Motion control process optimization, water treatment, and advanced engineering services. The different industrial applications, there was a coal angle here. I love what they were doing, but it just, they never really got anything going. They would have, you know, they would have, because of their involvement with certain industries that use coal for energy, you know, that's, you're never going to get a high multiple for that too. It didn't seem to be like a lot of consistent demand. When we look at these boring companies, a lot of times like that, they've been around for a long, long time. How can they find new ways to grow? As you know, right now, this whole data center stuff, it's really, and AI is reinventing a lot of boring companies. You saw it with TSSI.
We saw, you know, which does data center integration, rack integration services. We saw with PSIX, a boring, which I've done a video on, which is a boring engine company that now is making enclosures to protect generators and data centers. These are two huge multi-baggers. You know, I'm trying to, and I'm trying, when you're looking at these kinds of things, you're trying to basically separate the BS companies from the real companies. That's why I like to look at these because they've been around for a long, long, long time. They have a real company. They have real customers. They've survived different environments. They just haven't been able to like maybe consistently grow. Or maybe they were at one time great growers, and then things have changed.
FTEK came, was reminded by one of our members, sent us a note to take a look at this company, San Diego Lee, a couple of weeks ago. We actually covered it in our open forum, I think, on Monday from one of our members. We published our notes on it on Tuesday, actually, because of this. Just like out of the blue, he said we should take a look at it again. Things might be getting better for the company. They had their numbers, I think, last night. When we look at this, the numbers were not, you know, not fantastic. Again, let me see here. We had, make this bigger here. They lost money.
If you're looking at this, okay, now, first of all, a lot of investors aren't going to open that headline because, I mean, we all know this. If you see a headline without any kind of like dramatic comment from it, the content is usually going to be boring and bad. We have here, they lost money, even though revenues were flat. As you keep reading the release, you notice that there's a commentary here from the company. These are the small little things we like to watch. Why now this is going to be in our pipeline. Right there, just stuck in the middle of the sentence here, then it sends us off for a promising opportunity for Fuel Tech's emissions control solutions, including our SCR Ultra technologies.
You know, and that's basically enough for me to put it on my watch list. Obviously, I'm not going to buy the stock. Now, there's a potential that pumpers could find it and buy it and pump it up. Who knows? I mean, I bought a piece of it just in case, just for fun. This is exactly how the PSIX kind of roadmap occurred. PSIX went from $2.18 months ago to as recently as high as $46. It's around $30 right now. You know, it was a little small sense like that buried in the press release, "Hey, we're getting into this new enclosure business." That's basically why I love this kind of application. It brings me things closer. Pretty soon, right now you can search for data centers. The problem is it doesn't search for the actual phrase.
It'll search for all the word data word centers. On the next version of this we're putting out here, you'll be able to put, you know, whatever you want to look at, you know, phrases, eventually make the watch list of key phrases you're looking for. It's even going to bring you these press releases that you want to watch, that you want to monitor even quicker. That's what I wanted to show you. I'm telling you right now, this will help you with your research. I'm going to stress it again for beginner to intermediate investors. I really stress using press release research as part of your edge. It's because a lot of people just don't do it. They rely on screens, you know, maybe now AI to help them.
You know, and nothing beats just getting down and dirty into what management is saying and finding those little small little things. That is it. Let's move on. I think is Roger here?
Roger is on. I wanted to ask him if Jim was still planning on joining. I do not see him on here, but maybe he is under a different name or computer situation.
We are here.
We're both here.
Okay. Perfect.
Great , hey, how are you guys doing?
Excellent.
Great. How are you doing?
Good, man. Thanks for doing this. Let me.
I'm not able to turn the video on. It looks like that comes from your side. Is that right?
Oh, yep. Yep. I'm taking care of that right now.
Okay. Okay.
You should be good now.
I think, you know, Roger, you and I chatted about this, maybe doing this a little differently. Were you able to prepare any slides? If you weren't, I got something going if you weren't able to.
We actually did. Yeah.
Perfect. Perfect. Look, I mean, we've done fireside chats with you, skull sessions with you numerous times. Did a thing in Vegas with you, Bobby. I think you're going to be there. Congratulations. That should be a good event for you. I figured, you know what? I don't want to beat that to death. I think what will be good here is really take a litmus test. You guys had this plan you put together, I think in August of 2023, your presentation, what you want, where you want to be at in terms of revenue, EBITDA, acquisition goals. The funny, I think it's good to see where you are in that kind of timeline, what's happened. Maybe do some kind of presentation to put it all together for our members.
