Good afternoon. Thank you for attending the DS Conference. I'm Sandy Martin. Next up, we've got Distribution Solutions Group, a Nasdaq company traded through the ticker DSGR. And we've got Ron Knutson, the CFO today, as well as Brett Scarborough, the VP of Strategy and Investor Relations. I'm going to hand it off to Ron.
Great. Thanks, Sandy, and good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to spend a little bit of time and just give you an overview of the company from an operating standpoint, and then we'll get into a little bit more specifics around the investment thesis and so forth. I'm not going to go through the entire history here on the formation of DSGR, but just by a quick backdrop here, we brought three organizations together, really three specialty distributors serving different end markets and go to market differently. I'll talk about each of the three verticals here shortly. We brought these three organizations together in early 2022, really formed an organization that really focuses on not only the product distribution, but really brings the service along to our distribution capabilities, primarily in sourcing, in labor, and vendor-managed inventory.
I'll talk just briefly about each of those here on the business. Before doing so, just some high-level stats here. We're about a $2 billion organization on a combined basis. We generate about $190 million of EBITDA. If you look back, just by way of a little bit of history from pre-bringing these organizations together, we were less than $1 billion in revenue, and we were sitting at about $90 million of EBITDA. That would be the 2021 figure. In a matter of about three and a half years, we've effectively doubled the size of the business, both in terms of organic growth as well as M&A activities. M&A is a big, big piece of our overall growth strategy. Let me spend just a couple of minutes and just describe the verticals of the business.
Again, all specialty distribution, Lawson Products, really two pieces there. One is a Canadian branch business that was really formed out of two acquisitions that we've made, one most recently about a year or so ago, and then an acquisition that Lawson did when Lawson was a standalone public company back in 2019, being the Bolt Supply Group. On the other side of Lawson, really VMI. Lawson has about 930 sales reps, and we provide vendor-managed inventory to about 80,000 customers. What that means is that our sales reps go into our customer's location. We have real estate, what we call bins and cabinets, within our customer's location. The sales rep goes in, puts product away, actually makes the order on behalf of our customers. Many times, the customer doesn't even know that they placed the order until the product shows up or they receive the invoice.
That's how well-integrated Lawson is into the business. We'll talk a little bit about some of the initiatives that we're working on within each of these three verticals to grow the business. Really MRO-focused. Think about Class C consumables there. On the Lawson side, average piece price is about $1.20. High volume, relatively low cost to our customers, but critically important to keep our customers' operations up and running. For example, one of our largest customers is a multi-site rental organization, and we service over 800 of their locations. We're making sure that those bins and cabinets are full. When the mechanic reaches into the bin to find a hydraulic fitting, let's say, they can repair it, and then they can make that equipment available for lease or for rental that afternoon. We're critically important to keeping their operations up and running.
On the Gexpro Services side, this is really OEM-focused. Again, Class C parts. So again, think about rivets, nuts, screws, bolts, but really in the production cycle. Unlike Lawson, which is kind of break-fix. So when something breaks, Lawson is there to fix it. Gexpro Services is really more on the production side. They have about 2,500 customers. They have great insight into our customer's production cycle. And what we do is they are effectively outsourcing a lot of the Class C procurement and management of those items. Again, when you start thinking about Class C items, they're typically lower cost, but they're critically important. In Gexpro's case, from a customer standpoint, it may represent the Class C items might make up 5% or 6% of the overall cost of the production, but could be 50% or 60% of the actual unit volume that goes in.
Our customers come to us and say, "Look, these items, it takes too much to manage them. We don't want to go out and procure them. We want to focus on the more expensive items that are going into the production cycle, and we want you to take care of all these other items." We'll go out, we'll source the product to our end customer specs. About 70% of the products are manufactured. We don't do the manufacturer. We find the manufacturer. About 70% are specced to our customer's need. We do all the procurement, the inventory, making sure that it shows up really on a just-in-time basis to support the production cycle of our customers. The TestEquity Group, this represents about 40% of our overall sales. This piece of the business effectively doubled a couple of years ago.
