinnaker, and I wasn't looking to sell the business at all because we'd only been trading for three and a half years. We did have a brand that was very attractive to Climb. After meeting the guys, it felt like a really good fit. Genuinely felt like a really good fit. For me, obviously, being a smaller business, de-risking future growth was really relevant. I think one of the vendors that came with the Spinnaker business is now a global brand for us. It was just a U.K. brand at that stage. It's now a global brand, and it's a significant driver in the revenue.
The scale and the size of it, my business, which was Spinnaker, would've probably lost that brand because we didn't have the scale and the size or investment to go along with it. The attraction for Climb going into smaller disties is there, just to de-risk the growth, de-risk the losing out on some of the key vendors. I'm still here three and a half years in, just because I'm allowed to speak more than seven minutes on the stage. I think when we're doing acquisitions, all of us who've been involved with it can genuinely go and speak to the owners of the business and talk about the culture. It's a bit of a cliché from a culture perspective on many businesses, but genuinely within this business, that is very much the case.
That is our IP, right? It's the relationships we have, vendors, customers, and each other is the IP of the company. We do not make anything. Back to your point, Vince, and that is, you're right. Small deals can be very expensive, right? Because you still have legal and all the other things that go with it. We are looking upstream, just like we're looking upstream in vendors that we want to bring on. Charles and I argue a lot. Where are you? Because it's like, okay, is this vendor really going to move the needle? Will it move the needle in 10 months, 15? Where is it going to be? If it's not, then it's a tougher one. What's the margin profile? There's all those games. We do the same thing on an acquisition. Is it strategic in a territory?
Is it strategic for vendors that we could take those vendors once signed into other regions? We play a lot of the numbers games before we go ahead with it, we are looking significantly upstream at larger acquisitions.
Thanks for all the color, a quick one for Matt. Are you assuming better geographic cross-selling in your organic outlook than you have today?
We're assuming consistent cross-pollination across the geographies that we have today.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you.
I want to stop there.
Hi, guys. Thank you for the target. I'm trying to gauge whether this 2030 target is a two-foot hurdle, four-foot hurdle, or a six-foot hurdle for you guys. Is it something that is relatively easy, you're pretty confident in, or is it challenging? Is it pushing you? Could you do better?
As we mentioned earlier before, internally, we think it's a bit on the conservative side. We think we can achieve this strategy. It's our first jump of putting guidance out there, which we haven't done in the past. We'll continue to fine-tune that as we move along. Internally, we do think it's a very achievable goal for 2030.
We talk about low double digits as far as organic growth, that's why we flat lined at 10%, right? In the acquisition play, we just know the targets we're already talking to and the ones that are out there. We're getting so much income from, like Gerard said, some of these smaller distributors that are going through some tougher growth stages that need more vendors, and they see the combination with Climb, that we can do that and not selling out. If I look at it, if you're Ingram, you're $60 billion, what is a $30 million distributor going to do for you? It's going to do nothing unless it's strategic. Somebody like a $30 million-$60 million distributor makes a lot of sense for us.
We see the targets, and we still see the growth of the product mix of our vendor portfolio. Emerging vendors should be growing at that rate. If you look at some of our bigger vendors, they're not going to grow. The bigger you are, the harder it is to double. I look at Fortinet, and Fortinet, as a company, is growing what? At 14%-16% on that side. We have a long way to go with them in that relationship. The other thing is that we don't talk about, and vendors don't like to hear this because they never want to say it's share shift, right?
Once we get to a more efficient model, and we think we're halfway there, we get more efficient than our competitors, we'll get more share shift of existing business, it's the easiest, less expensive route to market to pick up business is just being better than everybody else, not going out to net new.
Do you think the challenge will be the organic part or the acquisition part for your target?
Good question. I haven't thought about that. I would say The inorganic, the acquisition will be the tougher piece because of the timing, how long it takes. Some of them we think we can wrap in very quickly. Other ones, just going to take more time. The larger they get, they'll just take. There's a couple of big ones out there could solve my $400 million in one fell swoop.
Thank you.
Thanks, guys. Appreciate the detail here. Matt, just one question for you, then I know I have a follow-up. You were talking about the top 15 vendors. I just want to make sure I understand it. You said the top 15 vendors are growing above the 10%-
That's correct
You were saying there, that's gross billings right now, correct?
