All right, good morning, everyone. We'll keep it rolling here on day three. Thanks for thanks for joining us with the team from Ingersoll Rand. We have CEO Vicente Reynal, CFO Vik Kini, and then Mike Weatherred, who leads the IRX program. Looking forward to to talking to to everybody. A lot of interesting dynamics going on in the company right now. But maybe just, you know, Vicente, start us off with what you guys are seeing out there, what you're focused on, and then we can take it from there.
Yeah, sure. And, you know, clearly, you know, when you say what are we seeing, refer to, like, China, Europe, in particular, 'cause I mean—
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of deliberately open-ended. Yeah, please.
So I, you know, we over the past four months, I have been to China now twice, and Europe as well, and actually next week, head back to Europe as well. 'Cause we like to see how things are in the ground, not just with the data. And, I think what, what you can see is that, clearly there continues to be a lot of good pockets of growth, and that is what the team is doing. I mean, clearly, you, you can read the macro, but I think the, the winning recipe here is that how quickly can you reallocate that technology to the specific end markets? And I think that's what the teams are doing incredibly well.
So if I, if I were to think about it, I can categorize it as two, three things that are working really well. One is that commercial excellence that we say, the demand generation, that is creating a great ability to take technology that we had in one end market, that maybe that end market is not seeing the growth, and pivoting pretty quickly and applying that to that end market. And demand generation executed through the IRX is particularly an excellent tool that is allowing us to see, you know, these 6,000 qualified leads per week, where we think roughly 50% of them are new accounts. So it kind of leads to the second point of taking share.
So we believe that also, clearly our data shows and demonstrates that we're taking share in these in these locations. And when you think about our company, that we're roughly this year will be $7 billion in revenue, but we play in a $60 billion market, there's clearly opportunities for us to continue aggressively take some market share and do it in a very profitable way, as we're very focused and targeted on specific things. And that kind of comes to the third point, where we saw it vividly in China and also in Europe, with the teams that are taking all these acquisitions that we have done over the past three years, which is roughly 37 acquisitions, bolt-on acquisitions in three years. And many of these acquisitions have been very regionalized.
So think about MD- Kinney, a company that 90% of their revenue was in the US, and the team in China, taking that technology, localizing that in China, and then playing in China in markets that they were not playing before. Or taking even, not even acquired companies, but taking the Gardner Denver Compressor product that we had in China, clearly subscale before the merge, before the acquisition of Ingersoll Rand, and now that team taking that and scaling that, and Gardner Denver Compressor now is roughly five times what it was before the merge. So I think it's just the story of this self-help that we like and we see with the teams in the ground, driving it and grinding it every single day, with a very robust process that Mike can talk about here clearly in terms of IRX.
Excellent. I do wanna spend some time on IRX and maybe sort of like a slight transition before we get to that point, is you guys have had a lot of self-help and kind of made your own luck in that regard, and it's, it sounds like, okay, the ground game of Ingersoll Rand is going well, but I can't imagine your competitors are just sort of sitting around wondering why they're losing share. Is this a scale issue? Is it a, you know, kind of a corporate functioning issue? Obviously, there's a very long tail of small guys. Like, do you think you're taking share across the board, and is it that these folks don't have the tools or the awareness? Sort of try to put the other guy's hat on and, you know, why are they losing?
No, great question, Josh. I would say, you know, think about it. I mean, when we acquire a company, we acquire because of the brand and the equity that the brand has and the reputation and the history of that brand. And when you think about Gardner Denver, Ingersoll Rand, even Kinney, I mean, these are, these are hundred-plus-year-old brands, highly, highly respected in the market, even most recently, Roots. I mean, Roots, 1854 was founded. And so these companies are known. These brands are very well known globally, and—b ut they have not been nurtured, and they have not been enhanced with the processes that we, that we have.
And when you think about this commercial engine that we have, demand generation, that we have this rapid ability to. We like to describe it, that we have a pointing the cannon to a specific end market and educating that customer of the technologies that we have, and very rapidly going to a transaction mode because we understand that buying cycle of that customer is pretty unique. So, I think it's just, that's the uniqueness of that we have in terms of our economic growth engine. That every company that we acquire, we put them through that growth economic engine, and that gives us that ability to, yeah, penetrate and understand that we have differentiated technology that offers a higher value to the customer because we save energy, and we save water, and we can translate that into return on investment for the customer.
