Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Mig Dobre. I am the Baird analyst covering machinery, diversified industrials, as well as rental companies. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Herc Holdings. As you probably know, Herc is the third-largest North American equipment rental provider. Joining us today, we have Aaron Birnbaum, Chief Operating Officer, and Mark Humphrey, Chief Financial Officer. Aaron, I'm going to turn it over to you for some remarks, then we'll do Q&A.
All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mig. Appreciate that. First of all, our CEO, Larry Silber, was planned to be here today, but he became ill, so I'm stepping in from him. As Mig said, I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Herc Rentals. As always, here's our Safe Harbor statement. Today, Herc Rentals is one of the leading full-equipment rental suppliers in North America. Here's our vision, mission, and value statements and our purpose: we equip our customers and communities to build a brighter future. Herc Rentals has gone through a tremendous amount of growth the last five years. Next year will be our 60th year as a rental operator in North America. We have 7,700 employees and nearly 450 branches in a market that is about $84 billion in size.
These are our core tenets, how we operate our business, and our mission for growth is to grow the core of our business. That means the density and the scale across North America. We have a specialty business, which we'll talk about, but that is a core tenet of our business because it drives a higher financial return. Technology is a big part of our business as it's becoming a critical component to our growth story for our customers, as well as for our employees with business intelligence tools, our capital allocation plan, and execution at the highest level. E3OS is our operating model.
And if you think about all the different touchpoints that our customers experience with us, E3OS means to become the most easy-to-do business with, expert at what we do, and the most efficient so that our customers have the best experience at every touchpoint they experience with us. Continuing to drive growth as we scale our business, this is a critical component in our industry, is to get scale across the network. With scale, we get efficiency and superior financial returns. Some of our key strengths, which we want to exhibit to you, as a leading equipment rental solutions provider, we deliver exemplary growth. We're a market consolidator, quickly building scale and density across North America. We've been aggressive over the last four years, doing roughly 51 different bolt-on acquisitions. A technology-enabled equipment services provider, creating value for our customers.
We went through a digital transformation roughly two and a half years ago and really transformed our relationship with our customers. There's a multifaceted diversification strategy to help us grow through products, customers, and geographies. And we still maintain a lot of opportunity and headroom to grow in the future. I think we'll leave it with that.
Thank you for that. If you wouldn't mind, could you go back a few slides, maybe a slide, I want to say two or three, where you kind of had that geographic footprint overlay?
This one.
Perfect. Thank you. Just in case we have to reference that in our discussion.
Sure.
So maybe where I would like to start is with a little bit of an update from you guys in terms of what you're seeing in Q4. I know we went through reporting in Q3 recently, but an update here would be good, especially given the fact that we have had these weather disruptions and hurricanes and things that obviously are deviating a little bit from normal and market trends. So I'd love to hear your thoughts there.
Go ahead.
Yeah. I mean, I think we can't really comment too terribly much on Q4, but I think as we sort of rounded out Q3, we've had an environment where it's really sort of been growing mega project, large project activity on one side of it, and then experiencing a very normalized local market behavior, and I would say to you, just sort of as you think about that, I would say that the local market activity has stabilized. I think we saw the low as we sort of rounded Q2, and I would say sort of the demand profile in and through Q3 has stabilized into this low single-digit growth profile.
When you look at your various regions, obviously you've got quite broad exposure. Is there something to call out, one portion of the country versus another?
Yeah. When you look at the specific markets, with the local market growth kind of getting down to the local single-digit level, really due to interest rates and the inflation activities, it's put a little bit of a damper on the local commercial market activity, but it's still growing. It's just growing at a low single digit. So where there's markets that are large markets, you see some of that extra pressure, especially when there's no mega activity going on. So markets where you do see mega activity, chip plants being built, renewables being built, LNG plants, there's more battery plants being built. There's more activity. So you see that stronger markets in Texas and along the South and kind of up the Eastern Seaboard, Ohio, those are still markets that are benefiting from that.
What we've been hearing is that the Pacific Northwest has been particularly weak. Do you experience something similar there?
Yeah. Really, any of the large markets on the West Coast are some of the kind of weaker markets. So that's true about the Puget Sound, Portland, the Bay Area, even Southern California to a degree.
You highlighted mega projects now for multiple quarters, and I've always wondered if there's a bit of a mixed impact that you have in terms of either the type of equipment that's being required by such mega projects or if that in any way alters the way you think about CapEx and deploying capital.
