I'm part of the Business and Information Services team here at BofA. This session will be on First Advantage, and I'm pleased to have the Chief Financial Officer, Steven Marks, and President Joelle Smith with us. We're going to start the session with a brief overview of First Advantage, and then we'll jump into a quick fireside conversation. Following, if time permits, we'll open the floor up for questions. Steven and Joelle, thank you for stopping by today.
Of course. Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Go for it. Give the overview of the
First Advantage at its core, we are a leading global data and software company, and we focus on helping our customers fight the challenges of human capital risk. Where if you had talked to us at the time of the IPO maybe four or five years ago, we would have said, you know, we're the leading global background screener, and we focus on background and drug. The risks that our customers face have evolved over the last, you know, five or six years.
We've really transformed from just a pure background screener to really a company that's helping our customers navigate all spectrums of human capital risk, which has grown into things like Digital Identity, Right to Work, and using our global proprietary data and global proprietary platforms to help our customers. We focus on large enterprise customers, so the largest hirers in the world do this at scale with compliance all over the globe. In 2025, we did 205 million screening checks for 80,000 customers and generated around $1.6 billion of revenue.
The scale that we operate, the focus that we have in in leveraging our our our our proprietary data, our our unique platforms, our applicant experience, we're integrated into 105 or more of the leading HCM and ATS, so the the major human capital software sets in the world, and have turned ourselves into an industry leader who just literally focuses on all spectrums of employee risk, onboarding risk, and now extending into the full life cycle of the employee. What did I miss?
No, that's pretty good.
Let's touch on a topic we just talked about, proprietary data. AI and proprietary data has been a debate across the space of investors, whether companies have a walled-off proprietary data versus an ecosystem of workflow tools and partner networks. On the most recent earnings call, AI was brought up as an enabler, not a disruptor. In a world where AI can automate many white-collar tasks, how are you positioning your vertical strategy towards blue-collar resiliency, like healthcare and transportation, where physical presence and compliance are non-negotiables?
All right. There's a lot to unpack in that question. This might take a few minutes. A few different kind of spectrums to that. First off, we use our proprietary data, which we have over 1 billion records in our two primary, you know, places we have data, both on the criminal record side and on the employment verification side. When it really comes to AI, you know, and specifically there, that, the billion records, 900+ million criminal records, 135 million employment verifications records, we use that as enabler of our services, of course. But for AI, that is a great training ground.
The hardest part, and Joelle will get into it probably in a second about getting AI right, is doing it with the right control data and test data to train your models to work appropriately. Which is really important for us because we operate in a very regulated industry. I think that's really when we think about kind of the AI, whether it's a risk of a disintermediation or just, you know, competitive influence, things like that, first people have to really understand what the industry is and how it's impacted. Because, you know, the U.S., you know, there's the FCRA, the Fair Credit Reporting Act. We're a CRA or a credit reporting agency under that.
There's a lot of rules and regulations that you have to follow, and that's just one of a spectrum of laws, whether they be state-level laws that limit the use of AI in the hiring process, international laws that kind of mirror the same, etc. You can't just go out there and broad search the internet for data, and then report it with an AI tool, and you're going to get it right. The other big key aspect of our industry when it comes to AI is, you know, have to get the data at the primary source.
The FCRA has a bunch of rules and regulations around a reasonable policy for maximum possible accuracy, which has been widely accepted to be, you know, if you want to report a criminal records, you have to have validated that at the source of that record, the courthouse. Those courthouses themselves are proprietary data networks, right? They don't just let anyone come and search them. There's often a paywall or a charge for it. You want to search a name here in the state of New York, it's $95 every time you want to search that name. There's no unlimited pass. They only let certain providers, you know, actually integrate into the system. There is this moat around our own proprietary data, which we certainly use in the fulfillment and train our data on.
Also the data that you have to then access is also walled off in and of itself. The people don't really understand about the U.S. is the U.S. doesn't have a single court system. There's about 4,000 disparate detached court systems. New York State is one, but there's counties in the state of New York. Look how many counties are around the country. There's upper courts and lower courts and state courts and regional courts. All of those, you know, you have to be able to access. In a number of those cases, or in a good portion of them, those courthouses haven't even digitized their records.
