Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Herc Rentals 2023 Investor Day. My name is Leslie Hunziker, and I handle investor relations, communications, and sustainability for the company. I wanna thank all of you in the room and those of you participating through the webcast for joining us today. We appreciate that you're investing time this morning to get to know our company better, and we're excited to speak with you about the strong trajectory for Herc. So let's run through a couple of housekeeping items, and then we'll get started. First, I'd like to remind you to review our safe harbor statement on slide 2. This morning's presentations will include forward-looking statements, which are based on the environment as we see it today, and therefore, involve risks and uncertainties.
For more information about these risks and uncertainties, please take a look at the Risk Factors section of our latest annual report on Form 10-K and our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Second, I wanna give you a heads-up that the slide deck is available on our website, and a replay of the webcast can be accessed shortly after the event. We have not given permission for any recording of this meeting and do not approve any transcribing of today's discussion. On slide three, you can see that presenting today, we have Larry Silber, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Humphrey, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Aaron Birnbaum, our Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.
As outlined on our agenda on slide 4, our objective today is to provide you with insight into the next three years of our journey as we continue to invest in scale for sustainable growth. This morning, we'll share with you the progress that we've made against the plan we laid out in 2021. We'll talk about our more data-driven, disciplined industry and our end market and product line diversity, which lay the foundation for economic resiliency. And we'll introduce new long-term guidance, having already met or exceeded our 2021 three-year goals after just two years. Finally, we'll demonstrate the scalability of our business model to achieve our new growth targets and update you about how we're thinking about capital allocation. So again, thank you for joining us, and I'd like to welcome Larry Silber to the podium.
Thank you, Leslie, and good morning, everyone. We're happy to be hosting you this morning from our corporate headquarters in Bonita Springs, Florida. At Herc, we actually don't use the term headquarters. Instead, we refer to this office as the FSC or Field Support Center. Since our field network of nearly 400 branch locations is where the rubber meets the road in terms of performance, our executives, senior management, and functional departments are all focused on one goal: supporting the field in any way possible to satisfy our customers and realize the vision of our company.
The term FSC is a reflection of our culture and how we all work together, side by side, collaborating with our customers, and I hope that all of you in person today will get a sense of the interconnected workings of our team as you meet with the leaders from IT, revenue management, fleet management, sales, and field operations after the webcast. This is our second Investor Day since becoming a standalone company in mid-2016. We've come a long way since then and have already met or exceeded the three-year goals we set in 2021, such that we're back in front of you today, just two years into that plan, to provide new long-term financial targets and insight into the benefits we're accruing by scaling our business for sustainable growth. Of course, the success of any growth strategy is determined largely by its people and culture.
On slide seven, our mission, vision, and values reflect the principles of our culture. With these core tenets at the forefront of everything we do, we move forward from a position of strength, more focused than ever on our customers. We want to ensure that our end users of our equipment and services achieve optimal performance safely, efficiently, and effectively. This is our mission. It's why we come to work every day. It's at the core of what our customers deeply care about. And just as our mission defines what we do, our vision guides us to where we're going. We aspire to be the supplier, employer, and investment of choice in our industry. Our team knows that the journey towards that vision should constantly challenge the status quo and set a world-class standard to create new and superior value for our customers.
At Herc, we're driven by our culture. We're inspired by our purpose statement: to equip our customers and communities to build a brighter future. We're grounded in our values, and we're passionate about developing our people, partnering with our suppliers, and solving our customers' biggest challenges. Our culture is what sets us apart from others, and I'm proud of what we've created here at Herc. Embedded in our culture, on slide number eight, is a deep commitment around safety to our employees, customers, and the communities in which we operate. Of the accomplishments achieved over the last two years, we're most proud of our safety performance. Our total recordable incident rate has consistently been well below the industry benchmark of 1.0.
Year to date, through September, we've maintained 97% perfect days, which are a day without an OSHA recordable incident, an at-fault motor vehicle accident, or a Department of Transportation violation for all of our individual branches. While we're pleased with our consistent improvement, our safety mission is never complete. We continue to invest in the tools, the technology, and resources for employees to integrate safety into their day-to-day operations while providing ongoing education and training for both employees and our customers. Having a proactive safety culture is a commitment we make, and it's the foundation of our brand reputation. Our reputation is a key competitive advantage for us. It's the result of a set of core strengths laid out on slide number nine, that differentiate us, differentiate us in a highly fragmented industry, where secular and structural demand drivers favor the largest, most capable, and agile players.
We're an industry leader, generating above-market growth by providing our customers with broad-based, value-added rental solutions through a team of equipment experts that deliver premium products and best-in-class services. We're a market consolidator, having completed nearly 40 strategic acquisitions since launching our M&A strategy in December 2020. Investments in technology are paying off for our customers and our operations as we leverage data and digital tools for better customer experiences and increased productivity. Further, we're executing on a multifaceted diversification strategy to improve operating results and ensure resilience in uncertain times. And finally, with our strong balance sheet, we're investing to win in an industry where secular trends, stimulus funding, electrification, facility modernization, and the reshoring of manufacturing are setting up the largest players to capitalize on a decade-long runway of economic investment like this industry has never seen.
As a result, the $76,000,000,000 equipment rental industry is expected to continue its upward trajectory. After three years of rapid post-pandemic revenue growth from 2021 to 2023, you can see on slide 10 in the upper left-hand corner, that the industry is projected to settle into a steady pattern of single-digit increases through 2026, with an estimated CAGR of more than 4%. This is expected to outpace annual economic growth of 2.5% due to accelerated private and public investments in infrastructure and domestic manufacturing, and a higher degree of rental penetration as customers continue to shift away from equipment ownership. The largest players in the industry are setting themselves apart with capabilities and a geographic footprint that support large national contractors and through consolidation of this highly fragmented market.
Since 2011, the industry has reduced the number of local and regional competitors through both landmark deals and smaller bolt-on acquisitions. Today, the top 10 equipment rental companies are responsible for more than 40% of industry revenue, compared with 26% just 8 years ago. Let's move on to slide number 11, where I want to talk for a minute about how industry consolidation has transformed the equipment rental market, not only in terms of market share, but also to a new level of sophistication and resiliency. In just the last decade and a half, equipment rental has undergone a massive evolution. It's probably why it's hard for you to model the future based on its history. The leaders today are not the same companies they were in 2008 or even 2016.
The change is most apparent in the application of data and analytics to drive strategic business decisions and in the diversification of products and end markets to counter economic risk. As consolidation has replaced a multitude of small mom-and-pop equipment rental shops with a handful of national, professionally managed, publicly traded companies, investments in digitalization, advanced analytics, and industry benchmarking are driving pricing and fleet discipline, strategic decision-making, and enhanced productivity. In addition to benefiting from better access to industry data and a more disciplined, insightful, competitive landscape, HERC has also come a long way in elevating our capabilities, expanding our network, and scaling for sustainable growth. This is on slide number 12.
Since taking control of our destiny in the spin-off in 2016, we've prioritized our operations to the North American continent, taking geographic complexity out of our business model and focusing on the fastest-growing domestic markets. We also accelerated diversification of our equipment offering into high-return, synergistic product lines and started introducing capabilities to new end-market customers. We've diversified our customer base so that we look at our customers today, and no one vertical represents more than 10% of our rental revenue. That compares to 2015, when oil and gas made up 35% of our top line. When it comes to individual accounts, no single customer represents more than 3% of our rental revenue. As a result, we've reduced our cyclical exposure to any one industry or any one customer.
We also broadened our reach from primarily new construction jobs to more resilient projects like industrial and commercial facility maintenance, manufacturing, emergency remediations, and MRO operations. In December of 2020, we launched a formal M&A strategy and continued expanding through greenfield locations. Building this branch network drives efficiencies of scale and provides greater access to local customers to balance our national account business and increase market share. As part of our transformation, we also consolidated our supply base, focusing on only 2-3 premium suppliers for each category of equipment. As we grow, we're putting more of our purchasing into the hands of fewer suppliers, which provides the purchasing power to make us more cost-competitive for our customers. Finally, when it comes to data, we've been among the leaders contributing to piloting Rouse's Rental Insights program since its inception in 2011.
That was really the first time the industry had access to meaningful market benchmarking for pricing, utilization, and fleet growth comparisons. We've also developed our own proprietary sales, pricing, and procurement tools for greater insight and decision-making, and our investments in customer-facing technology positions us today with best-in-class offering for e-commerce, workflow efficiency, enhanced collaboration, and personalized support, all from a handheld device. Our own recent transformation positioned us to profoundly extend our competitive advantage and accelerate profitable growth as our people, product portfolio, and strategies drive our performance. By any measure, the last three years have been exceptional for our company. We devoted meaningful resources to drive operational excellence in support of our publicly stated financial goals and to position Herc to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities that are ahead of us.