Gross billings, yeah.
Okay, great. Appreciate that. Carlos, maybe a little bit of color on the one slide you were talking about in terms of the, I think it was trailing 12-month increase of $335 million in billings. Maybe talk a little bit more about what was the drivers of that at those four, I think, VARs that you had listed up there. Was it share shift? Is it taking up new vendors? What was the driver of that significant growth there?
Yeah. No, that's a good one. It was a mix of both of those, right? One was our relationships with our existing vendors and being able to go out to bid and bid on the business with the likes like Optiv, CDW, World Wide Technology, and share shift that business over to us. That really came from twofold: Our relationship with both that reseller partner, getting deep, building the emerging vendors with them, helping them drive net new business, which is earning us a shot at the rest of the business. Two, our relationships at our vendor levels, right? We've earned the trust that we can support their business. In a lot of these wins that we've had, our vendors have backed us as the distribution of choice and primary distributor for their lines at these larger partners.
Now we're in the lookout for bids that are coming up in the next six, eight months.
Okay. If I could just clarify on that. I don't know the trend here is obviously you're gaining share here, when you gain that and you see the share shift, how unusual is it sometimes you actually will give back share if it's because of the pricing or whatever deal? Once you get it, is it pretty sticky and easier to keep it?
We've been able to be sticky and kept the shift that we've had on the bids that we've done in the last two-plus years that I've done on. Very rarely would we lose a vendor line on those bids. We're very sticky with the vendors that we have, and that's because we bring that additional value add. We're not just shifting the business. Yes, we're shifting the business over and gaining that, but we're helping our partners drive net new business. We're bringing our co-op funds and our funding from our vendors to their business to go out there and drive DRs, new logos, go-to-market strategy with them, and we're building the mind share higher with our vendors than they were getting from other disties. That's keeping them loyal to us as we move forward.
Gerard, you had mentioned the value add that Climb brought to you as a small acquisition. Dale, you're talking about a couple of really large acquisitions out there. What's the value add that Climb would bring to a $500 million acquisition?
One of the targets I'm looking at, Right now, they are very concentrated with four or five vendors, and that's all they do. We would bring them a bigger line card. Remember, they're not U.S.-based. Even though they have some tier 1 vendors that are out there, they're looking at more vendors to do that. They don't have a vendor recruit team, typically. The ones that do, and I'll give Exclusive Networks credit, they're very big in Europe. They brought more of a vendor recruit team that lived in the U.S. just to be in the U.S., do some transactions, and just get to know the lay of the land and take those vendors to Europe. Back to my Australia comment, there was a really great target there. Got to know the family very well.
They were going to move on, they had to spend two, three months a year just in the U.S. to get the relationships to say, "Hey, I want to sign you in Australia." We're finding that with our vendors, if we have in region, our vendors are very quick to at least have the discussion to bring them on in that specific territory. Here's one thing that's kind of mentioned here. Matt mentioned marketplace, and we talk about platformizing and all the other things. That is the wave or a big percentage of our business that everybody's talking about. You have the hyperscales that we thought were going to crush all of our businesses. That never happened because they want to sell compute and storage and workloads. That's what they want to do. They don't want to sell software. They make no percentage on that.
The goal for us is to continue to platformize for MSPs, and a lot of them don't have the resources to actually do that in-house. They're either going to get passed by a competitor or have a lot more margin or competition from a bigger player. We didn't talk about some of the distributors like ALSO and Infinigate. There's some big ones out there that are starting to chew up and take on acquiring companies in Europe.
Just back to that point on the vendor concentration, too. Using that one, the $400 million or $500 million one that has four or five vendor concentrations. Think back to our largest acquisition as well, which was Douglas Stewart. They had a heavy vendor concentration, but that also drove the lowest multiple that we've paid to date. That will also drive the pricing on the ultimate transaction, too.
All right. That's helpful. Relative to just using that example, $400 million or $500 million, four or five vendors. You have 100 vendors. Let's say the crossover is five, so we have 95 remaining. Is that relevant to those acquisitions that we could then see significant organic growth from the 95 vendors that you bring them in the ensuing time periods? Is this. Is this concept relevant?