We've got a network of over 2,000 what we would call court runners, but providers that we can tap into who can go into a courthouse and retrieve the records. That's just, we spent that whole few minutes just talking about criminal records. In order to be a full spectrum provider in our industry, you need to be able to do drug testing. We have 20,000 physical locations that we've partnered with over the country to be able to say to any company, if you want to screen someone, there's a location nearby. That network is proprietary that we've built up. We have our own proprietary network of fingerprinting locations with digital kiosk that we've placed there to do digital fingerprint acceptance and things like that.
We take AI very, very seriously, but we look at it as an enabler for our industry. Joelle can talk about a couple of the great use cases that we've developed there. From a risk perspective, we have our own data. The data is not just publicly accessible. While it's owned by the government, it is not public data in the common regard. Employment verifications data, you can't just go screen scrape LinkedIn.
Mm-hmm.
You have to go validate that with the employers, and there's either proprietary networks, we have our own database, and proprietary fulfillment workflows that we've used. It's a really complicated long story, as I mentioned at the onset, but it's not just a go into Claude and search Steven Marks and know everything he's done.
Yeah. Steven, that was great. It's not a single dataset. As Steven talked about the criminal records, also the verification records, and all of that, it is disparate across. Even if it was a single set, which again it's not, gathering the data isn't the really hard part. It's once you get the data, you have to normalize it, you have to categorize it, and then you have to be able to decision off of it. In order to decision off it, AI is not allowed to do that. There are laws around that. We have a really distinct workflow where we have a human in the loop, and our agents help to, you know, those humans to make the decisions.
Once those decisions are made, and we can only do that because we have permissible purpose, which again is another regulatory requirement for anybody who wants to hire an individual, then you have to be able to adjudicate it, which means make a decision on it. When you do that, it has to be legally allowable, and it has to be legally defensible, because these organizations are obviously hiring individuals. It has to be auditable. There's a lot of like RegTech that's built into the platform to enable our teams to help our customers, you know, hire those folks. That's just again, on the criminal record side. On the verification side, which is why we've made the investment in the proprietary data, which we have been building out for decades.
Mm-hmm.
It's not something you can just kind of get today. This is historical information about past history of what people have done from criminal perspective, where they've worked for the past 10 years. It takes time to build up all of this proprietary data, that is usable, actionable, and able, you know, to be able to decide on. That's just, you know, a high level of kind of where we've been, and the proprietary platform complemented by the data. The data does train the platform, and it informs kind of how to make some of those decisions. Then you add the compliance layer on top of it. It's not as straightforward as I think everybody would think it is.
Right. Just a point you touched on, Steven, described your AI strategy as building good AI to fight bad AI, particularly in the context of identity fraud. Given the rise in identity fraud, how much is the bad AI actually driving incremental demand for your higher margin Digital Identity product? I'm gonna start off, but I'll let Joelle take most of this 'cause this is her baby, if you will. I mean, that point is all around, you know, AI is creating new business opportunities for us, and I think people don't realize. You know, fraud in the hiring process is an unfortunate byproduct of the AI technology getting better. It is easier to fake your background.
Mm-hmm.
It is easier to deepfake yourself in an interview. You know, we've seen a number of kind of large publications around, whether that be, you know, the one in the Wall Street Journal about a year ago where, you know, 300 corporates had hired someone from North Korea, hadn't known about it, and who was using deepfakes and server farms and things like that to get into the companies. I mean, all it takes is one for them to have a colossal disaster on their hands. The market has rapidly educated itself on these risks, and customers are dying for a solution.
We've got our digital identity solutions out there, which helps the companies, you know, really validate the people that they're screening from not just, all right, with Steven Marks, has he got the right credentials? Does he have a criminal history? To, is this Steven Marks who I'm actually interfacing with, who I'm actually hiring, who I'm actually onboarding? And Joelle can talk about how the use cases have expanded. I'll tell you just from a kind of capitalizing on the market opportunity, it is not only creating good opportunity from the product itself, and it's a good margin product, it's a tech service, but it's creating incremental pipeline opportunities. Customers are coming to us thinking they're only gonna ask us, "Hey, we've heard about your digital identity solution.
We want to hear about it." When they hear the value of linking that together with the full screening program, an opportunity that started in pipeline as just Digital Identity has now allowed us to bid, and it gives us a very good driver's seat in that RFP to win the entire screening business, which, you know, is multiples of just that, the identity revenue. But Joelle can talk about the risk, you know, risk use cases, but it's just growing exponentially, which is obviously not a great societal problem.