At our first Investor Day in 2021, we laid out an ambitious plan to shift from a company focused on fortifying its foundation to a respected industry leader focused on consistent, profitable share growth. Today, by leveraging our organic strengths and investing in high-return areas of our business and capitalizing on secular and structural market opportunities, our three-year plan is already outperforming our expectations. On a trailing twelve-month basis, our 2023 total revenue is up 56% from our 2021 Investor Day and nearly 62% above pre-COVID levels. Since becoming a standalone company in 2016, total revenue has grown at an 11% CAGR. The growth was spurred by fleet CAGR of 8% over the seven-year period. Shortly after we set out our last three-year plan, when inflation was 4.7%, it surged to 8% in 2022.
However, by raising rental rates nearly 6% last year and another 7% this year and improving operating efficiencies, we more than offset inflationary pressures, delivering 100 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin improvement and 90 basis points of higher ROIC since 2021, while consistently investing in our business and our people. Our company is positioned better than ever to continue to outpace market growth and deliver sustainable profitability long-term. Moving on to slide 14. We've been in business for 58 years, with 382 locations in 42 states and 5 Canadian provinces. We have more than 7,000 Herc team members, and we're currently ranked as the 3rd-largest equipment rental company in North America, having grown our market share roughly 150 basis points in just the last 2 years as we scaled our operations and invested for growth.
The next slide reflects our diversity across customer types, projects, and markets. We're a $3,200,000,000 company, reducing risk, balancing revenue streams, and driving efficiencies across multiple verticals with a more diverse customer set: national and local accounts, large and small businesses, public and private projects. Slide 16 is all about the breadth of our offering and how we expanded our product line to meet the needs of our diverse customer base.... Today, we're balancing our general rental offering with a growing position in higher-margin specialty fleet. We have approximately 3,000 active equipment categories, representing $6,200,000,000 of fleet at original equipment cost. Of that, our high-margin specialty equipment represents about 24%, compared with just 15% at the time of the spin.
As we scale the business by becoming a one-stop shop for equipment solutions, we're selling more to existing accounts in addition to attracting new customers. Our extensive and growing range of products and services, and our team's equipment expertise and deep understanding of our target customers, sets us apart from smaller competitors and makes it easier for large customers to do business with us, which breeds greater customer loyalty. Moving on to slide 17, with the fundamentals in place, I can say with great confidence that the strategies we laid out 2 years ago are working. We intend to continue to grow our core business, increasing fleet and locations in urban markets to drive revenue, scale, and operating leverage. Greater penetration of our existing specialty equipment offering into new specialty categories and our service-driven model leads to higher dollar utilization and returns.
Ongoing investments in technology will continue to improve the customer experience and our own operational excellence, and our 2030 sustainability goals will advance our ESG initiatives as we remain committed to being a responsible corporate citizen. Finally, our focused capital allocation plan sets us up to continue to invest for scale and capabilities while generating increasing returns for shareholders. As our strategies drive exceptional growth, we're looking ahead at ways to ensure we remain nimble, innovative, and responsive to our customers. Success at Herc doesn't happen by accident. On slide 18, we're introducing a new operating system called E3OS, and it will drive every aspect of our culture and performance. We're using E3OS to guide what we do, measure how well we execute, and create options for doing even better.
The name reflects our brand promise of being, 1, easy to do business with, 2, expert at what we do, and 3, efficient in serving our customers. This system is about operational effectiveness and focusing only on those things that drive value for our customers. Of course, it's about a continuous improvement through standard processes, principles, practices, and a common structure. But while those are broad building blocks of an interconnected system, truly, the secret sauce is in our culture. On slide 19, empowering our employees to say yes to customers is already embedded in our DNA. It leads to great service that builds customer loyalty. Our new operating system is designed to ensure we're consistently delivering value throughout all areas of the company in a way that differentiates our services in the marketplace.
Our team members are the ones that create and deliver the value for our customers, so they are leading the charge. They are the closest to the work, and they know where the improvement opportunities lie. Our job is to engage them in a way that drives empowerment and allows them to see efficiencies that can be gained in the processes. E3OS will help us as we grow by improving existing capabilities, creating new capabilities, and making us think differently about how we get the work done, again, in a way that differentiates us. We want to continuously improve our operational effectiveness as a company, and we want to be able to anticipate customers' unmet needs and provide solutions to them that are consistent every time. And we want our employees always to challenge the status quo. E3OS is about moving from satisfying our customers to delighting our customers.
With our strong culture and new E3 operating system, we're consistently striving to make things better in a meaningful way. If we move to slide 20, you'll see that there are multiple macro trends that are driving significant incremental growth potential for us over the next decade. So continuously striving to deliver the ideal customer experience through E3OS is more important than ever. The mega projects being spurred by federal stimulus programs and privately funded reshoring of domestic manufacturing are presenting new opportunities for us with some of the largest contractors in the industry. You'll hear more about those opportunities today as we talk about continuing to deliver above-market growth. Mega projects benefit larger rental operations disproportionately over smaller players due to our extensive capabilities. As a result, Herc is positioned to win more than our fair share of targeted mega projects.
Additionally, over the last decade, we've seen a considerable shift across our classic equipment categories towards renting equipment over ownership. This is primarily being driven by high costs and inefficiencies associated with purchasing, maintaining, storing, and transporting construction equipment. Now we're seeing the rise in rental over ownership of specialty equipment classes to cover peak demand periods, address short-term usage, and reduce capital outlays and maintenance costs. This is another trend that is expected to continue to support growth for the foreseeable future. On slide 21, you can see that we also think about growth through the lens of sustainability. As you know, the mega trends driving the economy include electrification, digitalization, and renewable energy.
Our equipment, of which 38% is electric or hybrid, is facilitating the build-out of electric vehicle factories, data centers, solar manufacturing plants, wind farms, and facility upgrades for automation, all of which promote sustainable development and a transition towards cleaner energy. Facilitating our customers renting equipment as opposed to buying it supports the circular sharing and e-sharing economies. Collaborative consumption reduces the carbon footprint and the amount of gear we need, that needs to be manufactured. Further, we professionally and regularly service our equipment, ensuring its durability. Also, our used equipment is sold to extend its life or for recyclable components. Of course, I can't say it enough, creating an environment where everyone feels valued, trusted, and positioned to succeed is a cultural priority at Herc.
Through extensive training programs, employee resource groups, our focus on internal mobility and low employment turnover, we are committed to becoming a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization. We're in the early stages of our journey, but we're proud of the progress we've made this year, which you can see here. In 2022, we were named one of the most responsible companies by Newsweek, earned the EcoVadis Silver Award, reflecting quality in sustainable management, we're upgraded to a single A rating by the International ESG Rating Agency, MSCI, and we were awarded the Military Friendly Employer Gold designation. And most recently, we were named among the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For by the National Association for Business Resources. We also reduced our Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 5% last year, and our non-toxic waste intensity by 23%.
These are in direct alignment with our 2030 goals on the next slide. By 2030, we intend to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 25%, reduce our non-toxic waste to landfill intensity by 25%, and continue to improve our safety metrics annually, targeting a total reportable incident rate of 0.49 or lower. Our 2023 Corporate Citizenship Report outlines the initiatives we're undertaking to meet those goals. It's available on our corporate website. I hope you'll have an opportunity to review it. Let me wrap up on slide 24 by quickly reiterating our playbook for sustainable growth. As I've outlined, we've been investing for scale by growing our fleet, expanding our product lines, opening new greenfield facilities, making strategic acquisitions in key markets, investing in our people, and enhancing our capabilities.
Those investments have paid off, as evidenced by a nearly 1,000 basis points of margin growth since 2016. As we continue to capitalize on opportunities that will drive top-line growth, we're leveraging our assets and technologies to accelerate profit expansion even faster. Scale matters in our business, and we have the pieces in place to continue to build scale. As we grow, our new operating system, E3OS, will ensure that we elevate solutions and deliver consistent service for our customers. This is our path to generating higher returns and increasing shareholder value. On slide 25, I wanna leave you with a couple of key takeaways. The first is, I'm confident we have the right people and resources in place to continue our growth trajectory.
We are winning in the market with a purposeful strategy that is focused around delivering value for our customers, and that is resulting in record levels of new business for Herc. We have a strong foundation on which to deliver our 2026 financial targets. So now let me turn it over to Mark Humphrey, our Chief Operating Officer, to take you through our plans. Mark?
Thank you, Larry, and good morning, everyone. As you just heard, our industry and our company have come a long way over the last several years. I'm excited to share with you our progress towards the goals we set out in our 2021 Investor Day, and how the success we've already achieved has set the groundwork for growth over the next 3 years. Outlined here on slide 27 are the targets we set out at our 2021 Investor Day. With everything presented here on an organic basis, so excluding any impact of the acquisitions. This was a plan we expected to achieve over a 3-year period. However, as Larry mentioned, after 2 years of executing on our strategies, we've exceeded the plan with respect to equipment rental revenue and Adjusted EBITDA.
We want to reset more meaningful targets as a result of our performance, plus changing market dynamics. Even with the supply chain challenges that persisted since COVID, we have added $2,100,000,000 in net fleet CapEx into our branch network to address an expanding market and to introduce new product offerings. We have been executing on our strategies that we set out a couple of years ago, growing our core and expanding specialty product lines. We incorporated this fleet into our existing branch network and also benefited from the addition of 38 greenfield locations across the U.S. and Canada. New locations, diverse fleet, and a team focused on delivering specialty solutions to our customers, has enabled us to gain share in existing end markets and broaden our reach to new markets, which has ultimately driven our revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth.