Now, what I want to do is say to people, because everybody listening, if you were just watching this, we showed you, we're looking at the, we showed you how to use press release to find information arbitrage, we call it. Like hidden information where companies are talking, you know, because especially in small cap land. And with Lake, it was, it wasn't like, hey, you know, we knew who Lake was, our team. This pandemic kind of focus companies that was our thinking all the time. So that alone is going to make people not look at the company. They're going to look at the past and say, whatever, they're going to move on. But then, you know, when we found that presentation, we found it very interesting, but that you're going away from that kind of stigma, hopefully.
What caught our attention really was, and this will happen a lot in small cap land, the analysts really were not given that, given that any credence at all. When you looked at the estimates that analysts had put out there for the next two, three years versus if you met your goals where you might be, it was dramatically different. That is what really those two things are what got us really excited here. I will give it to you guys, man. You know, thank you for doing this. Let's hear the report card story and where things are going.
Excellent.
I think you can. Can you share? I think you can right now.
Yeah. We're going to get this.
This will give me a break too, Roger. My head kind of, I'm going to burn out today.
Excellent. All right.
I just want to interrupt for one second, Maj, because I didn't know that we were doing it this way. Do you want to play through the title screen and the disclaimer in safe harbor?
Yeah. Do you want to do that?
Say something really quick because I'm a little nervous to be doing a live call without.
I'll do that. Yeah. Why don't I bring that up?
All right. Just give it back to you.
Safety.
Yeah. I'll share my screen for one second.
Thank you, guys.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah, Maj, just play through the first three and then you can close. That covers everybody.
Can we see it?
Yep.
All right. Here we go. Nasdaq, LAKE, Jim Jenkins, CEO, and Roger Shannon, CFO. Oh, I should say, by the way, Roger and Jim here, that we have Geo Investing as one asset that I run. I also run a Substack, m smicrocaps.substack.com, where we've created what we call the first quality multi-bagger index. So smaller cap companies that meet certain quality or certain turnaround characteristics that we think are unique multi-bagger characteristics. And you guys met that. You were the 68th stock we added to the index. We thought, well, you're currently on 56%. We'll repeat that 80%. Protective solutions or protecting a man. I think that's it. We will go to the terms and conditions. We will go to your safe harbor and get you guys over to sharing your presentation.
This discussion is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell securities. This is not a recommendation to trade, buy, or sell any companies discussed. We recommend you consult with a professional investment advisor before transacting in any securities mentioned in this discussion. By viewing or listening to this event, you agree to the terms and conditions, which you can view in full at msmicrocaps.com.
Please also be aware of the company's safe harbor, which explains that this chat may include forward-looking statements that currently represent the company's views, opinions, and statements, which may or may not materially be representative of future conditions and events. Thank you.
All right. So here's a chart recently. It's come, you know, how you had a good run. We put it on an index around $15, I think. Got as high as $27-ish, and it's come down there with the market. Here's what your revenue looks like from 2020, $107 million to pushing $170 million this year. And, you know, profitable for the last several years. Okay. I'm just going to stop sharing here. You guys get at it.
Yep. All right. Take the wheel and make this a slideshow. All right. So, again, thank you again for having us. I'll turn this over to Jim just kind of briefly to follow up on your very kind introduction. Maj, you and your team have certainly been extremely kind to us with your platforms. It's been a pleasure to get to know you and the team. I think you do a tremendous job with your platforms. We had an amazing session with you last year at Planet Microcap, where you kindly invited us onto your best ideas platform. We are headed back out there in a few weeks now. Looking forward to participating at that again a little bit later this spring, as well as other conferences and getting on the road at every opportunity that we can.
Thank you.
Next thing, I won't go over this again. We have our own safe harbor. To the extent we've talked in non-GAAP statements, I will kind of preemptively say that we are in a quiet period. Our fiscal year ended January 31, 2025. We are a little bit off of a normal calendar fiscal year. We finished Q4 in our fiscal year at January 31. We are well into closing of that. We expect to release earnings the second week of April and then our 10-K at about that timeframe. Certainly limited on what we can talk about from a financial perspective, but plenty to talk about with the evolution, growth, and strategy of the company.
We won't ask any questions that put you in a tough spot, too.