We made a large acquisition, and it folded that into the TestEquity team. About 20% of TestEquity's revenues are generated from test and measurement equipment, primarily oscilloscopes. Those are highly sophisticated pieces of equipment that measure wattage, voltage, noise interference, everything that needs to be tested from an electronic manufacturing standpoint, runs through these oscilloscopes, and then they can be tested. Again, really highly sophisticated pieces of equipment. About 80% of their sales, I wouldn't say are more normal distribution, but really SKUs that help support anything that's being manufactured in the electronic world. Solder, tapes, adhesives, specialty tools. Again, most of these are pretty technical sales. When you're bonding different types of equipment together, you really need to understand what type of an adhesive that you need in order to accomplish that.
Again, but kind of the overarching umbrella here is that we love our products. In fact, about 40% of Lawson's products are private label. Really where we provide most of our value to our customers is through the additional labor or the additional technical expertise that we provide to our customers. Why invest in DSG? I think I hit the first one pretty hard on the first slide. We're really a specialty distributor. We are not trying to compete against Amazon. We are not trying to compete solely on price. Really, our value to our customers is how we can provide the additional labor, the additional sourcing. I'll talk about customer and number of vendors here shortly, but we have a tremendous supplier support team and many vendors that we can reach out to to find the specific products that our customers are looking for.
We're highly diverse. We have about 200,000 customers across the platform. You probably can't name an end market that Lawson Products doesn't sell into with its 80,000 customers. Gexpro Services sells into six very distinct end markets. Most of those markets have seen some really nice growth over the last six to eight quarters. They just do a phenomenal job. If they see some softening happening within one of the end markets, renewables, for example, which is primarily wind, if that softens up a little bit, we would then reallocate our resource to some of the other end markets. They have been able to really drive nice organic growth on the top line with a relatively fixed cost structure. We're seeing some really nice operating leverage come through on the Gexpro side.
The power of three, bringing three organizations together, being able to utilize each other's cash flow, really be able to leverage the balance sheet of three, having a really strong overall capital structure. We do have a designated M&A team that works across the three verticals. We are able to leverage that as well versus having a separate M&A team if each company were on a standalone basis. Certainly, we have taken advantage of some of the cost savings early in bringing these companies together around insurance savings, freight contracts, common vendors, procurement, and so forth, that we have been able to drive some savings there as well. Industry diversification, really broad exposure across the industrial end markets, both on the OEM side and on the MRO side. Thirdly, within the electronic distribution side.
Maybe just the last bullet point I want to get—I don't want to get off this page without mentioning this—is really what I would call best-in-class alignment. LKCM Headwater, they do own about 78% of our shares. I can take you through the history of how we got there. They have a team. They really support DSGR through—there's probably 10 or 12 individuals on the Headwater team that are very active within the DSGR platform, whether or not it's on the M&A side, looking at it from a strategy perspective, helping on debt refinancing and so forth. This is all done on a no fee, no charge. There's no management fee or anything related to that. Bryan King, who is our Chairman and CEO, it's a non-compensated position. When the shareholders win, everybody wins together.
Management is very well aligned with all of our shareholders. I think I hit on this a little bit, but really one of the reasons we really like specialty distribution, and it's an area that LKCM is really focused on quite a bit as well, is really the differentiating factors that we bring in to solve a lot of our customers' problems. I've been with many of our customers with sales reps. They'll come to us with a particular problem, and our sales reps can take that problem and turn it into an opportunity for the customer, primarily because of the technical knowledge on the product or the fact that you don't have to worry about this product showing up on time or have to worry about somebody being here to service these bins and cabinets. We believe that we can drive consistent organic growth.
I'll talk a little bit about our Q3 results, but in Q3, we posted a 6% organic sales increase. We've grown organically for the last four quarters in a row in what I would call a fairly flattish or sluggish industrial backdrop. The ISM, which is an index we certainly pay close attention to, I think has been positive three months in the last 30. We've been able to grow organically within the last four quarters throughout the business. The other piece I want to hit on this slide is just the varying business cycles with 200,000 customers in the end markets that we serve. We believe that we've got some kind of natural hedge built in there relative to the end markets that we serve. I commented earlier about our ability to move resources around to those growing end markets.