Our adjusted EBITDA margin and flow-through faced some headwinds since we developed these targets in 2021. Cost inflation was much higher than we had initially forecasted, and as a result, in early 2022, we publicly revised our flow-through target to 50%-60%. In 2023, as the supply chain has recovered, we have increased our fleet sales that have been pent up over the last two years, which has a dilutive effect on EBITDA margin and flow-through. Our adjusted rental EBITDA flow-through, which excludes the impact of used equipment sales, which we refer to as REBITDA, is solidly in the middle of that range for 2023. On top of the organic growth presented here, we've also grown through strategic acquisitions, adding 81 locations and another $990,000,000 in fleet.
We had targeted to have a branch network of 400 locations by the end of 2024 and are on track to accomplish that within the first quarter of next year. All of this has set us up nicely for the next phase of our growth. As we lay out our targets for the next three years on slide 28, I want to point out that all of these are once again on an organic basis, but also exclude our Cinelease studio entertainment business. As you will recall, we announced last week that we are exploring strategic alternatives for Cinelease due to the changing dynamics for lighting and grip rental providers in the film and studio entertainment industry.
As one of the top three equipment rental companies in North America, we are focused on increasing our scale, driving revenue growth at a pace of at least two times the market, and leveraging our cost structure to improve margin. Increase in scale all begins with investments in our fleet. Our goal is to invest $2,800,000,000 -$3,700,000,000 of net fleet CapEx in core and specialty fleet in our existing branch network and through Greenfield locations, representing an increase of 10%-12% in average OEC fleet. This drives a rental revenue CAGR of 10%-14% over the same time period.
Increasing the density in our branch network allows us to absorb our fixed costs over a higher revenue base and expand our margin profile, driving our REBITDA margin into the 48%-51% range, and ultimately gaining an expected 0.5% of market share per year. We will provide our annual 2024 guide during our fourth quarter earnings call. So how do we achieve these targets? On slide 29, we start with how we'll grow our revenue. Revenue growth starts with making our fleet more efficient, thereby improving time utilization and having pricing outpace inflation, both of which increase dollar utilization. In addition, we have to capitalize on base market growth and increase our share. First, let's look at the macroeconomic data that supports future base market growth.
On slide 30, you can see in the chart on the right-hand side, we have been consistently outpacing the market growth and intend to continue that trajectory. Macroeconomic trends remain supportive of the rental industry, with ARA forecasting the market to grow at a 4% CAGR over the next 3 years. This growth includes the continued secular trend of shifting from equipment ownership to rental, stimulus funding, electrification, modernization, and the reshoring of manufacturing. These trends benefit rental companies of scale, with only a few players who have a national footprint and the breadth of equipment required to meaningfully participate in these projects. Two of our key end markets are industrial and non-residential construction. Both continue to show strength in the coming years.
Combined, these two end markets reflect about two-thirds of our customer base, and both are likely to outperform other consumer-driven end markets as trends I just mentioned continue to gather steam. Moving on to slide 31. Equipment rental is a very relationship-based industry, where equipment availability and service excellence go a long way to retaining our customer base. Herc Rentals was the originator of the National Account Program, and our National Account customers have an average tenure of 29 years.... We also focus heavily on the local markets and build loyalty through our network of team members, who are face-to-face with our customers on a daily basis. With both national and local customers, we strive to be a full-service provider and supply not only equipment, but help solve their business needs with our breadth of gear and service solutions, expanding our cross-selling opportunities.
We've been scaling our business quickly over the past two years, expanding our network within the top 100 markets and taking share by adding nearly 120 locations through greenfield openings and acquisitions. There is generally very little overlap in the customer base when we acquire companies. This is not only a great opportunity to continue the local market rental relationship, but also to cross-sell our specialty equipment and solutions to that same customer. And as Aaron will discuss, we are also expanding our reach into new end markets through investment in new product lines and giving our sales professionals the training and resources to become experts in the field to capture new project wins. Megaprojects and reshoring are also driving growth in new business wins as these projects come online.
Rather than just discuss the overall trend, we thought we'd take you through the revenue opportunity that megaprojects present for us on slide 32. There has been significant funding made available through government spending bills, as well as private funding, that provides even more opportunity and a long tailwind for the industry. Currently, looking into 2024, there's approximately $350,000,000,000 in project starts greater than $250,000,000 . The rental budget for any construction project is generally around 2% of total spend. And knowing that we are one of only a handful of national rental companies that have the equipment and capabilities to service these projects, as Larry mentioned, that equates to a $7 ,000,000,000 industry opportunity, or $2,300,000,000, per year, assuming an estimated 3-year project life.
That's a lot of ground to cover, and we want to make sure we're being disciplined and strategic in the projects we are targeting, so we can continue to grow our local market customer base and provide the service and equipment they have come to expect. We're targeting and have line of sight into approximately 10%-15% of this annual spend, which is 2-3 times our market share. This results in annualized rental revenue opportunity of around $300,000,000 , a solid tailwind to our future revenue growth. Now that we've discussed the revenue growth opportunities over the next few years, let's switch gears to margin expansion on slide 33. At the time of the spend, we generated an Adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 34% and Adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 40%.
Coming out of the spend, we were inefficient in all of these categories shown. But as we've continued on our journey, we have made great strides in our execution and are driving margin expansion going forward. We're targeting Adjusted EBITDA margin in the 46%-49% range and EBITDA slightly higher, between 48%-51%. It's no secret that absorbing fixed costs over a higher revenue base leads to increased margins. As we've been discussing throughout today, increasing scale and urban market density allows us to increase our revenues while sharing costs across the network. Our fleet mix also plays an important role by investing in higher-margin specialty equipment. Having a breadth of equipment allows us to diversify our customer base and broaden the end markets we serve, ultimately making us less exposed to cyclical industries and being more recession-resilient.
We've also invested heavily in customer-facing tools, such as ProControl Next Gen, making it easier for our customers to do business with us and ultimately driving customer retention and gaining wallet share. We've also invested in technology that gives us the ability to gather, evaluate, and make data-driven decisions. Adjusted EBITDA margin is impacted by the sales of our used equipment and generally has lower margins than rental, which is why we also measure our Adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA excludes this impact and provides a clearer view of the efficiency of our rental operations. We're investing in our infrastructure in order to sell more equipment through higher-margin retail and wholesale channels, with the goal of closing the gap between Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA margins in the future. Aaron will give you a bit more about our plans in these areas in just a few minutes.
Now, turning to slide 34, we've come a long way on our journey to increase our Adjusted EBITDA margins, and we will continue to raise the bar. While we see no slowing in demand, and all of the industry data suggests that there are many more growth years ahead, we've made some hypothetical assumptions to address your concerns about a possible softening macro environment and the performance of our business. Let's say we enter into a recession that would reduce our rental revs by 7% per year in 2024 and 2025, with a recovery in 2026. We would preserve cash flow in those two years by reducing investment in the fleet and slowing M&A activity, which would in turn reduce our leverage ratio. We would then turn to investing in 2026 as we see recovery.
We've continued to improve structurally as a company, which makes us stronger through an economic cycle. Our margins mid-cycle increase, and as each cycle gets higher, the trough margin increases as well. Our structural improvements, coupled with the short-term actions detailed on the right-hand side of the slide, have reset the potential trough to 2022, 2023 levels for our margins as a new cycle would be set to begin. Even if there is softening in some of the end markets we serve, and not a full-scale recession, we're also well-positioned to make adjustments to take advantage of those end markets that are still growing. As you'll recall, our fleet is fungible and can be deployed in a variety of end markets. There are some end markets that still haven't recovered since 2020, such as retail, office, and warehousing.
That doesn't mean our fleet will be sitting on the sidelines, but we can reallocate that to data centers, education, healthcare, or manufacturing. Mega projects are also still in the early innings and will require a vast amount of fleet, and we can deploy our fleet to address those needs in a greater way than we previously discussed. We're excited to share with you our commitment to growth through 2026 by continuing to execute on our strategy. With that, I'll turn it over to Aaron to take you through how we will deliver on this above-market growth.
Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today to highlight our progress on our continued journey to build scale and market leadership. As Larry and Mark discussed, we have a tremendous opportunity ahead of us, and today I will take you through the operational drivers we're focused on to deliver above-market growth. I'll start by highlighting the long tenure of industry experience of our operations and sales leaders at Herc. We operate in 10 regional areas across North America, which are indicated on the map on slide 37. Our regional leaders have an average of 26 years of industry experience and 23 years with Herc Rentals. Here at the Field Support Center, senior functional leaders, including leaders in operations, fleet, pricing, and sales, have on average of 26 years of industry experience and 17 years with Herc Rentals.
