All right. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Gartner presentation. I'm Andrew Nicholas, and I'm the business services analyst here at William Blair. Before we get started, I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. With that out of the way, I'm very pleased to welcome Gartner CFO Craig Safian to the 45th annual Growth Stock Conference. That's it. That's my intro, and I'll let you take the wheel.
Thank you, Andrew. Just to let you know, this is not my 45th time at the conference, just to sort of lay it out there for everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for taking the time. Really appreciate it. For the next 29-ish minutes, I'm going to take you through the Gartner story. We have a breakout session scheduled right after this for any questions you might have. Let us dive right in. Just before I start, you know, with me on the team today, David, they'll also be joining us in the breakout session. Again, as always, if you have any questions going forward that you don't get to ask during the breakout session, David Cohen leads investor relations for us and is always available for inquiries, questions, etc.
So similar to Andrew, there are some, you know, forward-looking statements I may be making. I'm not going to ask you to read the slide. Let's start with who we are and what we do. I think, you know, fundamentally, this is super important, super critical to understand the core value proposition that we offer operating executives. What we do is deliver actionable, objective insights that help make smarter decisions and drive stronger performance on an organization's and an individual's what we call mission-critical priorities or MCPs. You're going to hear me talk about MCPs a lot. It is how we go to market, it is how we serve our clients, understanding what is most important to our clients, and then mapping our value proposition to those most important things is what makes us go from both a retention perspective and a new business perspective.
In terms of who we serve, it's actually a fairly unique story because we serve a very diversified set of clients, and it's diversified from a geographic perspective. We are operating in every major region and country you would imagine. It's diversified from an industry perspective. We serve financial services, manufacturing, retail, banking, public sector, private sector, not-for-profit, etc. Again, you know, broadly, we do that. We are diversified from a size perspective as well. We are serving the largest companies and enterprises in the world down to, on our technology business, serving pre-revenue technology companies, and on our end user, our enterprise user-focused businesses, serving companies roughly with at least $100 million or more, with the thinking being we serve clients or we target clients who are large enough, complex enough, and have enough budget to get value and benefit out of multiple Gartner subscriptions.
Why we do it, and we'll double-click on this a little bit later, it's really about making sure that we are helping our clients achieve their most important mission-critical priorities. That's sort of on the client side. In terms of our investor value proposition, if you will, our story has been the same and consistent for the last several years. One is our goal is to drive 12%-16% research growth, which equates to double-digit revenue growth. We believe we can modestly expand margins each and every year going forward. Because of the fundamentals and foundation of our model, we can generate significant amounts of free cash flow, free cash flow well in excess of our net income that we can then put to use on behalf of our shareholders. You know, you see a snapshot of some numbers about us.
Over $6 billion in revenues last year, $1.4 billion in free cash flow. We've been at this for a number of years. We've got over $5 billion of subscription contract value under contract. The compound annual growth rate over the last decade or so has been about 14% growth consistently year after year after year. Sort of, you know, make that point. We are a growth business, and it is people who actually fuel the business for us. If you sort of zoom back with us, about 70-75% of our operating expense base is our people-related costs. We are clearly a people business, but we actually productize and monetize it in very efficient and effective ways, with about 80% of our business being tied up in our quote-unquote research business, which is an annual subscription model.
On the top chart, you can see the CAGR I referred from 2014 through 2024. As important to us and to you, hopefully, is the free cash flow performance on the bottom of the slide as well, where you can see a 16% compound annual growth rate, 2014 to 2024, with a significant step up in our free cash flow generation, really starting in 2020 into 2021. Along the way, we've significantly grown our team, both in terms of the direct sellers that are going out and selling and retaining our products and services, as well as the experts that we have on staff that develop all the insights and actually help our clients achieve those mission-critical priorities.
You know, when we think about Gartner overall and the culture we have, and because we are so people-dependent, the culture that we've built and driven is super important to us. Again, if you look at accolades that we've gotten around our associate value proposition or how Gartner, you know, we've gotten those accolades year after year after year after year. Here on this slide, you can see several elements of how we define, you know, our culture and our ethos. Again, I think, you know, these are reflective of 20 years of developing this culture so that we can sustain double-digit top-line growth well into the future. I'll pull out a couple of them. We talked about the first one, which is impacting clients' mission-critical priorities. We do good in the world. We are supporting, you know, the initiatives of our clients across the board.