We appreciate that, Maj. You know, so we, you know, just sort of the way things felt. Look, I guess I start with August of 2023. You know, that's when I think we sort of hit your radar. You know, we have done a significant amount towards the goals that we set for ourselves in August of 2023. You know, if you look at the slide that Roger has put together, we have significantly changed the trajectory of the company. We've changed our strategy. We've changed our mission, and we've changed the way we want to grow. Since August of 2023, we've acquired Pacific Helmets out of Whanganui, New Zealand, Jolly Scarpe Boots, Romania, and Italy, LHD, which has operations in Germany, Australia, a joint venture in New Zealand, and an operation in Hong Kong.
We rounded out the portfolio with an acquisition in the United States, a company called Veridian, which we believe is sort of the gem of the portfolio. What was the goal? The goal was to do two things. One, to be in the top five in fire in the United States, top five in fire globally. The goal was to offer head-to-toe offering to the firefighter and not forgetting our legacy business, our industrial business, where we targeted, you know, mid to high single-digit growth for our business. You know, if I were to give this management team, which was really assembled over the course of the last really seven or eight months, it was really Roger, Helena, and I from August 2023 until about June of 2024.
Kudos to Roger and Helena for serving so well for our shareholders, our customers, and our employees, driving us through a rather significant change and a different growth trajectory. We have rounded out our executive team. It is a new team, but it is a very well-experienced team with a wealth of experiences in the industry segments that we need to be driving. We brought in Cameron Stokes to drive our legacy business, and he has an entirely different approach to how he will sell. We have already seen some very nice early returns from that. We brought in Barry Phillips, who has significant fire experience as our Chief Revenue Officer. You know, he has also brought a breath of fresh air to our fire environment and has embraced our M&A strategy.
Then we rounded out the team, Roger, myself, Helena, Barry, Cameron, with a Chief Human Resources Officer, Laurel Yartz. You know, Laurel also has a wealth of experience in global HR. You know, we were a company of, you know, prior to our acquisitions, probably 1,100, 1,200. We're now at about 2,100. We never really had an HR function to drive the kind of growth we need and the kind of talent that we need to acquire. What have we done since then? We've done some significant things. With that acquisition of Veridian, we are now four in the United States, probably four globally, Roger, and six in the United States. We're biting at the heels of number three. We've done that in the span of about 15 months.
That is something we're incredibly proud of, where we are now someone that the firefighters all over the world are relying upon. We're continuing to target our mid to high single-digit organic growth. You know, we seem, if you look at our third quarter numbers, we seem to be, you know, moving towards in that direction. Finally, we executed, our stock price moved in a direction where Roger and I believed that it was time to deleverage our balance sheet as a result of several of these acquisitions. We did just that, and we now have significant dry powder to drive additional M&A opportunities in the future. Roger, I'll hand that over to you.
Yeah.
And you know, as part of that, Maj, to get to your point about the, you know, you use the word stigma, legacy, we did get that quite a bit when we go on the road and talk to investors. There was a perception of the old Lakeland and, you know, how the company would pop during pandemics and bad events, but typically, you know, would give that back, would always give that back. We looked over a period of, you know, say 10 to 15 years, you take out those black swan events, and the company had grown at about 1% over that period of time, which is not acceptable in any regard as a public company. You know, so our board appointed Jim, kind of gave him the mandate to set about a new strategy for the company to build a new leadership team.
Part of that, you know, even as simple as the name change, and we call that out here, the transition to Lakeland Fire and Safety. You know, Lakeland Industries, what did that really mean? You know, it did not describe the business that we are in, how we, you know, kind of wanted to position ourselves. Even something as simple as that and kind of highlighting, you know, what we do has been very exciting for our team members and been well received for our customers. We think that name better aligns. We have spent a lot of time over the past two years, you know, speaking with investors, going on the road, speaking with analysts. You know, we do expect to add new analyst coverage over the next, I would call it next month or two.
We understand that probably at least two will be picking us up in the near term. That's exciting as we have, you know, grown through the acquisitions and organically. You know, this slide is one you may have seen on our website before. You know, we kind of break down those strategies into, you know, who we are, how we're going to grow, and then, you know, what the near-term, the long-term strategies are, kind of breaking those out, what we want to do immediately, and then how, you know, the company can sustain that over the long term. What are those competitive advantages that we have that we believe enable us to do that? A lot of that is really superior lead times from our company-owned manufacturing.