Right.
It's how our platforms can help companies navigate that risk, but it's kind of the whole point of the company I kind of shared at the onset.
Yeah. One of the interesting research reports that was sent out by Gartner, and they predicted by 2028 1 in 4 job applicants were going to be fraudulent, which was an alarming stat. I can tell you based on all the things that we've seen with our customers, it is 100% on track, in a really obviously not great way, but we feel really good about the investments we've made in our product to be able to tackle this. We were first to market. We bought Sterling, who was very close second to market. We have best-in-class products out there, and again, linking the Digital Identity at multiple stages.
It's the person you're interviewing, the person who they say they are on that screen or in person, and then the person that you're checking at the background check when you're doing all of the really important checks from a criminal perspective, education verification, employment verification, is that the person? Then the start of the job, right? The day one, the I-9 or the Right to Work, especially with all the immigration laws that are out there. Is that the same person that you interviewed who shows up or that you ship the laptop to? Once you get that person hired, they get credentials to the laptop, they have the keys to the kingdom.
Mm-hmm.
That is where a lot of the issues that Steven just brought up in the Wall Street Journal headlines have hit, where these nefarious actors have gotten access to the system. They've either exfiltrated data, sold it on the dark web, or they have dropped in some kind of malware that has just wreaked havoc on the organization. There's this interesting intersection of the CHRO kind of buying cycle together with the CISO, and in most cases the CEO, all having discussion points about the risk profile at their organization and how the hiring structure of that workflow is now a critical, like, security and risk requirement for all the organization.
The fact that we made investments early, the fact that we have an architecture that embeds this across, you couple that together with the biometric data that we're taking from the individual, the biographical data that we collect on the individual from their past performance, and then our proprietary data, it allows us to get a really great view into what the risk profile is for hiring this individual. There's a really interesting use case that we have, which we call Persistent Identity, which is happening post-hire. We really are kind of transcending across the full life cycle of the employee. Once they become an employee, are they still that person that they originally hired? You would think, "Well, of course they are." There is a reason why organizations rescreen very regularly. They used to rescreen every two to three years.
Now they're rescreening every year. Now some of them are really trying to monitor because there is so much fraudulent activity. These bad actors are good. They're getting to American citizens who have laptops, who are existing employees, and they're paying them off to provide. That was the server that Steven was just talking about that created the risk inside those 300 Fortune 500 companies. That's the issue. You couple that with some of the use cases in the gig industry or last mile drivers. This is really interesting, where you have people who are working for a transportation company or a gig company, and they're farming out their rides or their deliveries to other people who may or may not have been screened for that platform.
In many cases, they haven't, because if they were screened, they probably wouldn't be allowed on the platform. That's creating a tremendous amount of risk as well. One of the use cases that we have with our gig customer in particular started out as a point in time, did a screen, did an identity check, validated, and then once they were on the platform, they were good to go. Obviously, that created challenges for them. Now we have a customer that is doing up to 24 million selfie checks in the morning. Every time this person goes to make a delivery or goes to do a drive, they have to check in with their selfie and validate that they are the same person that was on that before they're allowed to even go and make a delivery or to do the drive.
That is really what we're seeing these trends, you know, transcend to. The Digital Identity plus the background check is a really interesting and also, very good for our business kind of, you know, risk mitigation product line.
Mm-hmm. Very wild times we're in, but happy that you guys are in the forefront.
It's risk that we didn't think we'd be dealing with five years ago, right?
Right. Just wanna step back a little bit and talk about the disconnect between media headlines about the labor market in general and your own booking numbers. Why is the enterprise hiring environment you serve so much more resilient than the macro headlines suggest?
Well, I've been telling investors for the last quarter or two, you know, it's like your mom used to tell you, "Don't believe everything you read in the news.
Right.
I think there's a little bit of just headline-first hysteria, where people read the headline, and it says, "ABC Co. is losing 1,000 jobs." They just assume that means broad scale labor market. What they don't read is the next 3 paragraphs that tell you, okay, well, A, they got 1 million employees, so 1,000 is a fraction of a percent, or 10,000 is 1%, right? And B, where those employees are coming from, and then think about what creates, you know, demand on our. You know? You know, take a, it doesn't matter, but, you know, a healthcare network, right? Our largest vertical. If they're cutting jobs, maybe they got more efficient in billing, right? Most of our hiring comes from their core employees.
