Thank you for being here today, Compass Diversified's 2025 Investor Day. We're really excited to have you here in person, and I know there's a lot of people on the webcast, so I wanted to say welcome. I've got to get this out of the way, so please bear with me. This presentation does not constitute an offer or invitation for the sale or purchase of securities and has been prepared solely for informational purposes. This presentation contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements may be made a part of this presentation or by reference to other documents we file with the SEC. Some of the forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking words.
Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as believe, expect, anticipate, plan, may, intend, target, estimate, outlook, continue, prospects, or potential by future conditional verbs such as will, would, should, could, or may, or by variations of such words or by similar expressions. Certain statements regarding the following, particularly, are forward-looking in nature: future financial performance, market forecasts or projections, projected capital expenditures, and our business and acquisition strategy. All forward-looking statements are based on our management's beliefs, assumptions, and expectations of our future economic performance, taking into account the information currently available to it. These statements are not statements of historical fact.
Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, some of which are not currently known to us and may change over time, that may cause our actual results, performance, or financial condition to be materially different from the expectations of future results, performance, or financial position. In addition to factors previously disclosed in CODI's reports filed with the SEC, the following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements: changes in the economy, financial markets, and political environment; risks associated with possible disruption in CODI's operations or the economy generally. I promise that's the most boring part of today, so thank you for letting me get through that. So, a quick flash of the agenda. We're going to have Elias Sabo, the CEO, come up after me to walk through a Q4 update and strategy overview.
Patrick Maciariello, COO, is then going to talk about the M&A market and performance of our verticals. Stephen Keller, CFO, is going to talk about the financial outlook. And then we're going to pass it to you, the audience, for a 15-ish minutes Q&A session. We're going to bring it back up to Elias. He's going to be hosting a panel with the panelists that you see on the screen. We're really super excited about that. That's going to be roughly an hour. And then after that, we can exit through the back doors for lunch and the CODI Corner. You probably saw a lot of the brands that have done a great job bringing product here, and we're really super excited. I also understand there's a little surprise with 5.11 and one of their cool new blazers. So if you're interested there, I think we can get you one.
So really want to kick this off now with a video that is going to get us started. But thank you for being here.
We are fueled by passion because exceptional outcomes demand total commitment, guided by integrity because trust is the foundation of every success, driven by collaboration because we know the best team wins, accountable at every step because owning every action means delivering on our commitments, grounded in humility because true leadership starts with listening and learning. We do things differently. Our bespoke approach to value creation is more than just words. It's a strategy to drive outsized growth together. We identify the disruptors driven by innovation because to lead, we must define what comes next. With our permanent capital, we provide active support, superior execution, and a focus on the long term. At Compass Diversified, we don't just invest in companies. We empower success. We go all in to achieve exceptional outcomes for all.
Welcome, everyone. Before we get started, introduce Stephen Keller, CFO, Compass Diversified, Pat Maciariello, COO, Compass Diversified, and I'm Elias Sabo, CEO. So as Cody mentioned, we're here in January, and I'm sure on everybody's mind is, how did we do in the fourth quarter? So without further ado, we'll get to that so that you're not distracted going through the presentation. I know if I was sitting in your seat, I probably would be. So we had a remarkable 2024, and Q4 was a remarkable finish to a remarkable year. We expect to deliver organic mid-teens rates of EBITDA growth. One thing to note here is that our Q4 will include roughly a $12 million write-down for PFAS, which we've been talking about for a couple of quarters. The numbers we talk about today are exclusive of that.
In the fourth quarter, we also had a number of additional highlights. We sold Ergobaby. We've been talking about the evolution of the portfolio and moving more towards companies with growing industries and innovative and disruptive technologies. Ergo, we felt was a good sale candidate to align our portfolio more with that strategy. We achieved about $100 million of enterprise value that came onto the balance sheet to provide more capacity for us to execute our strategic plan in the coming year. In addition to that, with respect to capital, we raised additional capital in the form of Term A loans. We funded $200 million of a $300 million Term A loan. The other $100 million is on a delayed draw. And the reason that is important, it was cheap. It's the same cost as the Term A loan that we already have in effect.
It gives us flexibility to be able to take down another $100 million as we need it and not have a negative arbitrage, and it provides the capital that we need to fund our business plan in 2025, both with respect to our subsidiaries and their capital needs, as well as our M&A activities. The most important thing in my mind on this page is the fourth bullet point, and it goes to our cost of capital. We were able to raise $90 million of preferred capital across our three tranches, A, B, and C, in the fourth quarter, about $115 million for the year. This is important for a couple of reasons. First, clearly, it brings equity capital onto the balance sheet. It deleverages our balance sheet. Stephen will talk about what our expected leverage is at the end of the year.
On top of that, it does it clearly in a non-dilutive manner. But the most important thing, and we've talked about this now for years with everybody, is one of our competitive advantages is our financing structure and our Weighted Average Cost of Capital. This demonstrably brings down our cost of capital as we have more preferred. And so having this as a new viable source of capital hits on multiple levels, but importantly, on the strategic goal of continuing to lower our WACC and creating a competitive advantage around that. Last point is we bought a little over 400,000 shares back of common stock. I will be honest, this isn't our preference. We believe that the best use of our capital is to fund our strategic plan and the growth of the Return on Invested Capital we can get by buying these innovative and disruptive businesses.
That being said, when our stock trades at such a massive discount to what we believe intrinsic value to be, the best opportunity for us to create value for you is in repurchasing our shares. So we did that in the fourth quarter, about $23 a share average repurchase price. Real quickly, where we stand today, we own nine subsidiaries, six in the consumer segment, three in our industrial tech segment. Consumer represents about 72% of EBITDA on a trailing basis, growing dramatically faster than our industrial, so you could anticipate that mix even moving more towards consumer. We've done almost $10 billion worth of M&A transactions over the 19 years of being public. Today, we have $2.2 billion of revenue. These numbers are all trailing as of September.
In another couple of weeks, a few weeks, we'll have year-end numbers that we'll be able to update, and there'll be growth across this: $500 million of EBITDA, 22.5% Subsidiary Adjusted EBITDA margins. We think that's important because it does financially indicate the strength of our competitive positioning of our subsidiary companies. Margins typically align with how competitively differentiated you are. And we did about $161 million of LTM earnings through September, which is about $2.14 a share. So for everybody in this room, when you hear CODI, I think you think of, "That's a ticker symbol of Compass Diversified Holdings." It's there on the New York Stock Exchange. We say, "Buy shares of CODI." Hopefully, you don't say, "Sell shares of CODI," but maybe that sometimes happens. But for us, it's much more than a ticker symbol.
CODI for us shapes the way that we think about operating our business every day that we come in. The acronym for us is not Compass Diversified Holdings. It's creating a culture of disruption and innovation. This doesn't just start with kind of Compass at the holding company and how our people think, but it goes through our entire organization. You're going to hear from three of our CEOs today. They'll talk about the importance of innovation, about how we want to challenge the status quo at all times so that we can do things differently. How do we create more efficiency? How do we create a bigger competitive advantage? That doesn't just happen at CODI. It happens at CODI as well. We'll walk through how we are different than others that participate in this industry and why we think it's so valuable.
It starts by the fact that we have a purpose and that we actually have values. And that isn't something that is commonplace in the private equity industry. You guys all read about what happens in private equity and some of the societal issues, bankruptcies, downsizing, leaving people behind. It really isn't what should happen with these middle-market companies. Private equity existed and exists as a valuable function in the economy today. It takes companies from entrepreneurial, typically non-professionalized businesses, and it brings them to a point where they can access capital on their own as a public company, as part of a public company where they can operate. And so it's an essential service. But private equity is done dramatically different than how it should be, in our opinion, today. And part of that starts with what is the ethos of the firms and how are they guided.
And for us, it's all in our values. And you might say, "Well, how does that create value for us?" And what we're going to do today is walk through where these values and how our purpose turns into us being accountable, one of our core values, and the level of return that we can give. And at CODI, we believe we have created the model that both can deliver extraordinary returns and do it in a socially responsible manner. And so, as you all know, we're unique. We are, unfortunately, only one of one in the public markets. We would love for more to follow us because we think this is the right way to participate in this asset class. But we have been redefining the industry. And part of the hallmarks of that are we give complete transparency to all of you.
In an industry that has been opaque and probably should be opaque because of some of the actions of the industry, we feel that this is the model that is right. And part of that is we are completely transparent with everything that we do. You see all of our companies. You see all of our financials. We talk to you every quarter and at meetings like this about our strategy, about how our companies are performing. And we think that holds a better level of accountability to our firms. So, as I said, we are not private equity. We think of ourselves as the next generation of private equity, Private Equity 2.0, if you will. And so it starts because we are a purpose-driven organization. We have values.
You might say, "Well, that sounds soft, and that sounds fluffy, and that's never turned into a dollar of shareholder return for me." Maybe you feel good at night when you go home. But how does that help us do what we do? I want to give you a quick example. The latest acquisition we did was the Honey Pot Company, started by an extraordinary woman, Bea Dixon. Bea, at one point, was homeless, and she had a personal health issue. And that health issue spawned the creation of the Honey Pot because doctors couldn't solve her problem. But she was able to do it, and she started a company using only good ingredients: plant-based, flower-based. And by the way, her problem was solved, something that antibiotics and the current medical system could not. Now, for Bea Dixon, money doesn't drive her. She has a purpose.
Her purpose in life is, "How do I educate people on feminine hygiene? How do I take what is a taboo subject in society today and take it out of the shadows and bring it into the open?" Because that's the only way you're going to improve feminine health. That is her purpose. She wants to align with a company that has purpose as well, and so we are able to buy a company. Frankly, we weren't the highest price. There were other bidders and strategics that were willing to pay significantly more, but her goal was to partner with a company that had purpose like Compass, and now we have this extraordinary opportunity because we are a values-driven organization, and that's what she wanted to align to.
I could go through all of the companies that we have in our portfolio, especially the ones of the last five years, and every one of them are going to have stories like that. And today, when we hear from Troy and Anne and Terry, they're going to tell you the value of purpose-driven organizations and how they recruit better management talent and how a group, when you're driven by a purpose, one plus one doesn't equal two. It is the definition of synergy where one plus one equals three. We have a long-term focus because our capital base supports it. Would anyone like to guess what the average hold period is in private equity right now? I'll say that rhetorically because you don't have microphones. It's 3.1 years. What can you really do in 3.1 years to change the direction of a company? The answer is nothing.
What you can do is you can cut costs. You can improve margins. You can put a lot of debt on the company, and you can get the financial arbitrage that comes along with it. But you leave a weakened company behind. And I can give numerous examples of where this is happening throughout the entire private equity world. I look at Leonard Green. They invest in healthcare systems. One of the investments they made, every one of their hospitals over the course of their ownership migrated into the lowest 15% of hospitals in the United States. They did it because they cut 20% of the cost out. Now, these are in small markets.
Jim, if you have a relative in Arkansas and they have to go to the hospital and no longer can get the service for their kid and their kid has a chronic condition that starts, I mean, come on, at some point, we got to look and say, "Is it worth some Leonard Green partner becoming worth another $100 million while we're doing this to society?" Private equity has become a blight to society, and it's earned the reputation, and it's earned it because it is short-term focused, and it is looking to create margin at the expense of a lot of families who struggle to put food on the table and a roof over their head, and there is a better model under which you can do this and both align societal goals to creating return. Our business is completely different.
