All right, well, thank you, everyone, for joining us here in Nashville for the Stephens Conference. I'm Stephens analyst Tommy Moll. Thank you also for your interest specifically in Distribution Solutions Group, where, to my right, the company's CEO and Chairman, Bryan King, is sitting. To Bryan's right, the company's CFO, Ron Knutson, is sitting. Bryan, Ron, thank you for your time and joining us in Nashville and meeting with our investor clients this week.
Thanks, Tom.
Thank you, Tommy. We love being here, and we love our relationship with Stephens. Appreciate you guys giving us an opportunity to see a bunch of our investors, see some familiar faces in the room, and a bunch of you all who I don't know. I look forward to telling you a little bit about our business, and I've been on the other side of this table for the better part of since 1993 at your conferences, so I'm happy to be able to contribute where I can.
Yeah. Well, you mentioned some folks in the room you haven't met yet, and that's by design. We do attract a pretty broad spectrum of investors to this conference, and so I always like to start off with some overview questions for folks who maybe have heard of your company before but never really done a deep dive. So maybe just to start, Bryan, give folks a sense for how today's DSG is really a specialty distributor that's a tie-up of a number of different businesses going back a handful of years.
Sure. You know, if you don't know it, DSG has its roots in three businesses that we were involved with, or that I was as chairman. One of them was Lawson, which had been a public company since the early 1970s. It's a 73-year-old business or so, and it has a very attractive VMI-focused Class C Parts MRO business that had gone through a tough chapter about 12, 13 years ago where they converted a bunch of their salespeople. I know Tommy hates it when I go back in time this far, but they had 1,500 sellers that were contract sellers, 1099, and they got converted. 750 of them came over to become W-2 sellers after the Department of Labor, in their infinite judgment, wanted to start getting payroll taxes. So the business had to go through a pretty big reset. I had taken Industrial Distribution Group private in 2008.
I was a 15% shareholder of it and was chairing it actively at the time and really very much appreciated how, in our integrated supply business, the Class C parts are super complicated. There's a lot of them, and there's a lot of technical expertise to them, as you might be surprised, and just managing them inside of a facility takes a lot of time. So we had contracted Lawson to step in to be our partner, and we became Lawson's largest customer at IDG. And it gave me an opportunity, as a customer of Lawson, to appreciate how hard it is to disintermediate that service offering and how valuable it is, even to us as a distributor who is managing the store rooms or the supply rooms for about 1,100 major manufacturing facilities in the U.S. or some around the world.
And so that business I was attracted to, and so I started buying shares in it in the open market in 2014 at about a little over $5 a share today and built a position in just buying shares, as a public investor would, to where we got to over 20%. I went on the board in 2016 or 2017. I became chairman of the board in 2018, 2019 after we did a bunch of channel analysis, looked at the business and what it was going to take to unlock a lot of the structural EBITDA margin that we saw inside of the company, and did a lot of channel work with some third parties and some of our competitors, or what you would think might be our competitors, some of the biggest specialty distributors out there that are public.
Talked to them about how hard our model was from a labor perspective, how important it was for a lot of our customers, how it was difficult to disintermediate, and so we got more and more comfortable that just owning the business and compounding it long-term would be an attractive investment for our capital. Meanwhile, we were trying to figure out how to solve for the fact that Lawson had a fixed infrastructure that had been built to be a bigger company back when they had 1,500 sellers, and they still were not managing the sales force in an optimized manner because they were still treating them very differently because they had been historically contractors, so they believed that they owned their book of business. It was their book of business, their customers, so there wasn't the sort of technology tools that had been invested in the sales force.
There wasn't the sort of oversight or management of a salesperson's customer list and their sales territories that you would more actively manage than most businesses that would be managing 1,000 sellers, and so we went to try and look at ways to scale it. We looked at a lot of different acquisitions to try and tackle, and one of them was an acquisition that we looked at Gexpro Services. It was a business that I'd been attracted to years before. I'd been chasing it since 2006 when GE decided to sell it to Rexel. It was the kind of orphan division. The rest of it was all electrical products focused. Gexpro Services was the Gexpro division that was focused on Class C parts and very specialized products that, if you think about them, they're managing a product all the way through the manufacturing process.
