Started here. Thank you all for being here. My name is Michael Francis. I'm a research associate here at William Blair, covering building products and distributors with Ryan Merkel. I need to let you all know that there's a complete list of disclosures on our website at williamblair.com. Here today is JJ Foley, CFO at Madison Air. Madison Air is a global air quality company dedicated to making the world safer, healthier, and more productive through highly engineered air solutions. Serving industries ranging from data centers and healthcare to advanced manufacturing and residential. They transform air from a commodity into a strategic asset that drives measurable business outcomes. I'm going to pass it over to JJ.
Perfect. Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you so much. Michael, thanks for the great introduction. I feel like you already hit some of the highlights for Madison Air, but maybe just for those that are in the room, by a show of hands, who's familiar with the Madison Air story versus kind of getting is new to the name? New to the name? All right, good enough. Danny, you were right. Forward-looking statements. The materials from today's presentation will be listed on our company website. I'm going to spend a little bit of time, so I'll introduce myself and then I'll talk a little bit about the company highlights, then we'll get into the Q1 , and then we'll get into some Q&A.
JJ Foley joined the company in 2021, when it was about a $300 million business with a big dream to be able to go build out a pure-play indoor air quality player in commercial and residential end markets. Prior to being here, I was at General Electric for about 12 years, most recently in investor relations. Prior to that, in GE Aerospace, as well as parts of Vernova, and other parts of the company. Delighted to be here with you today. From a company highlight standpoint, Michael hit it. These are kind of the three things that we think differentiate Madison Air and make it a very compelling investment. The first is really that we differentiate in terms of how we go to market with this return on air mindset.
This is really what allows us, and we'll see this showing up in the financials, to be able to drive value-based pricing and be able to solve problems for customers. We talk about turning air into a strategic asset. We serve in end markets like data centers, as well as clean rooms, as well as residential homes, where the cost of downtime impacts business results. The second is leadership in growth markets. You'll see that in the commercial side, we serve 15 different end markets, data centers being one of those, an important one. We offer a diverse and balanced look at different end markets, and we take technology into those using that return on air mindset. Then the third is our unique value creation model.
We have a highly decentralized operating model where unburdened management teams come into work every single day to be able to take care of customers and deliver value. We'll talk a little bit about where that advantages us as we get into the Q&A. Less than 0.5% of our total company headcount sits at the center, just to kind of give you an idea. Madison Air at a glance, it's a balanced business and resilient revenue. We're about $3.5 billion of pro forma net sales. We have about 26.5% adjusted EBITDA margins, and we generate a bunch of cash, about $442 million in 2025. On an LTM basis, that's about 12% free cash flow margins.
One of my favorite measures, to be able to see businesses that take revenue and take growth and turn that into cash flow that we can then deploy to be able to create more long-term value for shareholders like yourselves. We're a diversified end market as well as diversified by the two segments that we go to market in. 63% of our sales are into commercial end markets. About 37% of those into residential. In exiting 2025, about 12% of our sales were into the data center end market. Our revenues are resilient. We kind of talk about 50/40/10. 50% replacement and upgrade, 40% new build construction. A big portion of that driven by the data center market since by nature of the way that that market's growing, a lot of that is new construction. About 10% service and aftermarket and opportunity for us on the come.
The last is we're largely domestic. About 95% of our revenue in North America. We have about 8,800 employees, with 600 of those driving innovation through R&D. We are everywhere that clean air matters, you can see just to kind of familiarize yourself around the different end markets that we serve, starting with clean rooms, logistics, data centers, where the cost of downtime is up to $9,000 per minute or delaying the commissioning of a data center is over a million and a half dollars. Very critical that we deliver on time, on spec, and make sure that that commissioning and startup happens. We serve hospitality, recreation, hospitals, and life sciences. We'll talk a little bit about, in the Q&A, hopefully around differentiation. I'll give you an example in a hospital around where we are versus traditional HVAC players.
Then you can kind of continue to see playing in clean energy and advanced manufacturing. We think about structural benefits around reshoring, investment in advanced manufacturing, and we'll play a role there, as well as in residential and single and multi-family homes. We go to market through two complementary, highly differentiated segments here. You can see on the left-hand side of the page, commercial, about $2.2 billion in net sales. Then we take these segments and through our technology platforms, which is how we're organized internally, deliver impact into the end markets that they serve. Whether it's in air handling, air liquid and hybrid cooling, the humidity and control, our dedicated outdoor air systems. We could talk about the brands that we use to go to market there.