We match the duration of opportunity to the duration of our capital because our capital is unlimited. And we say one very simple thing internally at Compass: short timelines is the enemy of innovation. And so almost by definition, if you have the right mindset, a permanent timeline, an unlimited timeline can foster innovation. And so Compass has a different approach. You've heard us say Honey Pot might not grow in EBITDA in the fourth quarter despite the fact that we're going to have really strong revenue growth. Same with PrimaLoft. Why? Because we're investing in these companies. We're investing in innovation. We're investing in marketing. We are creating strategies that are putting more at the point of attack to grow our businesses because our hold period allows us to be able to do that.
There's one point on this page that I'm most passionate about, and it is our financing structure. And if there's one thing you take away from today, it's how we operate differently because of the way we finance our company. You all are aware how we finance our businesses at the holding company. Almost every one of our peers finances subsidiary by subsidiary, or as they would call portfolio companies. So why is that a big difference? We have a huge disincentive to bankrupt a company. When a company is going bad, we own all the losses. So guess what? That means Pat and Stephen and me and everybody on our team becomes even more accountable to our companies. On your behalf, we're going to work that company out and do everything we can to be able to get it back on the right path.
We're not going to turn our back. We're not going to let the company go bankrupt. Who here remembers Toys "R" Us? Probably every one of us. We all walked through one when we were kids. Great family bonding time. Well, KKR bought it. KKR took an enormous amount of dividends out of it so that they got all their capital out. 30,000 people now, post-upleveraging that business, are unemployed. Communities are hurt. Businesses that rely on those people are hurt, and that's because their financing structure encourages the behavior. That was one of eight investments in KKR's fund. If the other six go great, one goes bankrupt, and one is, guess what? They all made hundreds of millions of dollars. But what happened to the person that no longer can put food on their table?
This is wrong, and it's why private equity is not considered a good part of the American economy today. Our business requires us to act in a responsible manner. And so for Compass, you could say, "Okay, well, all those things sound good, but does it yield the return that we need?" Because private equity is at least able to give an enhanced return to what public equity is able to give. And the answer is yes. And you can go to our financial slide, which goes through, it's on our website, and it goes through all the investments we've ever made. And what we do is we put up, "Here's the capital we put in." So everything is on an unleveraged basis.
On an unleveraged pooled basis, over 19 years, having gone through the great financial crisis and the pandemic, we have been able to generate 19% unleveraged rates of return. I would put that up against any private equity fund. Could they have a fund that generated a 40 IRR? By the way, that's leveraged. Yeah, probably. But you know what they'll do? They'll put a little footnote next to the 2009 fund and say, "Well, that returned zero because we went through the great financial crisis and everybody returned zero." That's not Compass. Compass has to deliver through these cycles. And we're able to do it and deliver incredible results to you because of the way that our model is set up and the advantages that we're able to bring to bear. So the evolution of CODI and where we started came public in 2006.
What I would leave everyone with is our cost of capital was extraordinary. So our first financing partner, Pat Maciariello, was Ableco, a division of Cerberus. Now, if any of you know Greek mythology, Cerberus is the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell. I think the dog would probably be upset with them using their name. To say that our capital costs were high is an understatement. Essentially, lenders that deal in this level want to suck all the economic value up and let very little anywhere to anybody else in the capital structure. So how did it shape our behavior? We had to buy pretty boring non-growth companies that had really good cash flow because those cash flow needs were to service this extraordinarily high cost of debt.
And frankly, if you're going to disrupt an industry and you're going to do something different, a lot of times it's very hard to get people to understand the model and to back you with the capital that's necessary. It's where we stood. So we bought great businesses that couldn't grow: Advanced Circuits. It's a great business. 40% EBITDA margins, almost no CapEx, tax assets. It provided enough cash flow to service this expensive debt and the other needs that we had. And so what did we do? We paid a very high dividend rate, and that was the source of most of your return. In 2018, in May, I took over as CEO. Pat became our COO. And as a leadership team, we decided we were going to change.
The first thing that we needed to do in order to enable a change of how we were our strategy and what we would own is lowering our capital costs. We entered the bond market. We did a $400 million, 8% bond. Throughout this period, we were able to refinance that. We have a billion three now all bonds, a billion at 5.25%, $300 million at 5%, extended duration. We brought preferred stock into our balance sheet, three tranches, $100 million for two of them, $115 million for the third. You've heard we're adding to that now. Those different securities fundamentally changed our cost of capital, and it lowered it enough so that we could go through the very difficult process of turning a portfolio over from a low-growth, pretty good cash flow business to a high-growth, well-protected, innovative business. Now, what does that cost?
Because we are selling lower multiple businesses and we're reinvesting those in higher multiple businesses, there is a drag to our earnings stream. Our earnings have grown over this period, not to the level we would have liked. That's because we had to suffer the increase in cost that is required to own these kinds of companies. Our balance sheet, it suffered too. You saw our leverage move outside of our leverage ranges we did this. We went to almost four times over the course of this year before selling Ergobaby. And as I said, Stephen will talk about where we are, which we feel much better about. But those are the consequences of changing a portfolio from a slow-growth, kind of stodgy old portfolio to a new, fast, competitively positioned business that will achieve much higher multiples upon exit. And so where do we stand today?
Look, we've gotten through this now. Over 90% of our portfolio today is what we want to own. It is the right mix of high-growth, innovative, and disruptive businesses with free cash flow that allows us to support all of the payments that we need. What were the results in 2024? We expect our EBITDA to be mid-teens growth, and so we're seeing this now work its way in. We no longer have the drag that we had before from the transition. Now we are at a point where we have our portfolio. The results are starting to drive great returns, and those great returns are making its way into EPS. Our cost of capital is industry-leading, and it's enabling us to continue to buy the companies that we and you as our partners want us to own.
That is what 2024 started and what 2025 and beyond is going to be represented by. So as you think about the advantage for our businesses and we think about really three different constituents, we have our companies, we have our communities that we operate in, and we have our stakeholders. And for our businesses, our advantages stem around our permanent capital. And that permanent capital allows our companies to be able to invest in innovation, to invest in growing their market share through marketing and through sales investments. One of the areas that we are most excited about this year is the establishment of our centers of excellence.
And so one of the downfalls, and I'll go to a specific center that we're starting, of owning these smaller companies, and no offense, I know you guys think the companies aren't small, but relative to this crowd, one of the problems with a smaller company is it's just hard to invest in some of the functions. Microsoft can invest in AI. You probably all saw yesterday they're going to reduce 5% of their workforce, mostly in coding. Well, that's an AI-generated return on investment that they're getting right now. They're a $3 trillion company. They have resources coming out of resources to be able to do this. And with $30 million of EBITDA, it doesn't have the resources to think about some of these things, or maybe kind of SOX compliance and how that impacts the quality of earnings.
So for Compass, we believe we sit in a very unique position where we can deliver something totally unique. And that is you have the ability as an operator to have complete autonomy. Run like you're an entrepreneur building your business. Move with speed on new products. Continue to take market share. Hire great people. Do it without all the corporate bureaucracy. But you guys pay us a management fee. And that management fee should be used in order to support overall goals, not just us going out and looking for new companies, but overall improvement goals for our companies. And so we have an ESG center of excellence. Our newest center of excellence is around business automation and AI. None of our companies are large enough to think about AI and how AI will fundamentally impact their industries. So we need to build that at the holding company.
At the holding company, our teams go in. They establish what the pillars and the foundation of how they will operate. They go in with our CEOs, and they help them think about areas that are emerging opportunities or emerging threats to their business and where we can get ahead of that. It is beyond the Chief Technology Officer of any one of our companies to be able to do this, not because they don't have the skill set, but because they don't have the time available. Our resources are too constrained, and we're running too hard.
And so you will hear us talk about our centers of excellence and how that is impacting whether it be on financial compliance and better quality financials so that we get a better exit multiple, whether that be on our ESG principles so that we are a better corporate citizen throughout our entire company, whether that is on business automation, artificial intelligence so that we are leading in technology and innovating in that area. It is where Compass is going, and you'll hear us talk about that as a huge value-added service for all of our businesses going forward. With our communities, it's simple. We operate with purpose and with values. And we believe it's important to support social enterprises and to preach and live what we say we are doing. Our workforce is made up of 60% women now at Compass Group Management, the holding company.
We didn't do that because we have some DEI mandate. We did that because these are the best quality individuals, and we believe and find that diversity within our workforce yields a better result because diversity in thought creates much better outcomes than if it's just a singular group of people thinking about something. And for our shareholders, you guys get access to companies that you wouldn't be able to get. These companies are too small to access. But man, they're great companies. Think of a Lugano. The company went from $30 million of EBITDA a couple of years ago to $180-ish million and probably on its way to, with 50% growth that it's been experiencing, something with a two-handle here in four years. That's extraordinary. These companies don't become available to public investors. They are available to private equity investors.
So our unique structure gives you access to that. Our value creation model is different. We talked about that. And what we can deliver for you is a business that does not have long-term earnings decay. Every company that you'll invest in will have in their core business long-term earnings decay. It just has to happen because no company can get above 100% market share. And eventually, you'll get there, and you'll have to grow at the market. So while you're getting there, you're going to grow faster, and then you're going to start growing slower. Unless you divest that business, there will be an earnings decay in your business. We divest our companies 100% of the time.
And as a result of that, we can offset earnings decay because we take that money and we recycle it back into a new, younger opportunity that can drive the same type of returns. And ultimately, it's the track record of returns that we've generated. You can go look at our returns. It doesn't always manifest in our share price. And that's why with our return to capital in the fourth quarter, we started buying back stock. And so we will intelligently think about how to return capital because a gap between intrinsic value and the trading price doesn't do you any good. It doesn't do us any good. And so that is a problem we need to solve.
But if you look at the underlying return on invested assets, getting a 19% unleveraged gross rate of return under which we can put our capital stack drives a differentiated return that is not available publicly in the market. So last point, I know we've had a lot of questions on this before I turn it over, is today we filed an 8-K, might have been last night, with an amendment to our Management Services Agreement. I want to be clear. This is a benefit to the shareholders at the expense of the manager. We have dropped our management fee by 75 basis points going forward. Right now, we get paid 2%. We have $3.8 billion of Adjusted Net Assets. Think of that as our AUM. If I use the AUM, it's just synonymous with each other. At $3.5 billion, we get our 2%.
The reason we need that is because we have an infrastructure. We have a cost. We are very labor-intensive. We need that $70 million to come in and keep the lights on. Above $3.5 billion, the fee drops from 2% to 1.25%. So you will get an enhanced return on every additional dollar, and it will even yield a little bit of return on our existing capital base because we're above $3.5 billion. Now, that 75 basis points that we decided to give to our shareholders going forward, with the board, we said we think 25 basis points of that should be available for existing and current management only, not prior founders of the business, because you guys don't know if some of the money goes to prior founders right now, right, on the base management fee. This is only directed to the existing management team.
It aligns compensation and our pay structure, and it gives you, the shareholder, through our compensation committee, the ability to impact our compensation. It's based on us achieving our hurdle rates. And so worst case, you save 50 basis points on all incremental capital while creating a better, more aligned pay structure with management. And best case, you save 75 basis points. Now, I'm not sure 70 of that would be best case because we're not hitting our return targets, so you'd have to noodle on that. But you are getting a reduction. I'll show you mathematically where this comes out. Number two, we eliminated cash from the calculation of Adjusted Net Assets. That lowers our Adjusted Net Assets. Therefore, that lowers the amount of fees that we do. We no longer get an Integration Services Fee on new platform acquisitions. That was $3.5 million on The Honey Pot.
