All righty, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the second day of the IDEAS Conference. My name is Urke. I'm with 3Part. Today we have Global Industrial Company traded on the New York Stock Exchange under GIC. On behalf of the company, we have Tex Clark.
Thank you very much. Again, my name is Tex Clark. I'm the Chief Financial Officer at Global Industrial Company. Go ahead and get started today. First meeting of the day, we should all have a lot of energy. Just absolutely, I'd be remiss not to highlight the forward-looking statements, cautionary statements, so we'll go ahead and move into the deck. Again, who is Global Industrial Company? We were founded in 1949, and we are a value-added industrial distribution partner of equipment and supplies in the North American market. We're headquartered in Port Washington, New York, about 20 miles east of New York City on the North Shore of Long Island. We're going to market in the U.S. through a network of approximately seven distribution centers in the United States and Canada, and then we also partner with thousands of dropship vendors to fulfill goods to our customers every day.
When you think about what we sell and what differentiates us a bit, we really focus. We talk about being the experts in the big and bulky. We're selling a mix of products that is going to be more on the industrial equipment, durable, light capital side of the house. You think about some of the key categories that we're selling: storage and shelving, furniture, carts and trucks, material handling. These items don't go on a conveyor belt, high velocity, on the back of a UPS truck directly to our customer. These are non-conforming, non-conveyable, big products that have a different process for pick, pack, and ship, and it has a different end market. It is a very broad market, and we're a bit unique in that space in what we focus upon.
Not only do we sell our national brand partners and vendor partners, we also contract manufacture a significant portion of what we sell today. Really bringing extra products into what we sell, private brand products under our name, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we move along. Right now, about 1,800 employees in our company, with 600 of those being customer-facing in both our service and sales side of the house. In a broad and fragmented marketplace, we're in the top 15 in the overall MRO industrial distribution space. One thing that we are proud of, we have been returning our capital to our shareholders through a recurring dividend for over 10 years at this point. Let's talk about how we got to where we are.
When we think about the foundation of Global Industrial, we tend to focus on really that customer intimacy and that customer centricity. We know that knowing our customers, understanding their needs, understanding what they want, and understanding that we are a vital supply chain partner for them, that partnership is always going to be that much more important. It is delivering a personalized experience is what's key, not just putting products on a website and selling. While we're an e-commerce-first company, it's really evolved beyond that. It's a one-to-one selling relationship, and it's an area that we are able to continue to service our customers and, again, be close to them, understand their needs on the ground, understand what they need. Got to have the right products that offer the right value for them, right selection for them, and again, making sure you're removing all friction from the experience.
Clearly, they need to continue to buy from us, but we need to be easy. At the end of the day, the last thing on the mind of a customer is, "Who's my pallet jack supplier?" You want to make sure that's as easy as possible and that you're doing that so that they can buy that, get it, get it delivered, and move forward. Again, talked about the fragmented industry that we operate within, but our customer base is also fragmented. The products that we just talked about a few moments ago traditionally lent themselves to the manufacturing, light manufacturing, retail, wholesale, trade, logistics space. As we've continued to evolve and market our products, we realize that there's a very broad subset of customers and what they need to do with our products. Healthcare, education, hospitality, logistics, government, schools, etc., all utilize our products in this space.
When we think about things like hospitality, we're not necessarily saying we're trying to be in the room. We're not trying to sell beds and sheets. There's plenty of people that do that. Every hospitality, every hotel, every multifamily housing unit has a facilities group, a back office, and that's really where we're serving that product into. As we expand that category and those customers that we serve into, we're also expanding the total addressable market that we sell. One thing to note is that no single customer of ours makes up more than 2% of sales. It's truly a fragmented customer base in one area that there's continued additional opportunity to penetrate customers further, sell different products, and continue to make sure that we service the needs that they have. Again, going into categories, we're always looking to expand our categories.
