It's my pleasure to have from Custom Truck One Source here today with us CEO Ryan McMonagle, CFO Chris Eperjesy, and Vice President of Investor Relations Brian Perman. Custom Truck One Source is one of the largest providers of specialty equipment such as bucket trucks, parts, tools, accessories, and services to the electric, utility transmission and distribution, communications, and rail markets in North America. The differentiated one-stop shop business model. Custom Truck offers its specialized equipment to a diverse customer base for the maintenance, repair, and upgrade and installation of critical infrastructure assets, including electric lines, telecommunications networks, and rail systems. The company's coast-to-coast rental fleet of more than 10,000 units includes aerial devices, boom trucks, cranes, digger derricks, pressure drills, stringing gear, high rail equipment, repair parts, tools, and accessories.
We'll be using a fireside chat format today. I'll ask management some high-level questions upfront and get us an overview of the business. Later in the session, I'll pivot to questions asked by you from the audience. Getting started, gentlemen, could you please provide an overview of your portfolio of specialty rental fleet offerings and highlight their respective asset characteristics such as asset life, rental durations, and fleet age? Thanks.
Absolutely. Scott, thank you for having us. We certainly appreciate your invitation to participate. Thank you for listening. We love talking about Custom Truck. To just jump right in, we'll start with the rental fleet as Scott requested. Here, we think about the rental fleet as follows. It's 10,000 vehicles today. As Scott mentioned, about 70% of the rental fleet is primarily focused on the utility end market. That means bucket trucks that are used to go up in the air and work on power lines, digger derricks, which are used to dig holes in the ground, and then some of the adjacent equipment, things like pulling and stringing gear as well. About 70% of the fleet is used primarily for utility. About 10% of the fleet is focused on rail and telecom.
Think about chassis-driven trucks with rail gear on them to ride up and down the railroad that can be used for maintenance of the way gear or to perform construction in and around a rail track. The remainder of what we call our specialty vocational trucks, that's things like hydro excavators, things like some of our specialty dump trucks, some of our large water trucks, some of our service trucks as well. Together, it's about 10,000 units, as I mentioned. As you think about some of the characteristics of the fleet, I'd highlight a few. One is the useful life of the assets. Typically, it depends on the type, between 10 and 20 years of useful life for each of the assets. These are long-lived assets that I think are really important.
It's really important to understand the duration of our rental contracts is generally about one year. It's just over one year today. The average piece of equipment stays out on rent for just over a year is where the fleet is sitting as of today. One of the things that is really unique about our fleet is that it's a very young fleet. The age today is just over three years old. The fleet's young when you think about a three-year-old fleet in relation to a 10 or 20 year useful life. That's been intentional on our part to make sure we keep the age of the fleet young. We've been investing heavily in the fleet the last few years to actually bring down that age a bit. We think it's a competitive advantage to have a fleet that is that young.
Thanks for that. Custom Truck has a very unique one-stop shop business model. If you could please discuss how you're differentiated via your integrated production capabilities and broad offering of rental, sales, and aftermarket parts and services.
Sure. I think, as Scott said, that what we call the one-stop shop model really does start with the ability, the integrated production capability that we have. What that means is that we are outsourcing directly the attachment from somebody like Terex or Versalift or Galbrith or some of our largest attachment providers. We will go source the chassis directly. We will source that directly with Peterbilt or Freightliner or Ram or Ford in the case of some of our smaller chassis. We will go source that directly. We obviously purchase that through the dealer network. We will go source bodies directly as well from a variety of providers. In some cases, we will manufacture our own body or attachment. That is something that we have added recently with the Lode King brand and some of the product that we are bringing to that market.
It starts with that integrated production capability. One of the things that is unique about us is that we put together the majority of the trucks that we either put into our rental fleet or we ultimately end up selling. To me, we know we have some real economies of scale and a cost advantage because of the volume at which we put trucks together. It starts with integrated production, but then it is taking care of the customer however they want to consume the equipment. Scott mentioned it. It is the rental part of the business, which we spoke about. It is the sales side of the business where we sell new and used vocational trucks.
It is offering aftermarket parts and service, which is we use our service locations first to take care of our rental fleet, but then we also will sell parts and sell service to the customers that we sell equipment to as well. Our view is that having the one-stop shop model means we can take care of the customer however they want to consume equipment. The majority of our customers both rent and purchase equipment from us, depending on where they are on their CapEx planning process or where they are on their budgets or the time of the year or the type of project that they're working on. We think having that integrated one-stop shop model is certainly a strategic advantage and has allowed us to grow at the pace that we've grown over the last 10 or 20 years, for sure.