You know, we can feel really good, and our team can feel really good about helping our clients with, you know, with things that actually positively impact their business and generally positively impact the world as well. We have a no-limits mindset. One of our core, you know, operating philosophies is you got a challenge, we are going to break it down, figure it out, and then iterate and innovate our way through it. We prioritize in doing that. You can see a bunch of the other things. I think one of our secret sauces, if you will, and why we are so hard to compete against is on the bottom row, the middle one is we win as a team. I think we have this concept of team NCVI. So NCVI, or net contract value increase, is probably the most important metric we have.
What it is, is it's measuring the dollar value of contract value growth in a period, a year, a month, what have you. Think about NCVI as basically the numerator in calculating contract value growth. As I mentioned, we have this concept around we're all members of team NCVI. Whether you're on the finance team, the sales team, the research team, kind of doesn't matter. We're all about making sure that whatever we're doing is in support of sales and our clients in driving and supporting NCVI. Again, I think when we do run into competitive situations, which is definitely in the minority of our deals, our competitors find it really, really, really difficult to compete against us.
There's a lot of reasons why that is, but one of the core reasons is because we bring a team to the solution and we fight and win as a team. You know, we were founded in 1979 to cover the technology industry. The technology industry in 1979, now, you know, I don't remember. I was just a, you know, in elementary school at that point. Yes? Everyone cool with that? Okay, good. No objection. The technology industry at that point was really IBM, right? We were created as a resource to study and provide value about IBM. Obviously, technology exploded beyond IBM, and we've been serving technology executives since 1979 on all of their most important mission-critical priorities. In 2009, going into 2010, we got into the supply chain business through an acquisition of a small company based in Boston called AMR Research.
AMR Research was originally created as a Gartner competitor. They found it too hard to compete against Gartner, and so they veered into supporting supply chain professionals. We bought AMR at the very end of 2009 and it has been core to our supply chain business ever since then, which has been a really strong and significant grower for us going forward. That acquisition, though, proved to us that all of the best practices that we had developed in running our technology business from a go-to-market perspective, from a creating insights perspective, from a servicing perspective, worked just as well on supply chain as it did in IT. Put a pin in that because that is a really important point as we move forward. In 2012, we launched organically a service serving marketing professionals really focused on digital marketing.
With understanding that all of the best practices we had developed in serving IT professionals and now supply chain professionals would work in marketing, and marketing had a wonderful growth spurt as well and really contributed to our overall growth. In 2017, we were presented with an opportunity to buy a company called CEB, which used to be known as the Corporate Executive Board. What CEB had built was practices serving all of the other functional areas outside of the ones we had already either created or stood up. While there was a little bit of overlap in marketing and IT, what CEB brought was expertise in creating insights for professionals in the HR function, in the finance function, in the sales function, in the legal function.
What you can see on the bottom of this page is sort of the result of a combination of really smart and strategic M&A and some organic launches where we now serve leaders across every major function in the enterprise, across every geography and industry, as we talked about earlier, with a similar business model across all of them, similar product architecture, similar product elements, similar pricing, similar contractual elements, contractual terms, same sales systems, same sales processes, etc. In the middle, you can see that how we do it and what we're doing. We have more than 2,500 experts across all of these areas who are generating actionable objective insights for our clients.
If reading the research or the insights is not enough and you want to speak to an expert, we actually, if you subscribe at a certain tier of service, you get access to what we call inquiry, which is you pick up the phone and you get on, you know, a Teams call or a Webex call or whatever it may be with one of our experts. Clients find this incredibly valuable. Imagine, you know, you read a really interesting article in whatever publication you find interesting, and you really want to learn more and talk to the author of that article. Generally, you can't do that unless you're very well connected or have, you know, friends in high places. Here, if you subscribe to it, we get you directly connected to the right people at the right time with the right insights, etc.
On top of that, we have tools and templates and graphics and things like that that actually help you come to the right decision better. If you think about sources of value, it's the insights that our experts are creating. It's access to those experts through inquiry, and it's the tools and templates, etc., that we have developed over the years that really help those executives achieve and accomplish their most important mission-critical priorities. You know, when you think about the value proposition, and some of you may be Gartner Invest clients, if so, thank you. That said, you are not our core audience, and our value proposition is different than the value proposition for Invest clients.
You know, if you think about this presentation, that said, you are not our core audience, and our value proposition is different than the value proposition for Invest clients. You know, if you think about putting yourself in the shoes of an operating executive, and so in this case, you know, it is a so on and so up into what you see on the right of the page, mission-critical priorities. If I am the Chief Information Officer, my mission-critical priorities might be, you know, build out my cybersecurity framework, significantly enhance the user experience of all our client-facing applications, and build a data and analytics infrastructure that will support AI and machine learning development into the future. Okay, those are three big things. How do we help then?