Understood. I guess if I were to kind of zoom out for historical context, and I think there's some folks in the room who have probably viewed it the same way for yourselves and maybe the market at large, that this business is sort of a call on capacity utilization, right? You kind of bump up against the wall, you need to add more roof line, you need more capacity, bigger compressors. Something has clearly changed. Obviously, there's tightness out there in the market, but, you know, I think at other points in time, CapEx would've had a lot more sensitivity to some of the macro jitters that we've gone through. Obviously, you guys are taking share, but it's not like the market has been completely unforgiving at that time frame. What do you think has changed?
Is it, you know, all the mega trend stuff like decarb or the payback on energy efficiency that you guys are mentioning, is a little bit of everything? Like, maybe a few things that you would just call out to help us level set, like, just how much different, this market has become.
Absolutely, Josh. I would say when you go back to November of 2021, and we did Investors Day, and we were kind of unveiling, obviously, we were doing it already, how we are aligning our technologies towards these mega trends of particular trends of sustainability, digitization, and quality of life. And if I spend on the first two, sustainability and digitization, are dramatically accelerating. Sustainability, clearly, we know energy and anything that can really conserve energy efficiency or water conservation and has a great payback to the customer. Customers are more pronounced to be able to do that. And so I think that is driving, not only from the customer perspective, but then even on top of that, the tailwinds of what governments are doing.
Whether it could be IRA, that is really heavily focused on RNG, renewable natural gas, again, better biomethane sustainability, hydrogen networks, and things of that nature, or the Green Deal in Europe, too, as well, with the hydrogen infrastructure. So it's kind of like a double tailwind, where companies—private companies are definitely seeing that there's a benefit of going in terms of sustainability, while also governments really aligning that investment, too, as well, so that it can accelerate. So that's a great tailwind. And in terms of the sustainability, sorry, in the digitization, more and more customers want to know about their products, and clearly connecting them and creating new revenue streams, it's a great opportunity for us. We're super early stages on that, but one that we think has a long tailwind for us here to come.
Understood. And then maybe just coming back to some of the regional commentary. You mentioned that you'd spent a decent amount of time in China. Are there regions globally that have been, you know, a little bit more stubborn or disappointing? I think that some other folks on, you know, stage this week have... it certainly had, you know, the China complaints that I think are well documented. A few gripes about Europe here and there, but anything from your perspective that would stick out? I guess, you know, maybe just kind of the subpart to that, we've heard a little bit more about that as supply chain has healed, we're kind of back to normal summer shutdowns in Europe. Anything there that, you know, we should be cognizant of, and just in terms of the seasonality getting more normal?
Yeah. I mean, I think, clearly at the micro level, economically, we see all these countries that they're slowed down, whether it could be Germany or China. But it goes back to then, how do we continue to outperform? And it gets back to this self-help. So are there regions that are stubbornly or end markets? I mean, absolutely. I mean, you go to China, and the water and wastewater, for us, infrastructure, I mean, that market, we don't see that growing here for quite some time, until the government infuses more funds into it. But again, electric vehicle, battery production, that is growing very well, for us, offsetting the decline in some of these other end markets. So are there, you know, sub-regions and end markets that particularly showed some?
So we know, absolutely. But the key for us is like, how do you overcome that with, be able to find these other great vectors of growth that we've been able to find?
Understood. Is there anything on the summer shutdown stuff that you guys have noticed or you'd want to call out?
I'd say, you know, we have a big business in Europe, rightfully, but nothing of significance that we will say dramatically different. But no.
Got it. I want to pivot over to IRX. Obviously, the central tenet of, you know, gives you a lot of credit for the success you've had. I think a lot of folks have, you know, kind of their operating system that they're very proud of and have leaned into. You guys have definitely had, you know, kind of more objective success with, with yours and, and maybe come, you know, out of a, a little bit of left field for folks who didn't really expect that as the, the merger came together, just how successful that would be. Can you explain sort of the central principles and, you know, really what you think makes it special?
Yeah, and first of all, I would say it's not really special. I mean, it's simple to the point of being offensive. And the way that we think about it is we wanna... Two things, is we want to be able to accomplish what we say we're gonna do. So when Vicente says, "You know, control what you can control," we wanna arm teams with a simple process in which they can go after that, you know, five or six days a week with some rigor. So that's really kind of what it is. The second thing is that we want to focus them on 100-day improvement targets.