Thanks. Could you please share an overview of the end markets that you serve and the demand trends that you're presently seeing?
Sure. I think this is one of the things that is really unique about Custom Truck. We talk about four primary end markets. Utility today, or T&D, transmission and distribution, is the largest end market for us. Today, about 55% of our revenue comes from the utility end market. The second end market is infrastructure. Infrastructure broadly is things like road and bridge work, certainly non-residential construction falls in there. We put refuse in the infrastructure end market as well. Today, that accounts for just under 30% of our revenue. We talk about rail and telecom as well. Rail and telecom are each just under 5% of total revenue. If you think about drivers in each of those end markets, utility is in a good spot.
There's obviously a lot of demand for work on the grid, both on the transmission side and the distribution side of things. You think about some of the drivers of just grid upgrades. You think about electrification as a broad trend and obviously data centers as a broad trend that we can spend some more time talking about. We feel really good about the tailwinds of the utility end market. Infrastructure continues to have good tailwinds as well. There's obviously a lot of demand for our equipment in some of the non-residential construction areas that we're seeing. Plenty of road and bridge work. Certainly, as we think about the onshoring that is happening right now, that is also good work for some of our infrastructure exposure.
There is some federal stimulus that still is being invested that we think is supporting both the utility and the infrastructure end market. Rail, I always describe as kind of a steady plotter for us. There continues to be investment that's being made. Some of that is coming from the IIJA bill. It is also coming from class one and short line and some of the regional networks who are continuing to invest in their rail network. Telecom as well. Telecom is probably the softest of the four markets for us right now. We still think there is plenty of pent-up demand there as you think about some of the capital rollouts that need to happen. You think about things like BEAD money that is expected to be released later this year or the beginning of next year.
I would say that it's the softest of the foreign markets. Very bullish on utility and infrastructure, and rail is in a very good spot as well.
Thanks. Appreciate that. When you all reported, though, last week, the first quarter results, you'd highlighted secular tailwinds driven by data center investments, manufacturing, onshoring, electrification, and utility grid upgrades. Loosely just touched on those. If you could elaborate upon the opportunities in general, as well as the potential magnitude and timing of financial benefit to Custom Truck.
Sure. Yeah. I think I would probably highlight them in the reverse order of how we mentioned them. I think utility grid upgrade is certainly the biggest driver for us. There is a lot of pent-up demand of new transmission lines that need to be built and just maintenance and expansion that has to happen on the distribution grid as well. Those are two things we are watching closely. We are watching transmission line miles, both started and expected to complete, as a good indicator for us on the amount of transmission work that is coming. We are also watching closely some of the rate case approvals that have happened or are expected to occur. Those seem to be good indicators of when there is additional demand for distribution equipment to be consumed. We are feeling very encouraged by the tailwinds that we are seeing there.
Electrification, obviously, the pace of electrification has slowed, but electrification overall still seems to be happening. That is, again, just good support for our customers and for the types of projects that our equipment is used on. I think we're feeling good kind of about that dynamic. Manufacturer onshoring is a good trend for two reasons. One, there's obviously a construction component of that that's helpful for some of our more specialty vocational products. Then, obviously, those are large consumers of power as well. I think there's a lot of work for our utility contractors in that case. That would end in data centers too. Data centers obviously are a great underlying demand driver for the amount of power that's needed from a generation and transmission and distribution standpoint.
Those are not projects that are, it's not as though when we hear about a new data center project, there is an immediate uplift for our equipment. More broadly, they're just very good projects for our customers to work on, which means that they're continuing to need our equipment. All four of those are positive. That's some of what you've seen when we reported Q1, when we reported 13% growth in the ERS segment. Those are all, for the most part, skewed towards benefiting the rental fleet a little bit more. We talked about our call in Q1, some of the fundamentals of the rental fleet, a 440 basis point improvement where utilization is now back up to 78%. Up in the mid to low 70's at this time last year. I think it's why we communicated.
We're feeling very good about how the quarter developed and built during the first quarter and why we're feeling good about April and the beginnings of the second quarter as well.
Thanks. Let's head over into the world of tariffs. How do you view potential tariffs impacting Custom Truck One Source's procurement costs? How do you intend to manage supplier pricing and customer pricing, that element of that? Do you anticipate the potential for significant impact on volume demand for your offerings?
Sure. Look, it's certainly the new topic that we're spending a lot of time on. There are a couple of things I'd highlight. First is that our business is very well positioned and somewhat insulated from it for two reasons. The first is the rental fleet. Having $1.5 billion of assets that are young is certainly a very good dynamic in an inflationary environment. We think we are really well positioned with that. The second is, Scott, we have just over $1 billion of new inventory on the ground too. That's all pre-tariffed if we're going to think about it from a cost standpoint. In an inflationary environment, again, it is good to have that equipment on the ground to be able to sell or add to our rental fleet.