They're on the line, and over 70% of their parts are specced specifically for that product. So they are customized products where the engineering requirements, the specifications are conveyed from the original manufacturer, and they're handed over to Gexpro Services to go source from the very best manufacturing channel partner of those small Class C parts and then manage both the cost of as well as the product management all the way through the production line. And so it's a very embedded, 98% recurring relationship. And what you find is it's a long lead time sales engagement, but once you get involved with those customers, you typically, once you land, you try and expand your wallet share with the customer as you demonstrate your value. And that's what we had seen out of Gexpro Services for the better part of the prior 20 years.
I had an intimate kind of familiarity to the business because my best friend in graduate school was over that business for GE, same team that's still running it today, and so we had gone after it in 2006. We stayed after it. We got it bought in February 2020. I'd offered it to Lawson at the time, but it was just too big for Lawson to be able to handle. It was a bigger acquisition than they had the financial wherewithal to swallow, so we came back together and started thinking about, because we'd been looking at OEM relationships for Lawson to engage with, and by bringing Gexpro Services into the family fold, if you will, we started collaborating on ways that we could work together. We developed that to a spot where we were looking at an acquisition together that was large.
We weren't able to ultimately get it done. It sold to a bigger private equity firm, but it did have us go all the way through the intellectual process of pulling TestEquity, Lawson, and Gexpro Services together, each of which brings some specialty capabilities to the table and to be able to collaborate both in terms of the way that they manage their cost structure, the way that they innovate with tools, and the way that they are able to ultimately deliver collaboratively a better experience to their customers. And so we're capital allocators at the top level where I sit. I mean, I've got 10 people on my investment team. We don't take any fee dollars out of the company. We own 78% of the business beneficially with my individual shares and then some that our family owns. I own about 22% of the company.
And we look at the buying and selling and transacting and flipping of private equity as not very tax and risk efficient from a personal perspective. I only work with taxable partners on private equity. A third of the capital that we put to work is our own. And most of the capital that we have with us are people that have made money building companies, and over 60 of those are C-suite executives that have made their wealth in industrial distribution. And so it's a collaborative effort across that ecosystem, and we didn't want to sell these businesses. We felt like that there was a long runway in front of us to continue to execute the playbook. And so that's kind of how we got to where we are today, Tom. It's a long answer, but.
Yeah. And you touched, Bryan, on some of the incentive alignment here, but to the extent you can share, just give us some framing on how big a piece of the broader Luther King portfolio DSG represents. And then in your capacity as board member and CEO, how much compensation do you draw?
Yeah. So I draw zero, but I'm super aligned because of the 22%, if you will. We have about $600 million of at-risk capital deployed in DSG just for, I don't know if I've ever talked about that, but we've got nine figures of capital left in reserve if we want to deploy the capital, which I suspect we will at some point in the project or could access through Coinvest a whole lot, several hundred million dollars more if we wanted to. The real objective here is to, we manage over $30 billion, so we're not a really large firm, but we're not a small firm either.[inaudible] Our company is a C Corp. We control the business still as a family, but have a lot of really great partners that own a piece of the company, up to 20% maybe in aggregate.
And the firm owns a piece of DSG, but most of it's owned outside of the firm, obviously. Tommy, our lens is that we think that owning businesses, be it public shares in companies or private companies that have really strong free cash flow engines and have the ability to continue to reinvest capital at high rates, high incremental returns on capital rates, allow us to be really risk efficient in the way that we compound money over time. And given our long lens of time here and flexibility, we're able to take a lens that a lot of other private equity investors that work for tax-exempt money or that are really in the velocity of capital mode have a tougher time doing.
Now, what we're seeing across the marketplace, as many of you all may know, is that increasingly the best assets in the private markets, people don't want to let loose of them. So they're doing more continuation fund vehicles. They're selling them cross funds to each other, to themselves, or they're staying involved in them, just like the one that I talked about earlier about with Witt, where we would continue to own part of it going forward. And that's just a reality, and that's where we were on these three businesses and what we saw in the marketplace to continue to engage in businesses that were able to be tuck-in acquisitions that could enhance different parts of the lines of businesses that we had inside of the three verticals to drive the improved long-term competitive position and profitability and returns out of those verticals.