So to Vicente's point, if I'm in a part of China, and I'm a regional sales leader, and I can see that part of my economy, you know, part of my economy is not as strong as I would like to be, I want to take that into consideration in a plan called Headwind. But then I've got other things, like maybe electric vehicles, where I need to get specifically focused on that. So we're gonna, we've allowed those teams to take this weekly process, line up a series of leading KPIs or key performance indicators, in which, you know, how are we going to move away from the part of the market that's soft and move over to the part of the market that's not as soft or maybe there's some opportunity?
So there's really that simplicity, and then, you know, the thing I think we are proud of is, as our employees think and act like owners, there's 440-something of those sessions that go on a weekly basis. So the simplicity gets made more powerful when the simplicity happens, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with the people on the street that or the people closest to the factories or the people in finance, et cetera. It's run in all functions in all parts of the organization. So I would say, and I know this room, this group, what you guys do for a living, you see more junk and more fake, you know, operating systems in this space.
I, myself, am simple to the point of being offensive.
Yeah. Which makes you an easy target for a movie set if we're not careful, right? So that's not what we're about, and we don't, you know, we rarely talk about... We talk about IRX as the how, not the what. The what is the people, and the what is arming them with this self-help commercial economic growth engine.
I think the employee ownership is something that does stand out as being different. Certainly something that you guys reference a lot, and I think the results probably say that, you know, this whole thinking and acting like an owner because you are one, makes a lot of sense. I guess any sort of, you know, comparison or before and after? Obviously, you guys have had, you know, lives outside of Ingersoll Rand as well, that didn't have that same mindset necessarily. What sort of differences does that unlock? I mean, you can see the engagement, but are there sort of practical examples that people can get their arms around?
Yeah, I mean, so I've been with the company for 13 years, and the employee ownership model really started at the IPO of Gardner Denver, so 2017. So I was with the company well before that. You know, I think the examples are countless. You know, first and foremost, we've issued close to, you know, well over $250 million of equity to all of our employees through a series of all employee grants. We have an ongoing program, where all new employees to the company, whether they're direct hired or via an acquisition, become owners in the company as well. And, you know, that $275-ish million that we've granted is close to probably, you know, well north of $550 million-$600 million in value today.
So clearly it's meaningful, and, you know, in terms of the improvements we've driven, I mean, you could point to so many things. If you go back to the Gardner Denver days when we IPO'd, we'd done a lot of great things, but we told you, you know, working capital, probably an area for opportunity. We were above 30% working capital. Today, we stand below 20% working capital as an entire enterprise, even in the midst of a merger and 37 bolt-on acquisitions. You know, everybody wakes up every single day thinking about how they can drive improvement, and we're very transparent.
You know, one of the biggest things that comes with it is being transparent and the communication with the employee base. So quite frankly, every single quarter, you know, we'll do earnings, we'll talk to you guys. Probably 48-72 hours later, we'll have a global town hall, and we'll literally walk them through the exact same pages that we show you. That's because, frankly, they're owners, just like you guys are, and they have a vested skin in the game, but they also wanna understand, how can I drive improvement in organic growth, in margin expansion, in free cash flow, in pick whatever metric makes sense, but it's the same metrics that you ask us about, they're asking us about as well.
So, you know, for us, we've seen tangible improvement across the board, and we think this has really been a game changer for us, and one we're excited to continue. Got it. Now, some of the things are easier to measure than others-
Sure.
Of course, and I think, you know, maybe the demand piece is the one that's a little harder. Obviously, a very dynamic environment. You can't just say, like, how much you outgrowing GDP by, but how do you, do you measure outgrowth, and, and where do you see yourself having kind of the most success on those sorts of things?
Yeah, so we look at all the statistics, I mean, including the GDP, and GDP, particularly manufacturing only, you know, the service side too, as well. PMIs, IP, ISM, I mean, we looked at all of them. Now, what we say is that those are a little bit of lagging indicators, right? I mean, 'cause obviously it's telling you the history of really what happened in the past. We do have a lot of good leading indicators. Leading indicators for us will be marketing qualified leads, as an example. We generate that. So we always want to say that we want to see that stability of demand generation leads continue to grow year-over-year, much higher than what we're seeing the markets are growing. We also have really great data points, such as, you know, capacity utilization of our connected compressors. Bless you.
Thank you.