At the time that we started on this growth path, we had five company-owned kind of legacy manufacturing facilities. Now we have 10. We had acquired additional company-owned facilities as part of the Pacific acquisition, part of the Jolly acquisition. With Veridian, we got manufacturing capabilities that I think are incredibly pertinent, especially in this kind of time of uncertainty around tariffs. That is with Veridian, who is entirely manufactured within the U.S. Veridian not only gave us a kind of a top five fire brand in the U.S., it gave us U.S. manufacturing capability, which we believe will further enhance that competitive position. To that point, we're working as we speak to finalize certifications to where we can manufacture Lakeland fire turnout gear products at the U.S. Veridian locations for kind of tariff management purposes.
We can manufacture Veridian products at our Lakeland, Mexico facility for non-U.S. It gives us enhanced kind of scale, leverage, and protection against, you know, what could happen as part of the tariffs.
I would agree with that, Roger. I think the manufacturing flexibility that we have to move capacity around the world where we need to is going to be a critical component to sort of this new sort of world of tariffs. You know, it's going to be something we have to navigate. We spent several, I can't tell you the number of meetings we've had about tariffs. I feel like I'm playing a little bit of tariff whack-a-mole right now because they're either on or they're off or they're on. We are driving our business as if they are on. We believe we have a game plan that we're going to execute well on.
Okay. Good.
You know, we've talked a lot about the strategy, you know, the near-term, the long-term with you. We see the growth opportunity in Fire with it being, you know, very fragmented, non-dominated by one company type of opportunity. You know, at this point, and we've got a slide that we'll show you on how those acquisitions come together. At this point, you know, we do feel like that we have all of the products that we need within the fire turnout kit. Not to say that we wouldn't acquire anything in the future should an attractive opportunity present. It's just that we don't need it. We've got outstanding products from head to toe now. We have and continue to say very publicly that we are continuing to progress and advance our acquisition growth strategy.
You know, Jim mentioned the equity offering that we just did that was just incredibly well received. We, you know, we had originally gone, you know, thoughts of going to market for a, you know, $20 million-ish offering, you know, potentially $20 million-$30 million, depending on receptivity. When all was said and done with the pricing and the marketing of it, it was four times oversubscribed. We ended up upsizing to the $40 million level. Of course, when the shoe allocations were filled, it turned out to be a $46 million offering. Some of those investors have already begun to file their 13Gs.
You can see who that is, but there was one lead in particular that's incredibly well recognized, well-regarded investor that, you know, that we're just incredibly proud to have as part of our cap table now and took a, you know, rather large position in that offering.
You know, to pile on a bit, I think, yes, that was a transformative sort of public offering for us because it put us in position to continue to drive the M&A strategy that we want to drive. I think, as Roger says, we're going to be fairly discerning about the type of M&A opportunities that we are going to pursue. We've been that way throughout the beginning of this. We've kissed a lot of toes, I like to say. You know, when we acquired LHD, we became very intrigued with their service component, which is sort of a laundry decontamination business for the firefighter. We believe that's an opportunity that we want to pursue within North America and perhaps even Greenfield.
When you say pursue that, you mean pursue that within just a fire or the model across different?
Pursue it as part of, so part of the fire, part of the firefighter gets two pieces of turnout gear, so two fire suits. When that firefighter goes to a call, they're down to one. They've got to get that suit once they come back from a call, they've got to get it through a laundry and decontamination process. LHD has those in Hong Kong, Australia, and they've got a smaller one in Germany. They are very high-margin businesses. They are recurring revenue businesses, and they make the customer extremely sticky. We want to pursue that opportunity in North America.
You know, we think that there are, ideally, over the course of the next 12 to 15 months, Roger and I would look to acquire someone on the East Coast, someone in the Midwest, and someone close to the West Coast so that we could cover all of those markets. I think that's an enhancement to our current offerings in the United States, which is obviously the largest market. There is a market movement now in the fire space requiring, given the carcinogens that are associated with the, you know, the gases and the dirt that's emitted in these, you know, putting out fires, those things need to get cleaned off, need to be cleaned off in a correct way, need to be cleaned off in a way consistent with the certifying bodies. That is an incredibly fragmented market within the U.S.
The purchase prices for those businesses are not nearly as large as some of the ones we've looked at. We see some significant synergies very quickly as a result of that because we can take our current customers in the locations that we will find these opportunities, and we can move them into our laundry decontamination business. Again, high-margin business, you know, recurring revenue. I come from a services business. You know, the margins are really, really impressive.