So in total, it's a significant amount of savings that will be coming through. And this commences on January 1st of this year. So how does this look? At our current $3.8 billion, which is where we ended 2024, the savings would be about $5.5 million. That's $2 million in annual management fees, $3.5 million on the Integration Service Fee. So not huge. I get that. But we also have an infrastructure, and we have a cost structure that we have to be able to support. And so we need the compensation coming in. But as we grow, the savings grow. And so it's $18 million on the next $1.2 billion of capital we put out. And then when we get to $10 billion, it's $60 million that has gone prospectively from the manager to the shareholder.
And you'd say, "Why would you do this?" Well, as companies in the private equity space grow, they tier their management fees down. And we felt it was really important that we emulate the right parts of private equity, which is to allow the benefits of scale to not only the management team, but to the shareholders as well. And so we felt it was important, as we have gotten to this level, that this was put in place, and it continues to further align management with our shareholders. With that, I'm going to ask Pat to come up and give a quick update on our subsidiaries and verticals.
Thank you, Elias. Before I get started, I just wanted to take a moment to thank each of the employees of our subsidiaries who came today, and many of them traveled in and set up a really wonderful sort of exhibit for all of you. I just wanted to say thanks to them. What do we look for in a CODI business? First and foremost, we focus on three verticals. We look for consumer businesses and consumer products businesses. We look for industrial technology businesses. We look for healthcare and critical service businesses. I'll come back to that. Within these industries, we look for innovative and disruptive participants. How do we define that? It's part art, part science. The science part is you're looking for businesses that grow faster than their market.
You're looking for, in some cases, businesses that grow a lot faster than their market and are changing the market. You could think of Lugano as an example. You could think of BOA as an example, and we have many other examples where the market's actually changing. It's a benefit, obviously, if that market is also growing at an exceptional rate. And so that's what we look for in each of these verticals. I spoke of healthcare, and I said I'd come back to it. We've spent a lot of time over the last two years looking at healthcare and healthcare-related businesses. We're going to continue to do that. We're going to expand the aperture a little bit to include critical services.
If you're cleaning a steel tank for a healthcare business, it's really, in some ways, or for a medical device business, it's really no different than a company that cleans a steel tank for a high-end industrial technology business. And we'd like to sort of increase the aperture to look at those businesses as well. It's been challenging for us. We are disciplined. And though we're, as you've seen in the last few years, we're willing to pay high multiples for good, fast-growth businesses. It's a little bit, at times, extreme in healthcare, and at times, in some of the opportunities we've seen, we can't get our head around paying high teens 20 times multiples for a business that is growing at 3% to 5% because of the industry.
So on behalf of our shareholders, we're being disciplined, though we do think we'll have success in the coming years. Talked briefly about our consumer vertical. It represents about a little over 70% of our EBITDA. There's six great businesses in here. I'll go into detail on each one. We believe over the long term, we'll get sort of over 25% Adjusted EBITDA margin. So these are businesses that have tremendous moats, tremendous competitive advantages, and very strong management teams. As there's a picture of a BOA boot here, I will take the opportunity to announce we just launched earlier this week our dual dial boot system in alpine, which we're very excited about. We pre-launched that with five of our industry partners. And so here you'll see there's a BOA dial in the lower part of the system. The new product introduces one on the cuff as well.
We think that will continue to take market share in alpine boots. I'll touch briefly on Lugano. I think as Lugano grows and becomes a bigger part of our business, we have decided that we're going to provide additional disclosure a little bit more than some of our other businesses. Hopefully, that's appreciated. We truly believe this is a disruptive business. It disrupts in multiple ways. The two most fundamental ways, and I know Stuart is here from Lugano, who's a big part of it, is how they go and where they meet their customer. They go into the community to meet their customer where they are at. It expands the market massively, we believe. Second is how they source and how they find their product.
They're able to do that in a way that allows them to convey a lot more value to the highest of high-end buyers. We're very excited about continuing to invest. You'll see this year, they'll grow from roughly 110 million of EBITDA to, we believe, over 180 million of EBITDA in 2024. So really strong growth. Given this competitive positioning and given this sort of, I'm just really, the appetite for their product and for their value offering in the economy, we're going to continue to invest in this business. We'll have several store openings over the next 12 to 18 months. We've heard one of the worries is, what does this do to liquidity? You're buying a lot of diamonds. You're buying a lot of jewels. You're building a lot of salons.
We took the opportunity to just map out a potential scenario in 2024 and go through sort of a couple illustrative sort of scenarios just as it relates to liquidity. The punchline here, and I'll go through the math with you, the punchline here is if you take our target EBITDA leverage ratio of about 3.5, based on our investment in Lugano, the growth is so significant that it has a negligible to positive sort of impact on that 3.5 overall leverage ratio. First, if you take a few scenarios on the top on possible growth in 2024, and then you look at our target leverage that we've talked about, call it 3.5. I know there's a range.
You adjust it for what's in our credit agreement for some of the minority interest we have at Lugano, that gets you to roughly $212-$230 million more of liquidity. If you then say, "Okay, well, how much are you going to invest in working capital in a given year?" This year, it's going to be around that $300 million number. If you then say, "Well, Lugano creates a lot of cash." And so if you just take EBITDA, less cash taxes, less CapEx, you get to that cash created at Lugano. And then if you take all the corporate costs that encompass, including management fees, including dividends, including interest on our debt, and you allocate that based on Adjusted Net Assets, that gets you to that roughly $65 million number. What does all of this mean?
Is that the net liquidity contribution or leakage is slightly negative to slightly positive. And we get a lot of growth for that and a lot of enterprise value for that. It means that the impact on CODI leverage does not go from 3.5 to 3.6, but from 3.5 to 3.11 or from 3.5 to 3.47. So we believe continued investments in Lugano is the right way to both to manage leverage, but also to maximize shareholder value. I'm going to go through a few of our subsidiaries here and just talk about outside of Lugano, talk about the drivers of growth and what we're going to see and our expectations for the future. 5.11, we have Troy here. 5.11 had a bit of a transition this year with Troy coming on. We're focused now on really product and people. And we're getting the right people on the bus.
We're really top-grading the product that is out there in our stores and that's provided to our professional users. We're very excited about 2025 and beyond. We think we have the right team in place. At BOA, we mentioned continued penetration of existing markets in alpine. We're going to continue to penetrate other markets where we have single-digit or sometimes low single-digit sort of penetration. Workwear is a big area of growth. And as are several of the Asian markets. There's just a lot of growth opportunities here. The company has a really fascinating sort of Skunk Works Area 51 type facility as well, where we're constantly thinking about what are the next applications for BOA Technology. The Honey Pot Elias touched on, but we're going to continue here with new product introduction and really to benefit from increased demand for better-for-you feminine hygiene products.
We can't think of a company we have that's better positioned than Honey Pot right now to play upon some of the macro trends and consumer demands we're seeing. PrimaLoft, we're going to continue to take market share gains, hopefully from down products. We're going to continue to grow geographically. There just continues to be an increased demand for sustainable products. PrimaLoft is one of the most sustainable products we can have with using predominantly recycled materials. Then at Velocity, we're very excited about some new technologies that we have coming out in the crossbow space. We're also growing rapidly in our DTC business, both on the soft goods space with King's Camo and hunting apparel and on the crossbow space as well. Shifting gears here to our industrial business. It's a smaller segment, but a very important segment for us.
Here, we try to find companies that are real leaders in their respective markets and have strong market share. Terry, you'll hear from at Altor, truly a great business. Arnold and Sterno as well. I'll get in on the next page some of the growth drivers of each of them. At Altor, the recent acquisition of Lifoam really positions us well in the faster-growing areas of the packaging space. It really positions us well in the cold chain to benefit from a lot of the emerging drugs and drug development that need to be packaged in an environment that allows cooling and allows temperature control. In addition, we are really at the forefront again here of creating sustainable packaging products with Bio-EPS, with the RationL packaging, rigid recycled packaging that you'll see out there. Terry and his team remain at the forefront of sustainability.
And customers are demanding that more and more. At Arnold, we're going to continue to grow because of our investments in technology. The management team there has been focused on technology. And at Compass, we've supported that. The most recent is the creation of a new facility in Illinois that will have a much stronger R&D center to actually create ideas for our customers around electrification, etc. We'll also continue to grow there from core growth in aerospace and defense. And I don't think Dan will like me saying this, but having oil above $80 helps with sort of some of the exploration and that's a tailwind for Arnold as well. And then lastly, at Sterno, Sterno is going to continue to increase in volume as we're not quite fully back to that sort of pre-COVID travel levels and pre-COVID activity levels, corporate activity levels.
And as well, Sterno has some customer concentrations in one of its businesses that we've talked about. And we're going to continue to introduce new products and go after new big box customers on that side as well. So that's an overview of our subsidiaries and sort of our outlook. I'll now give it over to Stephen.
Thank you, Pat. It's an honor to be here for my first investor day. It was really, when I joined Compass, I really spent a lot of time doing due diligence, understanding the team, understanding the businesses, and I must say, I did a bad job. The company, the people, it's substantially better than I expected. It's been a fantastic first four months with the company, and I'm really excited about the long-term future here. Kind of moving in, as Elias said, we're a purpose-driven organization. We're guided by values and driven by excellence. Our focus is on empowering success, driving growth, and exceeding expectations for all of our stakeholders.
One of the things that we've been trying to do over the last few months and quarters is try to figure out how we can put real metrics against how we impact our businesses, how we impact our communities, how we impact our shareholders, and how we encourage our employees. And so one of the things when it comes to our businesses, our focus is on driving subsidiary Adjusted EBITDA. Since 2016 through 2023, we've increased it by 2.4 times. And as you heard, 2024 is looking to be very good. So it'll continue to increase. The focus here is making sure that we're not only buying great businesses, but that we are continuing to invest in them to create more value and accelerate their growth and growth in EBITDA.
When it comes to our communities, it is really important for CODI as well as our subsidiary companies to be an important part of the community. We've been looking for ways of how we can measure how we're doing it. So one of the things that we've been focused on the last few years is ESG. And I want to be clear, this is not ESG to check a box or it's not ESG to chase a rating. This is ESG to provide ourselves some guidelines and some framework of how to understand our impact on the community and how to make sure that we're measuring it, challenging ourselves to get better. We're very proud that we have made material progress with each of the rating agencies to improve our ESG rating. And we're going to continue to focus on this, again, because it's the right thing to do.
And we need the framework and the metric to make sure that we understand how we can do better for our communities. When it comes to shareholders, it's all about total returns. Since IPO, we've more than doubled the Russell 2000 Index in terms of total returns. That is, it's something that we're really focused on and going to be continuing to drive. For our employees, this is actually both employees at CODI and the management company as well as in their individual subsidiaries. It's a people business. We need to have the best people. We need to continue to attract and retain great investment team members, great CEOs, great teams across the organization. We're very proud that over 90% of the people who work for CODI and the management company consider it to be a great place to work.
This is an area of focus that the team has continued to drive. And we're going to continue to do it. So again, our focus is making sure that we're delivering for all stakeholders across the organization. I did want to take a little bit of time to talk through our Adjusted EBITDA and our history. So these numbers, just to confirm, these are our Adjusted EBITDA after the management fee as reported in each of these years. What you see is that we have a significant increase in Adjusted EBITDA over three, five, and 10 years. We continue to see growth driven both EBITDA growth, both organically through investing in our businesses, but also actively managing the companies that we have, both acquiring new companies and strategically divesting old companies. Our commitment is to continue to drive double-digit growth in Adjusted EBITDA.