You've talked a number of times, Bryan, about acquisitions, and that is certainly part of the DSG strategy that's been well established prior to today. Maybe you could help us understand how do you manage the pipeline, in particular the staffing, both at the DSG level and then also behind the scenes, I guess you could say, at the Luther King level?
Sure. I have a long-standing partner, senior partner of our team that works very intimately with Ron and each of the three vertical teams on KPIs that have to do with performance or operational improvement initiatives that we're working through to drive accountability, and then also on identifying through a framework on each of the verticals and then across the verticals where we think we have the opportunity for the improvement or enhancement, if you will, of our structural objectives around organic revenue growth, improvement in our customer intimacy, and ultimately our margin profile long-term and our return profile longer term.
We're framing out as best we can as we're going through our analysis operationally and kind of driving objectives at each of the vertical levels in concert with the management teams where we think we could go find acquisitions to improve the overall kind of long-term structural performance of the company. Underneath Brad Wallace, who's my partner, I have a team that is of senior investment professionals and then more junior investment professionals who are working on each of those objectives. They're working in concert either with people that work for Ron in the finance teams or the commercial leadership teams to identify and our M&A team at DSG. We've got buy-side brokers that are out looking for specific objectives that we have. I think we've engaged with 800 different acquisition opportunities over the last three years.
And so that pipe is really robust, but the filter is very specific. And so what we're trying to do is drop a lot into the pipe, and the buy-side guys just are grabbing, the buy-side brokers are grabbing as many different engagements as possible where they can kind of open a conversation. And then it's up to us to try and figure out where they fit in our framework and how it's going to unlock or drive value. If we were just trying to aggregate content indiscriminately, and if we were planning on selling the platform for the kind of the greater multiple theory, then we would be moving much more quickly with acquisitions.
If you look at the way that the business that we were trying to acquire several years ago that kind of prompted the formality of the conversation between Gexpro Services and Lawson, that business, we didn't buy it. It sold for 13.5x EBITDA to a really well-regarded private equity firm. They have acquired in the period of the last several years, they've tripled their EBITDA through just grabbing a bunch of really good assets, but assets that they've kind of just bolted underneath an umbrella without an intentionality around integrating and without an intentionality around trying to optimize because ultimately they would expect that a bigger private equity firm is going to buy that cash flow stream and pay a really high multiple, and they're going to get some level of multiple arbitrage.
Right now, the private markets have been in kind of a tough spot. It's been a really attractive time for us to be able to engage in some conversations that are the types of conversations that can ultimately lead to some more transformative opportunities for DSG. The tuck-ins that we've been able to get done, the five that we've done this year, are part of a really robust list, but those five were very specifically against objectives that we had laid out, and the environment that we were in allowed us to buy those, and they were more actionable than if it was a more competitive. We've yet to buy something since we've put together DSG, the 11 businesses that we've bought, not one of them has been in an auction process.
So it's been nice that we've been able to have all those acquisitions done in a direct way. Part of that's because we've been in the market. I mean, I've done 150 controlled transactions in the space over the last two decades. And so we came to the marketplace already as a known acquirer. We had a lot of lines in the water. We had a lot of relationships, but then we also, each of the verticals have a lot of relationships themselves, and they're helping open up dialogues. And then it's our job to try and do the underwriting and to do the capital, ultimately the capital allocation.
So while the board ultimately makes a decision, there's no doubt by the time we get it to the board level that we've already tried to vet out all the things that we think could be objections, issues at the board level and make sure that we are demonstrating why an acquisition is absolutely going to drive a lot of value to that vertical and to the whole of DSG.
Through the 11 acquisitions that Bryan mentioned, we've acquired about $900 million in revenues. That's over the, call it, 30 months since we've put together DSG and about $75 million of acquired EBITDA as well, so when we put DSG together, we were not trying to build out a huge kind of corporate infrastructure, although the M&A team, we did build out a team of three individuals that Bryan referenced that work really, really close with the LKCM team as well as the CEOs and the CFOs of the three operating verticals as well.