When you look at LHD, how much of that, I forget, how much of their revenue?
It was about $7 million or $8 million, Rog, for their service business. 60% margins.
The bulk of that currently is in Australia. Australia really is the poster child for running that business efficiently, sorry. From that, you know, we've built and do still have a very robust pipeline of acquisition opportunities, some of which, you know, we're in various stages of running out. It's like, you know, like the fire turnout gear market, this is even more fragmented. It all, for us, fits into the strategy, as you see on this slide, of being the leading full-service vendor for head to toe.
There are acquisitions within that segment now that you can go after.
Absolutely, Rog. Yep. To Roger's point, it is an emerging and highly fragmented market.
Yeah.
With maybe one or two significant players, and that's it.
Have you identified what revenue they do? I mean, how much revenue is out there in that business?
We're in the midst of sort of doing that study, but I can tell you for the smaller ones, you're probably looking at, you know, $3 million-$5 million of revenue, but very high margins, you know, north of the EBITDA margins that we aspire to. From an EBITDA margin perspective, quite accretive quite quickly. You add in the synergy of being able to take our customers and fold them into those opportunities. Now you're talking about some, you know, a lot of fun.
Yeah, yeah. That can be really interesting for sure.
Yeah. It kind of creates a lot of stickiness within the customer universe. Then you throw in things like rental opportunities that we kind of consider within the services business that some people are doing. We just do not think they are doing it. We and our customers just do not think they are doing it as well as could be done, and certainly not with any kind of scale and efficiency. As we look at it, you know, we would want to position geographically, position strategically, and then kind of build a holistic model that works within our product universe, but within the services, decontamination, and, you know, possibly even the rental business. The interesting thing about where this is going, and there are the NFPA, National Fire Protection Association, that we have talked about, that governs the fire turnout kits and products themselves, also governs the cleaning of these products.
They are becoming much more strident, much more stringent, prescriptive in how these have to be done. What we are seeing from this is there is a movement toward where the suit would have to be cleaned after every call, and then it has to have a deep cleaning twice a year and an inspection once a year. What firefighters are seeing as a part of all of this cleaning, and it is kind of intuitive if you think about, you know, your own clothing and washing things, they just are wearing out a lot faster by going through the cleaning process. Not only do you have to have an extra kit for when it is in the decontamination and cleaning process, that process itself is going to drive kind of turnover and replacement opportunities within the products themselves.
We're talking a lot about Fire, and I do see the last item on this slide. I do not want to forget our legacy traditional business. It's a business that we believe we've got, you know, a very high profile in, very well regarded. Frankly, there's some M&A opportunities in that space as well that I don't want to forget about. I want to remind anybody listening to this that, you know, we haven't foreclosed ourselves from opportunities within the chemical, disposable, critical environment spaces with companies that have enhanced products that we believe, you know, will round out our product portfolio in that industry.
You can do that in conjunction with Fire, basically, you're thinking.
Correct. You know, the interesting synergies between fire, I'll give you an example. People keep reaching out to us about California. Oh, you know, have you seen increases because of what's happened in California? The short answer is we know, but we're hearing from our distributors in many different regions about, hey, are we sure we're stocked up? Are we sure we're in good shape? The interesting thing was during the right after the fires in California, the cleanup that was involved, if you ever watched any of this stuff on TV, they're all wearing the white suits. You know, that's our industrial disposable suit. We had one significant order in January, and we expect to see more from the state of California in conjunction with this cleanup.
Right, right. That basically probably has a pretty good margin on that too, usually.
Oh, yes. Very good margin.
Your price, yeah. That's great.
Yeah. You know, one thing I want to get, I'm just going to skip to this. Since you touched on, can you do it in conjunction? You know, Jim talked about the buildout of the team. You know, one of the points in the very first page was it is an entirely new executive management team. That was, you know, kind of driven by the evolution of the strategy, is driven by the kind of mandate of the board to bring in a group of people with industry experience, but also with growth experience. Just not just in acquisition, but in growing the business organically, which Helena has done as the long-term employee, the 25 years of Lakeland experience and kind of starting plants for us around the world.
To your point about can you do them together, what we've been able to do in bringing Barry and Cameron in is to kind of have them lead each of those verticals. You know, the original thought when we were, I guess, creating the position of the Chief Revenue Officer and thinking about, you know, what we needed in terms of sales leadership and marketing efficacy, efficiency, you know, it turned out that we came across these two gentlemen, and they were very different, but very complementary, and really hit home to us the point that we have an opportunity to grow industrial to, you know, the same way we have with fire, not as much directly from an M&A perspective, but from a market share perspective and advantages that we have over customers. We've even taken that a step further.