We run a complex business with a lot of moving parts, and our experienced leaders work cross-functionally like a well-oiled machine to deliver for our customers, and they are training our next generation of leaders to do the same. I can testify to this, having started my career with Herc over 30 years ago as an entry-level sales coordinator. I have since held roles of increasing responsibility within sales and operations, and my journey with the company has had me move to many of the regions indicated on this map. Developing our people is a pillar of our culture and is reflected by the long tenure of our leaders and team members across the organization, which is certainly a competitive advantage for us. As one of the leading equipment rental companies in North America, we have many competitive advantages.
For nearly 60 years, we have supplied our customers with equipment and solutions, and our mission has long been to ensure our end users achieve performance safely, efficiently, and effectively. Our broad, diversified fleet, coupled with the expertise of our team members across our expansive branch network, enables us to serve customers across many dynamic market segments. Also differentiating us as a first-class provider is our investment in technology. Mid-last year, we launched our ProControl Next Gen digital platform, a comprehensive collection of applications and tools that provides customers with more insight and control over the rental equipment performance and utilization. We have also invested in digital tools that enhance the way we do business through world-class customer relationship management platforms and an integrated business intelligence suite that enables our operations and sales teams to effectively manage our $6,200,000,000 fleet.
Today, we are positioned among the top performers in an industry where scale, experience, and professional operations management matter, and we will continue to hone our capabilities in these areas for competitive advantage. On slide number 39, we provided you with a timeline of major events in the last two decades for Herc Rentals as a leading provider in a dynamic industry. By the early 2000s, after operating for over 30 years as the leader in equipment rental, the competitive landscape began to change. Our industry began to rapidly evolve, developing industry standards and data collection from rental companies that were introduced and tracked by Rouse beginning in 2011. Business intelligence and data-driven technologies emerged, and scale was becoming increasingly more important. In 2016, Herc Rentals separated from our predecessor, and we gained control of our own destiny.
We quickly focused on putting in place technology and processes that will lead the way for our own evolution. Once we had a good foundation in place, we laid out a strategy that would propel our profitability. At our first Investor Day in 2021, we shared a three-year strategy focused on rapid growth.... As Larry mentioned, we achieved several of those three-year targets in the first two years. We continue to outpace market growth as a result of our premium assets, national footprint, broad-based capabilities, and expert services. Our growing operating scale has enabled us to offer more value for our existing customers, win opportunities with new customers, and expand our presence in growth markets and diverse industry sectors.
Our journey isn't over, and we intend to continue to put in the work to take market share in an estimated $86 ,000,000,000 North American equipment rental market by 2026. So today, I'm going to take you through our strategies for delivering above-market growth, starting with strategic investments to grow our branch network and fleet, expand into new end markets, elevate our sales capabilities to support our local and national account mix, including mega projects, and continue to advance our technologies as a differentiator for Herc Rentals. On slide 41, you see in 2016, our physical locations in North America numbered 268, with 293 distinct profit centers. We define a profit center as a unique business operation that operates separately from the core branch, such as some of our specialty lines, including Pro Solutions, Trench Solutions, and Flooring, among others.
Our strategy has long been to leverage our existing infrastructure to develop our specialty equipment by standing them up within our existing branches and converting them to standalone facilities when they have reached a sustainable level of maturity to move to their next growth phase. Fast-forward to today, and you see in the last seven years, we have implemented this strategy and have added over 100 more physical locations, comprising 241 profit centers to our footprint. Here on slide 42, a combined view of the preceding maps illustrates our current total of 382 physical locations, comprising 534 profit centers, which are highly concentrated in the top 100 metropolitan markets as part of our urban market strategy.
While our focus up to now has been on the top 50 MSAs, we are now expanding that effort to the top 100 markets in North America, and we expect to be at over 500 physical locations by the end of our new three-year plan. Urban markets represent diverse end markets and provide a broad customer base and economic resiliency. Our diverse fleet provides a range of solutions for a variety of customers in these dynamic markets. In addition, many of the mega projects being announced are in the geographies where we have focused our acquisitions and greenfield additions. Our acquisition process is now a core competency for us. We allocate approximately $500,000,000 in capital spend to acquisitions each year. We have successfully integrated 39 businesses with 81 locations into Herc Rentals network since December 2020.
We have efficiently assimilated these companies' teams, equipment, operations, and customer accounts to rapidly add value to our operations. With only 15% customer overlap, these acquired businesses have delivered compelling synergies, including rate improvement, fleet optimization, and equipment cross-selling. We have also expanded our footprint with 38 greenfield locations since 2021. We plan on adding another 20-30 greenfield locations every year for the next three years, targeting top 100 markets and geographies that expand our footprint to drive scale and optimally serve market opportunities. In addition to growing our branch footprint by over 100 physical locations and scaling our network, our rental fleet has also grown to currently $6,200,000,000 at OEC, compared to $3,600,000,000 at the end of 2016. We plan to grow our fleet to around $9 ,000,000,000 by 2026.
Growing our core and specialty fleet through new equipment investments is a key strategy to expanding our share and keeping up with the increasing demand opportunities. Let me start with growing the core. We're investing in growing our core business of general categories like earthmoving, material handling, and aerial equipment, which represents 76% of our fleet value. We have the capacity to add up to $1,500,000,000 of core fleet to existing locations, providing further opportunity to recover fixed costs, drive optimal flow-through, and meet customer needs. We also continue to invest in high-margin, value-added specialty equipment categories that expand our ability to serve core customers while diversifying into new end markets. Our specialty offering encompasses our ProSolutions business, which includes power generation, electrical distribution, climate control, remediation, and pumping equipment, to name a few.
We will continue our focus on specialty expansion throughout our network, with a goal of approximately 25% of fleet mix over the long term. Of course, our greenfield and M&A activities I spoke of earlier add fleet to our operating markets, and we focus on filling gaps in coverage, as well as increasing density in target markets to better serve our customers... Multi-year mega projects and infrastructure jobs favor rental companies with quality fleet, a national branch network, digital capabilities, and on-site fleet management expertise, and Herc Rentals checks all these boxes. We have sized up what we believe our mega project opportunities are in the next three years to allocate fleet while staying disciplined to our overall market strategies and growth. Lastly, leveraging fleet management and technology integrated into our equipment provides customer efficiency and fleet management benefits.
Simply put, our service is renting reliable, high-quality gear and solutions. Our expertise, however, is managing the life cycle and deployment of our fleet, including buying, moving, delivering, maintaining, monitoring, and disposing gear. At Herc Rentals, digitally enabled business intelligence tools are integrated into every phase of this cycle, which becomes more complex as our fleet grows. Fleet planning starts with defining the optimal fleet mix, considering rotation and incremental adds to drive yield and performance. Our fleet acquisition process emphasizes acquiring quality products from premium vendors. The next phase is driving utilization and maintaining operating costs. Our demand-based fleet distribution model is supported by business intelligence tools that help our teams predictively manage our fleet, determining customer segments that would most likely utilize our fleet by region and ensuring it is distributed into the proper markets and at the proper cadence.
Lastly, our fleet disposal strategy is critical to enhancing return on invested capital, and we're focusing on a multi-channel used equipment strategy. Considering we generally rotate about one-eighth of our fleet each year, our used equipment sales strategy can have a significant impact. We're shifting from a heavy reliance on auction channels, which we've used for the last seven years, to higher return retail and wholesale channels. We've created a used equipment application for our salespeople and focused them on our go-forward strategy. With the app, our salespeople can see fleet available for sale with photos, tiered pricing, commissions earned, maintenance history, and location. We're continuing to gain traction on our capabilities in the retail and wholesale channels. On the lower half of the slide, I want to highlight fleet mix as a strategic component of lifecycle management.
We manage over 3,000 different fleet types, and having diverse fleet mix helps drive higher returns. We consider a 65% time utilization optimal for most of our core fleet, but some assets deliver premium dollar utilizations on lower time utilization. For example, a walk-behind floor scrubber, shown on the left, is used in maintenance, operations, and many flooring applications. For this piece of equipment, a 50% time utilization gets us a 110% dollar utilization. The 1-ton air conditioner, known as a spot cooler, shown in the middle, is a very nimble machine with many applications, often used in facilities requiring an extra level of cooling or heating at different times of the year. With a 35% time ute and 133% dollar ute, this is another product with low time ute and high dollar ute.
Then we have a compact crawler loader, which is part of our core fleet and a very common asset. At 65% time ute, you get 54% dollar ute. Connecting these examples back to our fleet management strategy, it's about fleet mix, and these are all products we're building into our core fleet because of the dollar utilization benefit and is why time utilization is not our sole focus. Moving to slide 45, as we scale the business, we're strategically growing our fleet to meet the needs of our diverse base of customers. Since the spin, our fleet has grown by 72% and our rental revenue has grown nearly 110%. We continue to balance our core fleet offering with higher-margin specialty equipment based on demand.
As you see here, our higher-margin specialty fleet today represents 24% of OEC, compared to 18% at the end of 2016. Allocating resources between core and specialty product lines is a differentiator for Herc Rentals. Unlike smaller local rental operations, we have the scale and expertise to invest in both core and specialty solutions for a broad range of customer types. As a one-stop shop for equipment solutions, we incrementally benefit from cross-selling synergies. As a case in point, a few years ago, we won a national account for a large North American industrial manufacturer needing specific core fleet. In the process of developing the national account, the customer experienced a challenging operational issue. Our customer service and sales team sprung into action, collaborating with the customer's engineering team on a solution which crossed into our specialty equipment lines.