It is. It's something that goes through, because we didn't put the growth factors in the acquired targets because of the timing when we would acquire the targets and then putting it in and pushing it out to 2030. If you look at the targets we're looking to acquire, they're already in the double digits, and sometimes high double digits, gross profit margin. If we bring products over there, we are assuming that they're going to get a higher margin because there's just less margin pressure, right? The Greeks do not have that much margin pressure in-region. Why is a company going to go into a smaller region? For us, it's very significant. Number one, it bolsters our Microsoft number. Number two, it bolsters our vision, our value at Microsoft, that we're handling an underserved region that they're trying to actually invest in.
Yeah, that is the play and some of the thought processes that go into when we're looking at targets. If they're hardware, I'm sorry, if they're mostly hardware, it's not a target for us, right? It's just not. There's a distributor called Tim. They do a lot of hardware. It's not a fit for us. We want software. We're 90% there. Even though we have some components with Fortinet and Sophos that are hardware components, we're still a software. Recurring revenue. As Matt Whitton said, we're moving much more into a monthly, and you'll see more and more vendors, when they have the technical capability inside their company, move to a monthly subscription. We want to make sure we can do that, and it's going to have to be a platform and a technology play.
Thanks for taking my question.
You've asked all your questions at lunch.
Given that you're targeting a higher exposure in Europe, looking at the long-term guide here, the gross margin numbers, you've kept it basically flat. What are the potential offsets?
From the acquisition strategy?
European margins seem to be higher, and if that becomes a higher percentage of mix.
Yeah. Our organic growth, we've just left flat that the geographic mix would remain the same between North America and EMEA.
Mm-hmm. Is that what you were looking for, or?
We can take it offline.
I'm just thinking of all the margin pressures. Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anything else? Go ahead.
Back to acquisitions. You talked about what you're looking for, is it competitive or are there other things that you bump into when you go into a region? Particularly as you go increasingly into Europe and beyond, what are you finding in terms of the challenges with France and employment regulations and other factors?
That's a concern, right? We've had to deal with that in our-- Because Amsterdam is a tough one. We have a small office there, we've had to deal with the employee concerns because there's different contracts. We have to be on top of it. When the contract is up, are you giving a year contract? I think we give 90-day contracts. We start in the U.K. that way. The Greeks are the first non-primary English-speaking company we've acquired, right? We've gone through that, it went pretty smooth because they decided in the transaction to go through U.K. law, pretty easy. Of course, if it's French or German, it probably won't be that way. We take all those into consideration, right? How they go to market. What is their turnover rate? What have they done in the last four years with employees?
If they lose them, what's the cost factor? We're still extremely small in the small of the targets we're looking at, the impact will be minimal at that. It is a consideration, for sure.
Do you see competitors when you're bidding or-
Yeah.
Talking to them and whether they sell or not, or?
I can't verify it 100%. I know we weren't the top bidder of the Greeks. We acquired them because of relationships and because where their team wanted to go. Right? Stamatis is with us today. He was not a majority ownership in the company, he had a lot of say to the owners that he was with and said, "Hey, this is a much better fit for me and my team. They're going to take a little discount to allow us to acquire them." We were competing with PE firms, at least one other distributor. We know we're right now in competition with another distributor for a target. Yeah, it's a combination of those two. Sometimes there's just some roll-ups that are happening underneath the radar on the size. There's a lot of factors, right?
How much is this going to cost us? What is a German law firm versus one in the U.K.? Now we have a couple choices. Venable are a law firm. They've been great hooking us up with targets that they've worked with in the past. We do some vetting there. Just one second, Bill. Go ahead.
You touched on return on invested capital, and there's a chart there floating around mid-teens, 20%. How does that look like for organic growth versus inorganic growth? Also, is there an internal hurdle? Like, I know it used to be 12.5%, 13% a long time back, but still that the case? What does it look like on both sides of the business, and is it an internal hurdle for both sides?
No internal hurdle on both sides. That chart was the consolidated return on invested capital of the company. That ebbs and flows. We've talked about it in the past. We have large, fast transactions in a given quarter or some other one-time drivers in a given quarter. It can ebb and flow based on those results.
Would you say, "Okay, we want to make at least 15%," or something like that? How do you think about it?
We more track it from the income statement standpoint, because we integrate those business lines right away into our operations. It's difficult to track that balance sheet and income statement specifically to the acquired entity. If it's a vendor line or whatever internal metric that we can peg it to, that's how we're monitoring the success of the acquisition.