Air movement and heat, that's where Big Ass Fans and Reznor play a big role, as well as energy efficiency enablers that go into many of the different OEMs in terms of driving real return on air, better energy efficiency, more fresh air into these highly tightly managed buildings. Then on residential, we're really the only player that brings together all five pillars of the healthy air system. Purification, ventilation, humidification, dehumidification, wrapped in sensors and controls. We take that into the single and multi-family residential. I love this chart. This is an always own chart. If we owned all the companies that we own today all the way back to 2007, how would the company have performed? What you see is on the left-hand side, from '07 to 2020, we had about a five percent growth CAGR.
It's about a point of price and four points of volume. From 2020 to 2025, we've really bent that curve as we've been building a growth company to an eight percent growth CAGR. Some of that is admittedly between 2020 and 2024 is a little bit more price than volume. In 2025, it was more of the recipe we expect to see going forward. That was 12% growth with three points of price and about nine points of volume. We really believe that we've bent that curve. Zooming back, what does resilient revenue look like?
To me, I kind of think about it as relative to U.S. GDP, we've outgrown that 16 of the last 18 years. I think that's enabled by this highly diversified end market mix, the replacement-driven demand, and the multiple growth vectors that we have that sets the company up well to deliver in this mid-single-digit plus organic growth path forward. One of the things that we're proud of are our margins. They're robust and sustainable with room to expand. 80/20 is very much at the center of all that we do. I would say what's a little bit different about our vintage of 80/20 is it's focused on growth.
You get the margin expansion, the complexity reduction, that simplification, but you're also going to see us focus on growth, figuring out who those whales are that we want to serve in the different end markets, and then focus on being able to surround them for growth. We've about 26.5% adjusted EBITDA margins, as I highlighted, about 39% gross margins. Over the course of the last three years, incrementals have been around 40%. Go forward, we'd expect them to be at or above EBITDA margins. We started to show that here in the Q1 . I think about a balanced playbook around robust and sort of margin expansion, and I think it starts and ends with being able to sell on a return on air basis, which allows us to be able to get price. We've proven that historically. We'll prove that again here in 2026.
The second is our ability to drive innovation. We can talk more about that to the extent that there's questions in the room. Jill Wyant, who's our CEO, really brings a growth mindset to all that we do. We think about return on air as we think about green lighting innovation. 80/20 says you can do anything, but you can't do everything. How do we focus that innovation? We think about innovation as great fuel for the top line, but also an opportunity to be able to make sure you mix positively from a margin standpoint as you bring in new products. The third is we're pretty good at levering our fixed costs as we continue to drive growth through the top line of the business. I highlighted that 10% service and aftermarket opportunity, which is accretive from a margin standpoint.
As we grow that, as we have been faster than equipment revenues, it naturally gives you a little bit of margin lift in the portfolio. The last is 80/20. I think that as we acquire companies, as we focus once a year on sort of our growth strategies, 80/20 is something that's never done. It's not an initiative. It's very much a way of thinking, and it's kind of like weeding your garden at home. Those weeds always kind of crop back in, and you got to go back in to make sure that that simplification sticks, and that allows us to sustain those margins. The innovation, as I just highlighted on the last page, fuels orders and backlog growth and will do great things for us for margin over time. In the Q1 , we saw a 29% orders growth.
We exited with about $2.5 billion of backlog. The best sort of forward-looking view of the company from a revenue outlook that we've had since I've been here. We had about 13% sales growth, a very nice contribution in terms of price as well as balanced volume. I thought the example on the right-hand side of this page is our Big Ass Fans business. Love this business. Category creator, great brand. Here, one of our customers said to us, "Hey, we're having a hard time being able to manage the heat load in the back of the trailer." One of the worst spots to work is because it gets to 110 degrees in these trailers in the summer.
When they bring in one that's been sitting out in the yard for three hours and they bring it to that dock, one of the things that keeps them from being able to drive truck turnover and rolls in the dock is they have to cool down the actual trailer. On the right-hand side here, you see one of the new innovations that's come to market called the Velocity Trailer Fan. This is an area that, in my opinion, was ripe to be disrupted. Here's a great example of where the customer, our ears are the customer's lips, and that's what's really feeding the innovation. Here's a great way where they're driving productivity, and that's gaining commercial momentum as we enter that cooling season. You can think about this also as a great example of opening up new TAM.