This customer remains one of our national accounts, and we now support all their rental equipment needs across many categories as they discovered the value of rental and its benefits versus using their capital to buy equipment. Slide 46 reflects our customer vertical expansion. Over the last 7 years, we have strategically diversified our customer base for resiliency. Here you see the diverse project types and end markets we participate in. We continue to broaden our customer and project reach, and shown in bold text are newer end markets we've expanded into. For example, we've broadened our reach to win resilient projects like data center, renewables, electrical grid, power grid, emergency rentals due to weather, and MRO, to name a few.
As Larry mentioned, we have diversified our customer base such that today, no one vertical industry represents more than 10% of our rental revenue, thereby reducing the impact of seasonality on our business. As previously mentioned, the equipment rental market continues to benefit from strong demand across a variety of end markets and geographies. Herc Rentals is positioned well for trending opportunities as mega project construction, alternative energy, and U.S. manufacturing capacity continue to gather steam. We're proud of the disciplined capabilities we've built across our sales organization, supporting both our national account business, which represents approximately 42% of our rental revenue, and local territory sales, which makes up the rest. Of course, a well-equipped sales team is our lifeblood.
Through our Black & Gold Academy, a program started when Larry became CEO, we recruit and train college graduates for entry-level sales positions, and then career path them within the sales organization. We have clear go-to-market strategies for national accounts and our local account business that, of course, complement our urban market strategy and increasing mega project opportunities. Our teams are laser-focused on territory optimization. Using a plethora of digital tools we built or customized, our sales teams have data at their fingertips for a number of sales tasks, from forecasting demand by zip code to finding availability for used equipment at the end of its life cycle. I'll zoom in more on technology-enabled capabilities later in this presentation. On slide 48, you see success in numbers as a result of our investment in our sales organization.
Since 2016, we have grown our local sales team by 39%, and in the same time period, achieved 132% local revenue growth. Our on the national account level, our sales team has grown by 48%, and revenue from national accounts has grown by 97%. So our investments in recruiting, training, and supporting our sales teams with tools to drive efficiency and productivity are paying off. I would like to focus for a moment on our national account program, which Herc Rentals introduced to the equipment rental industry more than 30 years ago. Today, the average tenure of our national account customer is 29 years, and these long-term relationships are delivering value for us in every vertical in which we participate.
As one of the largest players in the rental industry, our fleet capacity, digital capabilities, on-site management expertise, and broad location network qualify us as a preferred supplier for large national account customers. In particular, our customer care model for national accounts is an attractive efficiency driver for these customers. For example, take a large facilities management company with properties across North America. They cannot predict every piece of equipment needed for maintenance or emergency use within a time period. But when these needs arise, they contact our customer care team based here in Florida, versus a local branch. Our national account customer care professionals understand these customers' profiles and can facilitate and fulfill their equipment needs for a single job site or across all of their locations.
We've expanded and will continue to invest in our national account service capabilities to capitalize on what we see as a booming large project pipeline with the federal and privately funded mega projects, large infrastructure jobs, and manufacturing facilities. These mega projects represent the beginning of a multiyear flow of dollars into the industrial and infrastructure space, and we're positioned to win a substantial share of the market's growth. On the map on slide 50, all Herc Rentals locations are represented by the yellow icons. All other colored icons represent 2024 to 2025 planned mega project starts, including data centers, battery manufacturing plants, planned infrastructure, LNG plants, and other projects such as renewables. So you can see here that our branch footprint is well-positioned for participation in mega projects.
As I mentioned before, we're thinking about mega projects strategically while staying disciplined to our local market strategies, and we're targeting a balance of national and local accounts. Herc is positioned to compete, and we are expecting 2-3 times higher market share in projects where we participate. On slide 51, I want to take you through some examples highlighting our participation in some mega projects. I'll mention that Herc Rentals defines a mega project as a project of at least $250 ,000,000 in construction value, and that will generate approximately $5,000,000 in rental revenue. It is also important to note that due to the scope of equipment needed to support mega projects, customers may be awarded primary, secondary, and transactional positions to equipment rental providers across the timeline of a project based on market capabilities.
That said, the vast majority of mega projects do not have a primary equipment rental provider. They are instead, general contractor and subcontractors receive their fleet needs from their trusted equipment rental provider. As is the case in the first example shown here, Herc Rentals is participating in a $10,000,000,000 electric vehicle car manufacturing and battery plant that is projected to last 3 years and yield $200,000,000 in rental revenue during that project. So that is the pool of rental opportunity, and you can see this project is in the early stages. Again, this project does not have a primary equipment rental vendor. We currently have about $12,000,000 of fleet on rent for this project. For context, our mature branches on average, have about $18,000,000 in fleet. That means it takes more than 1 entire branch to satisfy this need.
Below that, you see a project with the same construction value, an LNG capital project, estimated to take 5 years, and we currently have $16,000,000 of fleet at OEC allocated to this project. In the upper right, you see Herc Rentals was awarded the primary position for a $500,000,000 data center project. Data centers typically add new buildings in sequence. So while the first phase is projected to take 18 months, we've seen similar projects last 10 years. We are the primary and operate on-site. This project started in September, and we already have $1,000,000 of fleet at OEC in this project, with an additional $20,000,000 of reservations scheduled for delivery in the first phase. The last example is a $15,000,000,000 chip manufacturing plant projected to last 3 years.
But similar to data centers, these types of projects are often ongoing as they keep expanding and retrofitting. Expected rental opportunity is $300,000,000 . While we're not the primary, we have $18,000,000 in fleet on this project. Again, that represents the fleet size of an average branch, which illustrates the tremendous opportunity these projects offer us, and as you see, most of them are in the early innings. On slide 52, we turn to some of the technologies powering our strategies for driving revenue. We continue to elevate the use of technology across the rental consumption chain. Leveraging the knowledge we have in servicing customers for nearly 60 years, we have created some proprietary systems that optimize productivity and efficiency for our customers and team members.
Starting with our ProControl Next Gen platform, which you will hear more about in a few minutes, that provides customers the ability to manage their Herc Rentals fleet and transactions. Our Optimus pricing tool, which provides real-time guidance on rental rates, ensures we remain competitive across the markets we serve. Our On-The-Go technology provides our professional drivers and dispatchers with all the information needed to seamlessly complete equipment delivery or pickup. We have also partnered with some of the world's leading technology vendors to customize off-the-shelf digital tools to support our customers and business needs. For example, our Salesforce.com platform arms our professional sales representatives with vital information to help acquire new customers and expand relationships with existing customers. We're also leveraging fully integrated telematics, primarily from Herc Rentals' proprietary units installed in our fleet for real-time information and management of our assets.
Our field personnel can drill into their daily operations with dashboards and reporting available in our Qlik Analytics platform. Of course, we use many other technologies and tools in our daily work, and we'll continue to invest in innovative technology-enabled tools to maintain our competitiveness. I now want to move into how we are optimizing efficiencies through market density benefits, our comprehensive logistics management, strategic used equipment channels, our customer-facing ProControl Next Gen platform, and our new enterprise-wide operating model that Larry spoke of earlier. You've heard us talk a lot about urban market strategy today, and I want to take a moment to really highlight how the benefits of having density and scale in these markets shows up in the numbers.
As we build out our infrastructure, introduce all of our product lines and expand our customer base, cross-sell into our new and existing customers, and obtain the operational efficiencies. Once scaled, we expect to see roughly 500 basis points improvement in both dollar utilization as well as EBITDA margin. We have a long runway ahead of us, although we have made great progress since the spin. Currently, we estimate that about 30% of our markets are meeting our criteria for being considered scaled.... As we introduce more specialty product lines while building out our markets, it enables us to cross-sell, gaining more of the customer's wallet. Currently, over 80% of our revenue from customers that rent both our core and specialty equipment. However, approximately only 40% of our customers count rents from both, providing significant cross-selling opportunities.
Whether it be from organic growth through greenfields or acquisitions as we build out our scaled markets, all of these components combine to provide financial benefits to the health of the business. For example, when we acquire businesses, we generally see that there is only a 15% overlap in the customer base, providing 85% new customers to the base. Then, with the added benefit of introducing more product lines and services, the benefits of scale become realized. Earlier in this presentation, I spoke of our fleet lifecycle management capabilities. From an operational perspective, logistics management is central to how we deliver on the financial and operational goals connected to every phase of our fleet lifecycle. Of course, moving our gear to where it's needed, when it's needed, requires incredible know-how, and we focus first and always on safety.
We actively recruit and train professional drivers as part of our team to optimize our logistics capabilities and reduce outside hauler costs. We continue to focus on optimizing our logistics capabilities, and the On-The-Go technology I mentioned earlier is a critical enabler to do that. We use this tool to dispatch our delivery trucks with visibility to where they are at all times. In 2022, we delivered $30,000,000 to the EBITDA line through improvements to our logistics operations. This is not just a one-time event, but a benefit that is expected to grow over time. Moving to slide 56, our used equipment sales strategy is a priority focus for us. I've already touched on a proprietary used equipment sales app, which has enabled us to perform better in the used equipment retail channel since it launched late last year.