That's janitorial, that's nursing, that's doctors, that's the staff that you're seeing and interacting with when you go to a hospital. Their billing team is a low churn, you know, low portion of their environment. So even if they get more efficient there, we're relatively or really pretty much not impacted because that wasn't where their hiring was. I use First Advantage as a common example when we talk about that. We're getting more efficient in our HR.
Mm.
If we cut down our HR department by 10%, we may hire like 3 less people this year. We'll hire 3,000 or 4,000 people this year as a company. The impact is so immaterial, I think. Because the headlines are focused on kind of the what is gonna grab the reader's eye.
Mm-hmm.
I think it's gotten more challenging on investors and the markets to start reading those next few paragraphs. All right, what are they cutting? Why are they cutting it? A lot of times you'll even read it saying, "Okay, they're cutting that because they're divesting that, then they're investing somewhere else." That also is actually a good thing for us because what drives our volume isn't necessarily total growth, it's churn, right? When a company is rotating employees, that's good for us because they have to go hire. Maybe they had engineers and their product focused on one thing, and they, whatever reasons, they've cut back there, and their focus is here. When they do that, and they start, you know, rotating their employee base, that's good for our numbers. That's investment hiring. That's growth hiring.
I think people gravitate to the headlines. I also think the underlying data has gotten more challenging. Whether that be the BLS or even, you know, ADP, which is a little bit more down market from us, SMB is having a bigger impact on those numbers maybe than it used to be, just because of how the response rates are coming in. You know, as you mentioned, you know, our focus is enterprise. Enterprise is half a million dollars or more of annual contract value. You start putting your head around how many screens does that take, and what size employers are these? These aren't SMB. These are companies that are hiring thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people a year.
These headlines, which are relatively modest actually, when you read into them, gravitate people towards the negative, and they just assume the worst, which is, I mean, you know, I know it sounds like a pun, but you know, a joke, but it's like literally, you really have to dig in and you can't just read the headlines. The headlines are what cause the problems.
Yeah. There, I mean, there is obviously that side of the business where there's churn and AI and, you know, they don't talk about all the people they are hiring to build the agents to work the models and all of that. But that's definitely, you know, happening. The other side of it is that risk profile. Nobody's kind of really talking about that. We talked a little bit, obviously, earlier about Digital Identity, but there's two sides to the story. For us, our ACVs are getting larger. We are delivering the, you know, that top-line growth that we had in Q4 at, you know, 17%, 12% overall. We have a lot of this happening because the risk profile of these organizations, especially at the enterprise level, is changing.
They are prioritizing risk over hiring a bunch of people, and that's really good for our business because it means they're adding services. We just put out our trends report. It just came out this week, where we are seeing in the enterprise market that there's 89% of the 5,000 people interviewed in the enterprise market will be adding more services to their programs for their hires and their employees to manage risk at a more efficient level across the enterprise. There's a couple of things at play here in the macro, and it's not just about who are they hiring, who are they laying off, and how are they kind of churning their labor force. We of course, you know, the labor force is going to churn.
Mm-hmm.
Again, as Steven said, that is really good for our business. You couple that with the risk profile change of a lot of these enterprises, and that's required, right? North Korean bad actors are hitting. It was just tech and financial services. It is every single industry right now. If we see industrial, manufacturing, every single enterprise industry that we operate in, it needs to address this bad actor, bad AI, conundrum they're in.
Great. Let's talk a little bit about Sterling. Joelle, you talked about it earlier. FA has officially completed the core integration activities of Sterling and turned the page to innovation. For investors, what is the most tangible change we will see in the P&L now that management is shifting from internal merging to external growth and product releases?
I'll start and then I'll let Joelle sort of talk about some of the growth initiatives that we're really you know, focused on. Yeah, I mean, you're right. Look, we closed the deal, I think it's almost 14 months ago now, a little over. And are really happy about kind of the core integration to your point, right? We've got through the major combination of all the business departments, you know, combining a lot of the go-to-market approach, the marketing, the branding, all that kind of stuff. And I think the most resounding success out of all of it, you know, yeah, the synergies are great. Yes, the efficiencies we have. Yes, the go-to-market success. Our retention levels actually went up through the process.