Yeah. When we acquire, we try to platform into our systems as quickly as possible, but if there's earn-out, we have to keep separate numbers all the way through to make sure that the targets are realistic and that we both agree, both the target and the acquirer, that we can track for the earn-out. We've paid earn-outs through half of our acquisitions, something like that.
The multiples, did you say 4x-8x? I think it used to be higher, like 8x-10x just a few years ago.
For us being acquired?
Yeah, for acquisitions.
The highest we acquired was the Greeks, right? That was about 8.5x of EBITDA. That's the highest acquisition that we made. DSS was about 4.5.
Okay, thanks.
Our multiple, as you've seen, between seven and 12, depending on your math and taking cash out and things like that.
Phil, did you have a follow-up?
I did. Vishal, there's a fair amount of conversation about the efficiencies that you all are bringing, and that today there's approximately five quotes for one order. Is there anything about the technology advancements that's going to decrease the number of quotes per order, or in any other way be revenue enhancing?
Absolutely. I think Matt Whitton touched in his presentation about marketplace. We right now do classic quote to cash because our resellers doesn't have a platform where they can find out what they want to buy and how much it costs. That's why they have to go through the quoting process. Now, everything will not move because there is still big amount of stuff will still go through the conventional quoting process. Anything like MSP monthly billing, those kind of stuff, they don't have to go to quote. If I have a platform, our resellers can log in. They can see what they have ordered, what are the price, what are the different terms and conditions. They can just call out from there. It will reduce some quoting processes. The other piece on the same line is, you talked about revenue generation.
From MSP perspective, believe we might be leaving opportunities right on the table because we don't have a good platform where our MSP can come and access those vendors. Putting that platform will allow more MSP vendors to get onboarded, the resellers or the MSP providers will have more options to purchase.
You want to say the first one? Yeah.
I think in a lot of instances, we do provide one quote because the customer knows exactly what they want. When you have a self-servicing customer, whether it's marketplace or whether it's anything else, they can absolutely go to you, get their one quote. The issue that we run into is at the vendor level. As long as there's vendor reps, they don't know the reseller as much, they don't know the end customer as much. They'll throw out a bunch of different things on the wall to see what's going to stick. Right. "I'm going to offer my product for a year. I'm going to offer my product with EDR for a year. Then I'm going to offer you for three years.
I might offer it to you for five years." Once you decide that you might be interested in one of those, then we'll start to get to a negotiation factor or phase, and we'll start negotiating. There'll be a new quote with special pricing. Right. That's generally where we see the edifications of quotes and how we get lost in eight, 10 or 12 quotes. There are a lot of quotes that is just one quote. Those won't change. If we can teach our resellers to be better stewards of our time, it would work. I'm not sure that that'll ever happen.
Damien? Yeah, the team members in the back that have been in that process of quoting, you know that they get their inbox, right? It's coming through email most of the time. It is first in, first out, instead of maybe an order or a deal that you know is going to be an order that's 15 buried. This is one of the things for efficiency. We're not necessarily saying we're going to cut down the quote, how many times we do a quote, but the speed of we can produce that quote. If we can do scraping off of emails that are coming in to produce a quote for the rep already, then verify it, look at the pricing, let's move on, we're going to do that.
If we can dynamically look and say, "Hey, what's the propensity of this deal to go versus another deal?" We put some logic behind it, then the teams would see those first in their inboxes, and it'll automatically shift. Probably giving away the store, but this is some of the things we're thinking about to make this much more efficient. We have some really good systems in with our vendors that have been legacy vendors with us, that when the quotes are done, they get loaded into our system automatically. This is one of the things that we talk about a lot, and that is 80%-90% is our recurring revenue, right.
It's reoccurring, if I say it right, that we're going to get a chance at it every year as long as that vendor's still performing, and unless the customer's still happy with that. Really a lot of that is, "Hey, how can we do 30% growth on top of that to get into our 110% year-over-year?" Once we have them, and I think more of the vendors are coming to these incumbency programs. If you're the incumbent, it's tough to switch you to another distributor, another reseller. Once we have them, we have them for a long time, as long as that vendor performs. Let's go to two.
I would love to get your insight on what you're seeing in terms of this death of software with AI talk that's going on, that's been going on. Would love to hear about what you're seeing, any impact maybe with your folks. Yeah.