Scott, one of the things that we've been doing is we have great relationships with our attachment suppliers and with our chassis suppliers. We have been, and we mentioned it on the call, but we pulled forward some of our chassis supply into the first quarter. You'll see more of it show up in the second quarter as well. We were quick to go ahead and order the majority of what we needed for the calendar year. There is some cost increase in there, but at least it's quantified and known. We felt like it was the right decision with what we needed to go ahead and pull that equipment forward.
That is where we have the most exposure to tariffs when you think about Canada and Mexico, in particular, as some of our chassis suppliers have production in Canada, some have it in Mexico. They also have it in the U.S. They are going through their exercise of figuring out where they are going to be building their trucks. Our decision was to go ahead and place orders so that we can lock in pricing on those orders on chassis. A similar story with our attachments. The majority of that supply chain is domestic. Very little exposure to China, very little to Europe. There are some things that come from both. We have done as much as we could to go ahead and pre-order to minimize the impact of tariffs.
Where there is some cost pressure to us, we anticipate that we will have to pass some of that through to our customers as well. We have done the best we could to minimize the cost impact from tariffs. We feel like we really are in a good position. We are certainly in a strong relative position too with some of our competitors.
Excellent. Thanks. Also on the first quarter call, you'd indicated strong rental demand across your primary end markets alluded to hesitancy from smaller customers to purchase vehicles who, in some cases, are choosing to rent a vehicle instead. If you could address this dynamic, discuss how you allocate capital to rental versus sales and why.
Sure. No, and it's interesting to watch. Look, we're in a unique position because we can rent or sell equipment to customers. What we've seen, what we're working on quantifying, is some of our smaller customers have said they're going to hold off on buying a new truck. That's obviously a large capital expense for our customers. They've said they're going to hold off. In some cases, they've said, "You know what? We'll rent it from you for the time being." We're uniquely positioned to be able to do that. We can quickly say, "Sure, we'll rent that truck to you," or we might use what we call a rental purchase option right on that truck where they have the right to buy it for a period of time in the future. To me, we're uniquely positioned there.
I think that's the dynamic of tariffs that we're watching most closely is what does it do to small customers' demand and their willingness to buy or continue to invest, which, again, we think we're well positioned because we have the rental fleet. We're watching closely to see how that develops over the next several weeks and months.
Just the profiles of rental versus sales, a little bit of a different margin profile, but both are good businesses for you from a return perspective. Could you just kind of speak to the different profiles of the two?
Sure. Yeah. So you're right, Scott. So clearly, the rental business is much more capital intensive. We're using our own balance sheet in investing in the rental fleet. It is lower revenue, higher gross margin percentage. We talk about kind of on rental revenue, it's kind of that marginal gross margin, about 75% in terms of gross margin on that side of the business. We talk about on-ring yield as kind of the revenue potential of an asset. We talk about a 38%-40% kind of of the cost of the equipment as the revenue potential. Then, Scott, as you know, we talk about unlevered returns on capital in the high teens to low 20's. As you think about that, we love deploying our balance sheet to deliver kind of that incremental high teens to low 20's for unlevered ROIC.
We think it's a great use of capital. We'll continue to do that. On the sales side of the business, you're talking about less capital intensity. As Chris has highlighted, we can foreplan the majority, the far majority of the cost of the equipment. We will sell and generate kind of a mid-teens gross margin on that side of the business. Less capital intensity, lower gross margin percentage. Again, we're very comfortable with the return on capital that implies on that side of the business.
Thanks. I want to move over to pricing. Could you talk about the pricing environment across your primary asset classes as well as your broader picture of pricing strategy, but just kind of the here and now and then looking out forward on what you plan to achieve?
Yeah, I'll take that one, Scott. Maybe just to start, kind of an overall pricing strategy comment. First and foremost, as you'd expect, general macro market dynamics, including demand, product availability, as well as end market-specific factors, definitely impact our overall pricing strategy. Having said that, we believe we have a unique competitive ability to offer quality products with exceptional customer service and greater product availability at scale, which definitely allows us to price accordingly. If you look from a high level, our targeted adjusted gross profit margins by segment are for our rental business, low to mid 70%. Our rental asset sales, mid 20%. Then for TES, our new sales, we've set a target of 15%-18%. If you look at ERS, we previously discussed that in 2023, I think we took two price increases, roughly 10%.