It's a key focus of how we're going to drive returns long term. An area of focus that we often do is something we call retained cash. I believe you've seen this before. Just to refresh, retained cash is the amount of cash that our subsidiaries generate or CODI generates before working capital, but after we pay for capital expenses and after we pay distributions for both common equity and preferred equity. This is, as you can see, we've had a lot of progress in our retained cash, and year to date, through September, we had $66 million. For the full year, we expect that to be substantially higher. By continuing to make sure that we're operating our subsidiaries, we're going to continue to do well. We're going to continue to drive an increase in retained cash.
Taking this cash, we can then really support our long-term strategic plans of organic deleveraging, of investing in the subsidiaries for growth, and ultimately deploying capital for new acquisitions, both platform acquisitions as well as added acquisitions for our individual subs. So this is a key point for us moving forward. We talked about a strong balance sheet, the cost of capital. Again, the key thing about this terming out some of our short-term debt was that we both now we have full access to our $600 million revolver. We also have the additional delayed draw. We are well positioned to be able to fund the growth in our companies and also be ready to buy companies as Pat and the investment team find the right things that are available.
We're really focused on making sure that we have the lowest cost of capital and making sure that we have a capital structure that provides us with diverse access to capital. I know you guys have seen this slide many times. It's something we're very proud of, is that our intention is to be conservatively levered, and we continue to focus on, despite buying companies, we're continuing to focus on driving down our leverage over time. We ended Q3 with a 3.68 times leverage ratio, and now we haven't closed the numbers, but we haven't closed the books, but we're expecting that to be right around the high end of our target, maybe a little bit below the 3.5. We're really consistently focused on making sure that we buy great companies, but make sure that we keep our leverage conservative and make sure that we are focused on deleveraging.
As new CFO, I often get questions about what our financing strategy is and what our capital allocation strategy is. So I just want to spend a little bit of time talking through that and making sure we rearticulate it, so first of all, we are committed to maintain a long-term leverage target of between three and 3.5 times. Again, that's likely where we're going to end up for the year, but this is a key focus for us, no change. Our goal is to ensure that we have significant liquidity. We want to be able to fund our subsidiary growth and drive strategic acquisitions throughout any kind of business cycle. So making sure that we have liquidity is critical for us so we can be opportunistic in our acquisitions, be opportunistic in making sure that we're always funding our businesses.
And then finally, we want to make sure that we have secure access to diverse sources of capital. We like that we have secure debt, unsecured debt, equity capital. We have the preferred capital. It's a really key point to have different capabilities here. This will, again, allow us to ensure long-term liquidity and make sure that we can continue to invest through any business cycle. In terms of capital allocation priorities, first and foremost, we want to continue to invest in our subsidiaries. Again, the goal here is to organically invest in our innovative and disruptive businesses. We want to make sure that we're funding long-term opportunities, long-term innovations. We want to make sure that we're doing strategic add-ons. I think the Lifoam acquisition is a perfect example of the types of things that we'd like to continue to do for each of our businesses.
Another area is doing more platform acquisitions. This is really important. We want to be very active here, but we're going to be very disciplined. We have a target of trying to do one to two platform acquisitions per year. I want to be clear, this is a target. We're going to only invest when we find good businesses that we can drive great returns. Our goal is to be active, but we will always be disciplined. And then finally, again, from capital allocation priorities, we want to continue to have a return of capital to shareholders. We want to make sure this is efficient. Obviously, we paid a dividend. As Elias talked about, we did buy shares back in the fourth quarter when we saw that the share price just wasn't anywhere near where we think the intrinsic value is.
We'll continue to explore ways to efficiently return capital over time. So we're going to give you an update on 2025 when we do our Q4 earnings. So we'll provide the guidance on 2025. But what I want to do is say, what is our long-term outlook here? So next three to five years, what do we see the business going at? And we really have three things. We're going to continue to drive organic sales growth to the high single digit, high single digit plus area. This is important. We're going to have good businesses that have a lot of opportunity for market share growth. We're going to continue to add to those businesses. And this is a key component of our long-term value creation. From our subsidiary Adjusted EBITDA, we think we're going to end up around 25% consistently at that level going forward.
Finally, we want to continually drive more than double-digit growth in our adjusted earnings. The changes with the management fee is actually going to help us as we grow. Our costs won't scale as directly with the assets and the growth. Therefore, we continue to get additional leverage on our earnings growth. Again, our focus is to continue to acquire attractive platform businesses, continue to invest in our existing businesses, and we will opportunistically divest in our subsidiaries when it makes sense. With that, we're going to turn it over back to Cody, who will manage our Q&A process.
Audience questions?
It's Larry Solow, CJS Securities. Good morning. I guess, Elias, I know this is more about long term and not 2025, but can you just give us a quick sort of state of the union? I think at the start of 2024, we thought things were good, but we're going to slow down a little bit. It didn't really happen too much. What's sort of your outlook today across your businesses?
Yeah, so I'll take a first stab at that, and then I'll ask Pat to chime in a little bit. Right now, Larry, I would say we feel better today in 2025 than we did on this day in 2024 because the economy feels stronger, underpinning growth. I would say our companies feel like they're better positioned right now each individually. And we own what we really want to own going forward. So as we look into 2025, I would say it feels really robust to us. I would think that this should be a year that is going to perform extremely well. Clearly, Lugano, we almost have to look at separately because Lugano is growing so fast and it's so large. And so if I take all of the business ex Lugano, it feels like 2025 should be a better year than 2024.
And then the question on Lugano comes: does it continue to grow at this pace? Do we continue to fund the capital in? Our current plans are to say yes and yes. We're going to fund the capital that's needed for it to continue to support growth. So therefore, putting the two together should yield a really good outlook for 2025. We probably won't go over our skis, as you know, Larry. We try to be conservative in our guidance when we come out at Q4 so that you have something that you can rely on with upside going throughout the year. But I would say just in general, it feels pretty strong. Pat?
No, I would agree. I think that's a good summary. Collectively, it feels a little firmer than it did a year ago as we enter 2025. I know our management teams are excited about 2025. I know our teams at Compass are excited about 2025. So we feel like we're in a good place. I would also say it does feel like the M&A market is firming up, and you didn't touch on it, and I did touch on it, but it does feel like the M&A market is firming up a little bit. It's still not gangbusters. But a year ago, we were hearing, oh, maybe there will be some deals in Q3, Q4. Now it's kind of more with names and launch dates for processes. So there's a little more firmness in the M&A process, I think, in 2025 as well.
Got it. Just two real quick follow-ups. Just on the leverage, I know you guys certainly want to be acquisitive. You're at about three and a half times. What are you willing to kind of go up to temporarily? And then the second question, just on Lugano, you mentioned it's somewhat become outsized. You clearly don't have any timelines on selling your businesses, which is a great positive. But as Lugano becomes like 35%, 40% of your EBITDA, does that give you any agita as you look forward? Thanks.
Yeah. So, Stephen can chime in on the balance sheet, but we've gotten up close to four times leverage. I don't think that is something that concerns us. Given that our cash flow generation, you saw that from the retained cash, continues to grow. That's a deleveraging aspect of our business, as well as just the speed at which our earnings are growing. It gives us confidence, Larry, to be higher for short periods of time. I would also say the addition of the preferred capital that we've been raising and the level that we did in the fourth quarter. It's just so meaningful. If we have the opportunity to raise capital at that level, which we think will exist going into 2025, it gives us a source of deleveraging that is kind of quickly at our fingertips.
To me, and I don't know, Stephen, where you are, but it's kind of. I think we have another half a turn of leverage that could be temporarily. We could go up.
I agree. I think the main thing for us is not where we're going to have a short-term blip on where the leverage is. It's making sure that we can drive it back down quickly to that 3.5 target level. So we're comfortable going higher as long as there's a clear path to deleveraging in line with our long-term targets. We're going to make sure that we're opportunistic and do the right thing.
And with respect to Lugano, we get a lot of questions on it because it is becoming an increasingly large concentration with our portfolio. That being said, if I said to any of you, the company that is becoming larger is a really disruptive business that gets a 30% return on invested capital every time we plunk down another dollar, and we can just continue to fund into this. I've talked to some shareholders who have said, well, why would you ever sell that? I don't care if it's 90% of your business. My job is to diversify. That's not your job. Understanding that management sits in a different position, right? And so if you think this is a business that, as Pat said, you fund it with three and a half times, and it doesn't drain from our liquidity in doing that, right?
It's leverage neutral for us to fund it. It costs three and a half times to grow EBITDA. Place whatever multiple you think on it. 12, 15, 20, I don't know what a company of this should trade at, but I will tell you it's not single digit. There's a lot of value creation that occurs. Even if you said 15, let's just pick the middle of that. If you fund and it costs three and a half, you get 15 turns on an exit. It's 11 and a half turns of growth that you get, 60% to us, 40% roughly to the initial owner, Moti And so that delivers what, seven, seven and a half turns of growth on that EBITDA for our equity to our shareholders. We think that's a really powerful model. And honestly, we don't see this all the time.
So it's hard to want to let go of something like that. But you have to juxtapose that against the risk that it presents to the firm and the capital that it does need and the fact that it is not a deleveraging kind of growing company like all other eight companies that we own in our portfolio would be. And so those two are things that we're balancing. You've heard me say this a lot, Larry. When a company gets large enough that it is professionally, and I talked about this earlier, our job as private equity investors is broadly to take companies that are very entrepreneurial and bring them to a point where they can access capital on their own more efficiently, whether that's as part of a conglomerate or public on their own. And Lugano is in that stage.
It's getting to a point where its growth is allowing it to build the infrastructure and the processes so that it has a plethora of opportunities to access capital. Frankly, it will be able to access capital, we think, cheaper than what CODI can. Today, the limitation on us thinking about possibilities with it is just further infrastructure build, process creation in the company. Lugano today relies a lot on Compass, as all of our companies do, in order to comply with a lot of the regulatory and public requirements. As that gets built out, we think Lugano will have a couple of different options, including an IPO, which is, I think, a reasonable path. It's one where it kind of is a hybrid model, right? We're able to access a lower cost of capital. The company, we get liquidity immediately.
For our shareholders, we're able to ride kind of a significant gain and monetize as we need, very similar to what we did with Fox Factory back in 2013 and then monetized over the course of the next five years. I think that is a reasonable pathway. I know I didn't give you a specific timeline and a specific kind of here's what we'll do with it because it's not the way that this operates. We have to look and see and assess where we are in terms of the company's infrastructure and capabilities. In the next couple of years, we are working towards having something kind of with Lugano that will allow us to both create a value mark with it and the liquidity and flexibility and lowering of cost of capital.
Thank you. I'm new to your company. What type of businesses are most of your firms which you own? Is it a certain product area, certain consumer area? And secondly, if God forbid, there's a recession in the next five years, how are you prepared if there's a downturn? But mainly, if you tell me more about the type of companies which you normally buy, what industry, like consumer or retail or something like that. Thank you.