Today, we offer about 350,000 unique products across our website and to our customers. We also are willing to source products for our customers. If we do not offer it, we go out and find that product. That is one area that when we talk about Global Industrial, we can supply that. We truly mean we will go out and find that product that you need for your service needs. Again, categories we have talked a little bit about, but these are the top 10 categories that we sell, but we are constantly expanding those lines. New products, new verticals that will allow us, again, to broaden the total addressable market on the customer side and meet additional needs. Focusing on our national brand vendors, they are also incredibly important. They are bringing new markets to channel, and we are an important channel to market for those vendors.
Like we said, national brands and exclusive brands is always going to be key to us. A couple of the new products that we brought in, pack and ship, scrubbers, welding products. We are continuing to expand what our customers want and what we are able to deliver for them. Getting a double click into the private brand space. Our private brand primarily is Global Industrial. When you get that product in your warehouse, the brand name on that is going to be Global Industrial. You may also see a couple of other private brands that we have: NextCell, Interion, Continental Dynamics. Those are some private brands that we offer under our name, but what do they do for us? 15%-20% better gross margins on those products compared to national brand competitive parts.
Great for us, but one thing when we develop our products, that made to exceed tagline is serious. We're always looking to develop additional quality, additional durability, additional feature sets that we can bring to the customer that we've solved a problem for them. When we say we use the term internally, extra chip. You know, extra chip in the cookie. How do you build a product that's slightly better? That's what we always try to do when we're developing private brand products. Today, approximately 40% of our sales are private brand. Obviously, the balance of 60% will be coming from national brand partners. It truly is a balance and a mix of what we sell, making sure that we can deliver the right product at the right time to our customers and, again, ensure that total cost of ownership meets the needs of that customer.
Here's a sample of some new products that we've developed over time. Today, Global Industrial employs over 20 industrial engineers that are really developing products and a team of quality assurance associates across the globe to really source products, identify, and bring new products in. Something as simple as a plastic guardrail that we've introduced this year that most guardrails out there are going to be steel, brought in a plastic guardrail. Same durability, no steel and aluminum tariffs on it. That lowers that price point for our customers. Everything from something as simple as that to something as advanced as a mobile robot stretch machine. We're thinking about in our DCs, we get ideas from our distribution network as we're looking at what we're doing in our facilities, saying that process of stretch wrapping was just taking too long.
Let's develop a machine that can do that, automated machine. While there's not a tremendous amount of automation in some of the big and bulky, this was one area that we said we can go out and develop a product that we know we need internally that our customers are going to want as well. Over time, what does that ultimately deliver for the company? About 6.3% revenue growth over this time period. Please note that in the last four years, we have completed two acquisitions. In 2023, we acquired a business called Indoff. Indoff was focused on outside sales. It was about a $180 million business, acquired in the midpoint of 2023, so about benefit 2023 in the full year 2024. Nine months into this year, we were up about 3.5% last quarter.
You do see that the operating margin of the business did tick down in 2023 and 2024. That was a reflection of a couple of data points. In 2023, that's when we acquired that Indoff business. It does have a unique, highly variable cost structure, but did come with a lower gross and operating margin profile that mixed into our overall sales in 2023 and then a full year in 2024 that brought that margin down. We have rebounded this year and expanded our operating margins and gross margins in 2025 so far through the first nine months. Again, now taking a step back from Global, but thinking about the industrial distribution market that we play in. There are so many things that are impacting distribution that we're thinking about every day and are impacting the broader market. Sourcing and tariffs.
We touched on it briefly, but again, that's something that really is we started in 2019 realizing tariffs were coming. Under the Section 301 tariffs of early 2019, began diversifying that supply chain. Obviously, we've had to continue to double-click on that this year, double down on that to diversify because, again, there's a lot of challenges in the trade market right now in understanding where you're sourcing products from. Again, we believe we're well situated to be on the forefront of pricing, sourcing, and diversification. E-procurement adoption. That is changing every day in our space. Five years ago, we were just talking about e-commerce. People saying, "All right, you got to have a website." Shockingly, the industrial distribution, especially the smaller long tail of the industrial distribution space, didn't have great e-commerce. Today, now it's all about, "All right, you have to have that website.