Last year, we did not take any meaningful price increases, just given the overall environment and particularly some of the challenges that we experienced in our T&D end market that we have discussed previously. For this year, we discussed that we have taken a 3%-5% increase at the start of the year. On the TES side, if you look historically, we are definitely not known as the cheapest option available. Customers, we feel, really are paying for the quality, the service, and the availability that we have. That said, we definitely have to remain competitive in the market. Pricing always has to be relative to what we are seeing in the market with an eye to maintaining the margins in that desired range that I gave of 15%-18%.
We've also discussed historically our ability to pass through and to adjust contracted price based on vendor surcharges for higher input costs, like steel, imported parts, and as Ryan just talked about on the tariff side. That is kind of our overall strategy and what we've done over the last couple of years.
Thanks. Let's talk now about the national footprint, 40 locations across the U.S., Canada, I believe, including a new location in Portland, Oregon. I think that's opening in a couple of months. You said you're targeting several additional sites over the next few years. Can you speak to your greenfield strategy and just the benefits of the broad footprint?
Yeah, absolutely. If you look at last year, we added four locations. We acquired two of those locations. We acquired a business in Louisiana. We acquired a business on Long Island in New York. We opened two greenfield locations. We opened Salt Lake City and we opened in Sacramento, California. This year, so far, we've just announced the one greenfield location in Portland. I think that's been our approach. When you look at our dots on a map, there's a clear lack of presence in the Pacific Northwest. In the Carolinas, I think you see that there's a lack of dots in that market more broadly. I think our approach has been, let's look for acquisitions and let's also be very open to greenfield. Whichever of those options makes the most sense is what we'll move forward with.
It makes the most sense, means the right location at the right rate if we're greenfielding into it and/or the right acquisition to acquire the right multiple if we're acquiring it. Scott, we've gotten really comfortable with both our accretives. When we bought businesses, it's been at a set of multiples that's obviously less than where we trade today. When we're stepping into a new greenfield site, we are generally leasing the building. It's less than $1 million of CapEx to really get a facility up and running. It's contributing positive gross profit, certainly within the first few months. Our approach on those, Scott, has been to generally follow where our customers are. Generally, that means we're following where a rental customer is operating or has been operating for a period of time.
As we build critical mass in that market, we open a location to be able to service that market. Obviously, as we open a location, we then are able to identify and begin to service additional customers in that region. It has proven to be a good model. I think the pace of a couple of locations a year feels about right. For us, it is really just identifying where there are clear pockets and then being open to either acquiring [audio distortion].
Thanks. Just a couple more prepared questions from me, and then we can open it up. Just a reminder on the lines, please feel free to send through any questions. For my next one, probably Chris for you, what's your free cash flow outlook for this year? What are the drivers? If you could speak to free cash flow kind of longer term on what you hope to achieve. Thanks.
Yeah. We've guided that our target for this year for levered free cash flow is $50 million-$100 million. On the most recent earnings call, we also indicated that the tariff environment, we'd made the decision to tactically pull forward some of our chassis receipts. While that's not necessarily going to increase total receipts for the year, it certainly is going to have an impact on the timing of our inventory reduction efforts, with those reductions likely coming in the second half of the year. We've also previously indicated that we finished 2024 with about nine months or just under nine months of whole goods inventory on hand and that our target is six months on hand by the end as we move through this year and into next year.
The primary drivers of that levered free cash flow are obviously going to be the EBITDA growth, but also the networking capital improvement that we think we're going to get in the second half of this year. When you think about cash flow, the biggest lever obviously is the investment we do in the rental fleet. This year, we've said between $375 million and $400 million of gross investment in the rental fleet. Typically, we're going to have proceeds on the sale of equipment coming out of roughly $200 million or just right around $200 million. Net investment in the fleet of $200 million, but we can flex that depending how the year goes. We'll use any levered free cash flow that we have to pay down debt.
As we've indicated, our goal is to get as close to four times by the end of this year and then by the end of 2026 to get down closer to three times or below three times by the end of 2026. We expect we can continue to have meaningful levered free cash flow as we go forward.
Thanks. Just a use of cash, obviously debt reduction is a priority, but how do you guys just think about capital application? Ryan, you were speaking earlier about M&A. Just how do you think about the prioritization, obviously with debt reduction seeming to be the priority right now?
Yeah. As I just mentioned, investing in the rental fleet, obviously given the long-term demand across pretty much all of our end markets, continues to be a priority for us. However, we're going to continue to balance that with our stated target of getting our net leverage below three times by the end of next year. As I said, we tend to use, we're intending to use our levered free cash flow this year to reduce our net leverage. We also, over the past few years, I think we've purchased 22 million shares roughly of our stock, $110 million at an average price of about $5. We have largely exhausted those approvals from the board. Certainly, we believe this demonstrated our commitment to shareholder value, and we felt it was a good use and optimizing our use of capital.