Greater than 70% of our earnings is driven by consumer-related businesses. For the most part, though, to answer your second question, we believe these companies play really sort of core functions in society and are relied on by their customers. If you look at 5.11, a big part of 5.11's business, for example, is selling to public service, to fire, to EMS, to first responders, to those who serve. And that's a big part and would help from a sort of recession standpoint, right? Other businesses like Sterno, simple luxuries, do great in a recession. And our portfolio is full, and you could see some of them as we walk out later. They're all here. But our portfolio is full of businesses. Nothing is recession-proof, but we believe that are recession-resistant, if that makes sense.
I think I encourage you to walk around out here afterwards and chat with the management teams and judge that for yourself.
Hey, guys. Thanks for putting on a great day and all the detail in the outlook and all the detail around the segments. Really appreciate it. Maybe just one near-term one and then one related to M&A. So first on the near-term, you guys sound more upbeat than last year. You're right about sort of the prospects for 2025. Curious maybe if you could just touch on margin expansion prospects in 2025. I know you're not providing guidance, but just the qualitative buckets where we see opportunity given all the cross currents that are out there in terms of tariffs, in terms of reinflation. Maybe if you could just touch on sort of where you see the most opportunity in the near term.
Yeah. So Matt, it's a great question. I'll let Pat answer some of the specific opportunities for margin improvement. But remember, within our company, mix shift is going to make a big difference in terms of overall margin. And as Lugano continues to grow at accelerated rates with a kind of 40-ish% EBITDA margin, that is obviously accretive to the portfolio. So that should naturally shift margins up. I'm going to let Pat talk about specific margin issues, and I'll address your tariff. I think there's two things that we have to worry about that have been talked about within the new administration. One is tariffs. The second is immigration policies. Both have inflationary impacts. With respect to tariffs, we have done a really good job. And as I remind people, there was something called the Trump 1.0 presidency, and China was the big part of the focus.
And I think any CEO who was listening and is worth being a CEO directed their company to say, we need to get diversification of our supply base, not just within vendors, but within countries and regions of the world. And we embarked on a process, and in some cases, it was working with current vendors who wanted to also diversify out of China because they don't want their businesses to go away if Trump got reelected. And in fact, did. And so we worked with partners. So that is the best way to do it. And in some cases, we found new partners that were outside of the area and were in zones that we thought were going to be more safe. So is there going to be friction if tariffs are to come in?
And if they're blanket tariffs everywhere, we're all dealing with it, and nobody can offset that. But if they are China-specific tariffs, I think we've really moved the ball along. And outside of a transition period where we're moving production out of China to other locations, I would say that should be the majority of the problem. That being said, China is likely cheaper than it is to produce in Taiwan or Vietnam or Cambodia. So there may be some cost increase, but we're not talking about a 50%-60% kind of tariff. Now, we could all query what happens to the global economy if this happens. Let's set that aside. But I think we've really positioned well in terms of how to deal with tariffs, especially if it's China singularly.
With immigration policy and discussions of mass deportations, we've gotten into a much better place with respect to labor availability now. It's been a huge problem that we've fought over the last couple of years coming out of the pandemic as demand for labor significantly exceeded supply. And we all saw what happened to wage rates. Wage rates went up to 6%-7%. They're running two to two and a half times what you would normally get in wage growth. That's problematic. That is the most inflationary thing that you can have. I'll tell you, and you'll hear from Terry and others where we've been doing things to try to bring up wages and have them be self-funding so that we have a bigger gap and we get more labor availability.
This is part of our value set and what we believe is right to do: create better living wages, but have them be self-funded within an organization, and I think Terry's been a real leader at Altor in being able to drive that, and Troy can talk about that as well because some of the labor is at the lower income scale, whether it being retail or on the shop floor, so that's creating a little bit of a gap that's creating more supply of labor for us, but understand that if that goes through, that's going to be a real problem that's going to cause some margin erosion temporarily, but I think really high levels of inflation, and as much as we can try to get in front of that one, I would be more concerned as an investor with that going through.
Now, the hope is that some of this might just be a little bit more talk and bluster, and we can come back to more reasonable policies. But on tariffs, I think we are reasonably well set. Pat, in terms of opportunities on margin for continued enhancement beyond mix shift, you want to address that?
Yeah. I mean, it's also mix shift within the companies, I would say, right? I mean, as we go more towards the cold chain and Terry's business, for example, that is a place where technology is even more valued and innovation is even more valued. As we move more towards DTC and several of our businesses at Velocity, at 5.11, that's a place where you typically get more margin. So it's kind of mix shift within the companies as well. I'd say having gone through most of our budgeting processes at this point, don't really see a lot of places where the gross profit margin now, we haven't modeled in blanket 20% tariffs, and that will be shared by the entire sort of ecosystem, right, including the consumer, unfortunately. But haven't seen much sort of margin degradation or expected margin degradation, if anything.
On the gross profit level, it's sort of slight increases. At the EBITDA level, there's obviously some companies where we're investing in given their growth stage. If you look at a PrimaLoft, if you look at a Honey Pot, I can't say there's not going to be some short-term sort of deleveraging on the EBITDA level there, but again, we don't believe that will be long-term, and we think those investments are well worth making.
And Matt, just one last point because I talked about it in the Centers of Excellence creation. It was a huge initiative of ours over 2024 to bring on a leader in our business automation/AI group. And we think that it's not going to impact 2025. These programs probably are a little bit costly in the beginning, most costly at the margin because we're absorbing all the cost without the benefit yet coming through. But we do think there are significant opportunities over the next couple of years to re-envision through use of more business automation, especially artificial intelligence in our subsidiaries, reimagining the way that certain functions, the way certain processes are designed from maybe inventory buy, from customer demand. There's really intelligent tools that are out there right now and the growth in those tools. And you hear about AI all the time.
AI was really just kind of getting the models and everything built up until this point. Now it's about how do we take this and drive it through the economy, drive it through what I'll call real companies, not the tech companies that are developing it. How do we drive it through there, and we're on the initial launch of that. I can't say that you're going to get benefit in 2025 from that, but that will yield benefit in 2026, 2027, and beyond, and we think there's a lot of margin that comes from this specific investment we're making at Compass.
Okay, great. Appreciate all the detail, guys. One more on the M&A front. You guys, it seems like you're expanding the scope of the healthcare initiative in terms of, I think the language was something to the effect of critical outsourced services and activities. Maybe just some examples of stuff that you could look at there would be really helpful. And then it sounds like the multiples may just be a little bit more reasonable in that particular space. But maybe just talk about the relative multiples versus the healthcare space, which you were saying was upwards of 20 times EBITDA, I think.
Yeah. I mean, as far as critical outsource services, I see what we will do, I see facility services. I see really high-end business services. What we're not going to do is buy sort of 4% EBITDA margin businesses that have less of a reason to exist, possibly, right? The critical is important, is all I would say. And we're seeing some of those opportunities now, and we're going to continue to look for them.
I had a question here. Barry Haimes, Sage Asset Management . Two, actually. One is you talked about the forward-looking growth rates and revenues and EBITDA. If you were to go back five years before the growth pivot, what would those numbers have been back in time by contrast? And then second question, just following up on AI, understanding that we're still early days, but are there one or two applications that you can talk about as an example where you're starting to implement or will start to implement this year? What might those be? Thanks.
Sure. So in terms of growth rate, prior to 2018, we used to say we are a GDP, maybe GDP plus growth rate. I think in some ways that might have been a little generous, so you may have thought about us as kind of a zero. We described ourselves as mostly a zero to 2-3% grower, and that was on a consolidated basis, and again, it was a function of the type of companies that we had to own, and we would say we produce a lot of free cash flow, and that free cash flow can be reinvested in new businesses, and that's how we're going to get kind of overall growth, and we return a lot of capital to you, but the reality is none of the businesses that we're in have great growth opportunities.
So, kind of that kind of a little bit positive, slightly positive is where we were. With each year that we transformed the portfolio and we sold off businesses that were kind of GDP or maybe even GDP minus growers, and we put in place of that a business that had double-digit growth rates, we were levering up what our kind of core organic growth rate is. Now we say it's high single digits. I mean, we kind of internally guide ourselves that we want our core growth to be double digits. And we feel on the slide that you looked at that Pat went through, both the consumer and the industrial side, that when you consolidate these businesses up together, that we can have kind of a core growth rate that is kind of plus or minus 10%.
So we feel we've really migrated the business up towards kind of a much faster core growth. In terms of AI and business automation, Pat, you want to take yourself?
It's early days. I mean, I'll give you just examples of the types of things we're looking at. BOA gets in hundreds of orders a week in hundreds of different languages. So kind of an optical recognition sort of these are the types of things we're looking at. It is early days. Sort of invoice matching and chargeback matching. A lot of vendors always want to create chargeback, so kind of that and kind of do it without necessarily us checking it or a lot of our customers. So kind of that sort of thing. I would say at 5.11, we'll be working in 2025 on some customer service applications as well. But again, it's early days. Those are the ilk of things that we're starting to dive into.
We probably have time for one more question, guys.
Thanks for hosting us and for all the information. Elias, historically, you've talked about a billion-dollar subsidiary EBITDA goal by 2028. Any updated thoughts on that and kind of where you are towards that?
Sure. So that's been a goal, obviously, within sort of a bigger strategic framework. And Chris, the reason you even put out a target of $1 billion was it's a guiding light for us to say we are growing and we're getting towards that. But more so, it equated to a size that we think is necessary to lower our cost of capital, right? And things always come back to us to what are our guiding principles. And one of the guiding principles is if we have the lowest cost of capital in the industry, we will buy the best businesses and we will deliver the best returns. And so size, whether we agree with it or not, does get better ratings and it gets cheaper debt costs.
And so we feel that growing towards a larger size is consistent with the strategic goal of lowering our cost of capital. I will tell you that Lugano is going to have a big determinant as to whether we hit that $1 billion target in 2028 or not. If we keep it, we are well ahead of that goal, right? If we continue to own it in its current form as a 60% owned business, we will exceed that goal demonstrably. If we end up monetizing it, which all assets we think about, right? This one in particular is so large, we would have a redeployment effort that we would have to undergo in order to kind of make up for that hole that was created. So I can't say that future M&A isn't going to veer us away from that.
But with the portfolio constructed as it is today, the liquidity that we have today, we feel we are exceeding our goal of achieving that billion-dollar target by 2028, or we are marching in a path that will exceed that.
Thank you. I think we're ready to begin the panel.
Terry?
Yep.
Good to see you.
Anne? Good to see you. Troy?
Hey Elias.
All right. So the second part of our presentation today will be a panel with our three distinguished guests. To my right, Terry Moody, Altor Solutions, Anne Cavassa from PrimaLoft, and Troy Brown from 5.11. And so I'm going to go through with each three of you and ask the same question, so I won't repeat it each time. But in general, and maybe we'll start, Troy, with you. If you could just tell us about your journey to 5.11, how you're, in your case, it's been your first year here, how that's been. As you exited 2024 and come into 2025, what are the things you're excited about, or are there concern areas, and just general kind of your view on what the coming year and future for 5.11 looks like?
Fantastic. Happy to talk about that. It's great to be here with everyone. I am a second-generation retailer. I spent my life really helping to build brands, create shareable value, create jobs with companies like Eddie Bauer, Tommy Bahama, Expedia, and most recently, Zumiez, helping to transfer that brand from being really a local skate shop into a global teen retailer. And so during that process, about five years ago, I had the opportunity to join the 5.11 board. And at that point, I had no idea who 5.11 was. But there were some people at 5.11 who knew where I was, and they asked me to come join. And so I got my first look at CODI and my first look at 5.11. And I just have to say that I was incredibly impressed.