We are a, I would call it an asset light model. Our CapEx typically runs about 1% of our revenues on a yearly basis. From a free cash flow perspective, really nice cash generation business that we can deploy that excess cash either back into the M&A activities, internal initiatives, or certainly share rebuybacks that we've been pretty active in doing here in 2025. Just a quick overview around customer diversification and our suppliers as well. You'll see here really minimal customer concentration. Again, about 200,000 customers across the platform. No real end market exposure, which concentrated end market exposure, which you'll see here in a minute.
Really one of the core strengths of DSG, and I would say this is really across all three verticals, is our ability to work with our suppliers and our vendors to find the solutions on behalf of our customers. We work really close with about 10,000 vendors, and we have the ability to go out and source product to meet our customers' needs. The power of three. I'm going to fast forward through here a couple of these things. Putting the three organizations together, if you look at kind of the upper right-hand side here, you'll see some of the benefits around that. We can, I'd say, coexist. We can exist very well within a common customer.
We have multiple examples of that where Gexpro Services might be providing Class C parts to the production cycle, and Lawson through their sales rep is providing the MRO solutions. Two very different buyers on the Lawson side. It might be a facilities manager, whereas on the Gexpro Services side, for example, it could be somebody in procurement, could be an engineer, would be somebody who really oversees the production process. We can take advantage of that given our deep relationships with our customers. Most of that referencing are really soft introductions for us to be able to take one of the other verticals' sales individuals and get them into a particular facility. We have one C-suite, really Brian King and myself, plus three individuals on our M&A team. Outside of that, the accountability sits within each of the individual verticals.
They each have their own P&L, their own sales objectives, their own EBITDA objectives, their own working capital objectives. We hold each of the three verticals accountable towards hitting those goals and targets. I mentioned a shared M&A team, strategic sourcing advantages, cash operating savings where we've been able to take a lot of the common expenses across the three platforms, take advantage of that even from an IT perspective, sharing best practices, and then the additional support that I mentioned earlier that comes through the LKCM team. From an end market perspective, again, I think I've commented on this, but I think hopefully this picture will lay this out a little bit better. You'll see that we really have very little concentration from an end market perspective. I think this is one of the real advantages of bringing DSGR together.
If one of our end markets softens up a bit, we've got enough diversification where we can offset that. Even if one of our verticals softens up a little bit, we can have one of the other verticals kind of step in and effectively cover that. It is nice to see how we allocate capital throughout the organization. Those with the highest return certainly wins. Also a little bit of the competition amongst the three verticals. Everybody likes to throw off the most cash in a given year or the highest sales growth. The three CEOs work really, really well together. As I mentioned earlier, we're all really well aligned around share price increase and equity value increase of DSGR. We're all really well aligned.
The three CEOs and the three management teams are constantly working together, whether or not it's common vendors, common source of product, M&A activity or opportunities or best practices that we're sharing across the three verticals. I'll spend just maybe a couple of extra minutes on each of the individual verticals. MRO, I mentioned this, about 930 sales reps. Again, really high valued from a labor perspective. Lawson's reported gross margins are about 60%. You'll see that in our segment breakout within our financial statements. Mostly what our customers are paying us for are the labor dollars associated with that. Labor for Lawson sits down in SG&A. We provide those solutions through a lot of labor that allows us to support our customers.
We are actively working on, and I don't know that we'll ever get to the finish line on this, but we are actively within Lawson working on really sales rep productivity. Lawson has the ability to buy product, get it through the DC, out to the customers on a really routine basis. That is something that I say it happens automatically, but there's a lot of our team members that work really, really hard to make sure that our service levels are extremely high to our customers. Most of our effort and focus is really around helping our sales reps earn more commissions and really trying to optimize their routes so that they can find time to make one additional customer visit a day.