As we look forward, deleveraging remains a primary and important goal for us. On the M&A front, I'll let Ryan chime in here. We've done a couple of small tuck-in kind of acquisitions. I think one was right around $4 million and one I think was just under $2 million. And so while there's lots of opportunities out there, there's nothing in the pipeline right now, and deleveraging continues to be a priority for us. Ryan, anything you'd add on the M&A front?
No, I think you hit it well. I agree with how you prioritize.
Thanks, guys. I appreciate that. Thanks for tackling all those questions. I'm going to go to the audience list now. First one's on backlog, and I'm going to add on top of it. The question is, how is your demand? How is backlog? And if you guys could maybe just kind of talk about that with some segmentation, that would be appreciated. Thanks.
Sure. Yeah, I'll start, and certainly Chris can chime in, but backlog's in a good spot would be the answer. In the first quarter, we actually saw backlog grow by over $50 million. I think it was $51 million with backlog increase. So I think it's just under five months on hand. We've given that range of we like backlog to be in that four- six months on hand range. That seems to be a healthy spot for where the business has been when you look at it all the way back to 2021 and even before then. Obviously, it peaked at over 12 months in 2023 and the beginning of early 2024. That four- six months really is the sweet spot from where we have some visibility to what we're building. We still can react quickly and sell equipment to our customers.
I think we feel like we're in a good spot. We like that it grew in Q1. The interesting thing in Q1 is that we actually saw backlog increase most in our specially truck categories. We saw a big pickup in vacuum and dump trucks in particular in the quarter, which we thought was encouraging. We've seen great demand on utility and forestry as well, but we saw a significant uptick in the quarter. The majority of that $51 million was within our specialty truck category.
Appreciate it. Next one, just a very high-level general question. How do you think about long-term growth? What's your expected long-term growth rate and your margin profile? That's it. Thanks.
Yeah, I'll talk growth, and Chris can talk margin maybe. Look, we think there are good secular tailwinds in our end markets. I think a lot of the macro forecasts would put kind of mid-single-digit growth rates on the majority of our end markets, certainly when you think about utility. We've given that guide in terms of how we think we can grow the fleet, kind of at that mid- to upper-single-digit range from ability for that fleet. I think if you look at our TES segment, we've grown faster than that. I think we're comfortable historically, and I think we're comfortable with continued market share growth story on that side of the business.
I think you end up with high single-digit, low double-digit type growth rate that feels achievable when we think about the end markets and our strategy. I'll let Chris maybe comment on the margin profile.
Yeah. As I mentioned in response to one of your earlier questions, Scott, the way we look at it, rental, we set kind of a target of low to mid 70% adjusted gross profit margins kind of over the long term on rental asset sales in the mid 20%, on the high end, maybe the high 20% range. On TES, 15%-18%. As we think about it, that's kind of our long-term targets for each of those segments. Obviously, there's going to be a mixed impact. If you're looking at adjusted gross profit margin on a consolidated basis or EBITDA margin, there could be some movement there that is really just based on the mix between the three businesses.
Thanks. There is only one more left in queue. We have three minutes. This is probably the last one, guys, unless anything else sneaks in. Can you differentiate what you are seeing right now between larger and smaller customers and why?
That's a good question. We are seeing good demand from both. I will say that. We are seeing our larger customers put a little bit more equipment in backlog, right? We are seeing some uptick in backlog from some of our larger customers. We are seeing, obviously, our large customers, the large utility contractors are doing, I'll say, a majority of the transmission work. I think we are seeing certainly favorable tailwinds from those. We are seeing good demand from our small customers, and we are seeing growth. The comment that I'll highlight to you is that we are seeing our small customers maybe be a little more patient or taking a little bit more of a wait-and-see approach on purchases. We have observed that. We are watching that closely. What they are doing is they are pivoting over to renting. Ultimately, that's good for Custom Truck.
It obviously has a different dynamic, the TES versus the ERS segment, but ultimately good for Custom Truck One Source. I would say overall, it certainly feels like it's a good demand environment for our customers, probably.
Great. Thanks. Guys, we're going to wrap it there. We're on time, and that's everything I have in the pipeline. Thanks. It was a great overview. Really appreciate it. Thanks, audience, for listening and the questions. Gentlemen, again, appreciate it very much.
Thank you, Scott. We appreciate it. Have a great day.