We did have Barry when he came in, it was obviously Chief Revenue Officer. Cameron was Vice President of Global Industrial. Over the past few weeks, we have elevated Cameron to Chief Commercial Officer of Industrial. We have kind of, that allows Barry to focus entirely on the Fire segment. Also has our Product Development and our M arketing, which he has expertise in. Cameron is able to focus entirely, as he did, on Industrial, but now has that, you know, clear line of leadership to the CEO, building entirely new leadership teams, sales leadership teams globally. We are starting to see the benefit of that. You know, you do not want to lose the point of it all starts with the experience of the leadership team and what we each bring to bear and how we are going to manage that business and that growth.
That's great color. I mean, and especially in these small, you need great teams to execute what you're doing for sure. I mean, it's not easy. It's a little tricky integrating these acquisitions and finding these efficiencies. I want to talk about your EBITDA margins. Where are you in that goal there? I mean, I know you wanted to get.
Yeah. So we are, you know, I think we're still early days of the EBITDA margin. When we first started talking with you and with, you know, with the street, we had consistently said we expect to be able to get to mid to high teens in adjusted EBITDA margin kind of over a three to five-year time frame. You know, when you do acquisitions like we're doing, that, you know, that kind of first year or so of cost that you have from that, of integration, of kind of training, additional travel, all those things, you know, that was expected. Things are still kind of continuing along the path that we expected in that time frame.
You know, I will mention as well that a large part of this improvement that we see over the next couple of years is not, you know, not only from doing the things that we need to do with our acquisitions to improve their gross margin, which we are doing, and which, by the way, need doing. We have bought these companies at very attractive EBITDA margins. We just looked back at it. We spent exactly $70 million on these five acquisitions, acquired, you know, almost $100 million in revenue, just a little bit below that. When you look at the multiple that we've paid, it comes to exactly 6.0 times. Coincidence there, but, you know, we think we're buying these businesses very efficiently, proprietary deals, you know, kind of not running through auctions and competitive bids.
I like what Roger describes when we talk to investors about who we buy. You know, we're not buying a mansion, right? We're buying something that's a bit of a fixer-upper, right? There are some, you know, we generally don't factor in a ton of growth in the first year. It's really in the second year we start seeing those synergies come into play. You know, I'll give an example. I mean, LHD was clearly a fixer-upper, particularly with regard to their German operations. You know, we don't like to run into companies and say, you know, we may have to skinny things back. LHD was an example where we had to do that. We had to rationalize, you know, the headcount we had there.
If we were looking and being honest with one another, which we were, you know, we looked at Eagle. Eagle was doing roughly $11 million in revenue with 15 people, 12 people. LHD, Germany, was doing $8 million with 40. You know, something's not right there. We took immediate action, you know, over the course of a six-month period, and we've sort of right-sized that German operation. You know, that German operation, Roger likes to say, was on its back. We had to, you know, reestablish relationships with suppliers, with manufacturers, and with customers because we had a two-year backlog that we were able to pretty much take care of over the course of six months. That's something I'm pretty proud of in terms of how our team was able to drive that in a very meaningful way. You know, I mentioned Eagle.
Eagle is a classic example of the talent acquisition that you can get in the context of these acquisitions. We picked up Kevin Ray, who has now really taken a leadership role for Eagle and LHD, and Jolly, the acquired company in Italy. Jolly has an entrepreneur who's driving it, quite talented person. You know, Roger and I were of the view that he needed to have someone to report to, and we decided that Kevin Ray was the right guy. Kevin now is driving growth really in that European Middle Eastern market for Eagle, LHD, and Jolly.
Yeah, truly a product specialist, evangelist, very passionate about it. I can't say enough about the kind of technical advances that Eagle and their research team and their product team has developed. A perfect example of that talent coming in. It's kind of a common theme across the Pacific was one to where there was not the talent that carried over. The seller was in his 80s and was at the, you know, generational and lifestyle planning stage where he's moving on. We have just in the process of bringing on a new highly skilled, talented, experienced managing director for that business to play a leadership role there. Again, Eagle very well run. Their EBITDA margins were already ahead of our aspirational margins. Jolly, you know, working on their gross margins as well.