If you think about it, there are dozens, hundreds, or thousands of inputs and data points that go into developing the right cybersecurity strategy, benchmarking the skill sets of your cybersecurity professionals, selecting applications, developing the right cybersecurity governance structure. We help on all of that. It's really hard to find help on that anywhere else, especially at the price point that we are talking about. On average, a license to Gartner costs about $50,000 per user per year. For that $50,000, you get access to all of the relevant insights for your role. For that $50,000, you get the ability to get on the phone as many times as you want with an expert to do inquiry to further your understanding and experience, you know, in support of those mission-critical priorities.
For that $50,000, you get the ability to attend one of our industry-leading conferences in the geography of your choice. You get to network with peers. You get access to peer reviews of software and other applications. You get access to all the things you need. If you think about the sources of value, it goes back to what I talked about a little bit earlier. It is the written insights that come from our 2,500 leading industry experts. It is talking to an expert through inquiry. It is networking with peers to understand what they're doing. It is going to a conference and really immersing yourself in all things related to your mission-critical priorities. It is leveraging our tools and templates to get to better outcomes and really drive support and success around your specific mission-critical priorities.
My simple rubric for thinking about the value proposition are these five elements. It's not the most elegant or articulate way to discuss the value prop, but it's helpful for me. It's actually, you know, I've been working at Gartner for almost 23 years. My mom, God bless her, still has no idea what Gartner does. This slide is the closest I've gotten to explaining to Judy Safian what Gartner does. I consider this really gold because my mom now has a basic understanding of what Gartner does. If you think about it, it breaks down into really five components. We save time. We help people get to the right decision more quickly. There's huge economic value in doing that. We save people money.
We actually will look at your proposals from technology vendors who not only do we help you get to the right decision on picking the right application or provider or integration partner or whatever it may be, we can actually help you get the best pricing and terms on that huge, demonstrable, quantifiable economic value. We help you manage risk. Cybersecurity is the perfect example. It's hard to put a return on your investment in cybersecurity, but we know that if you are smart and thoughtful about it and do all the right things, you are minimizing and mitigating risk along the way. We help you manage risk. You can't afford to have 2,500 experts on your payroll. We can. We have the experts on our staff so that when you need it on demand, you get access to that expertise. Lastly, you gain confidence.
If you think about a CEO or a board wanting to know, okay, you're going to spend X on a new CRM application, or this is a cybersecurity framework and tools you're going with, they're going to want to know, okay, what does a third party say about it? And very often, it's the Gartner stamp of approval that actually gives operating executives, boards, and CEOs the confidence to move forward. Save time, save money, manage risk, gain expertise, and gain confidence is my simple rubric for the value we provide. Again, that exists across every function we serve. It's the same value proposition for CFOs, same for CMOs, same for CHROs, and obviously the same for chief information officers as well. You know, the value that we offer is significantly differentiated from anything else out in the market.
I'll highlight the first circle there, which is independence and objectivity. I think this is actually really, really important. Our whole brand lives and exists and thrives because fundamentally we are independent and objective. We do not do implementation work. We do not do integration work. We do not have strategic partnerships with technology vendors all over the place. We are agnostic in terms of what you want to deploy from a technology perspective. Very few people can make that claim. Your systems integrator may say it to you, but it's not true because they have dozens of partnerships with software providers. Their skin in the game is really around driving significant implementation and integration work. That independence and objectivity is absolutely paramount to everything we do.
If you think about, you know, other sources where people could go to get information, whether it be large language models, consulting partners, whatever it may be, you have no guarantee that anything is independent or objective. We take this very seriously and have rigorous and significant research methodology and research process in place to ensure that we maintain our independence and objectivity. One small anecdote, our experts cannot invest in technology stocks, right? Simple, right? Unfortunately, Congress does not take that same approach, but that is a story for a different day. Our experts, we do not allow them to invest in technology stocks because it would be a conflict of interest and potentially tarnish our independence and objectivity. Obviously, you know, if you think about the rest of the value, we really do benefit from a significant network effect across everything we do.
You know, there is no one out there who matches the breadth of what we cover. There is no one out there who matches the depth of what we cover. On top of that, we have the network benefit of roughly 100,000 licensed users who are interacting with Gartner on a frequent basis. We know what they're thinking. We know what they're searching on. We know what they're clicking on. We know what they're doing once they click on something. Are they saving it? Are they printing it? Are they forwarding it? Etc. We know when they go to a conference. We know what sessions they're attending. We have our fingers on the pulse of a high-level, highly qualified global executive audience that reinforces the insights we actually provide. Again, you can't build that, match it, or meet it.