One of the things we're proud of is we've added more than $30 billion of TAM to the company over the course of the time that we've been here. This is a great new area. You think about the number of dock doors across the U.S. Great opportunity for us to be able to go take that. I'm going to shift gears here just to give you a highlight on the Q1 . We'll talk a little bit about capital allocation to wrap things up, then we'll hop into Q&A. Q1 , $924 million in sales, up 13%. We saw adjusted EBITDA up 16%, expanding margins a little bit there. Very healthy EBITDA margins at 25.3%. We saw balanced growth, 18% out of the commercial side of the business and four percent out of the residential business.
You think about we spent a lot of time educating investors on how we are different from traditional HVAC. If you look at the last 18 of 20 quarters, we've outpaced AHRI shipments, right? Just to kind of give you an idea and give you some data. four percent growth in a soft single and multi-family housing backdrop. This is a business, if you went back through the prospectus, we talk about the Aprilaire business being able to grow at an eeight percent growth CAGR over a long time. They just continue to do that. We do that through a penetration game. We talk a lot about Aprilaire being a 40 million at-bat story.
There's every single year, the clock turns, and there's 10 million opportunities to be able to participate in attaching a healthy air system to the replacement of an HVAC system, whether that's air conditioning or heating in a single-family home. It's the 30 million at-bats that people often overlook, which is the number of touch points that a contractor has when they enter into your home. They walk down the stairs, and they say, "The basement smells a little musty." We train those contractors on the opportunity to be able to upsell and really solve problems for homeowners around health and home comfort and that asset preservation. Running that penetration play, we feel we're very confident even against this backdrop that we have today, that we'll be able to continue to grow on the residential side of things.
That 80/20 model really driving continued margin expansion and our cash really in line with expectations. For those that may have been involved in our credit since 2021, we are a team that does what we say we're going to do. We saw that again be de-levering in the range of a quarter turn per quarter on a pre-IPO basis, and we'll talk here in a minute about where we stand today. I highlighted free cash flow margins. This is 12.4 under the pre-IPO capital structure. You can imagine, as we take out $2.6 billion of debt here in the quarter, and we recently repriced our term loan, we're approaching $175 million of annualized interest expense savings for the company. That'll contribute to that 12.4 TTM free cash flow margin.
I think it's a great way to just look at, take out all the noise of the cash flow statement. Are we turning sales dollars into cash flow and being in a position to be able to reinvest that? Post the IPO and the de-levering activity, we're at just under 3x trailing leverage here. In the quarter, we upsized our revolver to $1.3 billion here. That'll put us in a good spot to be able to have that flexible, strong balance sheet that we want going forward. We expect leverage to be in that less than two and a half times net debt to EBITDA on a trailing basis here in the next 12 months. From a capital allocation standpoint, I think the priorities are super clear. We're very focused on long-term, durable returns for investors.
The first is fueling that top line in the organic growth, and we've got a number of exciting things that range from the residential healthy air system that we talked about to data centers, which everybody wants to talk about. We have a mindset on the data center side of things of durable demand and flexible investment, and we think that we'll be able to continue to fuel the growth that we see in the future here in this sort of low single-digit % of sales from a CapEx burden standpoint. The second is really around de-levering and maintaining that strong, flexible balance sheet. As I highlighted on the last page, we're well on our way to where we want to be. The third is really a disciplined M&A framework. If you've spent time on the company, we've done a number of acquisitions.
I think it's 11 over the course of the last five years. We know how to do this. The management team, myself, as well as those that are in the back of the room, but also not here today, are the team that has digested these acquisitions. We have a track record of being able to not only de-lever but generate a high return on invested capital. We have a good framework around three and five-year targets that we look to hurdle. The last thing I wanted to highlight is just sort of an inter-quarter update. We had talked about on the Q1 call that we were comfortable in sort of at least mid-single-digit growth on an organic basis, and we feel good about that. We highlighted margins should improve compared to where they exited the Q1 .
Year-over-year, EBITDA incrementals will be less than what they were in the Q1 due to a tougher comp in the Q2 , but also some of the timing associated with our tariff mitigation actions. The third is more of a modeling item for folks, but given the fact that we went public in mid-April, our reported weighted average shares outstanding for the quarter will end up being a little lower than 209 million shares. Relatedly, the interest expense in the quarter will be a bit higher than run rate due to the non-cash OID charge from prepaying the debt. I will pause there, but I'll end where I started. We really appreciate your interest in the name. We're delighted. We very much believe that we are just getting started.
We look forward to bringing you along on the journey as we build a truly remarkable company and deliver for stakeholders. With that, we'll jump into your questions.
Awesome. Thanks, JJ. Wanted to start out with the return on air value prop. You've mentioned it a few times in the presentation there. What does that mean, and how does that help drive productivity and profitability across the business?