Everything that you've heard today about the way CODI operates is exactly what I experienced as a board member. And that was very attractive to me. I'm a value-based leader. And what I saw was a value-based organization, both in terms of CODI and in terms of the board and in terms of the 5.11 management team. So that was attractive. And in addition to that, the potential of the 5.11 brand. 5.11 is a brand that's the best-kept secret that's out there. Very few people know what it is. I don't even know if you know what 5.11 means. I may talk about that a little bit later. But essentially, it's just a purpose-built, very beautiful business. And as a board member, I just saw incredible potential. In about 2023, after a long career, I decided to retire and take some time off.
I was super energized about that, made some significant life changes, and had kind of decided to go play golf. I had been playing golf for about 60 days when Pat gave me a call and asked if I had retired enough. The funny thing about that was the one call I didn't want to get was from Pat because I knew I wouldn't say no. I wanted to play golf. But this was too good of an opportunity, both in terms of where I see 5.11 can go and who I get to do business with. Everything you've heard, I couldn't just put an exclamation point on it. There's a strong set of values. So just that's my journey to 5.11. I just wrapped up my first year as CEO. We're happy with the results. It's been a repositioning year.
You obviously heard about PFAS. We had to reposition almost the entire assortment into PFAS, non-PFAS products. So we've done that over the last couple of years. We've also spent an extensive amount of time looking at the brand and where the potential is of this brand. Like I said, I couldn't be really more excited about the potential. I'm cautiously optimistic. We still have a lot of work to do. And there's a lot of uncertainty out there about the economy. And one of the things that keeps us up at night, and Elias already talked about, was this tariffs and what's going to happen. As Elias said, this is not new. This is 2.0. And if you weren't adjusting to this eight years ago, you're a little bit late at this point. And I'm really pleased at where we're at. We've diversified supply chain.
We've diversified countries with our partners. And we're feeling really good about it. Our exposure to China specifically is very insignificant at this point. And so we're feeling good that we're in a good position. But that's really what keeps me up at night. And I'm cautiously optimistic about what 2025 is going to look like.
So because you teased everybody with what 5.11 means, I'm going to ask you to follow up on that. And what does 5.11 stand for?
Fantastic question. This is such a historic brand. If you don't know, this brand was really created by Royal Robbins in the 1960s. He was one of five climbers who spent a fair amount of time climbing Yosemite. Some of his buddies that were out there built brands like Patagonia, The North Face, Black Diamond. That's where 5.11 was born. We were born in Yosemite, and in the 2000s, we really were honed and crafted in Quantico, and that's how most people know us today as a public service brand. When you walk around every day, you are crossing paths with 5.11, and you may not know it because it doesn't have a 5.11 logo on it. But I can look right out the street right now, and there are people wearing 5.11. What 5.11 stands for is this idea of challenging what's possible.
In 1965, a 5.11 climb is a climbing term. A 5.11 climb was impossible until Royal Robbins made it possible. Today, it's gone beyond 5.11. But the essence of 5.11 is really challenging what's possible. And that's what 5.11 has been about since its inception. And that's what it's going to be about moving forward, is this idea for those who ask what if, it's challenging what is possible.
Oh, that's awesome. Anne, same question to you. I know you recently joined PrimaLoft as well. So a little background on you and your journey here, and then what excites you about PrimaLoft and the current opportunities and challenges as we look into 2025.
Yeah, great. Hello, everyone. Happy to be here and excited to share just what we're up to. So I have about 25 years' experience in sport and outdoor on the consumer brand side. I've been with wholesalers, D2C businesses, omnichannel businesses that have had own distributor and joint venture models. And I come to those businesses with expertise in the consumer-facing functions of product creation, merchandising, and marketing. The better part of the last 15 years, I've really spent on brand and business transformation. That's largely through the same kind of strategy around innovation and product leadership, consumer-driven engagement, and then just really driving high-performing teams with vibrant cultures. So that's been kind of the exercise over the last while. I would say some notable brands and positions I've been in.
I was a GM at Nike for their U.S. retail division when we were driving a new strategy and envisioning what that could look like for Nike. I was with Brooks at a time. I was the Chief Customer Experience Officer responsible for transitioning that business from being predominantly North America wholesale footwear to a global D2C multi-category business, and then most recently, I was at Saucony as the Brand President, really repositioning and reclaiming a performance legacy through innovative product and authentic experiences, so I have this deep love and passion for consumer brands, and this switch to an ingredient brand was a pretty big adjacent switch for me, and there are some things that I was really excited about that I could point to, so first, PrimaLoft is an awesome brand. It has great market leadership position today, but there's a lot of opportunity for growth for us.
So I'm excited about that. We are a brand that impacts the market horizontally. So that opportunity to drive our initiatives around innovation, performance, sustainability, and make really, really broad impact is exciting to me. I'm interested in that puzzle of going from predominantly a B2B business to a B2B2C and really building equity with the customer and the consumer so we can add significant value and kind of ignite our brand partner's business. And then lastly, and I think really important for me was CODI. And I say this really genuinely that who you work with matters, right? We all know that. And so vetting CODI management team was really important to me.
And instantly, there was this alignment on our values and how we think about being values-driven, on our growth hypothesis for PrimaLoft, and really on how we want to operate on a day-to-day basis and interact with each other. So super excited about that. And as we've been here about a year, and 2024 was an intense year. I think we would describe it as transformation. We did a lot. We covered everything from brand positioning and brand strategy to a short, mid, long-term playbook to process. We covered it all. And as we head into 2025, I would say we are definitely more optimistic today than we were a year ago going into the year. And really, that's for a few reasons. One, in our space, inventory levels have normalized, and they feel like they're in a really good spot.
Participation in outdoor and in sport is still really strong. There's a lot of positive sentiment there. Our brand partners' businesses are super healthy, and down prices are high. And that's good for us. That's great for us. So we're really excited about implementing some of those strategies. Specifically, we have three new technology launches that are coming. All of them are advancing our products, but one of them in particular is very innovative, and we think it'll disrupt our space. We're excited about that. We have some brand-building things going on in 2025. We're bringing some authentic brand communication to our consumer and our customer base. And then also, we'll be advancing on some of our emerging businesses of fish and hunt and workwear and footwear in the Asian marketplace in general. So optimistic, but there's a little caution there.
Troy mentioned it as it relates to, and we've been talking about it, just the geopolitical concerns, potential for tariffs, and how consumers might behave there. But we are nicely diversified in our supply chain. And we think for PrimaLoft in particular, any tariff impact might impact us in 2026 because it'll be a reflection of what happens with the brand partners. And also, we believe it'll be diffused across the value chain with factories, ourselves, our brand partners all taking a piece of it as well as consumers. So excited about the year ahead.
In Anne's really global business, where, as you mentioned, an ingredient brand, our end sales, which go through our brand partners, don't necessarily end up only in America, but more throughout the world. How are you seeing, and in your discussions with our brand partners, how do they look geographically? The US feels like it's really strong, not really so sure in the rest of the world. But as your brand partners, and they're some of the biggest in the world, and the Patagonias and the Nikes of the world, how are they looking at sort of the different regions of the country or of the world and what their view on kind of global growth will be?
Yeah, well, I would say we're in about 1,000 brands, predominantly in outdoor sport and lifestyle, and all of those brands are at varying levels of their maturity, but all of them, I would say, have a functional need and a consumer that they're very much going after, and this kind of groundswell, it's been going on since COVID, but around outdoor and outdoor activity and sport, I think, is fueling our global industry, so most of our brand partners are super optimistic about their opportunities for growth, whether they're a North America brand that's expanding in Europe or expanding in Asia, or whether they're a European brand that's gaining steam in the U.S. There's a lot of expansion and that expansion conversation, and it's interesting, too, because some of these large brands have big, huge, iconic programs.
They might be really strong in one part, in one geography, and they're seeing growth in others. Then in those more mature markets, they're introducing new products. I think regardless, technology is driving. Advancing product is driving those growth initiatives. Then how that cascades down, which technical product tends to be very influential down, both in the outdoor and sport category, but also in the lifestyle category because it's very much on trend. I would say our customers, our brand partners are optimistic about growth globally. Depending on which one they are, it's in a different marketplace.
Yeah, I think it's one of the benefits of being part of an innovative business. And as an innovative ingredient brand, you get to work on innovative products. And to one of the gentlemen's questions earlier, this is what creates that recession resilient, the on-trend products that our brand partners are using our ingredients for are driving growth almost regardless of the economy. And I think we'd all agree that kind of outside the U.S., the global economy feels pretty weak. But yet, it sounds like your brand partners are saying, we still feel good because the products are on trend. And that always sells regardless of economic condition.
Yes, yes. And it's interesting because we are hearing from our brand partners the importance of PrimaLoft as a validator for their brand. And so we're seeing more interest and expected kind of expansion in our ingredient brand as an igniter to them. And we aren't seeing that conversation waning at all. In fact, it's increasing. So we are expecting growth to come from that.
Excellent. Terry, same question. And yet again, someone who's relatively new to the business. And I don't know that we designed it this way when we put the panel together, but it happens to be that. But if you could also walk through your journey and history and kind of where we are today with Altor and the opportunity for '25.
Okay, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I will say that my journey has been in private equity for the last 20 years. So I was resonating real well with the intro. I've seen various approaches in private equity. I've been in the C-suite, I should say, for the last 20 years in private equity, but very diverse in background, anywhere from electronics to welding and cutting to aerospace to now packaging. So very, very different industrial or business types, mostly in manufacturing. I will say that coming into Altor in 2022, July of 2022 is when I began. I had just transacted in October of the prior year of a packaging company, actually, and was in the mindset of playing with my wife's horses for about a few months and getting all of her projects done.
Then I got a phone call or received a phone call from a recruiter, and they introduced me to Zach with Compass. I actually had no intention of going back to work at that point. I met with Zach and ultimately with Pat and looked at the opportunity here, which was tremendous in my mind because it's the kind I really like to do, is transformation and creating strategy for the next multi-years with innovation as a key driver, but also really, really going after the mix shift inside the business, changing up how we look at the end markets and where's the real bigger opportunities. I accepted the role and started, and we did build our five-year multi-year strategy.
And I can tell you that one of the key things that really landed me here was the fact that Compass empowers their management team to do the right things. They don't sit and tell us everything we're going to do. They expect us to bring it, build the teams. So I had a big task, a heavy lift there. We built a team. We had a very industrial-based company. And that industrial-based company was very traditional in one segment. And that one segment was very heavily loaded with competition. And I don't want to be ever in a situation where it's a race to the bottom. So we built a strategy around diversification in our segments. And at the same time, we built a strategy around building the brand, a mega brand of our company with brand extensions that really drive home our message.
And so that was a key element in it. So the alignment between the core values that I had coming in aligned perfectly with the core values of Compass. And it was an easy decision once I met the people and understood. That made the decision for me. Going into 2024 for Altor was still part of our foundation building. It was the second year of our strategy foundation building. We started the transformation of the mix, started the innovation, brought on new technology division. And we're starting to build our new offerings. But at the same time, early in the May time frame or early in the spring, there was an opportunity for a potential acquisition. And I went to my board and to Compass, and I said, well, this would be a great, great strategic move for us.