So we see manufacturing activity as well, and that gives us a very buoyant market, and that gives us the ability to then go into better end markets that we're seeing the better growth momentum. So when we think about outgrowing the market, we always like to say that we wanna grow 100-200 or 300 basis points higher than those statistics that we're reviewing. And we like to say that the way we achieve that is simple, you know, formulaic, in the sense that we should generate 1-2 points of price every year. Even in down cycles, we've proven to do that. Back in the GD days, we were doing it. We should be able to, with the self-help of the demand generation, get another 1 or 2 points of price.
And then with all these kind of localization and product rationalization, innovation, that gives us another kind of couple points of growth. So yes, you can start adding up, and then there's some of the offsets, which could be market declines or, or, or market corrections. But I think we always say that we have that ability, and we tell the teams: "Control what you can control," 'cause those three things that I just talked about, we can control it. And we can control how we take market share, we can control how we go to market, and we can control how we grow. So, yeah.
On the qualified leads, clearly, this is something you guys have had a lot of success with. At some point, this becomes sort of a base effect where, yeah, we're, we're out there getting them, but getting that incremental one becomes more difficult. Market's huge, so I'm not saying that, you know, it's necessarily mature yet, but how far along are we in that journey? Is there sort of a point, you know, down the road where it's hard to get that incremental just 'cause you've already, you know, touched a lot of the market?
I mean, I'll say, I might argue. We're still, we consider that we're still at the early innings. I mean, this is so sophisticated process that we have. We present it to our board constantly, and we present it with our maturity matrix. But the maturity matrix, that you look at it now, if we're calling, you know, at the halfway point, that maturity matrix looked very different. We were at the top maybe a year from now. So it's a way to continue to evolve that for us. So we're always like to say that we're gonna be here, that if the maturity matrix that we have is five stages, right now, the team is thinking as to what are the next five and the incremental of the five stages.
So it's part of that evolution that we continue to see greater, greater and greater acceleration. Really, more tools come in. I mean, people talk a lot about artificial intelligence. I mean, when we don't mention that buzzword, but we like to say that internally, we've been doing that for quite some time, because we get, you know, thousands of connecting points every single day with customers. And we're able to easily track Net Promoter Scores with the customers across buying points. We're able to track the digital footprint of customers going to our web pages. All the web pages that we have, they're search engine optimized as well. So I think it's just that really maturity that we think, yes, we have done a lot of great work, but plenty of more room for us to improve.
I think one area where that's been particularly obvious, and maybe an uphill battle, is in oil-free. Obviously, you have, you know, a pretty large incumbent competitor there that also does some, some good work. How do you think about what is the you know, does that plan of attack look different than maybe in some of the more fragmented markets? And, what do you see as sort of the entitlement in share there over time as, you know, you get further into that?
Yeah, so I think oil-free is definitely. Oil-free compressor is clearly a market that we always liked. And one of the investment pieces for the acquisition of Ingersoll Rand was basically the acceleration of the product development that we could have in terms of a portfolio of technologies that could be easily compete against the number one in the market. And so you have seen every quarter we report oil-free growth, and oil-free continues to outpace the growth of the total compressors, which obviously shows that we continue to really do pretty well. I would say that oil-free is it's a market that it grows higher than the oil-lubricated clearly because it offers the benefit of not only sustainability, no oil but many other benefits.
And technology now is at a point that you can have a higher energy efficiency in many cases as to compared to the oil-lubricated. So customers are definitely asking for it. It's very difficult to enter the oil-free market for those competitors for multiple reasons. One, the technology inside oil-free is not easy. It requires highly, highly precision manufacturing and engineering to be done. And the second is service networks. I mean, service networks are really essential for oil-free. It's a, it's a higher level technology. Customers don't have the skill. Customers want OEMs like us to be able to service those levels of technology. So I think it's just one that we're very excited about.
We continue to accelerate innovation and but penetration for us continues to be a great winning avenue because we see, you know, one, we can continue to take some share, and also the total market continues to grow better than the oil lubricated.
You touched on kind of my next point here on the service side. Not something that we talk about a ton, but certainly a decent part of the business and a very, you know, profitable part of the business. How should we think about things like attachment rate or sort of outgrowth opportunities there? I think there's probably, in your industry, a little bit more fungibility around service, maybe not for oil-free, but for other areas, a little bit more cross-pollination. Clearly, you guys want to get more of that. How do you guys approach the market? How do you think about attachment rates there?
Yeah, you want to take that?