As I mentioned previously, we're shifting our approach to used equipment sales with a channel mix strategy that relies less on auction and more on higher-return retail and wholesale channels. We have developed a targeted used equipment program, leveraging our extensive sales force reach with targets set for all territory sales professionals. To ensure an optimal lifecycle of our assets, we're using data-driven analytics for disposal and used equipment pricing, and we're expanding our resources, capabilities, and processes for growing volume, investing in search optimization aligned with our channel mix strategies. In the third quarter of this year, we sold 4 times more of our used equipment at a retail level as we did in the same time last year, and we continue to build our capabilities in the retail and wholesale channels. Ultimately, we'd like to put 70%-80% through non-auction channels.
Shifting to technology on slide 57, our ProControl Next Gen platform that we launched in the summer of 2022 set a new standard for the equipment rental experience. This innovative customer-facing platform includes telematics and fleet management solutions, along with a feature-rich and user-friendly e-commerce experience. From reserving equipment, to tracking delivery and pickup of gear, to monitoring equipment performance, to managing who operates equipment, to having full visibility to invoices and upcoming rental end dates, these ProControl Next Gen capabilities and more put our customers in full control of their key equipment rental events and actions. In short, through our ProControl Next Gen platform, customers have gained a new competitive advantage in accomplishing their rental tasks and achieving optimum productivity from the rental fleet. I would now like to play a video highlighting some of these features and benefits. ...
I'll close with the next step in our evolution as a first-class equipment rental company, and that is the introduction of our E3 Operating System or E3OS. As Larry spoke of earlier, central to E3OS is our brand promise to be easy to do business with, expert at what we do, and the most efficient operators in our industry. This is all to ensure we deliver the optimal customer experience at every touch point in the customer consumption chain as we continue to grow. In the graphic on slide 59, you see all the functional areas encompassing every part of our business that must work together to deliver a best-in-class customer experience. Functional leaders across our entire organization are working together to define and set forth the processes and tools needed within and across each function to deliver on our easy, expert, and efficient brand promise.
This is an exciting initiative that will amplify our capabilities in equipment rental and set new standards of excellence for our business. Across all of the operational strategies covered today, continuous improvement is the through line, and we'll continue to focus on strategic investments and operational efficiencies that position us to deliver more and more value for our customers. Once again, thank you for joining us today. Now I'll turn this over to Mark for an update on our capital allocation plan.
Thanks, Aaron. In 2021, we set out a new capital allocation strategy, and while we aren't shifting directions, I thought it would be helpful to review this again with everyone and also provide some color around our investment priorities, free cash flow, and net leverage. Herc is committed to delivering long-term, sustainable value for shareholders with a balanced, disciplined, and opportunistic approach to capital deployment. Turning to slide 62, our first priority in allocating capital is always growing the business. We will continue investment to grow our fleet to meet the demand within the market. We believe we're still in the early innings of a growth cycle, and as a company, have the ability to grow greater than 2 times the market. In order to do that, we need to invest in new fleet in our existing locations, as well as build out greenfield locations.
Growing fleet on our existing locations provides our best returns and improves our margins. Strategic M&A also continues to be a priority within capital allocation. We've expanded our footprint in many of the top markets over the past 2 years and still have a robust pipeline. We also continue to see the potential for approximately $500,000,000 in strategic acquisitions per year over the next several years. We introduced our dividend at the last Investor Day and intend to grow the dividend over time, in line with our long-term performance. We will also continue to opportunistically repurchase our shares to deploy surplus capital to our shareholders. We have a business of scale that we're managing exceptionally well. We are in an exciting growth industry that is benefiting from structural, structural and secular growth, and are executing our strategy to benefit our customers, communities, our team, and our investors.
Being able to leverage fleet growth, revenue growth, cash flow growth, and margin growth, we have demonstrated a track record of improving our return on invested capital and will continue to strive for 50 basis points of improvement year-over-year. We're investing in the business to continue our growth trajectory and take advantage of opportunities that the market is presenting. This level of investment often comes with neutral or even negative free cash flow in the short term. We have a long-term view of the business and are confident that as we get to a certain scale, we can continue to invest for growth while generating free cash flow. There are certainly paths to free cash flow in the short term, which we've modeled here on slide 64.
Our industry tends to have countercyclical free cash flow, where in times of growth, there is significant investment into the business, driving revenue and increased margins at the expense of reduced free cash flow generation. Reduction in revenue growth means pulling back on capital that we would deploy, potentially selling more used equipment and generating more free cash. We're investing into this cycle, and our goal is to invest $2,800,000,000 -$3,700,000,000 in net fleet CapEx over the next three years into our core and specialty businesses, which drives a rental revenue CAGR of 10%-14%, or 2.5-3.5 times market growth. However, we will remain disciplined in our capital deployment with regard to net fleet CapEx. Our goal will always be that our revenue growth outpaces our fleet growth.
So if the market determines the more prudent path is 1.5-2.5 times market growth, then we would generate somewhere between $900,000,000 and $1,200,000,000 over the next 3 years. In a scenario where our rental market is not growing and our investment strategy becomes primarily replacement CapEx, we would generate approximately $1,400,000,000-$1,800,000,000 of free cash. As always, we will remain disciplined in our capital deployment strategies. In addition to our organic growth, we're increasing our footprint through strategic M&A, as you can see on slide 65. We focus on acquisition opportunities in high-growth markets that complement our current branch network and fit our strategic, financial, and cultural filters.
We have invested $1,300,000,000 and added 81 locations since we began our acquisition strategy at the end of 2020. We're focused on companies within the top 50 markets, and we're expanding into the top 100, where there is good opportunity. As we've mentioned, the average EBITDA multiple for all of our acquisitions to date has been around 5.5x, with a little higher on specialty acquisitions and a little lower on general rental. And we aren't seeing any change to that in today's market. Our goal on all acquisitions, after incorporating synergies, is to end up around 3.5x-4.5x, which we would typically achieve within a two-year timeframe.
We've said it a lot today, but increasing our density in urban markets improves our margins and also improves Dollar Utilization, as we are able to cross-sell to a new customer base from fleet already located at nearby existing branches. The chart on the left is our organic leverage expectations. We get to somewhere around 1.5 times leverage by 2026 if we execute our plan. Our stated leverage target is 2-3 times, so we potentially have 1-1.5 turns of leverage or surplus capital to be invested in growth fleet, which also includes additional Greenfield opportunities, M&A activity, or return to shareholders over the next few years.
Our capital allocation strategy remains much the same as we laid out in our 2021 Investor Day, and we intend to keep executing with our main focus on growing the business while there is so much opportunity. Now I'll turn it back to Larry for closing remarks.
Thank you, Mark. Before I open it up to Q&A, let me leave you with this: We have never been better positioned to win. We've never been more resilient or had a more resilient business model. The market backdrop has never been stronger. This is a company that has what it takes across the board to be successful in any operating environment, and we're only getting better. Our premium equipment portfolio is comprehensive, and our service exemplifies quality and consistency at every step of the rental process. We're among the top performers in an industry where scale, experience, and professional operations management matter, which allows us to consistently exceed our customers' expectations. We have prioritized investments strategically in building our fleet and building our network. We've got great capabilities. We've got a great brand.
We've got a great culture and great talent, and our team never worked better together or has been more aligned on what we need to do collectively to be successful. They are our differentiating factor, and as a result, we've never been better positioned to win. With that, and maybe prior to taking questions, just like to remind everybody to wait for a microphone to come from either side, and also, if you would, please state your name and the firm that you work for. With that, we'll take some questions. Yes?
Hey, thanks, Larry. Adam Seiden from Barclays. Just a question first on some of the CAGRs that you laid out there. You could just give us an idea of how linear some of those would be through, you know, as you look through 2026 here. You know, whether that's from a CapEx side or even, you know, some of the things that weren't exactly CAGR, but thinking about some of the new branch openings that you alluded to over the next couple of years.
Yeah, I think, you know, a couple of things there. One, like I said in my prepared remarks, we'll lay out 2024 guide Q4 earnings, so you'll get more clarity on sort of the specificity around 2024. But I think generally speaking, we see that build in those CAGRs as relatively linear, over that three-year period. And, you know, I think if you think about it like that and take the midpoints of that, I think you, you probably land pretty close to, you know, being able to model out those three years in a linear way.
Got it. Also just a follow-up. So when you're looking at market share, so I think last, last, Investor Day, you had a goal from three to five. Now, we cut short the period by about a year here, fully appreciating that. So just thinking about, you know, how, how you guys are gonna achieve that next growth, how do you think about the competition set that's around you in terms of... You, you control your ability to grow, but there's other folks that are gonna grow around you as well. So how do you ensure that you're taking that share in those regions where you're expanding?