It fits the strategy, and it gives us complementary capabilities we didn't have. It would take us a few years to build them, even though we were willing, and Compass was willing to invest. So we made an acquisition in October, Lifoam. And it was a very good move for us. So it laid the foundation for what I think is a very exciting 2025 for Altor. We have now shifted our mix from just an industrial-based protective packaging company to a life science presence in the health care industry in terms more specifically in the pharmaceutical area and the perishable areas, which I think is the place we really wanted to go in our strategy. It's laid out by year. And by doing this acquisition, we are on track 100% to that five-year plan.
But more so, we're seeing the opportunities with the combined strength of our history and the combined strength of what Lifoam brought with the certification labs, engineering. We are now; the doors are opening, and we're excited about 2025. We're a little bit more bullish about it than we were about 2024. I would say one last thing there is that this whole challenge of putting this together is a cultural transformation as well because this is a 1957 company. This company was founded. And it was founded on industrial-type packaging. And now we're saying, no, we want to be an innovator. We want to create a platform of solutions and services.
And we're being more specific about how we're managing complexity for the customer base as opposed to singularity of just, OK, give us a washer and dryer, and we'll put a packaging around that. We are elevating ourselves tremendously.
Just a follow-up question, and I've talked to a lot of our investors about this, but 2024 was a tougher year, obviously. We saddled this with you. You were one of our best CEOs. I can tell you from inside, Terry has done amazing things in order to change the culture of the organization and increase productivity and all sorts of kind of strategic development. Nonetheless, the company was positioned to be at risk with a couple of customers who lost their customers because it was a two-step process. I just want to, from your standpoint, obviously, you had to deal with that. There's operating deleveraging that occurs. Now one of the solutions to that problem was Lifoam, which gave us capabilities so that we no longer had that two-step distribution problem.
But just kind of from your standpoint and making it through that year and kind of how that unfolded just, and now with that behind us and the opportunities that do we recapture a lot of that going forward? And we've made it through sort of, or is there more at-risk kind of customers with that that we now are better able to protect with our new kind of expanded capabilities?
Yeah, so a couple of things was going on. Distribution was being attacked by direct. And the markets were shifting. So the big traditional end users were looking to obviously drive cost out. So they started to go around distributors. And since we had a heavy concentration with distribution, we got impacted. But what we are, what part of our strategy, and we have been executing in 2024, was building direct relationships, not to circumvent our existing customer base, but to really go back and recapture base business and do it more competitively because we're not the second one out. We're not the one in the middle. We're the one at the front. And in order to do that, we had to be able to demonstrate our capabilities. And our willingness to manage complexity is one of those, which is management of how their logistics is operated.
The other side of this was getting a better, more stable cost base in our facilities. A way of doing that was we did what we called a network optimization. We are continuing to always. It's part of our process now is to look at. We have 23 factories in North America. We're constantly looking at the location of customers, our logistics from raw to completion to the customer end user. How do we best suit that? In a lot of cases, we're moving tools, moving our approach. It's not the model anymore to be at the back door of the primary customer. You have to be diversified, and you have to be able to reach out across the network. We have repositioned ourselves to do that. We're seeing success in that.
Excellent. And from the inside, I can tell you I see this as well as does Pat. And I want to compliment you on the strategic transformation that this company has undergone. And I know from my own standpoint, I think 2025 is going to be really a great year. And it's good to get back to kind of the strategic plan and growth. And I commend you for all the hard work that you've done.
Thank you.
Switching gears a little bit, Anne, I'm going to start with you. We talk about being a values-based organization and being driven by purpose. I think of PrimaLoft, which is kind of at the forefront of environmental stewardship. Just how does aligning with a company that talks about values and purpose influence you and your organization? How does that deliver better results than if we didn't have that lens through which we looked?
Yeah, it's such an interesting conversation because I think, and for me, I have to say, being with CODI over the last year has been a breath of fresh air on this topic because oftentimes, purpose-driven or mission-driven or values-driven are just words that sit in a marketing deck somewhere. And it's very difficult to kind of build your strategy around it. But when you look at the best brands out there in the market in our space, like most of them, the majority of them, their values are aligned with their consumer base. And they build strategy and action against that. And so my experience with CODI on this topic has been really interesting because I am trained to go to battle, to fight for investment in values-driven initiatives and things like that. And obviously, 2024, I spoke of this, we were building strategy for PrimaLoft.
Our purpose is to unleash the full potential of people, product, and planet together in harmony. We have put that right at the center. We have a roadmap against that that we're accountable to certain steps that will help drive those long-term progress against our big initiatives. Those are aligned with our consumer base. In all the conversations with CODI, and regardless of seeming alignment in our upfront conversations, I was like mentally gearing myself up to go at it. What was funny is we're delivering strategy. We're talking about the conversation. It was only met with a ton of support for what we're trying to accomplish, genuine interest and curiosity on how. The next question is always, OK, how can we do more? How can we go faster?
So it's been an incredible pleasure to have those kind of conversations. And I think it's a huge advantage for us as a brand because our time isn't spent convincing that what we want to do is the right thing to do. CODI knows that being values-driven is important to the consumer. And they know that if we can make progress against our sustainability initiatives, as an example, that ultimately drives kind of enduring growth for the brand. So all those are words. I'll give you a very explicit example. We have one of our highest performing products. It's our Gold Insulation. It's a large volume program for us. It's 100% PCR. And in 2025, we're going to be converting it to using our P.U.R.E. technology, which is produced using reduced emissions. So 100% of that product will move to P.U.R.E. technology.
And that isn't necessarily an easy thing to do, but it's the right thing to do. And it advances that product. And it adds value for our customer base. And it adds value for our consumer, our customer being our brand partners, the consumer being the end user that absolutely cares about both the performance, but also the sustainability in our product. So I think that alignment between subsidiary or brand and CODI, it's a shared belief. And I think of it as a huge win, win, win. It's been a great experience.
Yeah, I know one of the things I love to talk about, and you guys have probably heard me say this to you at different points, is PrimaLoft has taken about a billion plastic bottles out of circulation to use in our feedstock. And it's just such a wonderful story that we are creating an alternative to something that could be harmful to animals and price volatile and taking a pollutant to the environment out of stock. And I think that is a wonderful thing. You mentioned that we're moving to a P.U.R.E. technology on our Gold label product. And I'm not saying it is, but if that were to be a more expensive manufacturing process, how receptive are our customers typically to, you're doing the right thing?
It goes beyond just moving this to P.U.R.E., but it's the entire value proposition part of it around PrimaLoft, which is we're doing the right thing. We are great environmental stewards, but you might need to pay a little bit more for it. Just love to get your view as those discussions with brand partners and how kind of receptive they are because, as you said, I think Patagonia's customer cares a lot about that.
Yeah, yeah. Cost increases on things like that are never easy, right? They're never easy. And ideally, they come with an advancement in the performance of the product itself. So that's why kind of driving both performance and sustainability simultaneously is really important. But we are aligned with the values of our consumer. So there is value there for them to also want to invest in product that is delivering on those values. So for the most part, we have alignment with our brand partners. They understand where there's cost increases. They want to keep those pressures down as well. But it's a constant negotiation. And ultimately, I think that it does allow us, while we're pushing both technology and innovation and also sustainability, it allows us to be market leaders, to push the industry, to help ignite their brand and their sell-through. It adds value for them.
So there's kind of a mutual understanding on that. And I think it continues to keep us at the forefront.
My last question pertaining to this will be. I know you had a pretty big effort about building a team and getting the kind of right people around you. For us, we talk about how having a purpose and having values allows for the attraction of really top-level candidates who want to come in and feel passionate about what they do, not just earn a paycheck. Would love from your perspective, because this is something that you've been working on over the course of the last year, how does that play in real life?
I think two things, really. One, I do believe we all want to come to work and do something meaningful, right? So if you can actually action your purpose, it's powerful. It's meaningful. We happen to be in a space where most of the employees are also users. They're outdoor enthusiasts or they're athletes or what have you. So they're aligned by the industry, and then you layer on kind of innovation and sustainability. And it's really powerful for them. It becomes demotivating when it's just words on a page, right? So it kind of does the opposite, and so what we have found, and what I found historically speaking, and now at PrimaLoft, is it is an attractor to have authentic, genuine belief in being purpose-driven and to drive strategy and action strategy around that.
But I will also tell you, I think it's been a huge internal motivation for the team that's been there for a really long time, that those tenured employees that have built that already, that built the brand that's there, that they also have this re-energized around what we're doing and that we're actually building plans to advance our sustainability goals. It isn't just one project here or one project there. It is our brand. So I think it's been tremendous for our culture. And one of our big, hairy, audacious goals is to be a culture of innovation that's using innovation to drive performance and sustainability in everyone. I would say in the organization is really proud to work hard against that.
Excellent. Terry, I'm going to go to you and ask a similar question. And I'm going to phrase it in that running an industrial company, that generally you think of industrial as a little bit more hardcore, part of the old economy. And when you talk about values and value-based systems and industrial companies, those things have generally been mutually exclusive. And so we've talked a lot about how this really kind of is near and dear to your heart and how it is so valuable to the Altor platform. But maybe from your perspective as an industrial leader within the portfolio, why is aligning with a values-based organization important for Altor? And how does that deliver for you and the shareholder?
OK, so it's a great question because B2B and industrial is a little different, but people are the same, same emotions, same feelings, same wanting to belong to something, and I will tell you that working with Compass through this, I have a couple of primary examples. One is that we couldn't just go out and raise wages to everybody, even in areas where we were challenged, but we had to come up with a performance management process that would be beneficial to all associates in the company if we were to deliver our goals, and it's self-funding, self-paying, and at the same time generates a much higher return for investors, so I brought that concept to CODI, and because they could see the benefit to the people and how it was going to help us to bond around the culture, we had agreement to move forward very quickly.
We have. It's well received. It's creating value in the company already. That's one example. That may sound minor, but I'm going to tell you, across our 23 factories, or at that time 18, to tell people you're going to move to a performance-based added income, they didn't believe us. They didn't believe us. In fact, when they hit their first payout, there were phone calls to HR saying, hey, I got an extra check. I don't understand this. What happened? So we had to prove that this is reality. Now we went from a lack of ownership or self, to your point, identity to the company, people couldn't, they wouldn't be loyal. We had high turnover rates. I mean, when I walked in, it was really, really high turnover rates. Now that's all settled down.
We now have people thinking about how do we take this thing to the next level? How do we improve these processes? How do we embrace these new challenges we're putting in there? And it's re-engaging the workforce. So to your earlier comment, it's a cultural shift. But there's a reward for that cultural shift. They benefit just like our shareholders benefit. It's a win-win that way. The other side of it is this acquisition. This thing moved fast, quickly. And we worked together hand in hand. It has a lot of, we didn't talk about earlier, but it has a lot of environmental impact too because we are creating new solutions and new services out there that are environmentally friendly. That was not in our industry. As you know, it was not in our DNA when I walked in. We were a plastics manufacturer.
Now we have solutions on the docket with multiple patents, I will say, that are made from 100% recycled paper, and they're 100% recyclable or compostable. That wouldn't even have been talked about when I first walked in. Now we have that in the company. We have Bio-EPS in the company. We have some new opportunities potentially coming out in the near future that are all plant-based, so there's a whole shift and alignment around the environmentally friendly function of the company as well.
One of the things that I love that you've done, and we talked about it earlier, is marrying up the concepts of doing something that is right by people and actually being or by our customers or the planet and actually being able to make more money doing it. And most people think those are mutually exclusive categories. And I want to compliment you again for showing the way that you can both improve wages, improve standards of living, and improve profitability of an organization. And I think it starts by having a culture of saying, "I'm going to challenge the status quo." And nobody's going to have fear of reprisal for saying and putting their hand up to do something differently or made fun of. And I think that does come as a culture.