I thought you were looking at Vic. I was waiting for Vic's answer. No. So, I think, yes, big opportunity and clear area of focus. So Vicente and I, Monday morning, we're with the guy who runs the North American business and a person who's specifically focused on aftermarket. And they have said now, and you'll remember from the Investor Day two years ago, we talked about CARE, and we talked about the likelihood of doubling CARE over a relatively short period of time. I would say their enthusiasm is probably higher than it was two years ago, and part of that's been because they've gotten the traction that you're talking about. So the- you know, like demand generation, like some of this, you know, formulaic commercial execution, it- there's a maturity path to it.
And I think Ingersoll Rand was clearly ahead of Gardner Denver in the aftermarket. They had about a 50% mix of their products was aftermarket, although their EBITDA was quite low. We had a lot of curiosity about that. So we've actually learned a lot from Ingersoll Rand in the last two years. I think we'll update the figures that you saw two years ago at the end of November, at our next Investor Day. I think our enthusiasm for North America, which is the most mature of the markets, is really high. And then, as other markets, that Vicente mentioned, we were in China, we were in South Korea, on a separate trip a couple, three weeks ago. They're all coming up that maturation curve of: How do we sell CARE? When do we sell CARE?
What does it look like as an offering to the customers? The other thing that I would say that's happened in our industry through COVID, it had some momentum going into COVID, COVID definitely accelerated it, is finding people to work on these machines is not as easy as it once was. You know, the compressor room is usually off the beaten path, and there's a guy, you know, close to my age, who's been in there his whole career—
30?
Turning wrenches. Huh? 40. 48, 35. Turning wrenches, those guys are aging out. It's a hard job, and they're not, you know, it's not easy to hire for. We can also go in with these CARE contracts and show them where maybe they don't need to hire someone. We can take that service off their hands. So this whole—y ou know, as we talk about IRX, commercial, formulaic execution, demand generation, they all kind of point at the aftermarket, and there's a lot of enthusiasm.
Mm-hmm. And clearly, I think the other added, added benefit here is that we talk a lot about this CARE and the aftermarket and services on the compressor side, but now we're obviously launching that into blowers, vacuums, and even on the PST, where we have some ability to be able to increase the aftermarket via these service agreements that we're putting in place now.
Got it. And I think all that kind of rounds up to margin opportunity. You guys have had a lot of success there. What's the functional ceiling? I mean, pricing power seems to be pretty solid. You guys have a lot of, obviously, productivity to keep that cost growing relative to the pricing power. You're continuing to mix up. I mean, I don't know that we have a lot of kind of real-life examples of where margins can go, but it doesn't seem like we've petered out yet. Where do you see us, you know, as kind of your medium-term target?
Yeah. So I mean, two years ago, at the Investor Day for ITS, you know, we said we want to be in the higher twenties on the EBITDA margin percentage, and well, here we find ourselves, we're effectively there. I think the simple answer to your question is, we don't necessarily view there's an inherent cap, you know, on margins. You know, that's not the way we drive the organization or the teams. You know, if you think about the opportunities that we've mentioned, a few of them, you know, quality over variety is a huge focus. We've shown the ability to deliver 1%-2% net realized price year in, year out. Obviously, the last few years are much higher than that. Aftermarket, we just talked about these CARE contracts that, you know, Mike was explaining.
These are, you know, 60%-70%-ish% type gross margin type contracts, right? They're quite lucrative, and they're a win-win for the customer as well as us. And then you look at, you know, just a number of other factors, you know, whether it be just the ongoing productivity-type initiatives, i2V, things for a, you know, a company of our size. You know, we are now reaching kind of the tail end of the merger-related synergies. You know, if you remember, $300 million of merger-related synergies. When we came out of the merger, it was $250 million. We immediately raised that pretty much within a few months to $300 million, but we've always said that there's a funnel, you know, $350 million plus.
Admittedly, there was just, you know, there's opportunity set in there, whether it be supply chain-oriented with the, you know, you know, the direct material base, whether it be some targeted footprint opportunities that admittedly just-
... we never necessarily had to go execute upon, but also probably wasn't the right thing to be executing on in the last few years, just given the supply chain environment. So you put that all together, and, you know, our view here is there's still plenty of run. We also have now done, you know, 35 or 37 bolt-on acquisitions, and those all come with their synergy-related profiles that we should be executing on. Two of the largest ones happened in here in the last year with the SPX FLOW dryer business and the Roots transaction, which, you know, coming in below segment margin profile, but no reason those can't be at 30% EBITDA margin, and they're integrating quite well.