That's table stakes and that great e-commerce. You also have to have the true e-procurement capabilities to connect to the larger customers, the true EDI, cXML, the B2B connections that B2B customers want to make that buying process more seamless. Today, that sits very well for Global Industrial. Where over 60% of our transactions are E-enabled, including those e-procurement processes that our customers all are asking for. Customer expectations, they're just going up over time. This is one area that we love it. Everyone asked me, "How does Amazon compete?" Amazon, what they've done really to the marketplace is they've just increased our expectations. Everyone wants things that much faster, that much more seamless in the web experience.
That's something, again, we've been continuing to build our digital and omnichannel platform, that distribution model to make sure that we can reach our customers in a very reasonable time and ultimately having the right tools in place. Overall, again, we know AI, data analytics, big data, whatever you want to call that in today's marketplace, is going to continue to play a key role in this space as well, trying to get more efficient in servicing the customers, getting more process. We believe that the agentic AI portion of that will be very important in the service space within any distributor in America. But again this situation, we believe we're well situated to meet these challenges to move forward. We started by talking about the fragmentation of overall industrial distribution.
There's the biggest players in the space, all the tickers that you all know, the Graingers of the world, that's going to be the largest players in the space. We believe there's somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 industrial distribution companies in the United States. That would include everything from the biggest in the space to the local plumbing supply shop in Omaha, Nebraska. We're competing against all of those. Many of those smaller, that long tail of competitors, are going to be those single-channel, single-product line distributors. They're really good at what they do, but they offer one thing. When we think about how we can compete, how we can gain share, we're looking at both the smaller long-tail competitors, but also those big companies.
We believe our focus on the big and bulky items does position us well to be closer to our customers than some of our smaller distributors and smaller competitors are. We believe that our offering of both national and exclusive brands is very unique. The exclusive brands can also typically lower the total cost of ownership and the price point for our customers, and we're able to service that. We talked a lot about e-procurement capabilities, well situated there. A lot of the smaller businesses do not have those capabilities, focusing on marketing and the asset-light acquisition model that we have. Again, being able to deliver project management expertise. This is an area that not only does a customer want to buy a product, but how do you use the product? How do you install the product?
We have those capabilities to really help our customer find the right product at the right time and use it in the right way. Customer centricity. Right now, we brought a new CEO, Anesa Chaibi, who came into our business in February of this year. The first thing that she did when she came in, she went on a long listening and learning curve across the organization. She was a 20-year experienced CEO, so not a learning curve on becoming a CEO, but really learning what makes Global Industrial tick. Really meeting every associate, not every meeting at the distribution centers, the call centers, the back office, the corporate office, and really understanding what the difference is and building that customer-centric culture is what she has preached from day one. It's not just simply talking about it, saying that you do customer service.
It's not improving your customer experience. It's breaking it down to function one and really understanding every step of the way, how we touch our customer and what our customers want. Once we build that in the organization, it's really now how do you acquire those customers? Traditionally, it was through digital paid search, but paid search has changed. Paid search has continued to evolve. We know that using Google and Bing, costs have been rising. It's really expanding the overall customer acquisition funnel into GPOs, Group Purchasing Organization, other contract vehicles. Once you acquire those customers, really continue using your marketing arms and your service arms to enhance that relationship. We're currently right at the end of a two-year journey to install a new CRM platform for the company.
That will help us build that customer relationship and truly have a 360-degree view of the customer so that we can retain that customer and build that loyalty. What the outcome of that typically would be is we're going to grow share of wallet and expand the categories that we service to the customers. One thing that we understand is that because we're selling the durable, light capital goods, if you do a retrofit of a break room and buy your products from us to do that, you're not going to do that every year. We have a wide selection of products. Not only do we need to grow category shares, once we become that partner and that trusted supply chain partner, it's selling different products to you each year as you have more projects coming down the pipeline. Excuse me.