And you guys, all three of you do that so well, as does everybody else in the portfolio. I want to pick on one point, pick up on one point that you made. And that is the environmental stewardship. And I know we've talked to a lot of people. And they've said, well, wait a minute. We get it with PrimaLoft. That's all based on environmental stewardship and taking plastic out of society. And we get it. That makes sense. But man, you own a company that makes expanded polystyrene. You see what happens when a giant turtle washes ashore with that stuff in its belly. Everybody is rightfully upset over that. And so you have embarked, and we've embarked on these programs to create better environmental sustainability in our products. And would just love your perspective.
I asked Anne something similar, which is a lot of times technology and advancements come with a cost. I know our goal is to not have a cost come with it. But when you deal with your customers and you talk about these new environmental stewardship programs and whether there's a cost associated with it or not, how does that resonate with them? And are they willing to pay more for it? Or how do they kind of view this as we try to take something that is pretty bad for the economy and make it a much better green substituted product?
There's a mix. There's some of the traditional industrials that they talk it, but they're not willing to pay it right now, but we have now, through our robust approach on the raw material sides of things, been able to get it more attractive to them, and they're willing to pay the gap now, and it's not as significant, but now it boils down to how much engineering and re-engineering they have to go through to accept it. We're breaching that hurdle now, and it's taking off, then there's some of our other companies and some of the high-growth companies, they embrace it. They're pushing for it. They're driving for it, especially in the pharmaceutical industry and some of those. They're already planning for the next five years, seven years. Where are you going to be? Where are you going to be with us?
We're meeting with them now more and more. The whole subject discussion is just this. How fast can we do it? How fast can we expect sampling? How fast can we move forward to the next level?
What I love about what you just said there is you said some companies, it's a little harder. And then you said, but our fast-growing companies, and the point being, the fast-growing companies, the better companies that are positioned better in the market and capturing more share are also embracing these same ideas. And so that mix will in and of itself cure. And those others probably go away over time if they don't embrace these ideas. But it's interesting, as you segment just in your own mind, who is generally more willing to entertain this. It's the companies that are already taking share and growing faster. And I think it very much aligns with the things that we do as well. Troy, I'm going to go to you and ask a slightly different question. And that is, it's been your first year now working with Compass.
But as you said, you were a board member with us for kind of a handful of years now. But in your first year, you didn't have a lack of challenges to deal with, PFAS being the biggest. And I can't even imagine what it's like with all the SKUs that we have. And maybe you could tell us how many we have by having to, in some cases, run double that as we transition out of one and into the other. And there's costs associated with that, both in income statement and balance sheet. Just your perspective on the working relationship that we've had in your first year, and especially when you have to encounter something that is unforeseen and challenging and frankly, that came out of our control. There was nothing we could have done to change this.
Yeah, such a great question. And I'll just start off by saying I don't think any CEO ever wants to go through a PFAS transition, certainly not when you're in the pro side of the business where you do a lot of uniforms and you need to be in stock in uniforms. And then in a short period of time, you need to transition. And so it was approximately 70% of our business was professional PFAS-oriented product. And we did a fantastic job of transitioning out of that. But it's very complex. And I'm pleased to say today that we've transitioned the entire store now. And so I knew of that challenge being a board member. But until you're actually in the thick of it, you don't really understand it. And that's the difference of being on management and being at that board position.
And what I'll say is that CODI and the board have been just incredibly supportive. Pat, we have a regular touch base. And Pat likes to tell me that, hey, I handed you a brand that was much healthier and a challenge that's probably bigger than you imagined it would be. And he knew it. He didn't want to tell me that, I think, during the whole recruiting process. And I'd still do it again. And just a big shout out to the entire 5.11 team because it is a Herculean challenge. And they've risen to it, which is really a credit to the culture. And I'm just going to speak about this for a second, Elias. This whole idea of the value set and this idea that it's fluffy. I think about values. And I think about culture. And I think it's about amplification.
Just by way of context, I'll speak for my peers here. We're racehorses. We need to be unleashed. We need to be empowered. You heard Elias talk about the value set. The value set aligns perfectly with this particular set of racehorses. That's why we're here. I believe that culture is not an HR term. It's not something that goes on a wall. Culture is about a shared set of values. It's about a shared set of values that are held generationally. You heard about that today. That shared set of values creates momentum and amplification. That's something we spend a lot of time working our way through as a team, is trying to understand how culture creates value and how we can actually empower a very broad workforce to all be pulling in the same direction against a shared vision.
And CODI gets that. And one of the things that it does is it attracts a particular talent. I obviously came because of that shared set of values. And we have a board that has that shared set of values. And we have a team, management team that shares those values. And what I've found just in the last six months is my ability to attract top racehorses. It's because of this culture that you've heard talked about today. And so relative to my first year, what I really found was that I was empowered. And that's important to me as a CEO is to be empowered. And empowerment is about setting someone up for success. It's not about entitlement. I'm not entitled. I'm empowered by the Compass Diversified. They appropriately challenge me and support me at the same time. And this has been a formidable challenge.
They've been there every step of the way, as has the board been there every step of the way. PFAS is just a piece of what we're dealing with. I think the more exciting piece of it is really just the clarity that we've been driving out through the brand work that we've been doing. The board's been at every step of that. That's required investment. We've made some significant investments. We're dealing with one of the top branding agencies and, as a matter of fact, business transformation agency of the year, two years in a row. Super excited just about the clarity we have. Again, just the support that the entire CODI team has offered us.
And I think the other thing that's been fantastic is every interaction that I've had with the CODI team has represented those values, including Raj is someone that works with me on our business. And I'll regularly just get emails from Raj about this or that. Hey, here's an opportunity. What do you think about it? I've been doing some thinking about the brand. Here's some of my thoughts about it. And so there's just such a buy-in around the vision for 5.11. And I'm excited to share that because I joined this team because I believe in the future of this business. As I mentioned earlier, it's got such a low awareness rate. And I'm sure many of you had no idea what it was in your past. And you know a lot of people that have no idea.
Boy, when that message gets out, this brand is going to. We talk about unleashing wild success. We're sitting on a wild success. That's a lot of what I guess I've experienced this first year, just incredible empowerment from the CODI team.
Just as a follow-up, this business was acquired in 2016. When I went back through that evolution slide, Fox Factory was probably our first innovative business that we bought at a higher multiple. But then this was really kind of the next company that was part of that journey. We only had sprinkled in a couple of these because that's what our cost of capital could allow us to reach to. One of the things that we loved about 5.11 was we always used the term authenticity and that this is a really authentic brand. It means something to its customer. Its customer at the time was principally professional. It was a 90% professional business with a very little consumer side. Today, that is very different.
As you come into an organization now that has a professional business, and that's where authenticity is kind of born from, and you have this consumer opportunity, how do you marry the two of those together? And just as you think about the brand and not diluting some of that authenticity, how you go out into the consumer side and still represent the right brand, the right message, the right product?
Yeah, such a great question, Elias. It's critical to me to be part of an authentic brand. This is absolutely an authentic brand. I touched about it earlier, this brand being born in Yosemite alongside some other very authentic and powerful brands. This idea of challenging what's possible, if you think about the professional side of our business, it really was born from that challenging of what's possible. We brought something new to the professional space, which is why that professional consumer adores 5.11. I'll be attending SHOT Show next week. If you're not familiar with that, that's a big industry event. I attended my first SHOT Show last year. We're not the largest player at SHOT Show. I'll tell you that there's a love affair with 5.11. I was blown away that we always had the most energy and enthusiasm.
Our consumer just loves it. It's because we're innovative and we challenge what's possible. You guys are going to get a chance to get your hands on one of these jackets. You definitely want to get that. This is innovative. It's fantastic. You can throw it in your bag, and so we're about innovation. We're about challenging what's possible. That's what's built the pro side of this business, but it wasn't born a pro business. It was born an outdoor adventure business, and what we've learned, especially as we've gone out and done extensive research this past year, is that the number one reason that somebody loves 5.11 is because of its craftsmanship, its durability, and its versatility, essentially just the quality of 5.11. This is a consumer business, and our consumers are passionate about us. That's the reason they say they love us.
Price is way at the bottom of the list. It's about the innovation and the quality of 5.11, both on the pro side and on the consumer side. Another interesting data point is that the number one application that our customers report in terms of use of our product is everyday casual wear. So that's who our customer is. These are customers who challenge what's possible. They wear it to work. And they choose us for their casual wear. And what's fascinating is that our customer is what we call trailblazers. And people that are out serving every day, whether they're on the battlefield or the front line or a fire, these are trailblazers. And there are a lot of trailblazers in the world. And it is actually right now the perfect time to be a trailblazer.
And we're in the business of providing trailblazers with the gear and the products that they need to really challenge what's possible. And so it is so authentic. This is not a marketing campaign. This is who Royal Robbins was. This is who 5.11 attracts. That was one of the things I was most pleased about, but not surprised about, was the tenure of 5.11 leadership and who it attracts. Very passionate, values-based, and purposeful leaders. And so it just comes from a place of authenticity. And we're just getting super excited about where this brand can go over the next five years.
Perfect. I have one last question. And I'll have it for both you, Anne, and Troy. When we collaborate on products together, and Troy's the customer and you're the ingredient brand, how does that work? Are you guys ready to fist fight? I know we have a couple of products that we've done together. And it's something that we do support, obviously, working across the portfolio. But the ability for you guys to work together, how has that gone in the past? And how do you look at that just as you're thinking across the portfolio, especially, Anne, as you have ingredients that could work with other of the companies?
Yeah, well, transparently, I think it's been our first year together. Lots doing in our own individual brands. But I have to say that I work directly with Zach and Ryan most often. And they are constantly bringing connections for me. And also, I want to mention Phelan and Hannah too because whether those connections are about industry information that's going on at a macro level to help us where we don't have the resources to go get it, or if it's saying, hey, this is what's going on with another brand, another subsidiary under CODI, what they're seeing and what have you. So far, to date, a lot of the connections are coming from CODI management team that I work with on a daily basis. But these opportunities and talking, Troy and I chatted last night and found out our backgrounds are very similar and have overlapped a lot.
So, no doubt, as I dig in, have more time and get to know, we're seeing the business opportunities. The walk over to dinner last night, Terry and I talking about what he's interested in doing and where our technology might play even on that sector. So, there are a lot of opportunities for us to kind of think outside of the box and what we haven't done in the past just based on the CODI connections for sure.
Perfect. I want to thank all three of you and everybody for coming today. You three are part of the broader portfolio. But you do represent incredibly well our values and the organization. You run exciting businesses for us. I have great optimism for 2025 out of all three businesses. I know you three wouldn't want to get over your skis, but probably that's my role a little bit in thinking that all three companies are set up extraordinarily well. It's because of the efforts of what you guys have been doing. On behalf of the board, our shareholders, the management team, it's because of, as Troy said, resources like you and throughout our entire organization, we can deliver the results that we do and have exceptional performance.
We may be the ones who get to talk about it a lot, but you guys are the ones that are delivering it. Thank you very much. Thank you all for supporting us and being part of our organization to this point. We look forward to your future support as we move forward.
Thank you.
Thank you. As Elias said, you guys are welcome to go out through those doors behind you for lunch and to enjoy the CODI Corner. Thank you again. We appreciate it.