Again, just one of the many things that we have that significantly differentiates the Gartner value from any potential alternatives out there. Our Research business is the bulk of our business. Think around 80% of our total revenue. If you think about it, it's about 80% of revenue. It's probably about 85% of contribution margin. If you actually broke it apart from a valuation perspective, it's probably 90-95% of our value, right? This is the center of the universe for us. It is our largest, most profitable segment. We're in the other businesses essentially to complement and catalyze this business, as I'll talk about in a couple of slides. Research revenue, you can see the trend over the last several years, really strong growth.
You can see the margin improvement of the business as well, now nestling in in the mid-70s from both an incremental margin perspective and an absolute margin perspective. Again, the bulk of this revenue is under contract, minimum 12-month contract, but in fact, more than 70% of our contract value is actually written in multi-year contracts, which again, just further reinforces the stickiness of our offerings. When we talk about growth and the overall growth algorithm, this is the way we think about it. Basically, this is just bridging from a baseline wallet retention all the way up to total target growth, the point being that we generate a significant amount of growth from our existing clients on top of the growth we drive from new clients. As I mentioned, we do it across every major function in the enterprise.
You can see around 75% of the contract value base is actually on the GTS side, with the balance on the GBS side. GTS is solely focused on technology professionals. GBS is actually several smaller businesses that we manage as one unit underneath, but they're actually separate go-to-market teams. The supply chain team only calls on supply chain professionals. The finance team only calls on finance professionals, etc. You know, important to know, you know, we have enterprise clients, but essentially we sell and service to individuals. We call them licensed users. And you know, we target the senior most, and then we go down from there to direct reports and direct reports of that C-level. The way we sort of think about it is, you know, we serve multiple roles. And within those roles, there's a bullseye. The center of the bullseye for us is the C-level.
It's the CIO, Chief Information Officer. It's the CHRO. It's the CFO, etc. That's really important because it keeps our sellers focused on where all the money is and where all the value is for us, which is really owning the C-level. We don't just target them. We actually want to land and expand. When we think about the opportunity, it's, yeah, the center of the bullseye, but then if you're the CFO or you're targeting the CFO, you want to call on their controller, their head of financial planning and analysis, their treasurer, their head of investor relations, which reflects these other nodes that you can then sell to and find underneath the C-level. You know, we have a very large addressable market opportunity. We estimate it conservatively at around $200 billion.
That little teeny sliver that you see on the far right of the page is our current CV. So we've got about $5 billion of that roughly $200 billion market opportunity. And now you often look at charts like this, I'm sure, and you say, okay, that's great. Who makes up the other, you know, $194.9 billion? And the short answer is nobody. Our direct competitors are all significantly smaller than us, probably don't add up to a billion dollars in contract value in total. And so what this is is essentially a greenfield unvended market opportunity for us across all these major functions that we've been slowly but surely building and taking advantage of, but we're still in the really, really, really early innings of this capture.
The way we're going to get there is a combination of landing new accounts and then growing them over time, landing new accounts, growing over time, wash, rinse, repeat over and over and over again. Conferences is a complementary business. It's a great business. The reason we're in it is to make research better. It is for the most part, and we've managed to figure out ways to monetize it with technology, vendors, exhibitors, and sponsors, and also use it as a new business machine for our research business as well. It's a great business, but the reason we're in this business is because it complements and catalyzes the research business. The same thing with consulting. It's a great standalone business, not nearly as attractive as the research business. We're in this business because our larger clients want our help.
We do this in select geographies for a select number of clients, but we only do it to complement and catalyze the research business. Lastly, from a margin perspective, you know, we expect over time to modestly expand margins, as I mentioned earlier. The way we do that is gross margin leverage from research becoming a bigger and bigger piece of the pie, modest G&A leverage, and sales costs growing about in line with revenue as we continue to invest in ensuring we can capture the market opportunity going forward. Last slide, and I, you know, in my mind, a very important one, which is the model is set up to deliver huge amounts of free cash flow.
You can see the reasons why, but on average, we expect free cash flow of around 140%-160% of net income each and every year. Over a billion dollars of free cash flow each and every year that we want to put to use on behalf of shareholders, primarily through our buyback programs and strategic value enhancing tuck in M&A. That is our time today. Thank you for taking the time. We will be moving to Maher for a breakout. Feel free to join us. Again, I will echo your comments. Thanks for being here, and we will join you in the next room. Thank you.