Ultimately, what we hope that comes out of that will be gaining shares and again, leveraging our operating model to expand our margin profile. E-commerce first business, primary acquisition channel. That is going to be both through the web, through paid search, but also expanding into different vehicles. We also have a strong one-to-one selling relationship. Traditionally, Global Industrial was an inside sales organization with over 200 subject matter experts sitting in call centers, but managing relationships with their customers, proactively reaching out, understanding what the customers need, and again, having those full tools to be able to offer the quoting capabilities and service they need. What you have on the phone is you are limited to the ability to know exactly what your customer wants at all times.
Walking the floor, seeing feet on the street to understand what you can also service is something that we believe we needed. In 2023, we bought an organization called Indoff. Indoff focused on field sales. They had 350 partners in the field, visiting clients on a daily basis, understanding what they need. Not only being a full-stop shop, but they offer full project management, engineering, and field services. Again, being able to uncover new opportunities. We believe that's something that we can double down on and expand more into the outside sales space. Finally, we talked a little bit about the GPOs of the world. Historically, our one-to-one sales relationships and even our outside sales relationships, we were dealing with the end users in those facilities. Was it the foreman on the floor or the shipping supervisor that was using our product?
It was very important to get buy-in from that level of associate. What we realized is moving up the procurement channel and talking to higher-level procurement executives is one area that will help make Global Industrial a more valuable supply chain partner for our customers. We've done that partially through our group purchasing organizations. In the United States, OMNIA on the private and public sector, Kinetic in Canada, Vizient in our healthcare space. We've been joining these contract vehicles that give us a license to sell, becoming an authorized supplier to these vendors, pre-negotiated terms and conditions, and really being able to sell to a higher-level decision maker. Really more on the large customer acquisition side is something that we believe we've seen good success on over the last three years and will continue to focus on over the coming years.
Again, as a distributor, what you would imagine is that as a distributor, you're going to develop a lot of free cash. Over time, we have had a tradition of delivering most of our net income, converting that to cash over time and cash flow from operations. So far in 2025, we've delivered about 103% of our net income as free cash. You do see that there was a pretty significant spike in free cash in 2023. That was more related to the supply chain disruptions that occurred the year before. We can all remember back in 2022, this is at the end of the COVID cycle when all of a sudden we still were having substantial delays within the supply chain. Container costs were going through the roof. Boats were backed up at ports like Port of Origin and Port of Entry for 25 or 30 days.
We made a choice at the time. We invested in inventory, brought inventory in in 2022, and you do what you do in distribution. We sold it in 2023. Good part about our product line is there's very little obsolescence. Again, we invested in inventory when it made sense in 2022 to have the products for our customers that they needed. Again, we converted that to cash the following year, which is really what drove that large spike in free cash in 2023. Today, we are a debt-free company. We have no debt on our balance sheet. While we do maintain a credit line and a revolver with JP Morgan Chase, currently, again, we've not drawn on that today. Cash just under $70 million.
Inventory turns, including both what is in our warehouse as well as the COGS that we turn through our dropship suppliers, about five times. Good working capital metrics that have allowed us to generate free cash and have a lot of flexibility to execute over time. When we think about what we do with that cash, that leads us right into that final. We always want to first invest in the business, understanding those e-commerce capabilities, those CRM tools, making sure that we give our teams the right tools they need to succeed. That could be, again, we talked about technology stack, but it is also looking at our distribution network. Today, we have seven distribution centers in the U.S. and Canada, most recently expanding our Toronto facility and opening a new Toronto facility in 2023 to service our customers.
That is an area to continue to understand how we can get closer to our customers and have the right mix and selection in our warehouses. Strategic M&A is always going to be a key priority for the business. As mentioned, over the last two years, we've completed two acquisitions. One, again, of Indoff, which we've talked a little bit about. Earlier this year, while it was a very small acquisition, we purchased a business called Triad. It was a service business, our first foray into actually hiring technicians and having feet on the street that actually service the equipment that we're selling. I use the example of the mobile stretch wrap machine. When someone's going to be investing $10,000 or $12,000 in a product, you need to be able to service that product in the field.