I think that's always the fear, certainly in our industry, when you go into one of these large acquisitions, is you're gonna force migrate customers, and you're gonna anger customers, you're gonna degrade service, things like that. We had somewhat expected there to be actually an uptick in lost accounts, because inevitably you would scare customers off. I think the most resounding success of this whole thing is throughout the process, we maintained the 96% retention we had and grew it the last half of the year to 97%. I think that's a real positive impact of this whole thing. I think from, you know, what's given us now the confidence is, you know, we're exiting 2025 with some really strong growth rates. We had some great pipeline wins.
You know, we talked about throughout the years, you know, three large wins, one of which is the potential to be effectively a top five customer.
Mm.
Just to add that overnight. I think we've got, you know, that evolution and, you know, the core integrations behind us. Our go-to-market team is hitting on all cylinders. As Joelle just, you know, was explaining, this changing risk landscape, there are certain verticals and there are certain products that we felt now is the time to accelerate the initiatives, fund the growth, like continue to put our foot on the accelerator when it comes to go-to-market momentum, capitalize on those market opportunities. We still have some synergy to get. That we'll start executing on more towards the second half of the year, finalizing the combination of all of the fulfillment workflows and things like that.
You know, we've still got about $15 ± million in our synergy journey to get to, but we still feel really well about getting to those. Our main priority is going to be growth. Where we hope you'll see it on the P&L, yeah, we have to do a little bit of investment in product, in CapEx, software. Those investments have paid off tremendously well over our history. Where we expect to see it is on sustained higher levels of new logo and upsell, cross-sell momentum, as we're able to capitalize on the market opportunities.
I just want to touch base on the retention comment you just said. I think I agree that during M&A you see some attrition, but we didn't see that with First Advantage. What would you attribute to help you with keeping clients during the transition process?
Well, I think the first things were very strategic, and I think the last were a lot more tactical that came out of Joelle's go-to-market team. We internally, when we underwrote the deal, we had to have a promise to ourselves that we would not force migrate the enterprise customers, right? We have seen, you know, rewind First Advantage's history about 12-15 years ago, that predates us, but, you know, we made some migration mistakes and lost a lot of customers. We've seen it with some peers in the industry as well.
When we did the deal, we said we have to structure it in a way where we can get from a valuation and financing and other perspective, where the pressure doesn't become, "Hey, we have to force migrate all the clients, collapse the platforms," all those things, 'cause that's what triggers the attrition. When you take an enterprise customer who is happy with their integration and happy with their service, and then you make them change it, you put that account at risk immediately. The fact that we've from the day we announced the deal, we were as vocal as we could be in earnings calls and with all the announcements that we were not gonna force migrate that. That message got through, so I think that took the initial pressure off.
You know, our product teams, our sales teams, our customer success teams, all of the worlds that Joelle's teams manage, we're laser-focused on the customer, right? Making sure that not only were we focused on the customers, but also providing them incremental value. The way we've taken this approach with customers is regardless of if you came from First Advantage or if you came from Sterling, like you're gonna see upgrades, not downgrades.
Mm-hmm.
We've taken what was best about the Sterling platforms and taken some of those functions and made it available for the FA platforms. Taken some of the best of FA platforms, the proprietary data, and some of those other things, made it available on the Sterling platforms. We're getting all those synergies on the back end, on the fulfillment, on the back end of the platforms, preserving those front ends and making them better for customers, has driven not only retention levels, but now we're starting to see the acceleration in upsell and cross-sell, because now we have a broader suite of products to sell to the entire customer base.
Yeah, we gave, we promised our customers every month they were gonna get something cool and new kind of on their platform, regardless of where they were. Our product teams did an amazing job to deliver that. When typically you'll see attrition when customers feel like they're being neglected because everybody's focused internally on all of the synergy creation and all of that. We actually purposefully took the front lines and a significant part of our product organization, said, "We're gonna keep our customers really happy." Part of the thesis of the acquisition was that we needed to make sure the Sterling platform had enough nimbleness and modernness in it where we could deliver this, and so that's what worked. That commitment to the customers and then delivering.
Mm-hmm.
Better user experience, more product, you know, deeper risk profile, better analytics, all of those things kept our customers really happy and curious for more. I would say within like 6 months, we didn't even hear about the questions about the acquisition from our customers anymore. Like, we were still doing it on the back end, and it was still a lot of discussions around that, but it was a non-event for our customers. They just were like, "Okay, yeah, this is over. Your color's changed. We're moving on." That was a huge testament to our frontline teams, to our product teams to really put their experience front and center. Because we have a sophisticated platform to be able to do that, we were able to execute it very well.