And the, you know, the other, the other piece that's quite exciting for us is we've done this all in the last two years in the face of some pretty considerable inflationary headwinds, right? So, you know, as we think forward, you know, clearly we are, you know, our supply chain teams, our procurement teams, are pushing as hard as you can imagine on price clawbacks and things of that nature. And, you know, our view is, let that be the upside as we think about 2024 onwards. So we think there's a lot of leverage still to be pulled, and those really exist across both segments. Understood. So then trying to figure out how Ingersoll Rand maybe fits into the broader CapEx ecosystem.
A lot of discussion around big mega projects across a whole variety of areas, but, you know, clearly some secular demand drivers out there. From the time that, you know, we're pouring the concrete or putting a shovel in the ground, which maybe in some of these cases we're close to doing, when do you guys start to see the uptick? I gotta imagine you're maybe more like mid to late in that process b ut, is there sort of a rule of thumb that we could use, you know, if these things really start to kick off early next year?
I'd say it's mid to late, but it's really more like... I mean, we have basically like a 12- to 18-month lead time sort of window, for a lot of these large projects because they require large compressors, large blowers, devices that they don't require re-engineering, but they require that we add on maybe some subsystems, type of work. So we get this ability based on construction data, clearly. I mean, our team uses that as a kind of leading indicator 'cause, I mean, we have a lot of databases that show a lot of these kind of construction projects. And then, yeah, I mean, the order will come in more like mid to late stage.
Understood. Then I wanna spend our remaining time here on M&A. You guys have obviously had a lot of success, done a lot of transactions. I get that there's market fragmentation and sort of what that opportunity presents itself in some of those core, kind of rotating part type markets that you participate in. But, how have you had... I guess, what do you use to identify what quality looks like? Even though the market's fragmented, you said there's some, you know, long-term brands out there. Clearly, someone out there is not as good. I was just wondering how, you know, with these companies that are all sort of, you know, small to medium size, how you go in and evaluate, you know, here's a gem where maybe profitability is lacking, but we can bring it up, versus it's just lower quality?
Yes. I'll say it first starts with, I mean, we do a lot of market segmentation and a lot of market maps to better understand what are those white spaces that we're not playing, that we want to play? That's how we got SEEPEX and many other ones, and then we go on deep dive into technologies. Once we look at a set of technologies, then we find what is the best brand that is recognized out in the market? And those are typically the technologies that we want to have. So we look for great brand, great equity.
But they might be kind of niche-y, maybe number one, you know, on the top quartile of kind of being able to provide that technology to many companies, even though in many cases they're small. But then once we start looking at the financials, yeah, I mean, we see the way we run every single model in terms of acquisition is that we wanna be able to achieve mid-teens ROIC by year three, and that we're gonna do it with what we can control. And that basically means can we leverage price? In many cases, again, great brand, great reputation, family-owned, they have not done a lot of that sophistication and price. Can we improve gross margin? Clearly, you know, we're very good with i2V, with our supply chain, so we can definitely take cost out.
And then also we look at the SG&A. I mean, we know, as we always say, we have this very great, vast commercial footprint, so we can take these technologies and put them through our commercial footprint network without having to really increase the cost, and in many cases, reduce the cost for these companies that we acquire. So again, those are the three variables that we look in terms of when we acquire a company, and controlling what we can control to be able to be accretive to the total equation.
As you look across the landscape, I would imagine, you know, you're executing on the stuff that's some combination of easier to execute on, a willing seller, but also where, you know, some of those, that market analysis says, "Oh, you're the ones we want to buy first. Having had a decent amount of success in that, does that funnel of opportunity get smaller at some point? It sounds like it's not. But, you know, do you anticipate a time in the next few years where that gets more difficult just because of the base effect?
We don't think so. Again, I go back to that $7 billion revenue today, playing in $60 billion, highly fragmented. A lot of these companies we have been cultivating for years. Companies that, you know, I mean, Roots, we knew about Roots back in 2016 when it transitioned from GE to Colfax. So, I mean, a lot of these companies still here, we cultivated with a family for close to 5 years. So I think we have a really robust process of cultivation, of reaching out, that we know enough what we have in this pipeline that is yet not in the funnel. Because cultivation doesn't mean that it's gonna go into the funnel. Cultivation means that we're cultivating, like, tollgate zero like, we have no, no value to that acquisition yet. So... And we still see a lot of companies on that—
Understood.
On that cultivation stage.
Excellent. Well, I see your time. Guys, we really enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you. Appreciate the conversation.
Thank you.