From a return on air standpoint, I think it's different depending on the different end market that you ultimately serve. If you think about residential, which is an area that people may say, "I imagine that's probably a harder area to be able to come up with a return on air base sale," we actually focus on the contractors. We think about somebody's HVAC business and there's 72,000 HVAC contractors that are out there. We have a low penetration with them today, which is another reason why we believe in the penetration. We actually bring these folks into our facility at Aprilaire in Madison, Wisconsin, and we train them up. We think about how do we actually make your business better. We're really thinking, particularly in a time where HVAC shipments are down, contractors are looking for something to sell.
Return on air for us is lower working capital for them, a more efficient ability to get in and out, 30% faster install time than the competition, and the ability to be able to sell the healthy air system and add on to that over time. I think another example of this would be in a hospital. Here, our Nortek Air Solutions business, you think about a healthcare campus, and when you drive into the healthcare campus, you've got the medical office building, and then you've got the main hospital. The medical office building, while we have products that might play there, that's really not where we're focused. Where we're focused is on where that true return on air value proposition rings true.
When you move over to the main hospital, they're probably going to have a central plant that's generating the hot and cold thermal temperature, but then they're going to look to be able to move air around in the operating rooms and the sterilization suites and the patient treatment rooms, where hospital-acquired infections really have an impact, not only on patient outcomes, but the risk that that takes for the hospital. Here, an area where our assets will last 2x the time, downtime's really important to a hospital. You think about serviceability. In those cases, we are going in and selling to a customer on the basis of here's the return on air, here's how we're going to turn air into a strategic asset that'll actually improve your bottom line.
I think for us, it's actually one of our board members said, "Huh, so you use this internally and externally?" We do. When we have an innovation summit where we bring the different businesses together, we actually talk about what is that return on air value proposition going to be before we green-light the investment in innovation. We're starting with that end in mind, and then we're working with the sales and the marketing teams to make sure that they've got that collateral, but also that training to have a discussion with the business person that's deciding where are they going to put their dollars in terms of the investment. I think return on air is a scalable concept across the different end markets, and hopefully those two examples bring that to life a little bit more.
I think they do. I'll turn to the buzzword of the day, data centers. Like to hear what sort of products you offer, customers you're generally working with, what differentiates you going to market in that area.
Data centers, and nobody's probably spent any time on that in this room.
No, not at all.
Just kidding. I think for us, we've got the full surround. As you think about air, liquid, and hybrid cooling, we have everything from the CRACs and the CRAHs and the custom air handling on the air side, as well as CDUs and cold plates and rear door heat exchangers on liquid. We also have a hybrid technology, funny enough, the data center business that was born out of a relationship of building a custom product for one of the hyperscalers, and that was probably back in '18, '19, actually is very power and water efficient, which lends itself quite well as chips perform better at higher latent temperatures because you can actually change the operating mode of the asset.
We've got the full air, liquid, and hybrid cooling solutions, and then we go to market with what we call C-Force™, which is, I think, a big part of our moat. Because we are, given the fact that we are working on custom items and we're serving the likes of the top hyperscalers, and we're on the inside looking out, not the outside looking in, as well as the top 10 - 12 co-locators. We sit down with their design team, and what they're really wanting out of us is that thermal cooling expertise to say, "Okay, here's what we want from an output in terms of max IT." How do we get there? We will embed a group of engineers to build a custom solution for these hyperscalers, and then we become part of the reference design.
That reference design is going to be used for two, three years. We've already seen this turn over once or twice with a number of the bigger hyperscalers, where they say, "Okay, in two years, we're thinking about going to this next reference design. Help us start thinking about that," and then we get specced into that design. I would say to your question, we've got the full surround, air liquid hybrid. From a customer standpoint, we are by nature of the way that the industry has come together, there's a few really important players and we are working with them now and thinking about what that looks like in the future.
You talked about Aprilaire, you talked about Big Ass Fans. I know those businesses are relatively under-penetrated in their markets. Can you talk a little bit about that white space and then maybe if there's any other businesses that have a similar opportunity?
It's actually a mindset. I think it's been a learning for me over the course of the last five years, even how you think about sizing your TAM, right? When you think about the number of high volume, low speed fans that are sold, or the HVLS fan, which is kind of the category creation of Big Ass Fans, that's one way to size a TAM. When you think about it in terms of un-fanned space, we're kind of low single, mid-single digit penetration. I think for us, 80/20 has allowed us to be able to focus and say, "Okay, what if fans were in every single manufacturing facility? What if fans were in every logistics facility?" You say, "Well, what's going to be the compelling event?" At the end of the day, our biggest competition is really doing nothing in Big Ass Fans.