Got it. Let's switch a little bit to your investments for 2026. It's being framed as an investment year. Some investors may ask, why now? Why reinvest during a period of increasing macro uncertainty? Can you talk about buying signals and late-stage pipeline that drove management to go this route?
I'll give the why now and let Joelle take the rest. I think the why now is tactically possible. Hey, let's frame the investment. These aren't monumental like P&L changers. This is a little bit of incremental product, a little bit of an incremental sales, a little bit of incremental marketing, but it's not like they're gonna open up our P&L tomorrow, and it's gonna look very different than it was today. It's just instead of the core focus being synergies and integration, you know, we're putting some extra dollars towards accelerating growth. I mean, the why now is, you know, I think to a couple of the points that we've been talking about, you know, we feel like we are at a great point. Our customers aren't, you know, focused on integration and things like that.
We've got a changing risk landscape and products that are like ripe to go ahead and help customers navigate those. We've had a lot of success already, you know. We can make investments, whether that be some vertical focus, some product focus, geographic focus, right? Some international investments. We announced in our earnings call a differentiating partnership with Workday, a co-selling and development relationship there. Being able to maximize the output of those initiatives makes it a really important time. Joelle will tell you a lot. For a number of these investments, the product we're building, we're not building into an unknown market. Our customers have told us what their needs, you know.
We know there is a pipeline of direct opportunities available to them. We've never been the kind of company that just overly aggressively invests into the unknown. We've got some very well-known markets, known customers that we know once we finish building the product who exactly we're going to sell it to round one. I think the why now is because if you're not gonna do it now, when would you do it?
Yeah. We have a really unique market position. As Steven said, the risk landscape is changing for the enterprises. We have been able to explain to customers, you know, really and we have solutions for them to address this changing risk profile, and the product lines line up to it. No one customer buys everything we have at this point. We are getting inbound a lot to buy a lot more of what we have. When you start to feel that and you have a customer base that needs more, wants more, and is willing to buy more. You have a changing risk profile across macro. It just makes a lot of sense for us to continue to do that. We're seeing trends in vendor consolidation. We have an end-to-end solution.
That's amazing for us. Our ACVs are increasing because we're able to provide an end-to-end solution where they already are using us for a number of areas, but then they want to come to us for I-9, they want to come to us for monitoring. They're adding Digital Identity. They're adding more enhanced solutions around that. When you have an opportunity to continue that momentum, and we're seeing it in every vertical, which is also really great for our business, it just made a lot of sense to put the investments into those key areas that are going to help us maximize that for the enterprise needs, because it is different than the SMB. These are real world problems that they're trying to solve for. We are in a very unique and opportunistic position to be able to deliver it.
It just made sense.
Great. Now, both of you today have been with the company through different stages of growth. If you had to describe First Advantage of 2028 in one sentence, how does that differ from the company we're speaking to today?
Right. Should have been at our Investor Day what, nine months ago. We told you the answer. No, I think if you look at our 2028 model, we could be getting very near to it being a $2 billion company. In our space, the level of support we're providing and risk management we're providing to our customers, the number of customers that we help, over 80,000. We should be, you know, obviously growing that number by then. I think just the scale of our operation and what we're capable of doing will be just incredibly impressive.
Certainly we want to hit the long-term target goals, of course, that we talked about at Investor Day. I do think the transition of the industry itself, and us being able to deliver a global system of trust across the full employee life cycle is really where we are going. We have all of the fundamentals in place to allow us to get there, which is a key factor to us delivering on those long-term targets.
Got it. Before we close off the fireside conversation, we're asking companies that presented it to do a quick one-word association. Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when I say the following. First Advantage 5.0.
Growth.
Innovation. Yeah.
Digital Identity.
Opportunity.
Yeah. Pipeline is probably where I'm at, but I'm a numbers guy.
Sterling.
I'd say success.
Yeah, agreed. Definitely.
The last one, Scott Staples.
It's got to be nice. Is he listening?
Thought leader.
Yeah, I would say innovative. I think you know, and we could sit here and talk a lot more about him than one word, not just because he signs our paychecks, but I think you know, just the transformation that he's powered in our company, which is obviously now led our industry, is incredible.
Perfect. Amazing. Appreciate you both joining us today.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Thank you all.