When you start to compound the effect of that, 930 sales reps, 252 selling days a year, average order value, it compounds itself very, very quickly in terms of additional organic growth on the Lawson side. Again, this is a, I would call it a multi-year process, really trying to work through to help our sales reps, provide them more opportunities. The organization has made quite a few investments over the last couple of years, building out our inside sales team to adding business development individuals within the organization to provide new leads, to some artificial intelligence around identification of common products that are purchased together. Again, really placing our sales reps in a position to be successful. The other piece that falls under the Lawson umbrella, which reports up to Cesar Lanuza, who's our CEO, is the Canadian branch.
That is a result, I mentioned this earlier, of two acquisitions that we have made. One that we have had for six or seven years, Bolt Supply, which operates in Western Canada. We acquired an organization, Source Atlantic, in Eastern Canada about a year or so ago. Eastern Canada, the Canadian market, if you have paid attention to that, has been pretty soft over the last 12 months. It is nice to see progression there in terms of sequentially improving our overall revenues on a sequential basis. In fact, our EBITDA on a standalone basis on the Source side for the third quarter was higher from a margin percentage perspective than what it was when we initially acquired the company on a smaller sales base. The Bolt Supply business has operated between 13-14% EBITDA for quite a few years. We acquired it.
It was about 8-9%. We've made some investments there, and now they're running a really nice operation up in Western Canada. On the OEM side, again, I think I hit on a lot of this for Gexpro Services. We're not standing still within Gexpro Services. Really high customer retention levels, upwards of 98%. We grow with our customers when they go into a new location or they open up a new line. Once they—and Gexpro has about 2,500 customers—once our customers see the benefit, which we meet with them annually to show them the cost savings that we've taken out of their supply chain process, they're very quickly, when they open up a new line, they're very quick to get us reengaged or to engage us on any of their new opportunities.
We are making very strategic investments from a people standpoint within Gexpro Services to build revenue opportunities that we have not yet seen come through the P&L yet. We have got some of the cost just from a labor perspective, but we are building a nice pipeline and a nice backlog there. This piece of the organization is operating between 13-14% EBITDA. In fact, in the third quarter, they had a record quarter in terms of EBITDA dollars, throwing off in excess of $17 million of EBITDA. On the industrial technology focus, really here, we have placed a new CEO into this organization about 90 days ago. I have had the opportunity—in fact, he just presented; he and his team just presented to the board last week. For them, it is really about how do we enhance the go-to-market strategy.
There are probably four or five individual areas there, all the way from improving our e-commerce site in terms of the conversion rate for our customers to building out inside sales and inside sales team. TestEquity has about 35,000-40,000 active customers. There are thousands of customers that are only purchasing one SKU from us. There is a huge opportunity to make those investments into the sales team from a share of wallet perspective. We feel like we have got a really nice roadmap with Barry in place now. It does not happen overnight, but clearly some improvements will be coming out of this vertical as we get a lot of this underway. Just really quickly from an M&A perspective, I mentioned earlier we have a team of three. The M&A team that we have in place really supports all three verticals.
If you look back historically since we put DSG together, we've made nine acquisitions. We've deployed about $550 million worth of capital. $100 million of that was through a rights offering. The other $450 million has really all been through free cash flow and through our balance sheet. We have active dialogue. I would say a strong pipeline today. We made five acquisitions last year in 2024. We've not closed on any here in 2025. In fact, we just placed a new leader in this group as well earlier this week. He's anxious and already starting to get things going. The M&A, the acquisition is a big, big part of our overall growth story.
Really quickly, maybe before I open it up for any Q&A, just from a capital allocation strategy standpoint, our leverage today sits at about three and a half times. Publicly, we've said we're comfortable in that three to four range. At the end of the third quarter, we have a $250 million revolver that nothing was drawn on. We're accumulating cash, sitting with about $80 million of cash on our balance sheet. We feel like we've got plenty of firepower to go out, reinvest back organically, as well as make the necessary acquisitions that we're most interested in. We view working capital as an investment. We manage it very tightly. In fact, I mentioned earlier that we incentivize our teams around working capital efficiency. At the same time, we understand that it's an investment.