They had just acquired the factory to produce their own boots in Romania prior to us acquiring them. There, you know, there's still some kind of optimizing of that factory and that process, and that's coming along well.
I will add last, but certainly not least, Veridian, which I believe is the diamond of our portfolio. Bill Van Lent is a very well-regarded, you know, owner, operator in the, you know, United States, North American markets. You know, he's on the certifying boards. He's, you know, he couldn't be more excited to be a part of our team. You know, he and I are speaking weekly. He has, you know, he has been in with Helena several times working on the cross certifications for Veridian to be manufactured in Mexico and for the Lakeland products to be manufactured in the United States so that we're able to manage, again, it comes back to the tariffs, manage some of the tariff issues.
We, you know, in the, you know, medium term, maybe even the short term, we were going to be, you know, switching capacity in Mexico to provide manufacturing support for the Latin American market. Roger believes that's a significant bump to our margin. The Lakeland product will be manufactured with Veridian in the United States, obviously avoiding the tariff issues.
Right, right. As we speak, we are just starting up, and we talked about this production of Eagle and LHD products in our China facility or China manufacturing facility, obviously for non-U.S. markets, for Asian markets, and for Latin American markets. You know, to the point on Veridian, you know, Veridian at the time of acquisition had a 20% EBITDA margin, although their gross margins were in the low 30s. You know, there are a couple of takeaways from that. One is we have already started working with them on ways to optimize their production and increase their gross margin. The reason their EBITDA margins are so much stronger kind of speaks to, it is a concrete example of the situation that we have talked about with our ERP project, which kicked off in December. Veridian has, I guess, one of the better ERPs across the Lakeland landscape today.
Got an end-to-end ERP system that works well. We are going to, you know, we are going to eventually transition them to our unified system, but they're not urgent like, you know, like the ones that are in phase one currently are. Because of that efficiencies of their system, they're able to run at a 20% EBITDA margin to where, you know, we have kind of a, what, six different systems with lots of manual processes and people around those. You know, we're starting to see concrete examples of, you know, where we think we can get to from just efficiency improvement. The first step is just kind of taking out the manual processes and the people involved. I mean, not saying we're talking out a bunch of people, but the manual effort involved in doing all that.
Once you get into the things that you can get from the system, from streamlined production planning, MRP, ordering, procurement, business intelligence, and now AI from the data that's embedded in the systems, just incredibly excited about how that's going to help us accelerate that EBITDA margin growth.
You know, Maj, I think when we spoke to you with the microcap, you know, one of the things you asked us was what keeps us up at night. I think Roger's outlined that for you. It's really, it's our systems. Our systems are not good. They're going to get good. We have the right team in place to get us there. I would envision sometime around this time next year, you know, we're going to have a new ERP system go live.
Beautiful, beautiful. I think as you do the whole cleaning suit kind of with the LHD plan, that's going to be great margins. The more of that stuff you get in here is really going to really boost margins. I see that as like a, I mean, it's a significantly bigger number than it is now.
Oh, I mean, the goal would be obviously for that to be a segment that we would be reporting on. I would love it to be 10% of our revenue.
Yeah. I mean, that could be pretty interesting. Yeah, for sure. Yes, that paints a great picture. I'm trying to see, you really covered almost everything here, Roger. I mean, even the slide up here.
Yeah. I mean, this is just a wrap-up to kind of bring all of it back together. We're pleased with how the team's executing.
One thing I was curious was, you know, when you did your offering, you talked about paying the debt, but you really did not, the press was not really saying to further the acquisition strategy. I do not think it, I do not know if it said that. You know, that is what you definitely raised the money to pay down the debt as well as to continue to further your acquisition strategy.
That's right. I mean, with the dry powder we now have on our balance sheet, we, you know, we're going to, you know, we want to be able to, we want to be able to continue the momentum we've had with M&A, maybe not as large scale M&A, but I would envision, you know, a couple of, you know, pretty strategic acquisitions in the course of the next 12 to 15 months in that service space.
Yeah. We were, you know, quite frankly, transparently, we were not able to do an additional acquisition on the credit facility, you know, kind of coming out of LHD. We had done the first two acquisitions with COVID cash, as we like to call it. The third acquisition mostly was done from the sale of an excess real estate warehouse that we do not use. The last two, which were the two biggest, were done off the revolving credit facility. It is, you know, a single bank deal with B ofA . I have repeatedly said, it is the two easiest bank deals I have ever done in my life. I have been doing them for 25 years. Very supportive.