Yeah, I would say, Adam, and, you know, it's clearly a competitive landscape out there, but it's also very fragmented. So, you know, customers decide who their trusted supplier is based on a number of factors. You know, the trust to get the job done as they expect it, the technology that you have available, the relationship that is built to service the customer's business, typically, not just in the local market, but across a national footprint. So I think we're positioned very, very well. And for us to, you know, carve out our piece of this market and keep growing, I don't think - I think it's something we're very well positioned to get done over the next three years.
Next question.
Thank you. John Healy from Northc oast. Larry, I wanted to hit on one of the statements you made about the industry being very different from 2008 and 2016. And you kind of talked about the use of data, and you talked about the Rouse Insights programs. Can you talk a little bit about how much of the industry do you think is on the pricing platform today, and maybe how that's evolved? And just your confidence that with more equipment kind of being available to you in the industry, that pricing can stay with us as a tailwind as you look out the next three years. And is that baked into the kind of the milestones as well?
Yeah. I don't know that it's baked into the milestones. I think, to answer your first question, you know, all of the major players participate in Rouse, and I think that's growing. I think there's about 50% of the universe of players in Rouse. So, you know, I think they're figuring out ways to bring more people into that. And the ARA is also working on their own plan to bring more of their, what I'll call, you know, local regional houses or mom and pops, into a different universe of data collection and data analytics, for that type of a rental company.
So, you know, we think that the analytics, that are there, the data that are there, the professional management that, you know, now exists in the industry, that really didn't exist. If you go back to 2008, it was sort of still a little bit of, you know, wildness going on. It's matured through 2016. And post 2016, I think you really have a set of professional managers in this business that'll be very disciplined around pricing and marketplace, and, you know, covering inflation or exceeding inflation with pricing in the marketplace. So, I think it's here to stay. I don't think it's gonna go backwards for us.
Thank you.
Yes, Ken Newman from KeyBanc. Just wanted to dig into the $9,000,000,000 of OEC target that you have in 2026. I'm just curious if you could help us think about, one, just how much inflation are you, you know, assuming within that estimate? And then, two, just, is there any, you know, clear-cut way to help us think about how much of that net fleet CapEx is growth versus true sales?
You wanna grab that?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we've, we've got a low single digit modeled for on the inflation side. And I think, you know, conversely, we sort of have that being offset by pricing in that low, mid-single digit ballpark. When you think about... What was the second part of your question? I'm sorry.
Growth versus net fleet CapEx.
It's sort of growth at 60%. Growth, 60%, replacement is 40-ish.
We're gonna, we're gonna take a question from, the web world. We have a customer coming in from, Neil Tyler at Redburn, over in London. "On the Cinelease business, does this business hold any characteristics that would dictate a disposal multiple very different from those that you have paid for specialty rental deals?" Good question, and thank you, Neil. I think what we're doing—we don't know where it's gonna be right now. We're still in the very early stages of evaluating that and having our strategic partner that's working on this for us.
But it is a specialty business, and we do expect that as a specialty business, if and when we decide to sell that, it'll command a higher multiple than would a traditional general rental business, and more in line with, with the specialty businesses we've seen.
Hi, Steven Ramsey with Thompson Research Group. On the mega project market share assumption of 10%-15%, what are the risks to not reaching that kind of share in the coming years? And if you don't get the $300 ,000,000 rental revenue per year, does that change your targets in any meaningful way?
I think we're. You know, those are targets for the next three years, but we're already well on our way, as you saw from some of my examples. So the three times, two to three times more share, I don't think that's an issue for us, because on these big projects, there's several things at play. One, these contractors need a lot of equipment. There's a lot of contractors in these big projects, and they also want the other solutions, right? Whether it's specialty or technology solutions to monitor their fleet. They also want... When something breaks down, they want rapid response. So, you know, there's only a few companies that can really achieve that and respond in that manner.
So I think it's a realistic expectation for us, and as we said, we're gonna stay focused on our strategy of developing our local markets, urban market. We view, you know, the mega project as a nice opportunity for, you know, more growth that maybe wouldn't have normally been there.
Great. And then a follow-up. Thinking about the long-term position and the race to consolidate in the industry, why is $500 ,000,000 of acquisition activity in the next few years still the right zone to be in, versus that you've already been doing that in the past few years?
... Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we, we view the $500,000,000 , and we've said this on many occasions, that, you know, that's a guideline, right? I mean, it's sort of our disciplined approach, has been to spend about $500,000,000 a year, which we've done, over the last several years. But I think I would reiterate, it's a guideline. If other opportunities came to us that were attractive, met the return profiles, et cetera, we would evaluate and look at those as well.
There's a follow-on question from Neil Tyler at Redburn. "Please, can you give an indication of how the percentage of the branch network that you would consider scaled or matured has developed since 2016 to today? And what percentage will it look like by 2025?
I mean, I'll take that one. If you look at where we were in 2016, on an urban market level, like the top 50 markets, we probably only had a handful that were scaled. I'd say less than five. So, that's where our focus has been since that time. So we've really grabbed more market share and added more to our network to create that density. So we're a lot different company now than we were in 2016, and I think there was like, where do you think- the part... The second part of that question was, where do you think you're gonna be in 2026? I think, you know, in these markets where we can scale, in these big urban markets, whether you're talking the top 50, you know, those are gonna continue to scale up.
I bet we get to a level of, you know, 50% or so in that range.
Hi, Jamie Weiland, Weiland Management. On the mega projects, are there any difference in the dynamics and margins between the primary supplier and being a secondary or third?
You know, mega projects are exciting opportunities. You really. In some cases, you trade price for volume, right? But there's also a lot of volume. And typically, what happens when you get into these environments and you've started to deliver gear in a large volume, there's usually a basket of product goods that are, you know, more competitive on a price level. And, but once you're in there, and these projects last for several years, they tend to want more and more services and solutions. So you kinda yield up on other products, and some of this becomes more of a spot rental opportunity as you, you know, get through your entire, you know, diversified fleet mix.
So overall, I'd say that they're premium to, you know, a local business, where you might have a customer that's maybe renting 20 things from you a year. On these big mega projects, they can become a premium environment.
We have a question from the web again. "How do you decide which mega projects you'll go after and which ones you'll walk away from?
You know, that really has to do with the our infrastructure and our ability to service that project. So, some of these mega projects show up in very rural areas. I might have one branch in that area or two, and, we might not be able to scale as much as we'd want to go capture more of that opportunity. So we're really focused where we have the infrastructure, and we can push the fleet in, and we got all the solutions we need to really service a mega project the way it needs to be done. So that's how we decide.
Most of these opportunities come from our national account team, so that becomes the relationship and the strategy of, you know, where they want us to partner with them and where we can support them, either as a primary, secondary, or just, you know, be there for me as we ramp up.
Any other question from-
Hi, thanks. Stephen Volkmann with Jefferies. I had one question for you on penetration. Sometimes some of the big contractors we talk to agree with you that there's sort of unprecedented visibility over the next decade, really, in terms of a lot of these projects. But that visibility tends to make them think maybe they should own a little more equipment rather than renting in this next phase. Do you guys hear that, or what's the offset in terms of penetration?
Yeah, look, I would say we're hearing that less and less, that they wanna own equipment, primarily because once a major contractor or a big contractor decides he's gonna go to rental, he loses that capability of maintenance, of transportation and logistics, of buying capacity or buying, you know, at the right price. So I think just because there's a long period, it really depends on how often they're using that particular piece of equipment.
You know, I would say if contractor feels he's gonna keep a piece of equipment operating 80% of the time of the work week, then he might decide to invest in it, if he still has the capability to maintain it, to transport it, to store it when it's not being used. So, I don't think that's... It's becoming less and less to where contractors really wanna own equipment. In fact, it's going the other way, even now on the specialty gear, where they might have owned that themselves, and now they're going, you know, swinging in the direction of rental. So it's a secular trend that I don't see shifting, and we haven't, you know, sort of gotten wind of any kinda shift that's going back the other way.
... Okay, great. And, semi-related follow-up. The other thing that I guess is somewhat unprecedented over the next few years is interest rates. We actually have a cost of capital. How does that impact, do you think, the kinda smaller and regional rental houses relative to you, you larger folks?
Yeah, I mean, I think the way I think about that is that I think what it does is it makes our disciplined marketplace today in terms of pricing, more disciplined and maybe have a longer tailwind here, right? I mean, when you think about the economic impacts today on inflation on the fleet, as well as sort of what that interest rate looks like on that ABL to buy that piece of fleet, you know, I think all of that sort of aligns to a very attractive pricing market as we walk forward.
Hi. Brian Sponheimer from Gabelli. Same, same path, interest rates. Are you seeing your potential targets from an M&A perspective being more willing sellers, given what they think is gonna be a pricing environment that may be a little more difficult for them to digest, given where interest rates have gone?
Yeah, great question. And yes, to answer that question, I think we've seen some of the motivation, certainly in the recent 12 months, be around, you know, the cost of capital, the cost of replacement fleet, the availability of replacement fleet, where they are in terms of the chain on getting that fleet, being a motivator for them to look at now a sale of that business. So we have seen, in fact, we just got one in yesterday, that is motivated, and it says it in their headline, that that's what's motivating them to consider a sale, is the cost of capital and the cost of new fleet. And so to answer your question, whether that'll remain, I think as long as interest rates remain where they are, perhaps we'll see some of that.