For us, we would achieve a pretty high return on networking capital of about 40%. It is an area that we clearly watch very carefully, but we make the right investments to support our customer needs. Lastly, most recently, in fact, last week at the board meeting, we just issued a press release earlier this week. The board did authorize some additional share repurchase capabilities. During 2025, we have been active in the market. We have purchased back about 780,000 shares, not quite 2% of our outstanding shares. The board authorized another $30 million for us to be able to buy back shares. We certainly look at that as a return to our shareholders, but also an opportunity to invest our capital wisely when we think we are undervalued in the marketplace. Lastly, just really quickly, Q3 financial results, really solid top-line growth here.
EBITDA dollars were relatively flat sequentially versus the second quarter. I'd say we were impacted by about 60 to 80 basis points of some timing items that hit in the third quarter that are generally kind of non-recurring. We feel really good about the overall quarterly results. One point that I hit on earlier and really does not get reflected in this slide is really just the overall growth that we've experienced since bringing the three entities together. Really, $900 million of EBITDA three years ago growing to about $2 billion, and then about $90 million of EBITDA growing to a run rate of about $190 million. When you look at that, we've effectively doubled both of those metrics in about three years. I think I hit on the alignment side here.
I mentioned we've got a separate CEO, a separate CFO, separate management teams within each of the three verticals. As I mentioned, really, really highly aligned with the shareholders and the management team. With that, we've got about five minutes left. I think I took a little bit more time than maybe what I wanted to, but certainly we'll open it up to questions. Yes, sir.
Maybe take a strategic question.
Sure.
One could make the argument, looking at the last couple of years, that operationally, you guys have done really, really well and you've applied very strong discipline to M&A, to Cisco, everything. It takes a little longer to kind of get them molded into the stock has been locked in a, I'll call it mid-20s. It's locked up to 40. Yeah. Mid-30s, yeah. I kind of sit here.
It's a strange place to be because usually when operationally things are improving, the stock price reflects that. Either there's a, I don't know, does the market not understand the value? That could be one question. A related question is, what if the market's right and this combination doesn't have the power to generate in the next three to five years the earnings necessary to move the stock beyond that trade?
Yeah. I was asked to repeat the question. I'm not sure I can repeat all of that. I think the crux of your question is, why isn't the stock price performing versus the operational improvements that we've made? Does that kind of get to it? All right. We get asked that question even in some of the one-on-ones that we've been in really today.
I would say, first of all, I mean, where our performance at, we feel really good about it. I mean, we have accomplished a lot of what we said we were going to do in putting DSG together. I've always been one that I don't try and predict the stock price. You guys are better at that than I. We focus on the operation side of the company, the capital allocation. I think some of the pieces that are probably maybe not fully understood are a lot of the initiatives that we're working on internally within the organization. We've not seen all of that flow through our P&L yet.
Whether or not it's investments in the people that we're making on the Gexpro Services side, or it's the roadmap we now have on the go-to-market strategy for TestEquity, or it's the sales rep productivity improvements that we're working on on the Lawson side. I think that's probably part of the disconnect there is internally we see that. You can kind of see it in the fact that we're in the market buying shares back. We think that we're not being appropriately valued in the marketplace. I think there's some of that. It does bounce around from a liquidity standpoint, fewer shares traded on a daily basis, but our focus is on improving the performance and the liquidity will come. I think there's some of that misunderstanding. Any other questions?
Biggest opportunity for 2026 beyond here?
Yeah.
I would say probably one of the areas that we're most excited about is what's happening within the TestEquity Group just in terms of bringing in Barry Litwin there, having a really well-defined roadmap. He's been with us for about 90 days. Clearly, he is an individual that has added a whole new level of energy and excitement into that team. I think that's one of the areas that we're probably most excited about. That represents 40% of our revenues. If you look at our margin profile, let's call it 9.5%, getting that organization north of 10% is worth about 160 basis points on our consolidated margin. That is not going to happen overnight, but we feel like we've got a really good roadmap now there. He's making a lot of investments into his team as well to structure that for nice performance going forward.
I think that's probably the one area that I would point out. Great. Thanks, everybody.