It's the, "Hey, we've got it, and we're just working in an unworkable hot, sweaty environment," in an area like Chicago in the middle of summer where it doesn't necessarily make sense for them to spend the full amount on installing a full HVAC system. An investment for a high volume, low speed fan, not only does that give you that cooling effect in the summer, it also makes the heating more efficient in the winter. When we get in front of customers, we spend a lot of time, and it's funny, these situations start off small.
You may be selling to one location, and then as soon as that one location hears about it, we will go and say, "Okay, where else can we help you solve this problem?" They say, "Well, we've got 32 other locations." We had a great example of a customer that came in and said, "Okay, let's go fix this one site." Now we're probably 27 of the 32 completed with a lot of room to run. I just give you that example for Big Ass Fans. I think the velocity trailer cooling's another great example of unfanned, unpenetrated space where the solution that's there just is not helping the customer improve their bottom line, is not really focused on the energy efficiency, et cetera. That's probably on Big Ass Fans.
On Aprilaire, I hit on the story about the 40 million app adds, I think for us, on average, there's one of the healthy air system devices installed, and that's only in eight percent of homes. We got a lot of room to run. Whether you look at it by the number of contractors that carry Aprilaire, the number of metros that we're present in. There's one large state where we were going through the strategy review recently, we've got low single-digit salespeople in there. There's just a lot of room to run. If you frame the game as this white space opportunity and you approach it with a return on air-based sale, I think we've got a lot of room to run, and you can bring that mindset to a number of different end markets.
Yeah. Then can you talk a little bit about the 80/20 you do? You mentioned it in that answer, and you talked about it a few times. How has that helped enhance growth and margins for the business, and how do you think about that going forward?
I'm an 80/20 convert, admittedly. I think, for us, we wanted to be able to identify a business system that was going to be able to scale with us as we grew the company. We found 80/20 to align the most with our cultural values. Trust, a bias for action, and entrepreneurial. That entrepreneurial spirit, we actually think 80/20 is a shortcut to being able to get where you want to go faster. Because if you only focus on the 20% of things that drive 80% of the outcome, you're always going to be in a better spot. I think about the Nortek Air Solutions business, where it was kind of run as one blob when we first bought the business.
Now we've broken that out into the air handling and the direct expansion in the clean room, clean room breaks out into life sciences, into semicon. Now we've got, instead of a centralized commercial team, we have dedicated teams coming to work every single day thinking about how they serve those customers in that end market. It gives you focus, but it also allows us to say, is the complexity that you've got built into the product serving the customer? We've got great examples where we took a business that was maybe growing four percent or five percent a year to, God bless you, a 15% growth CAGR, we added 16 points to the margin. I think you can get growth and simplification, and I think that's what we look to do every single time we deploy 80/20.
Yeah. Can you talk a little about service and aftermarket? It's something you're focused on. There's definitely some margin opportunity there. Talk a little bit about your strategy with those.
Yeah. I would say, we've been building the company. I just think that we haven't really gotten to the service and aftermarket piece quite yet. I think for us, it's ours for the taking. There's a number, in true 80/20 fashion, we're really focused on three businesses that have the largest outsized service and aftermarket potential. That's the data center cooling business, the Nortek Air Solutions business, and Big Ass Fans. In data center cooling, I spent a lot of time in aerospace and we think about the equivalent of what is that shop visit one, what is that shop visit two over time, and how do we kind of build that into the thinking and the services model, and how do we make sure that we've got a high attach rate to units that we're building?
This is kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to build an install base. Make sure that we are set up, that we are so embedded and indispensable to the customer that we get that privilege to serve them for the long term, and whether that's through a retrofit or a relife or parts or controls upgrades, that's at the core of it. I think we're very early days. You can't do everything at once. We started by just putting a leader and a P&L on services in every one of the businesses, and that's got that growing faster than equipment. A lot to go, and as I mentioned earlier, that's probably 5-10 points higher than equipment margins.
All right. We've got just one minute here. To wrap up, what's one thing that you're most excited for going forward as a public company?
Good question. I think a lot of what got us here will get us there, which is high quality top-line growth and ability to expand margins to generate cash flow. I'm excited about access to the capital markets over time. We want the world to think about us as an organic growth company with M&A as a lever. We've got a proven track record of doing both. I would say, I think it's early days. It's exciting to be at this point and at this step, and we're excited to be able to see what this does for our employees, but our team members, but also to be able to deliver returns to a broader audience.
All right.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it. Thank you all.