I'll take the part about the mix and market take the CapEx. But when you look at a mega project, about 75% or 80% of the fleet they need is core fleet. So we support those jobs by moving the fleet in. And then the other 25% to 20% is the specialty fleet, which, as I mentioned earlier, comes with a higher financial profile, a better financial return. So it's kind of the mix. You really need both components to succeed in a mega project.
Yeah. And then I think just from a capital perspective, this is sort of incremental organic growth to us. And so I think as you think about much like 2024 being sort of at the high end of the CapEx range that we provided, I think we have to go out and at least at some level buy additional growth gear to supplement into this mega project activity.
But I'm sorry if I missed this point. Is that gear sort of the gear that looks similarly to your fleet mix that you have right now, or is there something else that you're considering doing?
It mirrors our fleet mix today.
One of the things I've always wondered, whenever I drive by one of these mega projects, the thing that really stands out, a sea of cranes. Cranes everywhere. How do you think about? I know you don't have exposure there, but how do you think about that portion of the market?
The large crane business isn't a part of the market that strategically we're interested in. In our business, when you're running a rental business and you're managing assets, fungibility and utilization are really important. And cranes aren't really in our wheelhouse. We like a fleet that is we could scale with large volumes of fleet and move it where it needs to go very easily. I wouldn't say cranes. It's a specialty kind of rental operation and not in our wheelhouse, nor in our strategic future view.
Okay. Go ahead.
No, no. Waiting on you.
Sticking with the mega project theme, I'm curious as to what sort of tools you guys use to keep track of these. Maybe give us an update in terms of what you're seeing in that market. And as we think about 2025, from your perspective, should mega project activity sort of continue to be robust, accelerate, decelerate? What are you seeing in your pipeline? And we're talking about growth generated from these.
Obviously, to succeed in the mega arena, you have to be able to analyze it and know where you're going to go. We haven't taken the approach where we want to be everything to everybody. We've been strategic and specific about where we want to operate. And usually, it has to do with the relationship you have with the general contractors. We're the strongest. That's where we're going to play the most. We view this year as it was an uptick in the mega activity. And our view is that as we roll into 2025, it gets stronger. And we really see another two to three years of probably, I'd say three years of attractive mega activity trends going on. There's a lot more large projects in the planning phases than there are actually at broken ground still today.
So we strategically look at it from a sales and operations team. We meet every two weeks, and we're tracking all the projects with our national sales team leadership and our fleet team and our operations team, the finance team to make sure that we're all aligned to deploy the capital, to make sure these are ideal customers for our profile. And it's succeeded for us.
As you evaluate these projects, I mean, obviously, we just had an election. That feels like that was basically the only thing any of us could think about over the past few days. I'm curious how you think about the impact that that would have not only on your business, but on the mega projects themselves. Or maybe the better way to ask the question is, as you look at the funnel of activity, how much would you guess or estimate is associated with clean energy, with maybe funding from the IRA or other measures that the new administration might consider reworking?
Obviously, we don't have a crystal ball, so we don't know exactly where it's going to go. But this is why having a good diversified breadth of in-markets you focus on will benefit us in whatever situation comes. For example, if I'm just listening to some of the talking points from the Trump administration and what he said, it's possible that some of the renewable projects that are heavily reliant on federal incentives might slow down. So we have to watch and maintain that. It's a part of our mega kind of profile, but it's not a large part. So let's say it's well less than like 3% of our current revenue trend. But if that happened, there'd probably be more investment going into upstream oil and gas, which would roll into downstream oil and gas.
That would create a lot of natural gas production, which probably is really good for the LNG environment, and those LNG plants that are getting built along the Gulf Coast, those are some of the biggest mega projects of any, so I think in any situation, we're nimble enough that we can focus on it and still find ways to grow.
Can we maybe talk a little bit about pricing as well, and I guess there's several questions here, but one of the peers that you have in the industry was observing, a smaller peer, that because indeed activity has skewed more towards mega projects and less towards the regular way, mom and pop, however you want to call a business, that in fact had a bit of a negative mix for them from a pricing standpoint, from a rate standpoint, arguably speaking, maybe even from a margin standpoint. What is your perspective on that?
Yeah. I mean, I can't speak to the individual company specifically. I mean, I think what I would say is that when you think about sort of the strategic overlay that Aaron went through, diversification of fleet, diversification of customer base, and a specialty group inside of our fleet, all of that combined sort of allows us to outkick the coverage, so to speak, in terms of we were talking about the local market sort of being in this 0% to 3% sort of low single-digit sort of growth profile. I think when you put all of that back together, we have more ways to sort of attack this normalized environment that we are in today.