We wanted to kind of get that back down to where we had that capacity under our credit facility to move quickly, which is what we have done.
Excellent. We got a couple of questions from one of your biggest fans here at Geo, Albert Jones. I mean, you might have already answered this, but maybe let's, just in case you didn't, explain Veridian's overlap of products, I guess. You already talked about FIT, but is there an overlap of products with Veridian?
Oh, that's a great question. There is not an overlap of customers and distributors, which was the best news. What Barry and team have been able to do, again, very quickly is they convened our worldwide fire product teams with the goal of saying, we don't want to, you know, one, we want to cross-sell everywhere we can, the head-to-toe products. Two, we don't want to step on each other in the locations where we might be, you know, both ourselves.
We prioritized in each market the go-to market strategy from, you know, the best to the least optimal for us. We are in the process of rolling that out now. I think that we, I left that meeting really energized because the two sales teams really stacked hands and we are excited about that. Add Eagle to the mix. We have some really interesting leaders that are driving our sales.
Yeah. In the U.S., Veridian is the much more well-known brand. Over time, it's, you know, very possible that we consolidate the Lakeland brand into Veridian. What we did do coming out of that meeting is we took the, we had five people in fire sales in the U.S. We had five in Veridian. The Head of Sales for Veridian is now the Head of U.S. Fire Sales for Lakeland. The guy that was Head of Lakeland Fire Sales is now in a business development role, which is fantastic for him. We have kind of redeployed each with a more focused and concentrated market. We've got, you know, more feet on the street, but with, you know, both brands where it makes sense.
Veridian also has opportunity in Latin America. We actually competed with them a couple of times in Latin America. Where they are, where we're not is they're in Brazil. And Brazil is the ninth largest economy in the world. We have had zero presence in Brazil. They have significant presence there through a contract manufacturer. You really can't make stuff anywhere in the world and send to Brazil without a massive tariff. We have manufacturing through our subcontractor there. We have a sales arm. We believe that's going to be a significant growth opportunity for us in LatAm.
That's great. Great. Good question, Albert. I guess he has another question here, I guess, wearing cosmetics. In the past quarters have been less than clean. Argentina currency writes offering from acquisitions, write-offs from acquisitions. What can we expect to quarters that are easier to understand?
That's a good one. That's a good one.
Yeah. We had a lot of cleanup to do. It is still ongoing. Of course, you know, with transactions, acquisitions that we're doing, you know, do bring, you know, certain types of expenses and charges and that sort of thing. We hope to get past that very soon. We certainly recognize that it.
I mean, look, you know, as we can, we're going to continue to acquire companies. There is going to be some white noise associated with that. That is just part of doing M&A. At some point, that white noise will be far less as we get bigger.
Do you guys actually, I don't think you do put a non-GAAP EPS number, do you? You do EBITDA. Might be interesting to explore that.
Yeah. No, we're talking about that.
We talked about an adjusted EPS. It's a little complicated given we got some clunkiness with taxes right now that we kind of got to work through.
Okay. That's definitely on the radar. Yeah.
He has one here. Is the interest savings of $2.5 million linear over the next four quarters?
I'm sorry?
Is the interest savings of $2.5 million linear over the next four quarters? That's his question there. I guess it's easy.
No, it starts immediately.
Yeah. Okay. Cool.
Yeah. Cool.
No, we don't have to phase in it. We did an immediate paydown of, you know, $42 million, $43 million. And that's, you know, when you apply that to the SOFR plus grid that we have, you know, that just went away.
Beautiful. I think this has been good, man. I think we got it all.
Wonderful.
I'm really thanking you guys for doing this, Roger, Jim. You know, have a fun time in Vegas. Hopefully, there'll be a lot of investors out there.
Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward.
Yeah, we'll have you on again. We've been here with Lakeland Industries, LAKE. Actually, it's actually Lakeland Fire and Safety, is it? Lakeland Fire and Safety, right?
That's correct.
Yeah. Yeah. We got to get that name changed on the slide there, Kate. LAKE, personal protective equipment. We're here with Jim Jenkins, CEO, and Roger Shannon, CFO. We'll talk to you soon, man. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks so much.
Thanks so much.
Take care. Bye-bye now.
Yes. Bye-bye.
All right, guys. Thank you, everybody. That about wraps it up. We'll do it again tomorrow and then on Friday again. Have a great evening.