We also have an operational team that is a third-party consulting but captive to our private equity efforts team. They mostly work on IT, so they are dealing with AI and technology tools. But as part of that, they also operate as the kind of PMO, and they manage integration and the KPIs and try to really measure how we're doing against what we underwrote to and trying to make sure that our teams that are at the operating level are delivering timely or enhancing the original underwriting and looking for ways to do it. And so that consulting initiative, we call it HOPS, Headwater Operating Partners, are not part of Headwater's P&L, and they work across our companies, but we limit them from being able to work for other people.
And so we are able to get, and what I do is I loan them money to buy shares or to buy equity in all the businesses that they work on. So there's a loan program that I support for them to have alignment. You asked about alignment beyond maybe just our own team. The Gexpro Services team and the TestEquity teams both came into the formation of DSG with significant equity performance waterfalls where they have to deliver certain EBITDA returns and profitability for multiples of invested capital for our capital that we put up to buy those businesses. So it's not as easy to see as options or if you look at a [crosstalk]10-K or not a 10-K.
[inaudible]Yeah, the proxy.
Proxy, thank you. My proxy filing at the end of the year. The proxy is going to show you who the key executives are, and you're going to be able to see options for them, but the reality of it is most of the equity that our management team has, which is a significant amount of equity, is buried in these waterfalls inside of our partnerships where if they hit certain multiples of invested capital, they get an accelerating amount of ownership of the company, and so when you really flow that through, we've got management teams like at Gexpro where collectively they'll be making nine figures of capital out of the Gexpro waterfall, and it's top heavy to the top four, but it permeates the team at a pretty good level. Same with TestEquity, not at the same level in terms of total dollars.
Then at TestEquity and Gexpro, we've added some capabilities with some really key hires, and those going forward will come out of the options that we bear 78% of, and the other shareholders will participate in.
So Bryan, last year you had an investor day where you laid out some long-range five-year goals, and I'll just walk through some of the key goals you laid out, and then we can talk through them.
Sure.
But in terms of organic revenue, five-year goal was for mid- to high-single digits. I think it's at least 75 basis points of margin expansion each year and then a 20%+ EBITDA CAGR, which I believe is inclusive of acquisitions. So we could tick through those individually, but maybe more important is to start the conversation, Bryan. That was really, you could say, the first introduction of DSG as DSG to the public market. And so you laid out some pretty bold goals. What gave you the confidence to do that? And maybe more than just the dollars and cents, what are you trying to communicate to your investor base there?
A couple of things. First of all, recognizing that what we have is a business where there's obviously a highly aligned shareholder, but one that is different than a shareholder that probably has the flexibility of it being just their own capital. I have to lay out those exact objectives to my limited partners whose money I'm managing as a fiduciary because without very clear objectives, I'm sitting on their capital without them understanding or knowing what we're trying to accomplish with DSG. So I would be doing that on any of our private companies that we own in our partnerships. And so it's just good house cleaning. It's good discipline to be committed to a set of objectives, to be transparent about what those objectives are as best you can, and to hold yourself accountable.
And so in order to say that to my limited partners, I needed to say it to the street, right? Because otherwise I was having two conversations. And so that was the first part of it. The second part of it is I had, to this day, still have real confidence in our ability to hit our objectives. I gave ourselves five years to get to $450 million of EBITDA. I gave ourselves five years to get to $3.3 billion or thereabouts of revenue, all of which are, to this day, still very attainable on that timeline or less. And now what I also did was I said, "Look, it's going to come from a combination of organic and inorganic growth." And the inorganic side of it has been a lot more in my control.
The organic side has been more challenging with ISM being weak and having a headwind in the marketplace, so the underlying organic revenue growth has been harder to get over the last 18 months, and that part of it, had I made the conversation this year versus last year, the numbers wouldn't have been any different, but I would have emphasized that we were coming out of a period or we were in the middle of a more challenging ISM backdrop and that that ISM backdrop was going to potentially delay some of the organic revenue growth that we believe is embedded in basically the tension on the spring that we've put there, so we've made the acquisitions.
We've cleaned a lot of the operating expenses out of those acquisitions that we needed to get the operating leverage in place that we expect to enjoy as revenue starts really moving up again. But you've put tension on the spring, but you don't yet have the tailwind that you'd like to have in several key markets. And we knew that we had a significant going back into 2016, 2017, that we had a program in front of us on Lawson's Salesforce that we needed to tackle.