Whereas if you're sort of singularly focused or sort of only have core product as an example and you're experiencing local market slowdown, then I think that what would result from that is exactly what it is that you're saying. You would have pricing pressure.
So just to make sure that I understand what you're saying here, if your primary focus was general rental general construction equipment, then you're saying, yes, there's actually a negative mix implication from that, but it's the specialty business that goes into mega projects that eliminates that.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's your ability to diversify your fleet into a diversified customer base. I think that's a huge part here. I think the other thing that I would say is that on the whole, the marketplace is still obtaining price as well. And so I can't speak to specifics about a particular competitor, but I think overall, the industry as a whole is still managing to get price sort of throughout.
And to that effect, maybe to put a finer point, when we're thinking about spot pricing versus contractual rollovers, this question keeps getting asked. I'm going to ask it as well. Where are we there, one market versus the other?
Yeah. I mean, I think we don't necessarily pull apart the contract from the spot, but I would tell you that our contracted business is a tailwind for us. And generally speaking, it is. I think as the demand profile sort of normalizes here, we'll see how the spot market sort of continues to behave as we walk forward. But today, pricing was 2.3 to 2.4 in the third quarter. And like I said, additionally, the marketplace is continuing to get that price point as well.
I realize that I'm being pesky here, but I'm curious if investors should continue to expect this progressive deceleration in pricing as we think about 2025, or if you think you have enough levers to be able to either stabilize or maybe hook pricing back up.
I mean, I think from that end, I mean, our goal is to always sort of have a price point that is somewhere on par with inflation and then go grab the premium for the service that we provide, and so that's our expectation. We have continued to sort of put forth sequential price improvement each quarter, and that's what our goal is as we move forward as well.
To that effect, as you think about costs into 2025, what level of inflation are you sort of anticipating? And I'm not just talking about equipment. I'm talking about employee costs. I'm talking about transportation freight, those sorts of things.
I think that it's probably in that low single-digit sort of profile into 2025, is my view as we sit here today.
I know skilled labor remains an issue, mechanics, drivers. Is that inclusive of the sort of inflation that we would be seeing for folks like that?
Yeah, yes.
Then in theory, I guess for you, in order to maintain margins, relatively low single-digit, call it 2%-3% price in 2025 would be enough. Is that fair?
I think that's fair. Yeah, that's fair.
On the point of margin, so your rental EBITDA, REBITDA margin, north of 46%. If we look at where it is relative to pre-COVID, like pre-COVID, it was 39%-40%. What are some of the moving pieces here in terms of what drove this margin expansion?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a lot of what we've kind of spoken about here already. I mean, I think that sort of the outpaced growth of specialty to core fleet over that time frame has certainly played a key role there. I think additionally, customer diversification that I spoke about, sort of being able to be nimble inside of the customer base is also hugely important, along with fleet diversification as well, so I think the combination of those three things, coupled with over the last five years, we've almost doubled the number of branches that we have, and so building that scale and then being able to leverage that is also critically important in this industry.
Then I think probably last, but certainly not least, is just being a good steward of the expense side of the P&L, making sure that the variable costs are under control and well maintained. I think about maintenance expense and delivery expense and those sorts of things. We've taken huge steps there to make sure that we're doing everything that we can to drop as much as we can to the bottom line.
How do you think about margin potential longer term?
Sorry, choked up.
No, I mean, when it comes to margins, we all do.
I think I want to run to 50. I think we stated that in Investor Day, and I think that there is a path to 50. We've got a lot of tailwinds behind us. We've got a greenfield group. We've got an M&A group that are immature still today. I think we've got a fair amount of room to run on the specialty side as well, and then I think as we continue to layer on exactly what we were just talking about, if we can continue to layer onto that fixed cost structure, I think that 50% is sort of definitely the charge that we're running for.
I know we already talked about pricing, but when I think through the cycle and the company's performance, I think pricing really stands out because it was outsized relative to peers in terms of your gains. Now, admittedly, you are coming from a lower level, so you are catching up. But as you think about the systems that you've put in place, the things that you're kind of working on to drive that clarity and discipline within the organization, what inning would you say that you're in? Are there more gains to be had specifically from these sorts of initiatives?
You're not just speaking of pricing. You're speaking just in inefficiencies in general.
No, I'm talking about the pricing tools that you have implemented to essentially allow branch managers, your operators, to be able to price such that they actually generate margin lift.