My snide remark is it's such Q1. That's such Q1 back then.
We're still there.
I do think, I might have said it earlier, that the enterprise will pace the AI revolution, if you like. I'm not sure enterprise customers All the CEOs have a remit for an AI strategy at the moment. No different to 12, 15 years ago when they had a remit for cloud strategy. They didn't really know what they were trying to achieve. It's going to take some time for, I think, enterprise customers to really adopt a full AI strategy. They're learning along the way. They're trying to figure out what they're trying to achieve with their data. Ultimately, that's what it is. They want to use their data to achieve a more efficient, more effective business. That's effectively what they're trying to achieve. It's going to take time. We haven't really seen a mass difference.
Even two or three of our products, we sell a couple of hundred million dollars. They are an AI company. The reality is they're selling storage. If you look at the use cases, when you're going out to these big hedge funds as an example, they're selling storage, it's not true AI. A lot of it is masked around automation as well. Is it automation? Is it AI? What is it? It's certainly not affecting the EMEA business. Charles, I don't know if you want to talk about
I think Matt was going to.
I was just going to touch on, we're seeing AI is helping our vendors release more product more quickly, right? That is helping them add more value in what's going out there. AI is also an opportunity for us. How enterprises are going to control that spend, how they're going to make sure it's secure. We're not seeing it replace security products, business productivity tools, those things that are embedded into organizations. I think enterprises are going to spend a whole load of money on AI. I don't see it replacing those core tools that are already there in place at the moment, certainly in the short term. When we're looking at, are you going to build your own CRM, or are you just going to buy one from Salesforce or something? It's already there. It's been tested. It works.
You get user adoption, all of these different things as we move forward. I see it as a huge opportunity for Climb as we go forward, but certainly in the short term, there's no immediate impact on our renewals or our business as it's going forward.
Yeah, well said. We were at the Ivanti LIVE! here last week, they talked about that specific question, one of the things they talked about. I agree with that. Looking at a lot of vendors, I treat vendors with a ton of suspicion that think they're going to have a revolution with AI-driven products. Most of what I see in product offerings are they're something like a 10%-15% change in their product's ROI, not an 85% change in their product's ROI. I think those guys, when I see companies that offer a modification with AI-driven offerings versus a revolution with AI-driven offerings, that's what I see most often in the products that I evaluate in our marketplace. From a brand standpoint, I see more modifications to existing products than I see some kind of revolution in the marketplace with AI products.
Yeah. I'll just add a little bit to that as well. We're actually seeing some opportunity creation as well with the proliferation of AI, particularly in our cybersecurity portfolios. With the proliferation of AI, you need to secure AI now within the enterprise. Whether that's from a data point of view or an identity point of view. Our vendors that serve those elements of the market are seeing significant pipeline generation. I actually see the explosion of AI as a significant demand gen opportunity for our channel.
Bill.
Yeah. Brian, you may have just hit on this, but with AI also benefiting the bad actors, the question now is, does that accelerate the adoption of the security software simply because the bad actors now can move more quickly and more aggressively?
My view is it 100% accelerates it. I think the need for the enterprise to stay ahead of the bad actors means the refresh cycles have been dramatically pulled forward. Now, whereas we might have been looking at a three- or a five-year refresh cycle for some technologies, that could now be down to six months or 12 months, and who knows how fast that's going to have to be. I totally agree with you. I would see the bad actors driving a lot more demand through our channel because we need to accelerate, pull forward that spend.
There is some interesting development just from the technology perspective. As AI adoption is increasing, companies are now buying more and more defect simulation solutions. Earlier, it was a little bit an optional thing for a lot of companies. Now they know because of the AI, they can get attacked, so they are now buying more software. Same with the SASE solution. That's another area on the cybersecurity where small or medium businesses, they generally do not buy a SASE solution. Most of those guys started buying those solution because they know that if they don't have, some AI player will come back and attack them and get the data from them. AI adoption is generating way more demand on the cybersecurity side right now, and potentially more newer companies are going to come.
Anything else? Any more questions? Thank you. Thank you for showing up today. I know it's right in the middle of the day, but I appreciate you guys. Reach out, our IR firm, Sean Mansouri and Aaron D'Souza. Thank you guys.