When Lawson was a standalone business and had $12 or $8, $12, $20, or $18, $22, $26 million of EBITDA, tackling investing over $10 million into the P&L of sales tools and investment back in the sales force while at the same time compressing the sales force to reorganize territories and trying to roll out a CRM and change a lot of the accountability of a sales force that had historically been independent contractors was a lot to tackle. And so we spent years setting that up at the table. And we also knew that now once you kind of got the portfolio scale that we had with DSG, that that anxiety that the board had back in the 2016, 2017, or the management as well of tackling that ambitious challenge was going to be far easier when you have $200 million EBITDA versus when you have 18.
And so the marketplace would have skewed our position, which was big, and it would have perhaps skewed Lawson had they tackled that initiative as a standalone where it would have compressed their EBITDA by $10 million. We kind of rolled right through that $10-plus million dollar. I mean, we didn't roll through it unscathed. We knew that we were going to give up a lot of salespeople. When we started the initiative, we hoped that ISM was going to sustain being over 50 and that we could kind of slide a lot of dollars through the Hisco TestEquity pipe and the Gexpro Services pipe and that we were going to get some buoyancy on the Lawson pipe and that we wouldn't have to talk much about that extra $10 million that we had to go spend on our P&L. But you know what?
We feel so good about what we did. There was so much anxiety 18 months or even 36 or 48 months ago about tackling an initiative like that and now being really through the J Curve of it and sitting on the other side. It's like, why did we wait so long to do it? Now we're hiring and we're building the sales force back up. And we've told the street that investing in the sales force, every net 100 sellers that we had cost about $5 million a year. And again, when you have $28 million of EBITDA or $18 million or $12 million, when Lawson was in the late teens of 16, 17, 18, it was daunting to go invest those dollars. And we were trying to do it then and manage while sustaining our EBITDA to the street.
But now we can kind of do it so confidently that and still manage to hit the objectives that we laid out. So there's some organic elements that we feel really great about that have to do with things that are increasingly back in our control. And our pipe of acquisitions is robust. We could do some bigger things that could get us to our five-year objective in a hurry that are highly accretive and build a ton of value to the business. Or we can continue to knock out, bunt little players around the bags and score some runs by just buying these $20 million-$40 million acquisitions that bring attractive EBITDA characteristics to the platform and do some tuck-in elements. But if we want to, there's some scale elements that continue to fortify our position in the marketplace on each of these verticals that we are also contemplating.
I want to dive a little deeper on some of the organic initiatives at Lawson. And there are really three parts of the conversation. It's the CRM/technology rollout. It's the net seller adds. And then those kind of go hand in hand to then ultimately drive seller productivity across the platform. And so this could be for one or both of you.
Well, Ron lives it intimately.
Yeah.
I live it as a whip and a spurn.
Yeah. Yeah.
Sure, Tommy. So on the CRM tool, we did go live on that in the April, May timeframe of this year. We have about 80% of our sales reps participating and effectively logging all of their activities today. If we look back prior to that, really the only insight we had into what our sales reps were doing on a daily basis was when they placed an order. And within the Lawson business, we're really good. When we show up, we generally get an order. But we didn't have the visibility around how much time is being spent trying to get to a particular location, how many calls are sales reps making. They may make, are they making six calls and only writing four orders, or are they making six calls and getting six orders?
So I would say we're still pretty early in getting through that data and really starting to evaluate it. But for us, it plays a bigger role around territory optimization. And I've probably ridden with 100 sales reps in my tenure with Lawson. And the most unproductive time is the windshield time. And we know that we have sales reps today driving by each other, maybe not waving to each other, but they're certainly driving by each other going back and forth from customer to customer. And it's not something that you can turn the apple cart upside down all at once.
We're threading that needle relative to trying to help the sales reps become more productive and be able to get one or two more visits out of their day and write more orders because a big piece of their compensation is hitting quota and also getting commissions on what they write. So we're still in the, I would say, early innings of getting that data. I mean, we now are getting the data. It's now a matter of evaluating it and starting to take some actions around it. Yeah, this has been something that those of us that are really close to Lawson are giddy about it, but at the same time, we've been appropriately anxious about it at the same time.