You know, the Fed yesterday agreed to hold the interest rate, you know, firm, at least for the foreseeable future. Didn't go a tick down, but I think we'll see motivation along those lines, Brian. There's a follow-on question here about that. Similar: "How much longer can you invest $500,000,000 in acquisitions annually before you run out of attractive opportunities?" I'll take that and, you know, and say, you know, ARA, earlier this week, sent me a report that their their base of mom-and-pop or local, local players has grown to nearly 6,000 local rental stores now, and that's a pretty significant rate of growth over the last, you know, couple of years. It seems like, you know, no one ever really goes out of business at the mom-and-pop level.
They sell their business and then, you know, work out their non-compete and come back five years later, and they're in business, and then maybe three or four or five years later, we get an opportunity. So while I would say there is limited amounts of larger regional players available out there, there are a significant amount of mom-and-pops available, and now we're turning to specialty equipment, where there are additional opportunities in the specialty equipment field that, you know, I think for the foreseeable future, and certainly the next three-year period, we're not gonna run out of opportunities to continue to look at M&A targets.
Hey, Ken Newman again with KeyBank. Just a quick follow-on. Wanted to circle back to that mega project opportunity that you guys talked about with some of the examples. That was very helpful. You know, when I think about some of these projects where you're not the primary supplier, it seems like the revenue opportunities pretty much mirrors your market share to a pretty close extent. As you think about that same opportunity over, you know, call it two or three years, if you're gaining 6%-10% market share the way that you think you're going to, does your mix of opportunity increase on that same project?
Is that how those contracts are structured, or is it really the, the opportunity on forward mega projects is more kind of in line with, you know, whatever your market share is then? Does that make sense?
No, I'm trying to follow it a little bit.
So, for example, if you've got 6% share on a specific contract-
Yeah.
Right? If you, if your share goes up from 6%-8%-
On the project.
... the following year. Correct. Can you gain incremental share on a project you're already on that's multi-year mega project?
Got it.
Or does that have to come from incremental projects that you win-
No
in the next three years?
No, I think, you know, projects go through phases, right? There's construction phases of construction, and as the... You might have a certain percent of the share in the early phases, but as it moves to the next, they might need specialty equipment, and they want to go, you know, with a certain trusted provider for that. And you can move your share pretty quick on the overall spend on that project. So kind of follows what your capabilities are as the construction phase continues on, and as we said, you know, most of these, as you know, are multi-year projects. It-
What it also does is, you know, if we're a transactional player on one of these mega projects and we are successful in getting some business with a contractor that we may not have done business with in the past, we then build a brand capability and a brand reputation and a loyalty where we can take that with that contractor, not only to that project, but to other projects. And that's recently happened in a couple of cases similar to that, where we were doing business with contractors on a particular project that had not been a traditional customer and they've engaged us for future contracts.
... Okay, and that kind of leads into my follow-on here. Is there a point where, as you gain share, is there a level where you materially outperform versus on a specific project in terms of mix, right? You're the number three player now with only, call it, 6% share on a project where you're not primary. At what point, or is there a point where that mix increases substantially, even if your market share doesn't, and the industry doesn't increase that much?
Well, if I understand the question, it would if we become named a primary or a secondary supplier, or they shrink their supply base down on that project.
I think maybe to come at it a different way, right? I mean, I think that there is this overarching discipline that we have to maintain through this cycle as well, right? I mean, we said it a lot in our prepared remarks, right? But we can't, we wouldn't turn our back on the local customer to sort of run to, you know, some 70% national account revenue base either. We've worked too hard over these last 3-7 years to sort of establish that. And so I think that the underlying, underscored word there is discipline, and we have to be selective in what we participate in.
I have a question from the web. Based on your mega project slide, Aaron, there are a lot of pieces of equipment on these jobs. Can the suppliers produce enough to keep up with the equipment needs of the rental companies?
Not like they used to. I mean, there's still constraints access equipment, which, you know, material handling and, and aerial, as we talked about on the earnings call last week. We can't get as much as we even want, right? So they can't produce enough for the industry, but we're still getting a lot. So we got to keep that in perspective. The rest of the equipment lines, compared to where it was like in 2019, the lead time might be, you know, twice as long. So might have to wait two or three months in the past, and now you got to wait, you know, five to six months to get it. I think the point is that, that, that's really, that I want to underscore, is that having a lot of fleet and ability to address these opportunities is what's important.
So it takes a lot of planning on fleet planning to get the lead times in place and have the relationships with these large, large, mega projects to know what their demand of fleet's gonna be, as much as you possibly can. But you have to have enough scale to respond. You have to have a lot of planning to know what's coming in to your, to your fleet system. And, we're gonna have to deal with some continued, supply from some OEMs, probably for the next 18 months. But that doesn't change the tremendous opportunity that's out there for someone that has a lot of scale already.
Any more questions from the audience? Yes.
Yeah, Chris Meeker from Franklin Mutual. I have a question about free cash flow. If we're sitting in 2026 and scenario one plays out, we have $9,000,000,000 of OEC. At what level of OEC do we need, where we tip the scales and the company can be, what's called solidly free cash flow and still grow the fleet?
Great.
Does it make sense?
Yeah, I know. Great question. You know, I think it's... You know, when you look back at sort of our life cycle and our evolution through this, and you sort of look at us in comparison to our two competitors at this sort of $6,000,000,000 fleet, our cash flow profiles are almost identical. When you sort of track that forward, when you start getting from $6,000,000,000 to your point of sort of the $9,000,000,000-$10 ,000,000,000, you can then generate cash flow while also still investing for growth in your business, right? And I think the other point here, and that's what I tried to illustrate with the slide, is that, you know, there is some opportunity cost here today between growth fleet and free cash flow generation.
We see such a tremendous opportunity out there that this is the path we're going, as long as the marketplace is receptive, receptive to that, right? If we sort of pull back to that, you know, 1.5-2 times growth, then we could produce cash over this next three years at that $900,000,000 -$1,200,000,000 sort of number.
So that 9-10 is where things start to get-
Yeah
... very interesting from a free cash flow perspective.
Yeah, I would, you know, if you haven't, I'd suggest you maybe look at some of the historical charts of where the green guys and the blue guys were at similar levels of fleet, and then where they started. You know, their financials are public, right? You can take a look at when they started generating cash and at what levels.
Okay, that's really helpful. Could I ask one more follow-up?
Sure.
Just in terms of modeling, as we think about $4,000,000,000 in rental revenue in 2026, what should we assume for an average time unit?
We don't really speak to time. I mean, I would almost prefer you to think about that fleet and then how we would sort of dollar utilize it-
Mm-hmm
... right? You know, 'cause again, as Aaron, in his slides, right, like, time utilization is a point of focus, but it's not the point of focus. And so I think as we continue to sort of improve that mix of specialty to core, I can't guide you there, but I can tell you, right, we've sort of had, you know, 43s from a dollar utilization the last couple of years. This year's down, headwinds from Sunbelt and sort of bringing fleet in, off cycle has sort of impacted that. I think if you think about this rolling forward in that 43-ish + range, our goal, we've stated it, we'll continue to state it, that we'd love to be in the mid-40s from a dollar utilization perspective.
But today, sort of that 43-ish number that represented the last couple of years is probably a reasonable approach.
Thank you.
Thank you. I think we have time for one more question.
Steven Ramsey of Thompson Research Group again. Your core EBITDA margin crossed the 50% mark this last quarter, and you're targeting the 48%-51% range for 2026. Putting those two data points together, it can at least sound conservative. Can you elaborate on the bridge there and what gets you to the higher end of that?
Yeah, I mean, I, I think, you know, we're looking at this on an annualized basis, right? I'm not gonna post a 51 for 2023 all in. It'll probably look more like 47, right? So this guide is essentially a point of efficiency-ish per year. And I think that that's a really strong performance there on a business that's growing double digits on the top side, and still getting that efficiency through the P&L and letting that sort of play in that, 48-51, which obviously implies sort of a 55-60 flow-through to get there.
I think we're out of time, Leslie. We have... We're done? Okay. Let me go back here and shut this down. All right, we'd just like to thank everybody for attending here, coming to the FSC and joining us for this session. We're gonna be boarding buses now. You wanna help, Leslie?
I think we're all set for the webcast.
Okay, w-
Thank everyone, and we'll move on.
All right, so the webcast is now over, and we thank everybody on the webcast, and we'll move on from here. And those that are local will be boarding buses. That'll be outside the door to my right, your left, and taking buses up to our Fort Myers location. Any questions from anybody before we gather our goods and go? We'll be able to get your luggage, we'll be able to check your luggage up at the branch, and then we'll begin the tour when we get up at the branch. There's a box lunch waiting for you up there, so anybody that's hungry, we're gonna have it available for you when we get to the branch location. So with that, thanks again, and we'll see you in a little bit up in Fort Myers.
Thank you.