Someone's buying a $200 fan, they're going to replace that fan when they need to. One of our very important product lines is floor care machines and scrubbers. They come from all sorts of brands, the Tennants, the Kärchers, the Nilfisk of the world, but we also offer our own proprietary brand, Global Industrial branded floor care machines. These are the machines that are typically ride-on machines that can cost upwards of $50,000 or $60,000 at the peak. We realized that our customers were using these machines, but they did not have a viable option to get these serviced. We went out, bought a business headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, and began actually having a network of field technicians now that can service these machines. We thought that was a very synergistic wrapper to an important product line that we offer.
Finally, returning capital to shareholders is going to be always a piece of our business. We began a dividend in 2015, and we increased that each year for the last 11 years. We have had special dividends over time to return excess cash, and we do maintain a share repurchase authorization on the books that we'll tend to use as needed. Just finalizing on that dividend, overall, we can see that the dividend has increased about 13% CAGR over this last 10-year period. Currently, at $0.26 per quarter, it's a dividend yield of just under 3.9%. Payout ratio targeted in the mid-40% for the company. It's an area that was actually about 53% last year, but that's just really a reflection of the final results of the earnings. Overall, growing that recurring dividend is something that we're going to continue to focus on as a company.
With that, I think that concludes my prepared slides today. Happy to take any questions from the audience. Please.
I don't know. I'm not super familiar with you and your history, but most of the acquisition, even the size of acquisition, you noticed that operating margins are down. You're coming back up. What kind of band do you have? That may change today to the next issue too. I don't know. But what kind of band of operating margins do you target going forward?
Yeah. So again, I think when we hit, if we go back in 2022, that would have been our peak operating margins at approximately 9%. Below that, again, we saw that mix coming in of the Indoff business and some other transportation-related costs that came into the business in 2024 and 2025.
As we continue to expand that, our focus on profitable growth and continue to move that up, thinking through the leverage that we can grow through our operating structure, through our distribution network, through our sales teams. Again, the goal is to continue to expand that. If we can get to 9 or 10, that's kind of that midterm goal for the company to get over 9 again on a sustainable basis.
Okay. You kind of work your way back there, and then that's kind of sustainable ± 50%.
Yeah. That's absolutely the goal. That's, again, going to require, it's going to require, again, more sustained top-line growth as well. That's the key. I mean, the last couple of years outside of the acquisition, it's been a flat top line.
Getting to that five midpoint of the single digits for growth will really go a long way to expanding the operating leverage, as you would imagine, with fairly significant fixed cost structure in the business.
How do you deal with Amazon and the area of the globe more and more in that space? Is it a concern at all?
It's one of those where it's not a concern today. We know that every one of our customers buys from Amazon, and we know we sell to Amazon for their own facilities for internal use. When we think about Amazon, what they're really good at, and probably world-class at, is going to be the high-velocity, fast delivery. I mean, we all probably get two or three boxes delivered to our front porch every day.
Where we don't actually see them moving heavily into is in this industrial equipment space. When we look at a basket of goods on Amazon, we often see it's fulfilled by individual marketplace participants, typically at a little bit higher price point and a longer lead time. We see a lot of those marketplace participants may have a single FOB point, while we have a network of five DCs in the U.S., as well as a couple in Canada. It allows us to be a little bit closer to our customers to get that to our customers faster. They've definitely lifted the water for everyone in terms of those expectations on how you need to service a customer. From a direct product competition, that's not the major competitor that we see every day.
What about Grainger and similar to it?
Grainger we see every day from the big scale, the Ulines of the world. There's quite a few out there. What we tend to find is we're actually competing because we're focused a little bit more on the mid-market customer size. Even Grainger is, again, going to be the best in class at the enterprise space and the national contracts. The mid-market space is really competing against some of the smaller regional players in each local market. How can we make sure that we're there to consolidate their spend? That's one area that we focus on through our marketing efforts.