We knew because of the historic culture of the sales force being kind of owning their book of business themselves, we took on, or the company took on, Lawson did, a lot of incremental expenses to try and satisfy or placate bringing those people into being W-2, the ones that came over into W-2 sellers. What has been a conundrum is that they've owned that list and that territory, and they kind of, whatever they could grab or whomever they could develop, they ended up with kind of a gerrymandering-looking election or kind of voting district that didn't make any sense because in their case, it was that they were driving right past some of their competitors' or some of their colleagues' customers that were on their list. So you had salespeople serving a territory without a lot of real logic around where they were going.
So I think about a lot of our sales businesses that have a high level of touch, and we really have an organized route structure with milk runs where it makes sense and you reduce the amount of windshield time, and you get a lot more efficiency out of your touches with your customer and your servicing of the customer versus being in a vehicle fighting traffic in Chicago or L.A. or any of these markets at this point. So the compression side of, and I would tell you that one of the initiatives that Ron and Mike did 10 years ago that we celebrate and we talk about a lot with investors when they ask questions about how we're doing on our strategic account side, we've grown the strategic accounts from 0% to 60% of our revenue at Lawson.
That's a good news, bad news situation because what you really did was you gave your sellers access to accounts that you developed for them. But at the same time, what happened was they effectively stopped servicing because they were windshield timed out. They stopped servicing some of the other accounts that they had as well as they used to, or they fired them, and we didn't know it because we didn't have a CRM, and so there was attrition or there was lack of connectivity with the smaller accounts that they had over time, and so we've been fighting, and there was no real new account development effort on those smaller accounts because we were feeding the salespeople with a robust set of strategic account opportunities, so they were relying on that as their business development arm, and so the Lawson salesperson has a very physical job.
It's a very much more physical than any of us in this room that haven't done it would appreciate because it's, and I sent one of my former Goldman Sachs structured leverage finance and McKinsey guys who is a young colleague that just joined me out on a sales call two weeks ago, and he couldn't believe how physically demanding the job was. Right? And he's no softy, but his résumé may look like it. But you're carrying and you're managing a lot of heavy boxes with a lot of heavy parts, and you're putting them back. And that's the reason why our customers assign a tremendous amount of value to the service piece of it and for the labor piece of it.
Over the last years, there have been, and really in the last 18 months, there have been a tremendous amount of initiatives that Ron and Cesar have tackled to drive more efficiency, to drive better connectivity, to better be able to support those smaller customers or those customers that may not get as many touches as they deserve as we're loading more strategic accounts onto our sellers. As we've compressed our sales force to try and rearrange territories to then be able to pour more sellers back in, expecting that those new sellers will get the profitability in a much faster period of time than they did historically, which was over two years.
Sorry. Yeah, the other piece, maybe, Tommy, maybe the second half of your question a little bit is around the sales rep and their productivity. And as I look back over the last 18 months in terms of what we've invested as an organization to help our sales reps become more successful, every position, a bunch of different positions, field technical, sales individuals that are product technical experts that offer support to our sales team, on-site service technicians that will go in and solely put product away versus so more of a handling a lot of that manual labor that Bryan mentioned, business development reps, core BDRs is what we call them, that are out hunting for new business and providing new leads. And so we're starting to see some of the returns coming through on some of those investments as well, which I think is really positive.
One of the areas that we look at really, really close is the success rate of the new reps that have come on board relative to the previous success rates, and we are seeing that our 2024 hires are getting off to a faster start than what they have really over 2023 plus the preceding three or four years, so those are all good signs pointing in the right direction that we're starting to get some returns on some of these investments.
When you invest in these efforts, one of the things you got to recognize is humility. You don't know what you're going to learn. When you don't have a CRM and you don't have data on 1,000 sellers, you're like, "Okay, what am I going to find out?" They not work on Mondays and Fridays? They don't. I mean, do they have a really great it's a heavy job, but they've figured out how to, especially the ones that are more profitable and productive, they figured out a way to have a life-work balance that really fits well for their families. And they work physically really hard for several days a week. They generate a lot more productivity than the average rep does.