Yeah. So we've been taking price ever since 2016. So we've been a good pricing rental rate story ever since. And I think the reason that is, is our systems. We have a pricing technology tool that is in the hands of all of our salespeople. It uses an algorithm to match up what type of contractor you're quoting a piece of equipment to and what are the average type rates that we have gotten on those other transactions. And it gives our salespeople and our branch managers guidance on where they should go. And it's a tiered guidance. And our sales professionals get a higher commission as they move along the value, along the higher rate value chain. So it's incentive-based. It's quick response. It's a mobile or desktop device.
And that's allowed us to really have the discipline in a centralized kind of fashion, but allow the decisions to be made at the point of sale. And those algorithms, it's a proprietary product. We developed it in-house. And we can dial the dials up or down however we want to go.
I see. We have about five minutes left. I want to talk a little bit about the specialty portion of the business. And look, you don't really break it out discretely for us to really kind of see how that's been progressing. But maybe you can give us some context about how this business grew relative to kind of like the gen ren portion. And one of your stated goals is that you want to lean into specialty. How do you think about what that means? For instance, your largest competitor continues to find sort of new verticals that they're adding to their portfolio. Is that a similar approach for you as well?
The specialty product lineup is really part of the story, how we've been able to move our margin along through that period you exhibited, Mig, through 2018 to now, or that period from like 2016 to 2019. And then the current kind of view, the specialty business for us was born in 2016. And you have to assemble the team, the culture. You have to buy the right products. And in the early days, it was really power generation. And then we moved into pump products. And then we moved into climate control. And that is the story for our future too. That's the biggest piece of our specialty line. But beyond just those three types of products, we're expanding into other product lines. We have a flooring product lineup that started about four or five years ago.
It's got a really nice double-digit CAGR growing in that segment as well. We focus on our ProControl tools, which is a high dollar yield, high profit product, pushing that into all of our branches, and over the last year, we've gone into the trench business. We've purchased three or four acquisitions, and then from there, kind of created other greenfield spurs off of that, so that's really our newest endeavor on the specialty side. Again, why is that attractive? It's because of the superior dollar yield and margin profile it brings. We also have an industrial tool business that focuses on all the manufacturing, industrial manufacturing plants, and we assembled a team to kind of grow that business too. There's 10 other types of specialty businesses that we could get into, or we're already kind of beta testing.
I think what's nice about our growth profile going forward is that specialty is the fuel that allows us to get there. We have a goal of today, we're about 20% to 22% specialty. We want to get to 25% to 30%. That's going to help us achieve those higher margins that we're after.
Does it make sense to do it organically or through M&A?
It's a combination. When you do it, sometimes you need to bring the expertise in from the outside. That's how we started trench. We needed to get that expertise in. But we don't have to just roll up 25 or 30 trench locations. We can get that expertise in and scale it internally with our integration team and our region management. That's really the optimal way to do it.
So maybe with that in mind, as we think about 2025, it sounds like you do want to continue investing in specialty. But from a CapEx standpoint, how should we be thinking about where you're going to be relative to this year?
Yeah, I mean, great question. I think the easiest way to answer that today is if you think about $6.5 to $7 billion of fleet, you got a rotational component to that that's probably 10% to 12%, give or take. And then I think there will be investments into specialty, as you guys just spoke about. But I think the last piece of it is really with the health of the OEMs, we don't need to speculate on if the growth is going to be there or not. And so I think we'll be able to take a measured approach and react and respond as we see that growth profile either accelerating or decelerating, however that plays out, and then be able to lean on the OEMs to deliver the fleet when we need to from a growth perspective.
So start with replacement. And if things are better than that, you tweak it up.
You said it better than I did.
Okay. And the final question with the final minute, I know the rule is you never ask a management team about valuation, but I'm going to break it. There's obviously a pretty significant gap valuation-wise between you and the industry leader. And I'm curious, from your perspective, what are some of the levers that you guys can do to try to close this gap, either from a capital allocation standpoint or from outright being active in share repurchases?
Yeah. I mean, I think obviously there's a gap there. I'm not sure that that is fully explained away from a performance perspective. I think that we have continued to sort of close the gap on the rental EBITDA margin profile. I think the thing that has sort of come to light, particularly over the last 30, 60 days, is that I think that where we are in our maturation, I think there was a component of that valuation gap that was we needed to prove ourselves when things weren't completely rosy. And so I think we're in the midst of doing that as we sort of walk through this local market slowdown and then being able to report the results out that we have. I think that has sort of boosted and probably solidified some of that you've got to show me.
I think it sort of starts and stops there. I think our strategy is one that we are extremely confident in. I think the results sort of today over the last six years sort of show that. We're going to keep on doing what we do.
That is a perfect place to end it. Please join me in thanking these gentlemen.