You kind of go, "Okay, are you going to change that model on them and require them to stop bass fishing on Monday and Fridays or taking four-day weekends? Or are you going to say, 'You know what? These are really good reps and they know their customers well and they do a darn good job'?
Bryan, you might just need your dad to come in and be the info.
My dad's a seven-day weekday.
But.
The opportunities that I see is you have an opportunity to get the margins and their teams. And it looks like, at least in the last quarter, Lawson is pretty close, has been there. Gexpro is getting there. But Hisco, combination TestEquity is the outlier. Where do you think you can get the margins of that piece of the business over time?
Yeah. So it's very fair, and it's a topic that we spend a lot of time on. The test and measurement business has been as weak as we had seen it in our seven-year engagement in that business and even going back further. The disruption to the supply chain around the chip shortages several years back, and then also shipping products, getting them into the U.S. timely was very disruptive. There was a lot of duplicative orders, as you know. The channel got fouled up. We were told by our channel partners three or four months ago that in their mind, and they were not sharing this with us in December a year ago or January, that there was 300% too much inventory in the channel at the beginning of the year. Well, that's still a real messed up channel.
So during the course of this year, it's down to, in August, I think it was 30% too much inventory. So there were a lot of inventory got bled out. Our bookings in September and October were the highest that we've ever seen in that market. So we think that we're on the cusp of operating leverage, to answer your question, on that part of the business, but that's about 20% of that vertical at this point. Then on the other side of the house, and I say 20% of the test and measurement direct business, there's that TestEquity channel, which has got some test and measurement equipment in it. It's got some capital spending benches and other stuff, laboratory supplies stuff that goes in there. And then you have the EPS business, the electronic production services business.
And that business, the electronic manufacturing end market, has been woefully struggling, and our customers. So we're seeing customer activity in terms of how many invoices we're getting and how many customers we're serving going the right direction, but the volume that's going through it has continued to suffer. And so we've taken $17 million of operating expenses in our consolidation, I think it is, between Hisco and TestEquity out. So the controllables that we had identified, when we bought Hisco, that business was we were paying under 10x for it. We paid $265 million of cash upfront for it. And then we had a retention payment that we ran through the P&L over the last year or so. But that business was set up in our mind to go from $30 million of EBITDA to $60 million of EBITDA.
It was going to have to come from about half to two-thirds of that was going to come out of expenses, and about the other third was going to come from gross margin and revenue lift, and we haven't gotten the revenue lift, and we've been fighting the gross margin up to this point because anytime you've got customers who are struggling and whose volumes are down, you're getting less leverage out of your gross profit dollars or your gross margin. Yeah. Okay. So that's been hard. We think that that business, we expected that business to be at over 10% EBITDA margins at the end of this year. It's not going to get there because of the volumes, but if you put the volumes back to where they were two years ago, then it is operating at over 10% EBITDA margins.
And I don't know that that's a 13.5% EBITDA margin business yet, the way that we've got it constructed. So we've got to figure out what other levers we've got to pull inside of their capabilities to get it to the average EBITDA margin that we're targeting for the whole business when I laid out my 5-year goals. So if I got to 5 years on the model that we had and I didn't have a crystal ball on what the inorganic levers that we were going to pull in terms of tuck-in acquisitions were going to look like, then TestEquity at 13.5% blended margins, TestEquity was going to be in a 12%-13% spot or 12% anyway. And Lawson was going to be at that 15%+ spot, and Gexpro was going to be sitting somewhere pretty close to the 13.5%.
We think that there's opportunity on Lawson and Gexpro Services to move those numbers higher as we continue to pull different levers to optimize their business. The acquisition that we did with ConRes is to attack one of the weaker margin and return on invested capital parts that TestEquity used in the calibration side of that test and measurement piece, so all that's mindfully trying to drive the structural margins of where we think TestEquity optimized would sit, TestEquity, Hisco, to move those higher.
We're going to have to end it there. No, no. We appreciate the thorough answer. And Bryan and Ron, we appreciate your time.
If you don't know me, I tend to be long on thorough answers, so I apologize. If you have any questions, reach out to us. I love what we do, so it's a lot of fun, and I love what y'all do because that's where I started covering this group when Fastenal went public, so it's been a while.